My short movie "On the Trail: Jack Kerouac in Cheyenne" is entered in the Wyoming Film Office short film competition. Please click on this link, view the movie and rate it by clicking on a star under the video player which records your vote. (The Wyoming Film Office asks you to sign up to be sure you're not a robot) Leave a comment, too.

http://www.wyomingshortfilmcontest.com/entries/38239

The top 10 are determined by a popular vote through Aprl 30. A panel of judges will select the "Best Film".

"On the Trail" documents a coming of age theme spanning three generations of "beats". The movie melds historic literature, still images and interviews with next "beat" generation members, including John Allen Cassady, son of Neal Cassady, who reads the part of Sal Paradise and juxtaposes them with 2009 video of Cheyenne Frontier Days and interviews of "beat" literature students from New Vista High School in Boulder, Colorado.

Kerouac’s “On the Road” is a classic American literature work. Kerouac writes about his experiences in Cheyenne, Wyoming during “Wild West Days” on his way to Denver.

“The stars seemed to get brighter the more we climbed the High Plains. We were in Wyoming now. ... As the truck reached the outskirts of Cheyenne we saw the high red lights of the local radio station, and suddenly we were bucking through a great crowd of people that poured along both sidewalks. ‘Hell’s bells, it’s Wild West Week,’ said Slim.”

That’s how Kerouac described the outskirts of Cheyenne in July 1947 from the back of a pick up truck traveling from Nebraska, probably on the Lincoln Highway.

After his crazy night in Cheyenne, Kerouac (Sal Paradise) hitchhikes to Denver to meet some rowdy, free-living friends waiting out the post World War II slump in the Mile High City. His pals include a Columbia classmate named Allen Ginsberg (Carlo Marx) and Neal Cassady (Dean Moriarty).