Robert Frank: Pull My Daisy

"First take best take," to paraphrase Allen Ginsberg, was for years the ethos presumed to have governed the making of Robert Frank and Alfred Leslie's classic Beat Generation film Pull My Daisy (1959)—until Leslie revealed in 1968 that its scenes had been as scripted and rehearsed as any Hollywood movie. Even Jack Kerouac's famous voiceover narration, which careens wonderfully in and out of sync with the action, was actually composed in advance, performed four times and then mixed from thre...