After the success of Howl, in which he played Beat poet Allen Ginsberg, James Franco is set to direct and star in another film about an American poet. Franco is reportedly set to direct and star in The Broken Tower, based on Paul Mariani’s eponymous biography of Hart Crane. The biography is one of Mariani’s best (he has also written biographies of Robert Lowell, John Berryman and Gerard Manley Hopkins, among others), and Crane’s life is at least as interesting as Ginsberg’s. The poet was the homosexual son of the man who invented Lifesavers candy, and committed suicide by jumping from the back of a cruise ship in 1932 at the age of 32.
Franco’s depiction of Ginsberg was excellent, despite the fact that Howl contained several factual errors – Ginsberg speaking about his stay in Prague for example, which took place in 1965, during an interview which was supposedly taking place during the “Howl” obscenity trial in 1957, is just one example. It will be interesting to see Franco’s depiction of Crane, and in any case it is exciting that the young actor has taken such an interest in portrayals of American poets. Hopefully viewers of the films will go out and by these poets’ books!
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Faithful Colophon readers will remember a recent post in which I discussed the rabid response to Jonathan Safran Foer’s Tree of Codes, a cut up of Bruno Schulz’s novel The Street of Crocodiles, and lamented the fact that mainstream literary critics only consider “experimentation” serious literature when brisk sales are assured. To clarify, I also stated that Foer’s book, as experimentation, is pretty tame, considering that cut up techniques go back at least to the 1960s. I also made a prediction:
“Pay attention the next time a ‘noteworthy’ new book is released by a white male American or British writer. The Guardian and The New York Times will both review the book within days of one another, then both will run blog interviews with the writer, and a week or so later The Financial Times will have a lunch conversation with said writer,” I wrote.
In confirmation of my literary prescience, on Jan. 11 The Guardian published “an audio slideshow” featuring Foer offering explanations of the method he employed to cut up Schulz’s novel. Who’s up next?
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