Directors Rob Epstein & Jeffrey Friedman

In their new film "Howl," acclaimed documentarians Rob Epstein and Jeffrey Friedman recount the 1957 obscenity trial surrounding Allen Ginsberg's controversial poem, which rocked the literary world and changed pop culture forever.

Epstein and Friedman spoke to The Yap about cat's eye glasses, fourteen-day shoots, latecoming "mad men," and the holiness of everything.

Your very impressive careers have focused on documentary film, but “Howl” is a hybrid of drama, reality and imagination. How did your documentary background help you, and how did it hinder you as you made a film that was not completely based in fact?

Jeffrey Friedman: As documentary filmmakers, we’re very used to taking material from all kinds of different sources and building them into a narrative and that’s very much what we did on "Howl." The sources were all sources we created, but the actual process of building a narrative is something we’ve done as documentary filmmakers.

Rob Epstein: As documentary filmmakers, you have to work fast. When you only have fourteen shooting days as we did, you have to move really quickly.

The film is part courtroom drama, part faux-documentary, and part animation of the original poem. Why did you choose to structure it this way?

RE: Well, first of all we wanted to do something that was challenging, in the way that the poem was challenging. One of our creative goals was to find a storytelling form that felt unique and different. The idea of working with these different filmmaking elements was very exciting. Once we got into the specific material, the dramatic elements of the trial were based on the original transcripts, and we felt it was so indicative of the time when the poem was published. Each element tells a different part of story.

JF: Each part of the film is told in its own style, and we studied different films of the period for each of the narrative strands. For courtroom drama, we studied films like “To Kill a Mockingbird.” For interview, we looked at a Beat film called “Portrait of Jason” by Charlie Clark, and also “Lenny,” the Bob Fosse film.

RE: For the animation, we studied “Pink Floyd: the Wall” and “Fantasia.” We really wanted to have these references. Also, the animation we felt would speak to a younger audience and bring the poem alive.

What was the production process like? What challenges did you encounter?

JF: We had fourteen shooting days. That was the biggest challenge. And we had a great crew that was able to create a lot with a very limited budget.

RE: One of the challenges was doing a period film for such a limited budget and that just means you have fewer opportunities to create the period and give the context. We had to find very economical ways to do that.

Can you elaborate on the economical ways?

RE: Our production designer Therese DePrez was very resourceful and went to flea markets and garage sales in upstate New York, and came back to New York with all kinds of authentic props and scenery elements. She found wallpaper that matched wallpaper and some photos Ginsberg had taken and our costume designers Kurt and Bart went to thrift stores and Salvation Army outlets.

JF: And actors brought their own ideas. Mary-Louise Parker had a very clear impression on how she thought her character Gail Potter would look down to the wig and the glasses, which are very period specific, the cat’s eye glasses. They might come back, though!

You worked with an incredible group of actors—among them Jon Hamm, Mary-Louise Parker, Jeff Daniels, and James Franco as Allen Ginsberg. Franco learned of the project through executive producer Gus Van Sant, but how did the rest of the actors get involved?

RE: Each of them read the screenplay and really liked and thought it was a cool project and had some connection to the material. We had a great casting agent: Bernie Telsey, who does a lot with theatre and film and he introduced the project to Mary-Louise Parker, Jeff Daniels, David Strathairn and Alessandro Nivola. People came on for the right reasons at the right time. Jon Hamm was actually the last actor to come on, just as the train was leaving the station. He got script on a Friday and was on set on Monday.

Speaking of Franco, how did you work with him to embody the young Ginsberg, a very distinctive individual?

JF: We worked with him like you would work with any actor. We worked on his emotional life and then we asked him to work on the external physicality and that was the last thing that James did.

RE: Working on the emotional life is really going through the script line by line and section by section and talking through what is going on with the character and everything that’s underneath what’s being said, so by the time the actor gets to the set they’re so infused with all of that history of the character and they’re able to perform in the moment. In terms of the physicality, James looked into a lot of videotapes of Allen to get the cadence of his voice, and video material. There was very little of that period, but he was able to get shots of how Allen looked and carried himself.

The poem “Howl” was first read to the public in 1955 and the obscenity trial surrounding its publication was in 1957. Why did you feel it was important this story get told in the new millennium? What do you hope 2010 audiences take away from the film?

JF: All of the themes in the poem are as relevant to day as they were when they were written. The poem talks about the consumerization of the culture and the militarization of the culture, and the dehumanization of the culture and there are themes of sexual liberation. All of these themes are every bit as relevant now as they were then. They were very prescient when they were written.

RE: You can pick up a newspaper and pick a topic and apply it to one of the themes of the trial, especially themes brought forth by the defense. The trial is about fearing what we don’t understand. Just because you fear something or you don’t understand something doesn’t mean you should try to obliterate it or deem it obscene or burn it, as people were suggesting, like what we’re reading about today with the Koran. All that is just fear based. We could all pick a dozen different analogies that would be applicable.

What’s your favorite line of the poem “Howl” and why?

JF: “Everything is holy.” Because everything is holy.

RE: Well, because Jeffrey went with the last line of the poem, I’m going to go with the opening line: “I saw the best minds of my generation,” but I’m going to stop before it gets to “destroyed by madness.” That’s just an inspiration for us all to live up to.