Release Date: 1992 
Genre: Documentary/Comedy
Director: Rodger Weisberg 
Notable Cast Members: Andrei Codrescu
Country: United States of America
Rating: PG-13 

Synopsis: Road Scholar is a documentary/comedy staring Andrei Codrescu a Romanian immigrant.  After moving to the United States in the 1960s, Codrescu becomes a citizen in 1992.  He immediately learns how to drive and buys a cherry- red 1968 Cadillac convertible, and takes off in search of America.  His all- encompassing road trip begins in New York and finished six weeks and 4,500 miles later in San Francisco. Along the way, he stops and meets a wide assortment of interesting and unique Americans. His conversations with people run the gamut from some girls who have created their own form of sign language to talk to their boyfriends in jail (the one right across the street from Walt Whitman’s home in New York) to ultra- serious survivalist in the dessert to hippies Santa Fe. All this he does in his search of what it is to be an American and what makes up America.      

Role and Significance of Whitman: Andrei Codrescu is not only a satirist for National Public Radio, he’s a poet.  Therefore, he travels to New York to receive the blessing of his mentor and begin his journey from the place where it all began for so many immigrants, Ellis Island.  As Codrescu travels across a ferry in New York the symbolism to Whitman and his poem “Crossing Brooklyn Ferry” is obvious.  He travels to the home of Whitman to pay homage and be energized for his travel and adventure.  It is almost as if Codrescu takes Whitman’s poem “Song of the Open Road” to heart and takes off in search of all that is out there.  Whitman writes in “Song of the Open Road”, “Afoot and light- hearted I take to the open road, Healthy, free, the world before me, The long brown path before me leading wherever I choose.”  Codrescu is a perfect example of what Whitman was describing.  Across the street from Whitman’s home he notices some women signing to the prisoners in the jail.  The women tell him that they are talking to their boyfriends and how they have invented their own form of communication.  Codrescu asks one of the girls if she has ever heard of Walt Whitman. She replies that she had read some of his poems in school, but no longer remembers any of the words. Codrescu tells her that Whitman lived across the street from the jail where they are now standing.  They both find the irony in a jail being across the street from America’s poet who extolled the virtues of living out of doors and enjoying the environment that is all around.  
     Throughout the journey, Codrescu searches out for the different people who make up the United States and are truly Americans.  It is these people that Whitman once wrote about and Codrescu now seeks out.  It is the Hopi Indian, the Sheikh people, the German communists living in a communal village, the professional gamblers in Las Vegas, the cattle breeder, the musicians from Motown, and the hippies in Santa Fe that Codrescu encounters.  In all of his adventures, Codrescu discovers American and her diversity.  It is through the beauty of the landscape and the people that Codrescu can find what Whitman was writing about.  In the end, Codrescu finds what Whitman was trying to show everyone all along in “Leaves of Grass”.  It is not the diversity of the people that separates Americans, on the contrary, it is what brings America together.      
 

Information and analysis contributed by Derek Bright