Thursday, April 12, 2012

The Beats will live again at the Holiday Cocktail Lounge (for one day, anyway)


So you know that the Holiday Cocktail Lounge closed on St. Mark's Place back on Jan. 29. Robert Ehrlich, the founder of Pirate Brands, and Barbara Sibley, the owner of La Palapa next door, will open a tavern-restaurant that serves staples such as fish-n-chips.

Allen Ginsberg, among many other literary luminaries, frequented the Holiday back in the day ... so it may not be so strange then that crews will film scenes for "Kill Your Darlings" at the Holiday on Monday.

IMDB simply puts the plot this way: "A murder in 1944 draws together the great poets of the beat generation: Allen Ginsberg, Jack Kerouac and William Burroughs." The crew has been shooting scenes around the city, including at Columbia, the last several weeks. (The Times has a lot of the backstory about the murder here; that the version of the story for this film can be found in "And the Hippos Were Boiled in Their Tanks," the 1945 novel by Kerouac and Burroughs.)

Sibley told us that crew members will arrive today to transform the interior to look like the 1940s, which, given the bar's timeless look, likely won't take too much.

In the drama, Daniel Radcliffe plays a collegiate-age Ginsberg just as he's meeting Kerouac (Jack Huston) and Lucien Carr (Dane DeHaan). Elizabeth Olsen is Kerouac's first wife, Edie Parker, and Ben Foster portrays William Burroughs. Michael C. Hall, Jennifer Jason Leigh, David Cross and Kyra Sedgwick round out the cast.

[Lucien and Allen in the movies. Via]

As for the rest of the renovations, Sibley says they are coming along slowly. There's major work ahead, including with the sewer line.

10 comments:

nygrump said...

I was skeptical, but I see Jennifer Jason Leigh is on the project so I must conclude this will be a quality product.

glamma said...

if bloomberg keeps gutting the soul right out of the city with his real estate pillaging, there'll be no where left for his precious little film crews to even fictitiously re-enact all he has taken from us!

tiny tim said...

The beats were kind of beat.

Shawn said...

It sure must be strange for tourists who watch all these movies and then come to NY looking for the filming locations and wonder why they can't find anything...

RIP Holiday... man I want a beer from Dave right now!

:-(

Marty Wombacher said...

@Shawn Chittle: Excellent point about the tourists, I never thought about that!

Jeremy said...

@Shawn - think of what those tourists must think when they visit Hollywood!

Anonymous said...

just 2 fugs

Anonymous said...

I still think Harry Potter every time I see him D.R. Can't imagine that ever changing.

Kurt Ralske said...

The photo shows Harry Potter as Allen Ginsberg, but the blond-haired muppet is portraying Lucien Carr (not Jack Kerouac, as the caption states)

EV Grieve said...

@ Unknown.

Thanks. Wrote that while wearing my Google augmented reality glasses.