‘Howl,’ Jane Lynch Open OutFest

Gay and lesbian film festival kicks off with film about groundbreaking Allen Ginsberg poem

“Whoever controls the media, the images, controls the culture,” Outfest executive director Kirsten Schaffer said on Thursday night at the kickoff of the annual Los Angeles-based gay and lesbian film festival.

She’d chosen the quote because it came from poet Allen Ginsberg, the subject of the festival’s opening-night film, “Howl,” and because it reflected the goals of a festival that aimed to spend the next 11 days presenting images that reflected all aspects of the gay, lesbian, bisexual and transgender (LGBT) community.

“These are stories,” said Schaffer, “that change the culture, and eventually the law.”

James FrancoThe kickoff film was a case in point: an examination of the groundbreaking Ginsberg poem “Howl,” and the obscenity trial of its publisher, Lawrence Ferlinghetti.  

That film, the narrative debut for documentary filmmakers Rob Epstein and Jeffrey Friedman (“The Life and Times of Harvey Milk”), is not simply a gay film by any means, but it is open about Ginsberg’s homosexuality, and the raw, explicit (and frequently homoerotic) language of a poem that scandalized polite society in the mid-1950s. 

To make their first non-documentary film, Epstein told the audience at downtown Los Angeles’ Orpheum Theatre before the screening, “we relied on a tried and true Hollywood genre …”

Interrupted Friedman, “So we made a queer poetry movie.”

The film stars James Franco as Ginsberg, and is divided into three interlocking segments: the poet delivering the first reading of his work at a small club in San Francisco, some of it dramatized with animation; Ginsberg talking about his life and work to an unseen interviewer; and the obscenity trial, which is drawn from the original transcripts and features Jon Hamm, David Strathairn, Bob Balaban and Mary-Louise Parker as participants.

It is a risky, potentially static approach, but in the end the power of the poem and the eloquence of some of the courtroom sequences makes the film deeply moving. 

Christine Walker, one of the film’s producers through the independent production company Werc Werk Works, said that the company does not look at “Howl” as being limited to a gay audience, but that Outfest is a hugely important showcase for the film and the filmmakers, who in 2000 were honored with the Outfest Achievement Award (which last night went to “Glee” actress Jane Lynch.)

“We feel that it’s a very important audience for us, and a very supportive audience for Rob and Jeffrey in all of their work,” Walker said. 

“At the same time, we definitely want to speak to a larger audience.  So if we can win the gay audience over, we can go from there and expand.”

Oscilloscope will release “Howl” in September and October, initially in New York, San Francisco and Los Angeles.

Before the screening of "Howl," actress Jane Lynch was presented with the Outfest Achievement Award by director Paris Barclay and Lynch's "Glee" costar Chris Colfer.  At the end of her remarks, Lynch declined to offer any advice of her own to aspiring actors and filmmakers; instead, she deferred to "the infinite wisdom" of the fictional Carol Brady (from "The Brady Bunch"): "Find what is is you do best, and do your best with it." 

Outfest’s Schaffer also spoke about the Outfest Legacy Project, which restores and preserves films important to the LGBT community. 

Its next project, remarkably, is “Different from the Others” (“Anders als die Andern”) – a silent film from Germany in 1919, and the only surviving work from a group of German films sympathetic to the gay experience. 

All of the other such films made during the Weimar Republic, she said, were later systematically destroyed by the Nazis. 

Outfest continues through June 18, with most screenings at the DGA and Sunset 5 theaters in West Hollywood   Information is available at www.outfest.org

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