"Howl": Allen Ginsberg and His Times Are Brought To Life
By ANNA BLOOM
January 22, 2010
There was a "mad night" in 1955 when Allen Ginsberg read his poem
"Howl" for the first time at the Six Gallery, a former auto-body shop
on Fillmore street in San Francisco.
It began "I saw the best minds of my generation destroyed by madness,
starving, hysterical naked," then went on for 3,000 lines, many of
them quite explicit about things sexual. The audience left in tears,
and Lawrence Ferlinghetti, the publisher of City Lights, offered to
publish Mr. Ginsberg's work. In 1956, Mr. Ginsberg read the poem at
Reed College, which has a recording that Reed believes is the
earliest one available of a Ginsberg reading.
"Howl," a narrative film, was screened Thursday night at the opening
of the Sundance Film Festival. On Jan. 28, it is set to be shown
again to a sold out audience at the Sundance Cinema's Kabuki theater
in San Francisco. (Salon's Andrew O'Hehir has a review here.)
In anticipation of the San Francisco showing, I interviewed the
filmmakers, Rob Epstein and Jeffrey Friedman, both of whom hail from
the Bay Area. But before I get to their remarks below, a little
history is in order.
A year after his debut at Six Gallery, United States customs
officials seized all copies of the second printing of "Howl" as they
arrived in the United States from England. As described in an
historical review on the First Amendment Center's website, "Lawrence
Ferlinghetti, the owner of the City Lights Bookstore in San
Francisco, published "Howl and Other Poems" on Nov. 1, 1956, with the
British printer Villiers."
"Word spread about the controversial poetry collection, and a
government crackdown began in March 1957 when San Francisco Collector
of Customs Chester MacPhee seized more than 500 copies of Howl and
Other Poems."
The program notes for "Howl" say that Mr. Ferlinghetti was arrested
and charged with selling obscene material. The trial that ensued,
People v. Ferlinghetti, was high-profile and far-reaching, as
literature professors took the stand in a San Francisco courtroom
defending writers' First Amendment rights. Mr. Ginsberg died in 1997
at the age of 70.
The movie was directed and conceived by Mr. Epstein whose credits
include the Academy-Award winning film, "The Times of Harvey Milk"
and Mr. Friedman, who also worked on "The Times of Harvey Milk" as a
consultant, before joining Mr. Epstein to form the company Telling Pictures.
The movie stars James Franco as Mr. Ginsberg and Jon Hamm as Jake
Ehrlich, the suave defense lawyer.
The filmmakers' comments below have been edited and condensed:
Q.
What does the poem "Howl" mean to the gay movement?
A.
This was a big discovery for us once we delved into the project. As
we began deconstructing the themes within "Howl" in order to figure
out ways to dramatize it, we began to understand that "Howl" could be
read in part as a gay manifesto. And this was written in 1955, at a
time when homosexuality was still considered a disease. The poem is
unabashedly sexual. Allen writes about his love for his comrades both
spiritually and physically, and we knew of no other literary figure
doing this at the time. It's important to recognize that in writing
the poem, Allen integrated his sexual politics into a broader protest
against an increasingly militarized, consumerist culture. It really
does feel like the seeds of all the protest movements that would
emerge into what we think of as 60s counter-culture.
Q.
Did Ginsberg change the Bay Area or did the Bay Area change Ginsberg?
A.
Like many, ourselves included, moving to the Bay Area freed something
up in Allen, allowing him to fall in love and ultimately find his
true creative voice as a poet. There is something mysteriously
freeing about the Bay Area that historically has attracted misfits,
outcasts, dissidents and artists. It's a culture that seems to
welcome eccentricity and creativity.
Q.
Is that still true today, as it may have been in the 1950s and 1960s?
A.
It's a different world today in so many respects. Creative voices
that emerge today need to speak to a whole other set of
circumstances. Still, many of the themes in Allen's "Howl" continue
to resonate in the Bay Area: a resistance to militarism and the human
sacrifice it entails; a tolerance of sexual differences. The creative
energy in the Bay Area today seems to be directed into high-tech
areas: phone apps, interactive social networking, even
bio-technology. It is definitely another world, but there are still
adventurous explorers and creators at work. Visual artists and
writers and filmmakers are still drawn to the Bay Area.
Q.
What does it mean to you to be screening the film in San Francisco?
Are you planning on doing anything special?
A.
We will be flying in for the night from Park City to be with our
peeps in San Francisco, and then flying back to Sundance for our
final screening, the next day. The poem was written in San Francisco,
it was published here by City Lights, Ginsberg had a lifelong
connection to the city and it's our hometown. We're looking forward
to bringing "Howl" home!
--------
Bravery triumphs over repression in 'Howl'
http://www.sfgate.com/cgi-bin/article.cgi?f=/c/a/2010/01/21/MVMI1B7QFV.DTL
Ruthe Stein, Chronicle Movie Correspondent
Friday, January 22, 2010
When San Francisco filmmakers Rob Epstein and Jeffrey Friedman felt
inspired to do something about the Beat poem "Howl," they started off
making a documentary. It's a form the two excel at: Their first film,
"Common Threads: Stories From the Quilt" in 1989, won an Oscar, a
second for Epstein, who had taken home the 1984 Academy Award for
"The Times of Harvey Milk."
But their research efforts failed to yield much. There turned out to
be no footage of Allen Ginsberg reciting his controversial poem in
public for the first time in 1955 at the Six Gallery, a small art
gallery on Fillmore Street. There weren't even any photos of the
momentous event. The recorded readings of "Howl" are audio only.
Epstein and Friedman tracked down a few people to interview who still
remember the brouhaha caused by the poem's numerous references to
drugs and sex - homosexual as well as heterosexual - or the
subsequent obscenity trial.
"We came to see that unless we found a way to make it come alive in a
more immediate way, it would be just a history lesson," Friedman said.
The situation proved an impetus to force him and Epstein to do
something they had dreamed about for years: Hire actors and make a
feature movie. The result of their efforts, "Howl," premieres at the
Sundance Film Festival and then comes home to San Francisco, where so
much of the story took place, for a special sold-out screening Thursday.
Researching Ginsberg's life, Friedman says he was struck by "how
incredibly courageous Allen was in his public statements of his
sexuality, and in the mid-'50s, too, which I always think of as the
most repressive time in my lifetime."
Once the script was finished, they took it to Gus Van Sant, who was
in San Francisco directing "Milk." He suggested James Franco, an
actor he was working with, for Ginsberg.
That wasn't thinking that much out of the box, the filmmakers decided.
"I know people always think of Allen as this avuncular, bearded bald
guy. But there are photos of him back then where he looks like James
- well, maybe not quite as cute," Friedman said with a laugh. "We
wanted to remind people that where this poem came from was a young,
very vibrant person who was very engaged in his time."
Jon Hamm of "Mad Men" signed on as flamboyant San Francisco defense
attorney Jake Ehrlich, who takes the "Howl" obscenity case. Although
no heartthrob like Hamm, Ehrlich was "the hero of the legal part of
our story, so we wanted a heroic actor," Friedman said.
Their research found that Ehrlich was a bit of a dandy - a spiffy
dresser and man about town. Casting a dude like Hamm suggests that
part of his personality.
Working with actors didn't turn out to be much different from the
subjects Friedman and Epstein have interviewed for their documentaries.
"The actors are real people," Friedman said. "When you film real
people in a documentary, you are looking for the truth of the moment,
the same thing you're looking for working with actors. But actors
bring a whole level of creative energy to the table, so that makes it
more exciting."
The two completed their last documentary, "Paragraph 175," in 2000.
Since then they have been doing a lot of television work while still
maintaining San Francisco as their home. They worked for three years
on the NBC series "Crime and Punishment," a sort of nonfiction
spin-off of "Law & Order," and also did shows for the History Channel.
Sundance and its writer's lab have been an integral part of both
their careers since Epstein brought his Harvey Milk documentary there
in the early '80s.
"The network of compadres we've established come from Sundance," he
said. "Those are relationships you carry through your career. So much
of filming and producing is dependent on those relationships in terms
of getting our work out. I started with a gay-theme film and it got
launched in the mainstream world before it hit the gay world."
Getting "Howl" shown in competition at Sundance was their dream.
Their fellow filmmakers "feel like that family we want to be among,"
Epstein said - so much so that he hasn't given much thought to
actually competing with them.
"Of course that may change once we get to Park City," Friedman added,
laughing.
--
E-mail Ruthe Stein at datebookletters@sfchronicle.com.
--------
Ginsberg's Howl resounds on film
http://www.guardian.co.uk/film/2010/jan/19/allen-ginsberg-howl-film
In 1955, Allen Ginsberg performed a poem about sex, drugs and race
that became a battlecry for the US counterculture. It also led to an
obscenity trial. B Ruby Rich on a new film about the epic Howl
B Ruby Rich
Tuesday 19 January 2010
On 7 October 1955, at the Six Gallery in San Francisco, Allen
Ginsberg brought the house down with a performance of his
hallucinatory new poem, Howl. Among other things, this epic work in
four parts dealt with drugs, mental illness, religion, homosexuality
the fears and preoccupations of a generation. Jack Kerouac and
Lawrence Ferlinghetti were both in the audience. Ginsberg was 29
years old. Also present was the future choreographer and film-maker
Yvonne Rainer. A teenager at the time, Rainer still clearly remembers
that night: "Ginsberg, quite drunk, clean-shaven, in black suit and
tie-less white shirt, holding a jug of rot-gut red wine, intoning and
chanting the poem." Back then, the beats were in thrall to the jazz
world; Ginsberg himself explained his poem as akin to "bop refrains".
Eight years ago, film-makers Rob Epstein and Jeffrey Friedman
received a call from Ginsberg's estate asking them to make a
documentary about Howl. With the 50th anniversary of the poem's
publication (and subsequent obscenity trial) approaching, the estate
wanted the best. Epstein and Friedman have, between them, won Oscars
and Emmys for a lifetime of work including The Times of Harvey Milk,
about the first openly gay man elected to public office in
California; and The Celluloid Closet, based on Vito Russo's book
about screen depictions of homosexuality. Ginsberg's estate knew the
pair could deliver an in-depth documentary on time and on budget;
plus, they were queer enough to understand the social pressures that
formed the poet.
Had things gone as planned, the film would have been released in
2007, and it would have been a documentary. Instead, the hybrid
drama that is Howl has its world premiere tomorrow, on the opening
night of the Sundance film festival. Epstein and Friedman ended up
overshooting their deadline by three years, losing themselves
completely in what turned out to be a mad project, struggling to
create something worthy of Ginsberg's incantatory work.
The day after that first reading, Ferlinghetti sent Ginsberg a
telegram offering to publish Howl. It became the third volume in the
Pocket Poets series, dedicated to bringing out paperback first
editions of serious literature. But in 1957, a copy was purchased by
undercover police at Ferlinghetti's City Lights bookshop in San
Francisco, who then arrested Ferlinghetti and store manager
Shigeyoshi Murao on the grounds of obscenity (one line in particular
seems to have inspired the arrest: "who let themselves be fucked in
the ass by saintly motorcyclists, and screamed with joy"). The
charges against Murao were dropped, but Ferlinghetti was tried in
what became a landmark case. (Ginsberg was never put in the dock;
while Ferlinghetti fought the good fight, he took off for Tangiers.)
An anarchist unlocks the past
Epstein and Friedman's bop-inflected film now mixes Ginsberg's
original reading with a dramatisation of both the obscenity trial and
a mercurial interview Ginsberg gave to a Time reporter, as well as
dreamy animation. "We interviewed everyone who was still around,"
explains Epstein, sitting in the San Francisco production office he
shares with Friedman. They videotaped Ferlinghetti, now 90; Al
Bendich, a member of the American Civil Liberties Union, who helped
defend the case; and Peter Orlovsky, Ginsberg's lifelong partner.
But somehow they couldn't make any progress. "I showed [the footage]
to my students," says Epstein. "And they just didn't respond." Their
goal was to reach a new generation, and they weren't even close. With
scores of beat-generation documentaries already in existence, the
film-makers just couldn't get excited about their own growing archive.
Then they interviewed Tuli Kupferberg. The poet and anarchist
features in Howl: he's the man who jumps off the Brooklyn Bridge and
survives. Now 86 and still living in New York, Kupferberg proved to
be the lynchpin that began to unlock the past. "It was there that I
picked up a book with illustrations by Eric Drooker," says Friedman.
Best known for his graphic novel Flood!, Drooker had collaborated
with Ginsberg on a collection of illustrated poems in 1992. Suddenly,
Friedman saw a new route into the past. "We finally realised we had
to make Allen young. This is all about his youth, but there was
almost no footage of him then. Lots of photographs, but not film." So
the film-makers decided to create an animation out of Drooker's
illustrations. This would bring the poem to life, while actors would
dramatise the reading, trial and interview.
Howl was a powerful affront to the bourgeois sensibilities of the
late 1950s: as well as the illicit sex and drugs, its verses
described a mingling of the races. Today, the big surprise is how
explicit it remains. Howl wasn't just an anthem for the beats, nor an
ode to drugs; it was primarily a celebration of homosexual love and
lust. This, combined with Ginsberg's run-on sentences, peppered with
slang, was too much for the conservative forces of the day. In court,
Ferlinghetti was defended by attorney Jake Ehrlich (played in the
film by Jon Hamm, Mad Men's Don Draper), while nine literary experts
testified in his defence. The conservative judge decided the case in
his favour; the poem, he said, was of "redeeming social importance".
Friedman buried himself in the archives of the 1957 trial, then did
the same with all the interviews Ginsberg gave at the time; he edited
these down into a script. To test it, Epstein and Friedman put on a
staged reading of the trial at the ACT theatre. The crowd was
transfixed: I was in the audience, and we couldn't believe how
relevant this still was. Epstein and Friedman knew they were on the
right track.
Ginsberg's missing interview
As there is no filmed record of the trial, its staging is the
film-makers' own invention. "We tried to find trial films of the
time," says Epstein. "To Kill a Mockingbird was a big influence. We
tried to think of what people in that circle were doing with film in
the 1950s and 1960s. So we looked at Shirley Clarke's Portrait of
Jason and Robert Frank's Pull My Daisy. That was the only place we
found the young Allen. It was a conscious effort on our part to make
a film that would be more primitive than, say, Avatar."
They also used a fabled Time magazine interview with Ginsberg. Time
had flown Ginsberg from Tangiers to Rome, where its reporter
conducted the interview in a hotel room. Never published, never even
located, this interview proved the perfect device to drive the film.
To recreate it, Epstein and Friedman simply shoehorned together all
their favourite excerpts from Ginsberg's interviews at the time,
stitching his words into one long, eloquent defence of himself, his
poem, and his generation. Like their animation, it's a great trick,
one that allows Ginsberg, on the brink of turning 30, to speak for
himself out of the past, directly to us.
Today, locals and tourists still make the pilgrimage across San
Francisco to City Lights, largely on the strength of Howl. "We've
probably sold a million copies by now," says the publisher's poetry
editor Garrett Caples. "It really did build the publishing business here."
As yet, the movie does not have a distributor. But luck tends to
shine on Epstein and Friedman. Their timing seemingly disastrous,
as they missed the 2005-2007 commemorations has turned out to be
perfect. As Howl makes its debut, another trial is transfixing San
Francisco. In a federal courtroom, with a conservative judge
presiding, the trial over Proposition 8, banning gay marriage in
California, is unfolding.
Opening night at Sundance used to be the province of big crossover
movies that linked the independent world and Hollywood. But the new
festival director, John Cooper, is shaking things up. "I was inspired
by this film," he says. "It's time to talk about art in America
again, not just healthcare because art really can change
everything. We owe so much to Ginsberg."
.
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