Pull My Daisy is the Ocean’s 11 of underground movies, an all star lineup whose names–Jack, Allen, and Peter–are as recognizable among the literati as are Frank, Dino, and Sammy among the denizens of Casino Heaven.
Daisy was the brainchild of Alfred Leslie, a painter and underground (i.e. amateur) filmmaker and Robert Frank, a Swiss born photographer, who had left Europe after the war and whose newcomers eye caught the poetry of day to day America.
The duo hoped to make a film of On the Road, Jack Kerouac’s 1957 novel that had created a sensation with its celebration of bop and hitchhiking and had shaken the polite literary drawing room world of John Updike and Truman Capote.
Unfortunately, for the filmmakers, Jack’s agent was holding out for big dollars, and Jack himself wanted the movie to be made with Marlon Brando whose films he admired. Frank and Leslie were forced to rummage through the large stash of unpublished material Kerouac had accumulated during the seven years it took for Road to find a publisher.
The full interview is available online at the source cited below.
Read the original article in American Legends Interviews.