Beat Alice looked around at her generation and threw it away in a spectacular leap in 1962. The Beatniks were gone. She left too.  The Beats—the famous coming-of-age generation from the 1950s whose art and poetry first established American postmodernism. The Beatniks, coolest of the cool. Yeah, but for their women, for their chicks, not so much. The women of the Beat generation were invisible, were battered, were beaten down by their men despite their own genius and their own great but forgotten art. Zig Zag tells the story of the most enigmatic of all Beat chicks, Elise Cowen, part of the Ginsburg-Kerouac crowd but not part of it. Only about 40 of her poems survived her seven-story leap. The rest were destroyed. But what if the papers and poems of Elise were rediscovered? What if the fragments of her surviving poems were really part of the greatest epic poem of the 20th century? What if all the suspicions were true that she was more than a muse for Allen Ginsburg and Jack Kerouac? What if her story was the real story of the Beatnik era? Zig Zag finds out the answers in a story loaded with great music from bebop to contemporary. This is no nostalgic, sentimental story. Zig Zag, a film aimed squarely at the coming-of-age generation of today, shows the dark side of the Beatniks. It looks behind the dark shades and all the black garb and searches for answers to questions only a few generations care to ask. Questions being asked again today.
Executive Producer Harvey Rochmann.
 

SYNOPSIS:

A tale from the Beat Generation about Elise Cowen, who historically was part of the Ginsburg-Kerouac crowd. She too was a poet and writer. Alas, as a result of her mistreatment and neglect by the big boys of the Beat Movement, she committed suicide at age 29 in a spectacular way. Her parents destroyed all her poems, But a friend retrieved 20-30 poems. Today, critics and scholars ask what if? what if she had lived and been allowed to publish her own work? What if her journals had survived? Zig Zag answers the what if questions. Here she is, the bad girl of the Beats, the quintessential Beatnik chick, invisible to the men of the movement. Here is what her story might have been like.