The event was organized by the founder of Semiotext(e), Sylvère Lotringer, along with Grauerholz and poet John Giorno, and featured performances by Ginsberg, Patti Smith, Philip Glass, Laurie Anderson, and Frank Zappa, readings from Peter Orlovsky, Anne Waldman, and Burroughs himself, and panel discussions with Timothy Leary and Brion Gysin.

The convention was an assemblage of downtown New York figures. After having been presumed lost for almost 30 years, the film was recently discovered in MoMA’s archives and restored by the filmmaker’s nephew Aaron Brookner, receiving a screening at last year’s New York Film Festival for the Burroughs centennial and now a proper release by the Criterion Collection.īurroughs’s former lover, adopted son, and literary executor, James Grauerholz, recalled in an interview at the NYFF that the idea for the film came about in 1978 when Brookner, a student at NYU, walked into Phebe’s, a bar on the Bowery, having lost his keys, and told Grauerholz that he wanted to make his senior thesis film about Burroughs Grauerholz suggested that he document the upcoming Nova Convention, a three-day conference on Burroughs’s work and ideas held at the Entermedia Theater that December. Brookner’s first film, Burroughs: The Movie (1983), is the only documentary about the 20th century’s most literary junky produced during the writer’s lifetime. Add to that list Howard Brookner, filmmaker and fellow denizen of the Lower East Side, who died of AIDS in 1989, at the age of 34, after completing only three films.

and his fellow Beats Jack Kerouac and Allen Ginsberg, though they were more than a decade younger. Despite a decades-long addiction to heroin, numerous run-ins with the law, and an unabashed love of gunplay, the author of Naked Lunch (1959) died in 1997, at the age of 83, outliving his wife, Joan Vollmer his son William S. COURTESY THE CRITERION COLLECTION Few humans maintained a courtship with death as intimate and prolonged as that of William S.

Junky william burroughs