Hollywood actor James Franco had the opportunity to introduce a screening of his new film “The Broken Tower” at Los Angeles Film Festival on Monday. The movie is a biopic about American gay poet ‘Hart Crane’ which Franco wrote, directed, produced and starred.
Los Angeles Times reports:
Monday night at the L.A. Film Festival, the prolific actor, author and artiste premiered his latest project, “The Broken Tower,” a biopic about a notoriously obtuse poet.
Franco wrote, directed, produced and starred in the black-and-white film about Hart Crane, a tortured gay artist and son of a wealthy Cleveland businessman, who committed suicide in 1932 at the age of 32. Crane’s poetry was so difficult that even such renowned writers as Eugene O’Neill and Tennessee Williams said they couldn’t understand it….
….The 99-minute film captures Crane’s life in an unsettling stream of scenes of explicit sex, drunken rages, depressive lows and literary genius. The film’s title comes from Crane’s last publication, “The Broken Tower” (which he penned during his affair with a friend’s wife, his only heterosexual lover), and Paul Mariani’s biography of Crane.
The Wrap adds:
As Franco himself pointed out, “The Broken Tower” also contains two scenes apt to stir up a lot of discussion. One is a 10-minute sequence in which the action stops and we stay on Crane’s face as he reads the entirety of his long, thorny poem “For the Marriage of Faustus and Helen.”
The second is an oral sex scene between Crane and another man that at one point gets so explicit as to all but guarantee an NC-17 rating. (Though the scene is dimly lit, it clearly shows Franco performing oral sex on what is reportedly a prosthetic penis.)
“My guess is that the two scenes people will talk about the most are the blow job scene and the 10-minute poetry reading,” Franco said, to laughter from the packed house at the Regal Cinemas.
“The Broken Tower” Cast includes: James Franco, Michael Shannon and Stacey Miller.
