Pull My Daisy

Pull My Daisy is a collectable object containing Robert Frank's famous film of 1959 on DVD; a text booklet with an introduction, the transcript of the film and lyrics to the opening song; and a photo-magazine of on-set documentary photos by John Cohen. Pull My Daisy typifies the Beat Generation. Directed by Robert Frank and Alfred Leslie, the film was adapted by Jack Kerouac from the third act of a stage play he never finished entitled Beat Generation. Kerouac also provided improvised narration. It stars Allen Ginsberg, Gregory Corso, Larry Rivers, Peter Orlovsky, David Amram, Richard Bellamy, Alice Neel, Sally Gross and Pablo, Frank's then infant son. Based on an incident in the life of Neal Cassady and his wife Carolyn, the movie tells the story of a railway brakeman whose painter wife invites a respectable bishop over for dinner. However, the brakeman's bohemian friends crash the party, with comic results. Pull My Daisy was praised for years as an improvisational masterpiece, until Leslie revealed in 1968 that the film was actually carefully planned, rehearsed, and directed by him and Frank.