Cold Chicago Productions

Clancy Sigal ventured everywhere and accomplished everything a bold spirit possibly can in the turbulent course of a mere lifetime: street-smart city kid, precinct worker, union organizer, soldier, UCLA graduate, Hollywood agent, target of McCarthyism, European emigre, Fleet Street journalist, novelist, staunch leftist disdainful of party lines, enemy of cant of any kind, psychedelic journeyer, skeptical devotee of psychiatrist R. D. Laing, National Book Award nominee, and screenwriter of Frida and other films. An eloquent radical who shook up things in every milieu he encountered, nothing he ever wrote was predictable, except for the compassion, dark humor and demand for social justice always at the core.

This documentary explores the artistic, musical and literary resonances of the mystique of the road - and especially of going off the beaten track - in American lore. The Westward expansion, the Dust Bowl era, hobos, post-war suburbanization and the Beat critique of it; hitchhiking, the upheavals of the 1960s and early 1970s and the current generation of backpackers clutching their Lonely Planet and Rough Guides. American Road ultimately probes the meaning of what it is to be an American, not just a wayfarer.—anonymous