Acting
Michael McClure (October 20, 1932 – May 4, 2020) was an American poet, playwright, songwriter, and novelist. After moving to San Francisco as a young man, he found fame as one of the five poets (including Allen Ginsberg) who read at the famous San Francisco Six Gallery reading in 1955, which was barely fictionalized in Jack Kerouac's The Dharma Bums. He soon became a key member of the Beat Generation and was immortalized as Pat McLear in Kerouac's Big Sur.

Martin Scorsese's documentary intertwines footage from The Band's incredible farewell tour with probing backstage interviews and featured performances by Eric Clapton, Bob Dylan, Joni Mitchell, Van Morrison, and other rock legends.

Three actors in Hollywood live and love together. A director comes from New York to make a movie about actors and Hollywood.

Traces the Beats from Allen Ginsberg and Jack Kerouac's meeting in 1944 at Columbia University to the deaths of Ginsberg and William S. Burroughs in 1997. Three actors provide dramatic interpretations of the work of these three writers, and the film chronicles their friendships, their arrival into American consciousness, their travels, frequent parodies, Kerouac's death, and Ginsberg's politicization. Their movement connects with bebop, John Cage's music, abstract expressionism, and living theater. In recent interviews, Ginsberg, Burroughs, Kesey, Ferlinghetti, Mailer, Jerry Garcia, Tom Hayden, Gary Snyder, Ed Sanders, and others measure the Beats' meaning and impact.

The poet and painter, Lawrence Ferlinghetti, is among the world's living monuments to arts and letters. For well over a half century, Ferlinghetti helped shape the currents of poetry and literature with his forceful engagement with society and an ideological position that often found him at odds with the political currents of his day. Ferlinghetti's quiet, behind the scenes demeanor and disarming mien may have assuaged, or even fooled, certain opponents, while in reality he was a literary mercenary, a rebel at the forefront of our own cultural revolution.

Captures the spirit and essence of the great San Francisco Human Be-In of January 14, 1967. Ten thousand people imbued with peace, love and euphoria. Set to hard rock such as only San Francisco blues can produce. BE-IN contains Allen Ginsberg, Lawrence Ferlinghetti, Timothy Leary, Michael McClure, Lenore Kandel and Buddha. Music by Blue Cheer.

Jim Morrison considered himself first a Poet, and subsequently a Rock Star and sex symbol. “ROCK POET” tells his story. He was far more than the hell-raiser, infamous for his arrest in Miami for exposing himself on stage, another rock casualty- dead by the age of just 27. “Classic Artists” meets with legendary Beat Poets Michael Horovitz, Michael McClure, Pete Brown of “Cream” fame, about the movement and what it meant to the burgeoning tide of Rock and Roll, more specifically, to Jim Morrison, and finds the admiration and respect for his talent as a poet and writer amongst his Beat Poet predecessors and also contemporaries to be unquestionable. This film includes revelations from those that were present in the final days and final hours of Jim Morrison, including an eye witness . A vigorously captivating insight of a time in rock history , a time in the life of the man, both rock star and poet.

Sepia toning lends a romantic (even wistful) quality to Larry Jordan's film Visions of a City, which he shot in San Francisco in 1957 and edited in 1978. The pace is un-irritating, in contrast to the San Francisco of today; but unlike the equal weight Helen Levill gives to all her subjects, there is an internal evolutionary development in the Jordan film that ultimately delivers a story. Until the introduction of the human protagonist, poet Michael McClure, we are treated to an extravagant display of visual delights.

More than 20 contemporary North American poets recite, sing, and perform their work. Early in the film, Charles Bukowski talks about the energy of poets and of a poem. These poets are the children of Walt Whitman and of Charles Olson, incantatory and oratorical, radical, sometimes incorporating contemporary political imagery. Black Mountain poets, the Beats, minimalists like John Cage, the wordless Four Horsemen, Tom Waits, and others capture aspects of poets as troubadours.

Takes place over the course of one feverish night in a Manhattan police precinct and neighboring bar.

Two portraits in relation to each other, the first of Robert Creeley, the second of Michael McClure. Preserved by the Academy Film Archive in 2007.