MVD Entertainment Group announced this past week that writer/director Stephen Kay’s 1997 film release of The Last Time I Committed Suicide will be making its long-overdue Blu-ray debut on July 6.
Way, way back in 1950, future “Beat Generation” guru Neal Cassady, who was an associate of Jack Kerouac and Allen Ginsberg, wrote a letter to his mentor, Jack Kerouac, who he had met a few years earlier, and that letter became the basis for playwright Stephen Kay’s script (it was his first directing and writing effort).
The Last Time I Committed Suicide follows the life — the real-life “adventures” — of Cassady during his formative years. He would become Jack Kerouac’s “voice” in his novel, “On the Road,” and this letter — which came to be known as “The Great Sex Letter” — was Kay’s inspiration.
Thomas Jane (Face/Off, Boogie Nights, Deep Blue Sea, The Mist, Into the Grizzly Maze), in a very early role for him, plays Cassady, and others in the cast include the likes of Keanu Reeves, Adrien Brody and Gretchen Mol.
The film by Stephen Kay (Get Carter, Boogeyman, Yellowstone, etc.) is presented very much like an arthouse entry, with the narrative moving freely backwards and forwards in time touching upon a series of pivotal points in Cassady’s life.
The film itself, was released theatrically by Multicom, an indie production company, very briefly in the summer of 1997, it arrived on DVD eight years later and is now being made available by MVD Entertainment Group on Blu-ray for the first time. For most, this will be the first chance to see Kay’s early film.
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