James Franco TV - Funny Or Die

The Art of Elysium, a non-profit 501(c) (3) organization founded in 1997, encourages working actors, artists and musicians to voluntarily dedicate their time and talent to children who are battling serious medical conditions. We provide artistic workshops in the following disciplines: acting, art, comedy, fashion, music, radio, songwriting and creative writing.

Palo Alto is the debut of a surprising and powerful new literary voice. Written with an immediate sense of place--claustrophobic and ominous--James Franco's collection traces the lives of an extended group of teenagers as they experiment with vices of all kinds, struggle with their families and one another, and succumb to self-destructive, often heartless nihilism.

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- Photoshoots > Outtakes > Session #41

If you were looking for someone to play Allen Ginsberg, Paul Giamatti might come to mind, or Robin Williams, if only for his hairiness.

Unlikely to turn up on even a very long list of possibilities is the name James Franco. But it is Franco who appears as the iconic Beat poet in the fall movie “Howl.”

The casting is not as far-fetched as it first sounds. The film is set in the mid-1950s, when Ginsberg wrote “Howl,” his first published poem and the one that would be his legacy. He had just turned 30 and was more than a decade away from becoming the avuncular, bearded bald guy of most people’s memories. Fresh-faced, trim and with a killer smile, he was kind of cute.

“He even says that,” Franco said at “Howl’s” premiere at the Sundance Film Festival. “I heard him say on tapes, ‘Yeah, I was pretty cute when I was younger.’ ”

Franco, who was voted the student with the best smile at Palo Alto High School, is so convincing that others in the cast began to believe he really was the author of “Howl.” Being interviewed next to Franco at Sundance, co-star Jon Hamm keeps pointing to him while discussing Ginsberg’s accomplishments.

Franco, 32, readily identified with his character’s artistic sensibility. They both excel at pushing boundaries, whether it was Ginsberg’s mind-blowing use of language in “Howl” or Franco’s melding soap opera with performance art.

Since last year, he has been appearing on “General Hospital” as a demented artist named Franco. For the soap, he created an outdoor show at a design center in Los Angeles, which he grandly calls “Francophrenia.”

Ginsberg’s public readings of “Howl,” which is sprinkled with four-letter words and addresses his homosexuality, would hardly seem over the top to someone who could make a gentle mockery of his own celebrity.

Franco became interested in the Beat poets while in high school and read “Howl” when he was 15.

“I didn’t understand it, not in the way that I do now. But the idea of traveling, of going out across the country and looking for new experiences and the lifestyle the Beats were living, appealed to me as a teenager,” he said.

“I had this desire to be free and liberated and was also searching for an identity and a self the way Ginsberg is in the poem.”

Even as a teen he understood “the way ‘Howl’ was written with these long lines. It gives it an energy and I could feel that energy and know how it is happening.”

San Francisco filmmakers Rob Epstein and Jeffrey Friedman cast Franco in their film – which covers the obscenity trial over “Howl”- after consulting with Gus Van Sant, who was directing the actor in “Milk.” His appearance as Harvey Milk’s lover wasn’t the first time he had played a real person. Franco shot to fame as James Dean in a television biopic.

As he had done with those roles, Franco meticulously researched Ginsberg’s life.

“Even if people are less familiar with the younger Allen, I still wanted to get it right,” said Franco, who studied photographs of Ginsberg from the 1950s and watched “Pull My Daisy,” Robert Franks’ short film starring Ginsberg and his colleagues as themselves.

Because of limited footage of him from the ’50s, Franco relied on taped interviews that Ginsberg did at City Lights Bookstore in the 1960s, figuring his mannerisms wouldn’t have changed much during that time.

Franco was surprised to learn how much suffering and death had surrounded Ginsberg before he turned 30, much of which found its way into “Howl.”

“All that pressure on someone so young,” he said, shaking his head in sympathy.

Ginsberg’s friend and fellow poet Lucien Carr murdered someone and was imprisoned for it. Another pal, William Burroughs, accidentally shot his wife in the head and killed her while drunk. Yet another friend was decapitated on the subway.

Ginsberg’s own travails included being expelled from Columbia University and institutionalized to be “cured” of his homosexuality.

“If he hadn’t been hospitalized, he might not have written that poem,” Franco said.

His research uncovered “other autobiographical sections or things that were inspired by his own life and the lives of his friends that pop up in the poem.”

Coming up next for Franco is another depiction of an actual person. In “127 Hours,” he plays rock climber Aron Ralston, who cut off part of his arm with a knife after a boulder fell on him in a canyon in Utah.

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