The independent production company Werc Werk Works announced last Thursday that it has signed on to finance a feature film about the creation of and controversy surrounding Allen Ginsberg’s long poem "Howl." The eponymous film will center on the obscenity trial that Ginsberg and his publisher, Lawrence Ferlinghetti of City Lights Bookstore, faced shortly after the work was published in 1956.
Ginsberg’s own words, excerpted from his journals, essays, and interviews, will serve as narration for the film, telling the story of his emergence as one of the key figures among the Beat poets. The film will also include an animated adaptation of "Howl," "making even more vivid Ginsberg’s extraordinary delivery of the poem," according to a press release from Werc Werk Works.
Actor James Franco is slated to play the young Ginsberg, who was twenty-nine when the poem was first published. Documentary filmmakers Rob Epstein and Jeffrey Friedman cowrote and will direct the feature, set to begin filming in New York City on March 16.
