The world be an infinitely more cheerful place if every 20th Century Fox Film started like this, wouldn’t it?
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James Franco Reads a Dreamily Animated Version of Allen Ginsberg’s Epic Poem ‘Howl’
“Hold back the edges of your gowns, Ladies, we are going through hell.” With those words, William Carlos Williams gives fair warning to anyone bold enough to read Allen Ginsberg’s harrowing poem from the dark underbelly of America, “Howl.”
“Howl” made quite a stir when it was first published in 1956, sparking a notorious obscenity trial and launching Ginsberg as one of the most celebrated and controversial poets of the 20th century. In 2010, Rob Epstein and Jeffrey Friedman made a film examining the events surrounding the poem’s inception and reception, starring James Franco as a young Ginsberg. The film is called Howl, and Newsweek called it “a response to a work of art that is art itself.”
Perhaps the most celebrated aspect of the film is its animated version of the poem itself. The sequence was designed by the artist Eric Drooker, a friend of the late Ginsberg who is perhaps best known for his covers for The New Yorker–including the famous October 10, 2011 cover showing a towering statue of a Wall Street bull with glowing red eyes and smokestack horns presiding over the city like the false god in Ginsberg’s poem:
Moloch whose eyes are a thousand blind windows! Moloch whose skyscrapers stand in the long streets like endless Jehovahs! Moloch whose factories dream and croak in the fog! Moloch whose smokestacks and antennae crown the cities!
Drooker first met Ginsberg in the summer of 1988, when they both lived on the Lower East Side of Manhattan. It was a time of local unrest, when police on horseback were cracking down on punks and squatters occupying Tompkins Square Park. The young Drooker had been plastering the neighborhood with political action posters, and as he recalls on his Web site, Ginsberg later “admitted that he’d been peeling them off brick walls and lampposts, and collecting them at home.”
The two men went on to collaborate on several projects, including Ginsberg’s final book, Illuminated Poems. So Drooker seemed a natural for Epstein and Friedman’s movie. “When they approached me with the ingenious idea of animating ‘Howl,’ ” he says, “I thought they were nuts and said ‘sure, let’s animate Dante’s Inferno while we’re at it!’ Then they told me I’d work with a team of studio animators who would bring my pictures to life… how could I say no?”
You can watch the beginning of Drooker’s animated (and slightly abridged) rendition of “Howl” above, and continue by clicking the following six links:
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Allen Ginsberg Reads His Classic Beat Poem, ‘Howl’
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“Expansive Poetics” by Allen Ginsberg: A Free Course from 1981
Bill Murray Reads Wallace Stevens Poems — “The Planet on The Table” and “A Rabbit as King of the Ghosts”
On June 11th, Poets House hosted The 17th Annual Poetry Walk Across the Brooklyn Bridge. The event features “readings of the poetry of Walt Whitman, Marianne Moore, Langston Hughes and other greats,” all in order to raise funds for the New York City non-profit dedicated to cultivating a wider audience for poetry. And the event is regularly attended by the greatest cinematic supporter of Poets House — the actor Bill Murray.
In 2001, Murray took part in the festivities and read three poems: Sarah Manguso’s “What We Miss,” Cole Porter’s “Brush Up,” and Billy Collins’ “Forgetfulness.” (Click links to see the readings.) This year, he returned and delighted the audience with a reading of two poems by Wallace Stevens: “The Planet on The Table” and “A Rabbit as King of the Ghosts.”
But if you’re looking for my favorite reading, then I’ll steer you back to 2009, when Murray read poems by Billy Collins, Lorine Niedecker and Emily Dickinson to construction workers building the new home for Poets House. It’s a charming, very Bill Murray moment.
Find more poetry in our collection of Free Audio Books.
h/t @webacion
The Making of Apocalypse Now Remixed/Revisited
In an interview aired on San Francisco radio last week, Francis Ford Coppola acknowledged that he could no longer compete with himself — that he couldn’t make the kind of films that made him famous during the 1970s. The Godfather (1972), The Godfather II (1974), and Apocalypse Now (1979) — they were big, sprawling, masterful films. And they sometimes pushed a young Coppola to the physical and financial brink.
The making of Apocalypse Now is a legendary tale. Shot in the Philippines in 1976, the production ran into immediate problems. After only two weeks, Coppola fired Harvey Keitel, the lead actor, and replaced him with Martin Sheen, who stumbled into chaos upon his arrival. As biographer Robert Sellers noted in The Independent, “Coppola was writing the movie as he went along and firing personnel, people were coming down with varioustropical diseases and the helicopters used in the combat sequences were constantly recalled by President Marcos to fight his own war against anti-government rebels.” And things only got worse from there. Marlon Brando showed up enormously overweight and not knowing his lines. Then, during the difficult filming, Sheen suffered a heart attack, and Coppola himself had a seizure and eventually a nervous breakdown, apparently threatening to commit suicide on several occasions. Speaking about the whole experience years later, Coppola’s wife, Eleanor, said:
It was a journey for him up the river I always felt. He went deeper and deeper into himself and deeper and deeper and deeper into the production. It just got out of control.… The script was evolving and the scenes were changing — it just got larger and more complex. And little by little he got out there as far as his characters. That wasn’t the intention at all at the beginning.
Yes, it’s no wonder that Coppola, now 73 years old, might not have another epic film in him.
Apocalypse Now hit theaters exactly 33 years ago this week. And to commemorate that occasion, we’re serving up a short remix film, Heart of Coppola, that weaves together scenes from the film, footage from behind the scenes, and audio of the great Orson Welles reading from Heart of Darkness, the Joseph Conrad novella upon which Apocalypse Now was loosely based. (Find it in our collection of Free Audio Books and Free eBooks.)
Bukowski: Born Into This — The Definitive Documentary on the Hard-Living American Poet (2003)
Neglected to mark the occasion of poet and novelist Charles Bukowski’s birthday yesterday? Then observe it today with a viewing of the documentary Bukowski: Born Into This (available for purchase here). The most in-depth exploration of Bukowski’s life yet committed to film, the movie “is valuable because it provides a face and a voice to go with the work,” wrote Roger Ebert in 2004. “Ten years have passed since Bukowski’s death, and he seems likely to last, if not forever, then longer than many of his contemporaries. He outsells Kerouac and Kesey, and his poems, it almost goes with saying, outsell any other modern poet on the shelf.” A wide range of Bukowski enthusiasts both expected and unexpected appear onscreen: Sean Penn, Tom Waits, Harry Dean Stanton, Black Sparrow Press publisher John Martin, filmmaker Taylor Hackford (director of the earlier documentary titled simply Bukowski), and Bono, to name but a few. “Excerpts are skillfully woven with the reminiscences of former drinking buddies, fellow writers and Bukowski’s second wife, Linda, the keeper of the flame, whom he married in 1985,” wrote Stephen Holden in the New York Times. “Without straining, the film makes a strong case for Bukowski as a major American poet whose work was a slashing rebuke to polite academic formalism.”
Some might contrarily consider Bukowski’s writing glorified wallowing, a mere profane exultation of the low life, but Born Into This reveals that the man wrote as he lived and lived as he wrote, omitting neither great embarrassment nor minor triumph. Holden mentions that Bukowski, “a pariah in high school, suffered from severe acne vulgaris, which covered his face with running sores that left his skin deeply pitted. He recalls standing miserably in the dark outside his senior prom, too humiliated to show himself,” and that for all his work dealing with late-life sexual prowess, “he was a virgin until he was 24, the same age at which his first story was published. His description of sexual initiation with an obese woman whom he wrongly accused of stealing his wallet is a spectacularly unpromising beginning to the prolific sexual activity (described in his novel “Women”) that flowered after fame brought admirers.” Ebert asks the obvious question: “How much was legend, how much was pose, how much was real?” Then he answers it: “I think it was all real, and the documentary suggests as much. There were no shields separating the real Bukowski, the public Bukowski and the autobiographical hero of his work. They were all the same man. Maybe that’s why his work remains so immediate and affecting: The wounded man is the man who writes, and the wounds he writes about are his own.”
Related content:
Charles Bukowski: Depression and Three Days in Bed Can Restore Your Creative Juices (NSFW)
The Last (Faxed) Poem of Charles Bukowski
Tom Waits Reads Charles Bukowski
Bono Reads Two Poems by Charles Bukowski, “Laureate of American Lowlife”
Charles Bukowski Reads His Poem “The Secret of My Endurance”
Colin Marshall hosts and produces Notebook on Cities and Culture. Follow him on Twitter at @colinmarshall.
The Hearts of Age: Orson Welles’ Surrealist First Film (1934)
The story is legendary. When Orson Welles shot Citizen Kane (1941), he was a first-time filmmaker who created what Roger Ebert has called “one of the miracles of cinema.” And, years later, Welles admitted that perhaps youthful ignorance, being a complete novice, was the genius of the film.
I didn’t know what you couldn’t do. I didn’t deliberately set out to invent anything. It just seemed to me, why not? And there is a great gift that ignorance has to bring to anything. That was the gift I brought to Kane, ignorance. [See him elaborate on that here.]
If you want to get technical about things, Kane wasn’t Orson Welles’ first film. Back in the summer of 1934, Welles, only 19 years old, joined up with William Vance, a high school friend, and shot The Hearts of Age. It ran eight short minutes and featured four cast members: Welles, Vance, Virginia Nicholson (Welles’ girlfriend and eventual first wife) and Paul Edgerton. Meanwhile, the plot was surreal, cryptic, hard to follow — all for a good reason. In an interview with Peter Bogdanovich, Welles claimed that The Hearts of Age was nothing but a parody of Jean Cocteau’s first film, The Blood of a Poet (1930). It was also a “joke,” a film “shot in two hours, for fun, one Sunday afternoon. It has no sort of meaning.” Senses of Cinema has more on Welles’ first foray (or non-foray) into filmmaking. You can find it permanently listed in our collection of Free Movies Online, along with other movies created by or starring the great Orson Welles.
Related Content:
Orson Welles Narrates Plato’s Cave Allegory, Kafka’s Parable, and Freedom River
Orson Welles’ The Stranger: The Full Movie
Fear and Loathing on the Road to Hollywood: The BBC’s 1978 Portrait of Hunter S. Thompson
“It’s been four years, maybe five,” mutters artist Ralph Steadman as his flight descends into Colorado. “I don’t know what the man has done since then. He may have terrible brain damage.” He speaks of a famous collaborator, a writer whose verbal style the culture has linked forever with Steadman’s own visual style. “He has these mace guns and CO2 fire extinguishers, which he usually just aims at people,” Steadman’s voiceover continues, and we know this collaborator could be none other than Hunter S. Thompson, the impulsive, drug- and firearm-loving chronicler of an American Dream gone sour. Many of Steadman’s fans no doubt found their way into his blotchy and grotesque but nevertheless precisely observed artistic world in the pages of Thompson’s best-known book, 1971’s Fear and Loathing in Las Vegas — or in those of its follow-up Fear and Loathing on the Campaign Trail ’72, or alongside his “gonzo” ground-breaking article “The Kentucky Derby is Decadent and Depraved.” Fear and Loathing on the Road to Hollywood, the BBC Omnibus documentary above, finds the men reuniting in 1978 to take a journey into the heart of, if not the American Dream, then at least the ostensible American “Dream Factory.”
As Steadman’s British, middle-aged stolidness may seem surprising given the out-and-out insanity some see in his imagery, so Thompson’s famously erratic behavior belies his words’ sober (as it were) indictment of America. He wrote of Thomas Jefferson’s belief in America as “a chance to start again [ .. ] a fantastic monument to all the best instincts of the human race.” But alas, “instead, we just moved in here and destroyed the place from coast to coast like killer snails.” We see him cruise the Vegas strip, suffer a fit of paranoia by Grauman’s Chinese Theater (though I myself react similarly to Hollywood Boulevard), and take a meeting about the film that may or may not have become Where the Buffalo Roam, which featured Bill Murray in the Thompsonian persona. We see archival footage of Murray helping Thompson out with his sardonic “Re-elect Nixon in 1980” campaign. We even see Thompson have a hotel-room sit-down with Nixon’s White House Counsel John Dean, who testified against the President in the Watergate trial. Between these segments, Thompson reflects on the wild, substance-fueled persona he created, and how it had gotten away from him even then: “I’m really in the way, as a person. The myth has taken over.” But he always had an eye on the next phase: at the documentary’s end, he draws up plans for the memorial mount and cannon that would, 27 years later, fire his ashes high into the air.
[NOTE: Fear and Loathing on the Road to Hollywood’s narrator refers to Thompson as a former Hell’s Angel. In fact, he only rode alongside the Hell’s Angels, collecting material for the book Hell’s Angels: The Strange and Terrible Saga of the Outlaw Motorcycle Gangs. Remaining a non-member all the while, he even bought a British bike to distinguish himself from the Harley-Davidson-dedicated gang.]
Look for Fear and Loathing on the Road to Hollywood in our collection of Free Documentaries Online, part of our collection of 635 Free Movies Online.
Related Content:
The Crazy Never Die: Hunter S. Thompson in Rare 1988 Documentary (NSFW)
Hunter S. Thompson’s The Rum Diary: a ‘Warped Casablanca’
Hunter S. Thompson Gets Confronted by The Hell’s Angels
Johnny Depp Reads Letters from Hunter S. Thompson (NSFW)
Colin Marshall hosts and produces Notebook on Cities and Culture. Follow him on Twitter at @colinmarshall.
Unseen Scenes from Jim Jarmusch’s 1986 Jailbreak Movie Down By Law
In 1980, Jim Jarmusch made his first feature, Permanent Vacation, an urban walkabout that’s equal parts stark, alienated, and funny. Four years later came Stranger Than Paradise, a film often compared to both Yasujiro Ozu and The Honeymooners, and the one that made his name in the cinephilic consciousness. Faced with the job of following up this surprisingly (some would say shockingly) low-key hit, Jarmusch came up with 1986’s Down By Law. His productions have always taken pains to assemble distinctive casts, and this one stars the trio of Tom Waits, Stranger Than Paradise’s John Lurie, and Roberto Benigni. When the three find themselves locked up together in the same prison cell, they devise an escape plan that takes them straight out into the surrounding Louisiana swamps. The film therefore represents Jarmusch’s entry into the genre of the jailbreak movie, albeit in the same convention-skewing, tradition-dismissing, tangential way that his Dead Man was a western, his Ghost Dog was a samurai movie, and his The Limits of Control was a spy thriller.
Above you’ll find unseen scenes Jarmusch shot for Down by Law (here’s part two) showing a few characteristically intriguing moments of performance from Waits, Lurie, and others in jail and out on the streets of New Orleans. All of it comes shot in a rich, dreamlike black-and-white by famed cinematographer Robby Müller, a look Jarmusch tried out in Stranger Than Paradise and would later perfect in Dead Man. Though these scenes didn’t ultimately make it into the movie, they nonetheless come off as clearly Jarmuschian in their appearance and tone. Critics have long considered Jarmusch one of the least, if not the least compromising independent filmmaker to come out of the eighties. You can, of course, see that in the way an entire personality comes through in each of his films. But listen closely to these outtakes, and you’ll find that even the way he says “action” and “cut” bears the stamp of his cinematic attitude.
Related Content:
Jim Jarmusch: The Art of the Music in His Films
Colin Marshall hosts and produces Notebook on Cities and Culture. Follow him on Twitter at @colinmarshall.
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