55 years later, 'On the Road' is finally a movie

Fifty-five years after its publication, Jack Kerouac's "On the Road" is finally burning on the big screen.

Everyone from Marlon Brando to Jean-Luc Godard to Brad Pitt has circled the classic 1957 novel over the last six decades, but Walter Salles' adaptation is the first to actually get made. The wait isn't for lack of desire: Kerouac passionately wanted to see his book made a film, even writing Brando a letter promising that he could turn the book's lyrical road trips into a "movie-type structure."

"On the Road" premiered Wednesday at the Cannes Film Festival, far away from the American roads crisscrossed by Sal Paradise and Dean Moriarty, the characters modeled on Kerouac and Neal Cassady, respectively.

"Unless you revive it by rereading it, re-imagining it, performing it, it's a dead thing," said Viggo Mortensen, who plays the William S. Burroughs character in the film. "You have to reread it to make it live again."

The pun is inevitable: It has been a long road for "On the Road." Though there was interest in a Hollywood adaptation as soon as it was published, nothing came of various negotiations and attempted screenplays. Francis Ford Coppola purchased the novel's rights in 1979, and he, too, failed to grasp an interpretation.

It's his son, the director Roman Coppola, who's producing "On the Road," which is being released in various international countries over the next few months, with a U.S. release prepared for late fall by IFC Films and Sundance Selects.

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