No major Kerouac- inspired productions came along until 1980, when Orion distributed writer-director John Byrum's Heart Beat. With its theme being the rejection of societal moral values, Kerouac's beat novel On the Road (1957) was by definition unacceptable to the Production Code. Hollywood never figured out how to capitalize on the beat craze of the 1950s, as shown in MGM's embarrassing attempt to adapt Jack Kerouac's The Subterraneans (1960).