PART 2

JOHNNY BERLIN PART 2: NOTES FROM THE DUMPSTER, picks up where JOHNNY BERLIN left off, right after Johnny's tour of duty as a porter aboard a luxury train ended. In the first JOHNNY BERLIN, Johnny talks about wanting to get off the train to go on a “writing sabbatical” in Cambodia where he is sure that he can live cheaply for months and thus have time to write his unfinished novel about a man who rolls across America. In JOHNNY BERLIN PART 2, we find Johnny lying in a hotel room bed, talking about how he gambled away almost all of the money he had saved for his trip while working on the train, and thus ended up destitute in Phnom Penh where he had visions of leaping off of a bridge into the Mekong River.

From the opening strains of the A.P. Carter tune, “Worried Man Blues,” sung by Woody Guthrie, the film follows Johnny, alone, as he travels from Arlington National Cemetery in Virginia where he searches in vain for the graves of his uncles, Benjamin Franklin Simpson and Thomas Jefferson Simpson, to New York City where he goes on a failed job hunt. Along the way, he talks about his grandfather’s lost novel, “Autobiography of a Failure,” muses about finding himself after reading a New Yorker article by Tom Robbins on the “crazy wisdom” of Buddhism, and ends up in a dumpster on the street filled with used books reminiscing about his homeless older brother whom he lost contact with years ago.

VIEW the ENTIRE FILM
for FREE now
on