This program presents a selection of films by American Beat writers who explored existentialist themes.

Pull My Daisy is an improvisation based on a play by Jack Kerouac, and features members of the Beat Generation (Allen Ginsburg, Gregory Corso, Peter Orlovsky) as themselves. Railroad brakeman Milo (Larry Rivers) and his painter wife (Delphine Seyrig) love to hang around their New York City apartment with their poet friends, but conflict arises when "straight society" (in the form of the couple's bishop) pays a visit. Recorded without sync sound, the film is maniacally narrated in voiceover by Jack Kerouac, and features a jazz soundtrack written by David Amram. Pull My Daisy is a landmark film that inspired the underground film movements of the 1960s.

The End follows six different people whose individual ends will either be self-inflicted or brought about by the world's imminent nuclear annihilation. Christopher Maclaine, a San Francisco beat poet, imparts their stories with dark humor and formal inventiveness.

Maclaine narrates an allegorical nonsense poem over the fable of an alchemist whose quest for gold will ultimately bring about his own transformation.

Taylor Mead starts as a homosexual beatnik who walks around San Francisco. With a stolen flower, a teddy bear and an American flag, he gets into a series of misadventures that lead him up a hill before he descends in a children's wagon. Filmed in 1959 through 1960, the incidents foreshadowed the hippie movement by several years. Claude Debussy's music is used for the soundtrack in this early counter-culture feature. Dan Pavlides, All Movie Guide