METAL MANIACS I: The line-up hadn’t even been announced and already the hard-rock glossy Revolver was declaring the fourth annual New England Metal and Hardcore Festival the can’t-miss event of the year. And now it can be told: the two-day blowout April 5 and 6 at the Worcester Palladium will host In Flames, Nile, Overcast, Iced Earth, Cannibal Corpse, Arch Enemy, Soilwork, Poison the Well, Shai Hulud, Lamb of God, and plenty more. The Palladium is at 261 Main Street; tickets to the shindig go on sale this Saturday, February 2, at 10 a.m. Call (800) 477-6849.

METAL MANIACS II: Penelope Spheeris, the woman behind the classic behind-the-metal documentary The Decline of Western Civilization Part II: The Metal Years (not to mention the other two Decline films, which were less amusing takes on punk rock), returns with We Sold Our Souls for Rock and Roll, a cinematic paean to three decades of metal as contained in the person of one Ozzy Osbourne and his traveling circus, the OzzFest. We can’t imagine it’ll be as funny as the upcoming MTV series The Osbournes, a kind of Real-World-meets-the-Cosbys-in-Hell deal. But it ought to be good nonetheless, and Sold Our Souls gets its Boston premiere during the Boston Underground Film Festival, at midnight on Saturday February 23 at the Brattle Theatre, 40 Brattle Street in Harvard Square. For more info on the BUFF, call (617) 975-3361; or call the Brattle at (617) 876-6837.

NEXT WEEKEND:

Beats on film

The 74-year-old artist, filmmaker, and playwright Alfred Leslie saw his career take off in 1959 with the release of his film "Pull My Daisy," a 29-minute piece that spawned passionate (if not always positive) responses, and that for many contemporary critics marks the birth of American independent and underground cinema. It’s the Rosetta stone of beatnik films, and a natural choice as a centerpiece for the Museum of Fine Arts’ "Beatniks and Poets" film retrospective, which kicks off next Thursday.

Directed by Leslie and Robert Frank, scored by the composer David Amram, and narrated by Jack Kerouac, "Pull My Daisy" was based on Kerouac’s unproduced play The Beat Generation; the title comes from an erotic poem written by Kerouac, Neal Cassady, and Allen Ginsberg. It began as a no-budget enterprise; Leslie solicited funding by writing to any and every artist or luminary that popped into his head, starting with friends like poet John Ashbery and moving on to T.S. Eliot and Fidel Castro. He even got some responses: a postcard from Samuel Beckett and a kind letter from Boris Pasternak, but no money.

"I was penniless," he explains over the phone from New York, "making a living doing moving jobs with my pick-up truck, living hand-to-mouth doing my painting. I had nothing. I sat on the floor of my studio pecking away at my typewriter. And Robert, Jack, and I appeared to be such lunatics, most investors would see it as complete folly."

Then he sold a painting and decided to invest the cash in the film project. "I called Robert and said, ‘We’ll take this and get a space,’ and the minute that happened, money started coming in. It was a complete fluke."

For years after its release, "Pull My Daisy" was believed to have been improvised in slapdash fashion; not until 1968 did Leslie reveal that it had been carefully crafted. "It had a completely formal structure. We used a tripod, every shot was rehearsed, we did three takes of each shot, and even Jack’s part was recorded more than once."

What was Kerouac like at the time? "He was a nice guy and fun to be around, but he didn’t really have friends. Most of his time around people was spent trying to find someone who would take him in and take care of him so he could write."

Kerouac, whose Beat maxim was "first thought, best thought," was said to be annoyed that his part in the film had been edited. "I wanted him to just do it his own way, at his home, but the recording was unusable, so we had him come into a studio. I wanted as much coverage as possible, sort of like how Altman worked with Gosford Park, having all those mikes on the actors. Jack, in the sound booth, could hear David’s piano, but David could not hear him. Some of it [the soundtrack/voiceover] was recorded while Jack was taking a break. And then, sort of like what Glenn Gould might have done, we’d use the first part of one take, the second part of another."

Leslie attributes the film’s notoriety to its raw shock value. "When people first saw the Impressionists, they thought they were wild beasts. The Beats got the same response. "Pull My Daisy" touched some kind of nerve. People did not understand Kerouac at all. Also, the audience’s familiarity with the ways of film and how films were made in 1958 was totally unlike people’s sophistication today."

"Beatniks and Poets" runs February 7 through 21 at the Museum of Fine Arts, 465 Huntington Avenue; "Pull My Daisy" screens February 21 at 8 p.m., with an introduction by David Amram. Call (617) 369-3770.

BY PEG ALOI