Ian Holm as Joe Gould, aka Professor Seagull - bohemian, scholar and man
with a secret in the new film from actor/director Stanley Tucci.

Stanley Tucci's new film, Joe Gould's Secret, looks back to an era when New York was one of the last bohemian haunts - and introduces us to one of the most eccentric bohemians of all.

Before the hippies there were the beats. And before the beats there were the bohemians. Joe Gould was a bohemian, maybe one of the last, belonging to a close-knit, self-supporting community of artists who inhabited New York during the war and post-war years. The bohemians have since been overshadowed by the shameless self-promotion of the flower-children and the cult that has grown up around Jack Kerouac and his fellow beats, so the whole movement has rather faded from view. But not from memory.

"I don't think there are half as many people in the arts like that as there were then," says Stanley Tucci, who has been rediscovering the bohemian world of the forties - not to mention recreating it - in Joe Gould's Secret, his third film as a director. "I've talked to people that were around then, and New York in the forties and early fifties was like Paris in the twenties."

Perhaps e.e. cummings - the poet whose surrealist view of the world is less well-remembered than his refusal to use capital letters - was the most famous of the bohemians. cummings is frequently mentioned in Joe Gould's Secret - indeed, he even puts in a brief appearance at the end. But the focus of the film is the far more eccentric title character, who may have lived in and around the Village in the forties.

"The film is based on two articles that Joseph Mitchell wrote for the New Yorker magazine," explains Tucci as he sits in make-up on the fifth week of the film's New York City shoot (in addition to directing, producing and co-scripting, Tucci also plays Mitchell in Joe Gould's Secret). "The first one was published in 1942 and was called 'Professor Seagull'. The second was called 'Joe Gould's Secret' and was published in 1964, after Gould's death. Since the film is based on fact, I have tried to stay very true to their story."

Played in bravura style by British actor Ian Holm, who has been carving out a niche for himself on the other side of the Atlantic playing driven eccentrics (notably in Atom Egoyan's The Sweet Hereafter and David Cronenberg's eXistenZ), Gould would, in all probability, be dismissed as a street person today. Indeed, a street person is what he frequently was during the period in which the movie is set: he had few fixed abodes, no regular (or, for that matter, irregular) source of income, and survived on hand-outs affectionately referred to as 'The Joe Gould Fund'. Everyone from bartenders and short-order cooks to gallery owners and established artists contributed as and when the need arose. Which was often.