The writer Terry Southern, who died in 1995, has emerged in hindsight as a kind of real-life Forrest Gump figure--present at the creation of virtually everything new, liberating and free-spirited in post-World War II arts and culture. As Lee Hill states in his Scenario magazine profile, Southern appeared to "emerge from a phantom zone between the underground if the Beats and the uptown chic of The Paris Review and Esquire."

Southern has been called the founder of New Journalism; the novel he and Mason Hoffenberg published in 1958; Candy, was a prelude to the swingin' 60s; and the Academy Award-nominated screenplay he wrote for Stanley Kubrick's Dr. Strangelove helped make satiric black humor the cultural force it is today. The 1960s were Southern's decade--he worked on the screenplay for Easy Rider and got on the cover of the Beatles' Sgt Peppers. But he disappeared from public view afterward. One of his last movies was 1970s little-seen End of the Road, which he co-produced and co-wrote (and briefly appears in). Directed by Aram Avakian and adapted from an acclaimed John Barth novel, it pushes the theme of 1960s alienation to the edge and received an X rating (it still has that rating). Stacy Keach plays a catatonic Johns Hopkins graduate found on a railway platform by an unorthodox doctor, played by James Earl Jones. With Harris Yulin, Dorothy Tristan and James Coco. It was filmed in the Berkshires.

Introduced by
Steven Rosen
The Denver Post
Q&A afterward by
Nile Southern
4:00 pm, Saturday
October 9th, 1999

• TS biographer Lee Hill's assessment of End of the Road
• End of the Road (more)

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