Howl Has New York Premiere

Howl Has New York Premiere at NewFest / In Memorium Peter Orlovsky

http://www.huffingtonpost.com/regina-weinreich/howl-has-new-york-premier_b_603334.html

Regina Weinreich
Co-producer/ director, Paul Bowles: The Complete Outsider
Posted: June 7, 2010

The actor James Franco channels poet Allen Ginsberg in Howl, the part
animation, part courtroom drama, part period piece about the creation
of the iconic beat poem and the censorship trial for obscenity that
followed its 1956 City Lights publication. Having filled the
prestigious slot of opening night film at this year's Sundance Film
Festival, Howl was featured this week at NewFest, premiering in New
York at the 22 year old lesbian, gay, bisexual, and transgender film
festival--appropriately so, as every kind of sex is openly rejoiced
in this iconic poem, written at a dire time comedian Richard Pryor
dubbed "the great pussy drought."

Howl, unusual for a film, delves deeply into the poem's language
evoking taboo images of a subterranean realm of sex, drugs and jazz,
and effectively conveys the arguments critics had to make in defense
of the poem's redeeming human values, and America's first amendment
rights at large. The actual trial transcripts supply the dialogue,
comic in today's world.

Thus focused, Howl avoids the biography of the poet. And so spends
little screen time on Peter Orlovsky, Ginsberg's life partner who
died this week of lung cancer, and who was buried on June 3, Allen
Ginsberg's birthday. Peter Orlovsky penned the poetry volume, Clean
Asshole Poems and Smiling Vegetable Songs, encouraged by Ginsberg to write.

This sad synergy augurs the end of an era: with Lawrence
Ferlinghetti, Michael McClure, Diane DiPrima, and Gary Snyder the
remaining elders of the beat movement. Fortunately the literature
holds up with new publications forcing a re-evaluation of this
literary circle that used to be best known for scandal. Look for the
just released, The Typewriter is Holy: The Complete, Uncensored
History of the Beat Generation by Bill Morgan (Free Press), and
especially the upcoming Jack Kerouac and Allen Ginsberg: The Letters
(Viking). The correspondence reveals the sweet and sometimes
belligerent Orlovsky on every page-Jack calls him Petey-- in his role
as muse and significant other.

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