It was confirmed yesterday that Walter Salles (Motorcycle Diaries, Central Station) would direct a film version of Jack Kerouac’s On the Road, ending producer Francis Coppola’s search for the right director, a quest that has seemed longer than Godfather III. Coppola has owned the rights to the beat bible forever and once thought of directing it himself, but this was before he directed Jack (in which Robin Williams played a little boy who never grew up or an old man who wouldn’t shut up or something) and turned all of his creative abilities to making wine and building high-end ecotourist resorts in Central America.

First Francis grappled with the problem of how to convert the wordy, rather plotless book into a screenplay. One early version involved the use of some software of his own devising that allowed you to pour the text of a book into it in novel form only to have it emerge formatted as a script. Sadly the screenplay that emerged was about a thousand pages long and unfilmable. Undaunted, he garnered publicity for the on-again-off-again project with an open casting call in New York for potential unknowns to play the film’s lead characters, Sal Paradise and Dean Moriarty (based on Kerouac and Neal Cassady). Grey sweatshirts and khaki pants were in short supply at the Gap that week but no stars were born as a result.

The quest for the right director seemed to reach a new low last year when Coppola announced that Joel Schumacher, best known as the man who killed Batman, was at the helm. And some bonafide Hollywood stars were attached as well, with Brad Pitt being mentioned as a potential Dean/Neal. (Nick Nolte played Cassady to John Heard’s Kerouac in the rather lifeless 1980 film Heart Beat; no less a Cassady cohort than Prankster Ken Babbs said that Nolte had already played Cassady, or a character directly inspired by the legendary wheelman, in the film version of Robert Stone’s Dog Soldiers, inexplicably retitled Who’ll Stop the Rain? And done a hell of a job.)

Meanwhile, every writer in creation was approached to have a go at the script. A few years ago Coppola hired the relatively unknown Pete Rock (The Ambidextrist) to tackle adaptation chores though Russell Banks announced to the world that he had a lock on the job before then. I talked to Banks last year when I was trying to track down the film’s status for a piece I was pitching to the New York Times. He admitted he had no idea where the project was at but had just heard that Salles might direct and was optimistic that On the Road might finally get into gear. Too bad for Banks; Salles has already announced that Jose Rivera, who wrote Motorcycle Diaries, will handle the writing.

The big question, of course, is does anybody care? Beat wannabes, young and old alike, won’t be queuing up at the cineplex on opening weekend; that’s square stuff, man. Remember, at St. Marks Bookstore in Manhattan they still keep all their Kerouac behind the counter ’cause the kids, and presumably the young at heart, still come in and steal it off the shelves. Jack probably doesn’t care, he ain’t getting paid nohow…