‘Last Beat’ Standing

‘Corso’s a poet’s Poet, a poet much superior to myself. Pure velvet … whose wild fame has extended for decades around the world from France to China.’ ‘ Allen Ginsberg Call him the Beat Generation’s Zeppo. Or Gummo. Or maybe it’s Shemp. Nunzio ‘Gregory’ Corso did not become a college graduate’s household name like his fellow literary assassins and drinking buddies Jack Kerouac, Allen Ginsberg and William S. Burroughs. But those in the know knew who he was: the real deal.   ’The Beat writers were reacting to the mechanistic world in which 16 million people were killed during World War II,’ says Palisades writer/director Gustave Reininger, whose new documentary, ‘Corso: The Last Beat,’ chronicles the author’s final years. ‘They had a certain worldview and it was celebrating spiritual values. They had amazing core values. They were very dedicated to get the African-American arts, lingo, and jazz into the mainstream, as well as Latino and other minorities. They also became the voice of middle-class kids who wanted to be heard.’   Several generations since the Beats shook up literary circles, middle-class kids are still appreciating the avant-garde writers, including actor Ethan Hawke, born in 1970 and a Corso reader since his teens. The ‘Training Day’ star, a friend of the late poet, appears in, as well as narrates, Reininger’s movie, which is currently seeking distribution.   Garrulous and mealy-mouthed in old age, the colorful Corso, as on display in the ‘Last Beat’ film, reminds this reporter of an Al ‘Grandpa Munster’ Lewis. We see this firebrand cut a march to the sea across Europe like a literary General Sherman. In Paris, he taunts a P’re Lachaise Cemetery guard near Jim Morrison’s grave, brazenly challenging the description ‘poet’ that appears on The Doors singer’s tombstone in favor of Oscar Wilde, buried several plots away. We watch the man behind such powerful poems as ‘Power’ and ‘The Whole Mess’ Almost’ revive ghosts at old haunts such as Harry’s Bar in Venice, and Hotel Richou (a.k.a. ‘The Beat Hotel’) on Paris’s Rue Git de Coeur, where Corso had lured his famous friends (Burroughs wrote ‘Naked Lunch’ there). We can not believe what we’re watching when Corso visits Rome’s Protestant Cemetery and burns the ashes of Allen Ginsberg (well, a photo of him anyway) on Percy Shelly’s headstone.   Later in ‘Last Beat,’ Hawke pays the poet a hospital visit and recites Corso’s ‘Marriage,’ which he had memorized at age 16.   Like Hawke and singer/songwriter Patti Smith, who also appears in the film, Reininger, a Pacific Palisades resident of 22 years, is no stranger to the entertainment industry. As a writer, he created ‘Crime Story,’ the 1980s NBC program that coat-tailed on ‘Miami Vice.’ Although ‘Crime Story’ ran for only 17 episodes, it garnered three Emmy nominations. Reininger also wrote a ‘Miami Vice’ episode (‘Forgive Us Our Debts’) in 1986. Throughout the ’90s, Reininger developed projects for TV and film with Michael Mann, Penny Marshall, Paul Verhoeven and Dino DeLaurentiis. He also consulted on ‘Homicide,’ wrote various pilots for CBS and ABC that did not go to series, and worked as a script doctor on features.   ’I’m originally from Kentucky,’ Reininger says. ‘I started out in international investment banking, lived in London and Paris, then settled in New York.’   In 1987, Reininger and then-wife, Gale, moved out to California with their 1-year-old son. Today, Haven, 23, is a Yale graduate. Daughter Olivia, 17, attends the Putney School in Vermont after graduating from Corpus Christi School and St. Matthew’s, while Isabel, 14, attends Corpus Christi. The Reiningers also had a daughter, Anthea, who died from a tainted vaccine. She is buried at St. Matthew’s.   Reininger is active in the Palisades. He is on the vestry at St. Matthew’s, and, for a decade, he served as assistant scoutmaster for Boy Scouts Troop 223.   By the mid-1990s, Reininger began feeling the itch. He wanted to direct and ‘get out of this pigeonhole of being a writer of cops-and-robbers shows,’ he says.   The film that evolved into ‘Corso’ stemmed from Reininger’s lifelong fascination with the late-1950’s Beat Generation.   ’There was this explosion of creativity taking place in the ’50s and ’60s,’ he says. ‘This [Beat youth movement] was the first time that this happened in the history of the world.   ’There’s this resurgence of interest among young people today with the icons of youth culture,’ continues Reininger, who is almost single-handedly spearheading the Corso revival. From January 15 through February 7, the University of Cincinnati has been hosting ‘I Gave Away The Sky: A Festival Celebrating Life and Legacy of Gregory Corso,’ which Reininger helped organize, with the participation of Cincinnati Conservatory of Music and the Art Institute of Cincinnati. The exhibit includes the original manuscript of the Beat poet’s masterpiece, ‘Bomb.’   ’Corso liked to paint portraits of poets,’ Reininger says. ‘Everyone from Poe to Orpheus to the Greek god Hermes and Dickinson. He was a very good painter. He was friends with Robert Motherwell, Jackson Pollock and Larry Rivers.’   Ever since ‘Sea Chanty,’ his first poem at 15, Corso had built his work, his personal mythology, on the premise that the mother he never knew was long gone; a downbeat subtext that ran through all his compositions”’Bomb,’ ‘Destiny,’ ‘How Not to Die.’ The melancholy of his mother, who had given him up for adoption at an early age when she fled Corso’s abusive father, fueled his poetry, which got him through hard times, including life on New York’s streets and prison time for petty crimes. And then, halfway through ‘Last Beat,’ filmmaker Reininger himself becomes the crucial player in resolving the mystery surrounding Corso’s missing mother. What’s remarkable about ‘Corso: The Last Beat’ is that the camera is there as Corso’s final years evolve from a requiem for days past to a surprising reboot of his personal history, played out before the viewer’s eyes. The search for Corso’s mother takes hold of the documentary’s narrative, as Reininger pushes and challenges the iconoclast on film.   ’We’re sitting around, looking at the flood in Venice,’ Reininger recalls. ‘I said to Gregory, ‘You’re doing those readings and what you’re doing is repeating yourself. It’s not developing.’ He said, ‘[Expletive] you! You had a mother!’   ’So I suggested that we could find her grave. Whoo! He didn’t like that. He said, ‘You just want to see me cry at her grave on film!”   Reininger visited Corso’s mother’s place of birth, the Vatican, New York Cardinal Joseph O’Connor, Governor Mario Cuomo: ‘All dead ends,’ he says.   Then came a chance encounter in Manhattan.   ’I had just sold my apartment on 84th Street, and I met a little old Italian lady,’ says Reininger, who told her about his quest for Corso’s mother. ‘She says, ‘Do you know what I do? I’m a bounty hunter for bank deposits.”   The woman found Corso’s sister, Marie, who had incurred two parking tickets. Reininger drove up to the Poconos to Marie’s doorstep, and Marie helped him find Corso’s mother. As it turns out, she was still very much around” an uneducated former coffee shop waitress who had been residing in Trenton, New Jersey, all along”a mere half-hour’s drive from her son”oblivious to beatnik culture. The inevitable reunion forms ‘Last Beat”s dramatic centerpiece.   Soon after, Corso died in 2001, when he was buried at the Protestant Cemetery, next to his literary hero, Shelly. ‘His life came full circle,’ says Reininger. Filmed over nine years with a small crew, ‘Corso”The Last Beat’ is the culmination of uncontrived cinematic miracles. Initial financing for Reininger’s film came from a foreign investor. Along the way, he secured additional funding from several private investors and the support of Benetton, which has the world’s largest Beats library at their corporate headquarters in Milan.   ’I originally wanted to do a narrative feature about the Beats,’ Reininger says. That was until he ran the idea by Ginsberg, who suggested that he make a documentary about Corso. Reininger enjoyed filming Corso and Ginsberg together.   ’They were completely fused,’ Reininger remembers. ‘They had a friendship that was so intimate, it was indescribable because they had gone through so much. They had met each other at a dyke bar, the Pony Stable. Soon after, Gregory was watching a woman sunbathing nude. Turns out it was Allen’s girlfriend. One of Allen’s rare forays into heterosexuality.   ’I picked up Gregory at a very tender, poignant moment in his life when his friend [Ginsberg] had died.’   Ginsberg passed away early in the shoot, in 1997, when Reininger suddenly shifted his film’s focus to Corso, the only surviving Beat, as Corso renews his Beat association at a time when he was on the cusp of burying his literary past.   Reininger opines why Corso may be the least known Beat: ‘Allen was a publicist, Kerouac’s ‘On The Road’ was a novel that caught a generation’s attention, and Burroughs, bizarreness.’ Couple that with Corso’s loathing of publicity or any ‘scene.’ And yet, even though, chronologically, Corso was the baby of the Beats, to the other writers, he was the most revered and profound, according to Reininger: ‘Kerouac got a football scholarship to Columbia, Ginsberg’s father taught at Columbia, Burroughs went to Harvard. They saw Gregory as the real thing. Someone who came up from the working class.’   Philosophically, Reininger short-hands the Beats this way: ‘Kerouac introduced Buddhism into Christian circles, Ginsberg introduced Buddhism to Jewish circles, and Corso stuck to basic Roman-Greco values.   ’For a while,’ the filmmaker admits, ‘I thought he was one of the greatest con artists I had ever met,’ as their Euro-trip hi-jinks included Corso translating hieroglyphics on the wall of the Louvre, or contacting the Duke of Caniglia Nico from a Veneto gas station. ‘Then I began to realize what a remarkable life this guy has had.’   As Reininger discovered, ‘Gregory never had a choice. Poetry was his only way in life.’