At the end of this month “HOWL”, a movie by Rob Epstein and Jeffrey Friedman (“The times of Harvey Milk”, “Celluliod Closet” etc) featuring James Franco playing the young Allen Ginsberg will have its world premier at this year’s Sundance festival. The film is going to depict events that happened in 1957 when an obscenity trial was brought against the publisher of Ginsberg’s eponymous poem. For the synopsis I quote from the Sundance page: “The film recounts this dark moment using three interwoven threads: the tumultuous life events that led a young Allen Ginsberg to find his true voice as an artist, society’s reaction (the obscenity trial), and mind-expanding animation that echoes the startling originality of the poem itself. All three coalesce in a genre-bending hybrid that brilliantly captures a pivotal moment—the birth of a counterculture.” You find more pictures of the movie on Film School Rejects. For a text version of HOWL click here.

UPDATE (Jan 23) : Footage and some clips of the film here.