Jack Kerouac, who fathered the Beat Generation with the novel “On the Road,” wrote only one fantasy novel, “Doctor Sax: Faust Part Three,” a metaphysical ode to pulp characters of the 1930s. Doctor Sax, the dark protector of children, was inspired by The Shadow and horror movies of the time — so much so that Kerouac wrote a screenplay adapting the book, long thought lost until his nephew Jim Sampas uncovered it a couple of years ago.
Sampas, who produced the tribute album “Kerouac — Kicks Joy Darkness,” discovered the manuscript while examining the author’s archives. He has also assembled a cast including Robert Hunter, Jim Carroll, Lawrence Ferlinghetti and Graham Parker to perform the script as a radio play, now featured on two CDs accompanying the manuscript called “Doctor Sax and the Great World Snake” (Galley Six, $24.95). The collection features 72 illustrations from artist Richard Sala (“Evil Eye”), whose style echoes ’30s pulp magazines.
“I’m really, really proud to be apart of this, because I fell in love with this screenplay,” Sala says. “I didn’t really have to adapt anything at all. A lot of it had to do with that pulp style, when horror movies were discovering German expressionism. There was this embracing of non-linear stories . . . a lot of Dutch angles, and shadows.”
Now that the project is finished, Sampas says he’d like to shop the script in Hollywood.
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“I definitely want to get it made into a film, but I see it as an animated film,” he says. “If it were done as a real movie, I think that it might be taken too literally.”
We’ve reprinted some of Sala’s illustrations, courtesy of Sala and Gallery Six, and matched them with Kerouac’s text.