Arena — Season 1, Episode 536: The Source
Documentary • 90 min • 3 seasons, 689 episodes • ★ 7.2/10
Episode synopsis
Tonight's film dramatises the story behind the leading artists who personified the Beat Generation, which saw its roots in the meeting of Allen Ginsberg , Jack Kerouac and William Burroughs in the forties. Examining their bohemian life in the fifties through a set of vignettes, featuring Dennis Hopper as Burroughs, Johnny Depp as Kerouac and John Turturro as Ginsberg, it also charts the subsequent San Francisco and West Coast renaissance, the hippie, political and spiritual movements of the sixties and seventies, and their influence in today's popular culture.
About Arena
Arena is a British television documentary series, made and broadcast by the BBC. Voted by leading TV executives in Broadcast as one of the top 50 most influential programmes of all time, it has run since 1 October 1975 with over five hundred episodes made, directed by the likes of Martin Scorsese, Alan Yentob, Roly Keating, Frederick Baker, Volker Schlondorff and Vikram Jayanti. Arena's subjects are a roll-call of the world's best known cultural figures from the 20th and 21st centuries, from singers Bob Dylan and Amy Winehouse to academics Edward Said and Eric Hobsbawm, from writers Jean Genet and V S Naipaul to artists Francis Bacon and Louise Bourgeois. The current series editor is Anthony Wall.