A couple of years ago, a well-respected, fellow cinephile and friend sent me a copy of Aram Avakian's End of the Road. I'd been looking for it since the mid-1990s. I'd found a copy at my favorite second hand book shop when I was in the 10th grade. John Barth's End of the Road quickly became one of my favorite books. The film however, was impossible to find and took on some kind of mythic status in my little world of obsessing over hard to find films. It became available on DVD due to a single-handed effort by Steven Soderbergh to make it available and seen.
I put the copy in my DVD player only to find the batteries in the remote were dead. Not long after the player was packed for a move, with the unplayed DVD inside it. The box stayed packed for 2 years. I finally rescued the DVD and watched it today.
First of all, Barth's book was written in the mid-1950s. The movie takes place in the late 1960s. This is fine with me. The film was adapted by Terry Southern, who'd just finished working on Easy Rider with Dennis Hopper. Indeed, End of the Road is touched by experimental cinema and psychedelic culture of the 1960s. The film is delightfully anarchic. It's full of really bizarre imagery. It's totally riveting but very dated and very strange.
It was originally rated X for two controversial scenes, one in which a man in an insane asylum rapes a chicken and another a grim abortion scene. Only the latter is in the book.
End of the Road stars a very young Stacy Keach as the protagonist Jake Horner, a recent college graduate who suffers a mental breakdown, suffers a type of catatonia, and seeks unorthodox treatment from an unnamed doctor, played by a very young James Earl Jones. The doctor encourages Jake to take a teaching job at a local college where he meets a teacher and his wife and a love triangle ensues.
I definitely recommend the book. The film is good too, but more of a peculiar find than a must see. 4/5