One of the most interesting aspects is hearing his father's poetry and realizing how influential he was to his son as Allen’s work uses the same sort of structure -- like two artists using the same framework yet filling the spaces with different themes and ideas. His mother says that they would even argue about poetry as though they were colleagues. Ginsberg clearly loved his parents and the poems that he wrote about their lives and his mother’s deterioration are some of his most moving.

There have been many failed attempts to bring On the Road to the silver screen by U.S. filmmakers. Francis Ford Coppola, who purchased the rights to the screenplay in 1979, tried several times to adapt the work into film, but his efforts never materialized. “I never knew how to do it,” he remarked when Brazilian filmmaker Walter Salles accepted the cumbersome task of filming the unfilmable. It was Salles (best known for the Motorcycle Diaries, another road film) that Coppola finally trusted to make On the Road a reality, with a screenplay developed by José Rivera.