Reviews
“Alan Ginsberg, Peter Orlovsky, Gregory Corso and William Burroughs’ extreme lifestyles and creativity are brilliantly chronicled… This wonderful documentary allows us to dwell within the Beat Hotel for just a little while. The visit is a real treat.”
– Jennifer Merin, About.com Documentaries
“Makes you want to pack up your laptop and write away in some cheap garret. Vivid…
a real sense of the joyous energy of the time emerges, bristling with creativity.”
– David Noh, Film Journal
“The hotel’s fading legacy is what makes this documentary so worthwhile. Anyone with an interest in the Beats will enjoy hearing the stories and seeing the hotel as it once was. Chapman’s photographs, Rudie’s anecdotes, and Govenar’s film really are the next best thing to being there.”
– Gary M. Kramer, Gay City News
“Insightful, colorful. An inspired musing of audacious ideas expressed by charmed personalities.”
– Cole Smithey, ColeSmithey.com
“An epic poem to the late American geniuses of fiction we now call the beat generation.”
– Sawyer L. Lahr, Go Over the Rainbow
“Govenar’s history is twinklingly delivered.”
– Nicolas Rapold, The New York Times
“Vividly portrays these freewheeling years of sex, drugs, and poetry and restores to cultural history this neglected yet highly original phase in Beat Generation art .”
– Sue Dougherty, Reality Sandwich
“Exquisite… [The Beat Hotel] might just be the best documentary on the beat generation.”
– Louis Proyect, The Unrepentant Marxist.com