The Art of Howl

I'm co-curating a show at the Cartoon Art Museum, opening May 14 and running through the summer. The show, called The Art of Howl, has been a great opportunity to re-connect with a couple of folks who have been important in my own artistic development: Eric Drooker, who kindly blurbed my first graphic novel and has been a friend and artistic resource/inspiration ever since, and John Hays, who was crucial in shepherding my web cartoon Romanov into the world. I owe a debt of gratitude to both of these guys, and am glad to have the occasion to toot the horn for their recent work.


In addition, the show allows me to tip that hat to some "art heroes" who I've admired but never met: Rob Epstein and Jeffrey Friedman, whose documentary The Times of Harvey Milk is an exemplar of socially committed historiography, and of course Allen Ginsberg himself.

And while there are no paintings or even doodles by James Franco featured in the show, I'd like to think it offers at least a small extension of his project to establish all reality as an emanata of the all-encompassing Francoverse.

I'll have a small bit of my own work in the show (for past posts on my involvement with Howl, click here) -- what follows is the official press release:


The Art of Howl at the Cartoon Art Museum
655 Mission St. San Francisco, CA 94105
May 14 – September 11
Opening Reception Thursday, May 19, 7:00-9:00pm


Rob Epstein and Jeffrey Friedman's film, Howl, produced by Werc Werk Works, opened the 2010 Sundance Film Festival. Featuring James Franco as the beat poet Allen Ginsberg, the film took an experimental approach to documenting the creation and performance of Ginsberg's revolutionary poem, "Howl"– as well as the obscenity trial that followed when, after undercover policemen purchased copies of Howl and Other Poems from City Lights Bookstore, the state tried to suppress its publication. The film blends glimpses of Ginsberg's personal life, recreations of the obscenity trial, and animated sequences that accompany Franco's performance of the poem, riffing on its ideas and images.


The Art of Howl gives a revealing look behind the scenes at the creative process of turning poetry into animation. The film directors enlisted Eric Drooker to design the animation; Drooker, a graphic novelist and painter, was friends with Ginsberg and had collaborated with him on the book Illuminated Poems. John Hays, a San Francisco-based animation veteran, directed the sequences, which were animated by The Monk Studios in Thailand.


Translating Ginsberg's incendiary, oracular, stream-of-consciousness language into moving images was a unique challenge. The animation, like the poem, conjures a world of outcasts, "deviants," outlaws, poets and prophets digging for scraps of connection and enlightenment under the shadow of "Moloch" – the overpowering industrial cityscape that demands submission, conformity, and ultimately annihilation.


This multimedia exhibit includes character design drawings, animation keyframes and concept art, photos by Allen Ginsberg, storyboards, animatics, and images from Drooker's graphic novel version of the poem. The Cartoon Art Museum is pleased to present this animated interpretation of a piece of literary history – just a couple miles from City Lights Bookstore, the launching-pad for Ginsberg's poetic career, and through their victory at the Howl trial, a historic ground zero for freedom of expression.

Curated by Andrew Farago, Eric Drooker and Chris Lanier


Telling Pictures: Rob Epstein and Jeffrey Friedman
Rob Epstein and Jeffrey Friedman have been  making non-fiction and feature films together since 1987 when they founded Telling Pictures, a San Francisco production company. Their films have played in movie theaters, at festivals, and on television throughout the world. Between them they have received two Academy Awards, five Emmy Awards, three Peabodys, as well as Guggenheim and Rockefeller Fellowships. Their films together include Common Threads: Stories from the Quilt (Academy Award, Feature Documentary, 1989), Where Are We? (Sundance Documentary Competition, 1991), The Celluloid Closet (Emmy Award for directing, Peabody, duPont-Columbia Awards, 1995), and Paragraph 175 (Sundance Film Festival jury award for directing, 2000). Their website is www.tellingpictures.com.


Werc Werk Works
Werc Werk Works is an independent film production and finance company dedicated to the production and financing of high caliber, story-driven films with wide appeal. Recently released films include Howl starring James Franco, and the multiple Spirit Award nominated Life During Wartime. Upcoming releases include The Convincer and the new Lawrence Kasdan film Darling Companion. Werc Werk Works is also co-producer of the Béla Tarr film The Turin Horse that was recently awarded the Silver Bear at the Berlin Film Festival. Their website is www.wercwerkworks.com.


The Monk Studios
The Monk Studios is a boutique Visual Effects and Animation Studio, located in Thailand. The philosophy of the company is to focus on producing world-class imagery using highly skilled artists and cutting edge technology. The company produces high quality Visual Effects (VFX) and Animation for both feature films and commercials in the Asian and Western markets.

Eric Drooker
Eric Drooker is a painter and graphic novelist, born and raised on Manhattan Island. He's the award-winning author of Flood! A Novel in Pictures, and Blood Song. His paintings appear on covers of The New Yorker, and hang in numerous collections. His website is www.Drooker.com.

John Hays
John Hays is an award-winning animation producer and director, having worked at ILM, Colossal Pictures, Lucasfilm, and co-founded W!LDBRAIN Studios. His projects range from Howl to Yo Gabba Gabba, and a recently completed animated dream sequence in Lawrence Kasdan’s new film Darling Companion.

The Beat Goes On

"Howl," the movie I did some storyboarding for, opened in limited release this past weekend. If not for the obligations of Candy Dance, I would've trekked out to San Francisco see it on the big screen -- it doesn't seem to be coming to Reno, so I'll probably catch it when it opens in Sacramento or Davis in a couple weeks. The reviews appear to be a replay of the reaction it got when it opened Sundance -- opinions are all over the map. And it's not just that opinion is split: there also seems to be general disagreement about which parts of the movie work and which parts don't. Some people find the animation imaginative and striking, others find it over-literal (one reviewer found the animation "pornographic" and "fruity"(!)). Some find the coutroom scenes, detailing the obscenity trial for "Howl," an enthralling re-enactment of literary and legal analysis, others find them stiff and static. The one thing most agree on, across the board, is that James Franco gives a fine performance as Ginsberg, transcending his moviestar good looks to get at his subject's soulfulness (not that Ginsberg would've objected to a cinematic reincarnation as marquee-ready beefcake; and at any rate, he actually was cute when he was young).

A worthwhile piece that uses the release of the film to talk about the social context of "Howl," when the poem first appeared, is How "Howl" Changed the World, by Fred Kaplan. Here's an excerpt:

Ginsberg proved prophetic. The same year that he wrote "Howl," Robert Rauschenberg and Jasper Johns were breaking free from the cage of Abstract Expressionism. Over the next few years, Ornette Coleman and Miles Davis would free jazz from the structure of chord-changes; Norman Mailer would smash the barrier between literature and journalism, the subjective self and the world; Allan Kaprow would stage the first "Happenings," which blurred the boundaries between spectacle and spectator, art and life; Lenny Bruce and Mort Sahl created a new stand-up comedy that rejected mere jokes for jazz-inflected monologues on politics, race, and religious hypocrisy.

(Although I feel obliged to note that Kaplan mischaracterizes Eric Drooker, the designer of the animation, as a "graffiti artist," when in fact he was a street poster artist)

Serendipitously, I was recently reacquainted with an example of beat poetry making ripples in popular culture, when Ralph Carney posted a link to the below clip on his facebook feed. The beats, as Kaplan underscores, were cultural outsiders -- they were also too distinctive to avoid a translation into the more mainstream entertainments of the day. The clip of Phillipa Fallon as a beat poet showed up in the B-movie High School Confidential, two years after the publication of "Howl." It's more or less a square's version of hip, but Fallon brings it all the way back to cool again somehow.



If you'd prefer to hear pure beat performance, unfiltered through the lens of 50s teensploitation, here's Ginsberg himself (click through to youtube for the full performance -- and be warned that the language makes it NSFW):



And lastly, here's a clip of Ginsberg on William F. Buckley's "Firing Line." Though Buckley drips contempt, it's weirdly quaint to see two ideological opposites being civil while talking past each other. It's a transmission that might as well be from another world.

Releasing a HOWL

As I mentioned in a previous blog post, I did some storyboarding work for an animated sequence in the upcoming film "Howl." The film opened the Sundance Film Festival, to wildly mixed reviews. Oscilloscope Pictures finally picked it up for distribution -- the release date is Sept. 24. The film has been outfitted with a terrific poster (anchored by the distinctive font City Light Books used when they first published "Howl"), and a trailer is online.


Here's the trailer:



The only bits of animation in the trailer are almost-subliminal glimpses, alas. I'm kind of dying to see how the final animation turned out.

I wrote a few paragraphs about the experience of working on "Howl," for an interview with SNC's Eagle Eye last semester. Here are my comments in full:

A friend of mine, Eric Drooker, was tapped to design the animation for the film, which looks at Allen Ginsberg's famous Beat poem "Howl," and the obscenity trial that followed its publication. Drooker and Ginsberg were friends, and Drooker had previously illustrated an edition of Ginsberg's poems. Drooker is a cartoonist who specializes in wordless or "silent" comics, where the story is told purely through images -- no captions or word balloons. That's related to how we met; many years ago I did a comic in that vein, and approached him to blurb the book. He called me up, agreed to do it, and we hit it off from there.

At any rate, the film-makers were looking to Eric to design the characters and storyboard the animation (the movie mixes live-action recreations of Ginsberg's milieu, with James Franco playing Ginsberg, and animation that seeks to give a visual interpretation to the poem). In a way, his work as a cartoonist already resembles storyboarding -- that's when an artist breaks down what the shots will be for a film, sketching out ideas for composition, camera movements, and so forth, so that when it's actually time to shoot the movie, there's a well-defined visual plan. On Eric's first pass, the storyboard flowed well on paper. But once it was timed out to a reading of "Howl," the timing seemed to move too slowly. Then, other animators were brought on to work out a more quickly paced storyboard, using Eric's draft as a starting point.

I was one of those animators -- I got the chance to take a whack at the third section of the poem. I worked up digital drawings that were emailed to the animation studio -- I even worked out a rough "animatic" (which is basically a storyboard that's timed out to the soundtrack, with some rudimentary animation from one shot to the next) in Flash. Because the poem free-associates from one strange image to the next, it was a very open-ended task. I took some images from Eric's draft, and pushed them in other directions, and sometimes I just came up with images of my own (stemming, of course, from the text of the poem). The storyboard went through at least one more draft, with another animator, after I was done with it. At a certain point it seemed like no one working on the storyboard really "owned" any of the images -- the images were just passed from one artist to the next, tweaked, digested, discarded, regurgitated. I haven't seen any of the finished animation, and I have no idea if any of the scenes in my draft made the final cut.

"Howl" is a poem I've admired for a long time. Its incantatory vividness made an impression on me -- I wrote at least a couple of bad poems in its shadow, back in the day. It was somewhat daunting trying to come up with a visual interpretation for such a famous, and such a self-sufficient, work. Ultimately, I felt it would be obvious that the animation was a riff on the poem, and not an attempt at a definitive encapsulation. The poem is singular and strange enough to resist any whiff of encapsulation. It was certainly the most enjoyable storyboarding gig I've ever done. I felt like I really got to inhabit that stanza of Ginsberg's poem -- it forced me to think it through, line by line. It was a chance to play in Allen Ginsberg's mental sandbox for about a week.

And James Dean As Allen Ginsberg

I got a pleasant surprise about a month ago, clicking on an article at the NY Times, about the upcoming slate of movies at the 2010 Sundance Festival. The picture heading up the article featured James Franco staring down a typewriter page: he's playing Allen Ginsberg in "Howl," which will be making its debut at Sundance tonight. It's been getting some good anticipatory buzz, snagging the premiere Sundance slot. The movie focuses on the poem and obscenity trial that took place in the wake of its publication -- and the poem itself has been animated. I did some storyboarding for one of the animation sequences, riffing off an initial storyboard created by the main designer of the animation, Eric Drooker.



(photo from the NY Times)

It certainly wasn't your typical storyboarding job, trying to work out Ginsberg's charged, pseudo-free-associated patter into sequences of images. I worked on the third section of the poem, which is addressed directly to Carl Solomon, a fellow inmate with Ginsberg at the Columbia Psychiatric Institute (Ginsberg spent several months at the mental hospital). Here is an excerpt of that section:

I'm with you in Rockland
where we are great writers on the same dreadful
typewriter
I'm with you in Rockland
where your condition has become serious and
is reported on the radio
I'm with you in Rockland
where the faculties of the skull no longer admit
the worms of the senses
I'm with you in Rockland
where you drink the tea of the breasts of the
spinsters of Utica

Obviously, the images are already there -- the challenge was to make visuals that wouldn't seem redundant -- that would spill out into their own poetic associations -- and still be able to link together, the stanzas vertebrae in an overarching spine that would weave through the entire poem. Eric had already laid out an over-riding image for the section, a surreal boat journey taken by Ginsberg and Solomon, linking them like the images of Dante and Virgil that have descended, through the works of Blake and Doré, from the Divine Comedy.

The storyboard went through other passes after I was done with it, getting worked over by John Hays, the animation director (who I've known from my days at the WIldBrain Animation Studio). I haven't seen any of the finished animation, and have no idea how many, if any, of my shots made it through to the final edit. But I have my fingers crossed for a positive reaction from the premiere. I'll probably have more to write about this project down the line, but wanted to at least send out those crossed fingers on the big day.