Howl

James Franco suited up last night in NYC for a special screening of Howl. Despite the school year having started for James, who's working on a PhD at Yale in creative writing, he'll be plenty busy promoting his various upcoming films. His movie about Allen Ginsberg hits theaters in limited release tomorrow, while his project about trapped hiker Aron Ralston comes out in November. James was in Canada a few weeks ago premiering the latter flick, and it ranked among Buzz's top picks from the Toronto Film Festival. He's balancing his workload and promotional schedule, while still finding time to feed his appetite for pleasure reading. The Twilight series even came James's way, and after making his way through the four books he had a comment on all the sexual tension between Edward and Bella. James said, "I think I got to the sex scene, but it was so brief, I didn't even know if it was the actual sex scene. It was kind of a letdown after all that buildup."

We were reminded just how perfect James Franco is as beat poet Allen Ginsberg when the trailer for the Ginsberg biopic, Howl, came out yesterday.

He's already PhD-from-Yale smart, but there's plenty more where that came from. Here are three things he has common with the icon he'll play.

• Columbia connection: Both studied writing at Columbia University. Allen got his undergraduate degree there and James got an MFA.
• Authors: Allen's entire career was his writing. While James has only published one book — a collection of short stories titled Palo Alto — he writes poetry, too. In 2008, he told Blackbook his poetry combines fragments of existing texts. But he didn't talk too much about it, fearing the takeaway would be "James Franco likes poetry." Sorry, James! Besides we're saying he writes poetry!
• Art as a hobby: Allen took photos to relax, which were collected and published in Beat Memories: The Photographs of Allen Ginsberg, while James paints. In an early interview (back in his Freaks and Geeks days), James said he's been painting longer than he's been acting.

Now we just have to wait until the film, which has been in the works since 2008, comes out September 24.

Between his soap opera appearances and myriad viral videos, it can be easy to forget that James Franco is actually a very talented actor. The trailer for Howl is the perfect reminder of Franco's acting chops, taking us back to the beat generation for a glimpse at the life and career of poet Allen Ginsberg. Titled for Ginsberg's famous (and in some cases, infamous) poem "Howl," the film is a juxtaposition of Ginsberg's creative process and the trial that debated the poem's controversial content in 1957.

Jon Hamm plays Ginsberg's defense attorney, but if I told you that Don Draper was plunked into the middle of this movie, it wouldn't be a huge stretch. I caught this movie back at Sundance, and it's definitely worth a look for Franco's remarkable performance. Watch the trailer and let me know what you think after the jump.

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James Franco touched down in Berlin this morning, and it didn't take him long to get suited up for a premiere of Howl at the city's Film Festival. He was just off attending more screenings of the film at Sundance, where we caught up with his costar Jon Hamm. Buzz had great first impression of their movie, but while James is hard at work doing promotion, he's also looking forward to his next project, Danny Boyle's 127 Hours, with Amber Tamblyn and possibly Kate Mara. James, meanwhile, recently sold his home back in LA, as his brother Dave of Scrubs spent time in the city shooting the look book for Boy by Band of Outsiders with Leslie Mann.

More photos of James so read more

Before Jon Hamm was in NY gearing up for SNL, he made an appearance at the Sundance Film Festival for the world premiere of Howl. I was lucky enough to catch a screening of the film, which centers around Allen Ginsberg's life during the beatnik era and his controversial poem.

• Who's behind it? Rob Epstein and Jeffrey Friedman teamed up to write and direct the film, with James Franco, Jon Hamm, Bob Balaban, and David Strathairn as the major players.
• What's it about? The film takes its title from Ginsberg's four-part poem, Howl, and goes back and forth between the year it was written (1955) and the year it became a lawsuit (1957). The movie is cut together into four very distinct parts: we see an interview with Ginsberg (Franco) as he discusses his life and work in 1957, as well as Ginsberg reading his poem to an audience for the first time in 1955. When Franco's not on camera, we see some trippy animation portraying the poem in a literal sense or scenes inside the courtroom debate regarding the poem's obscenities and literary worth.

To see whether or not the pieces all fit together for me, just read more

The Sundance Film Festival was off to a star-studded start with yesterday's premiere of Howl, where we chatted with stars James Franco and a still-bearded Jon Hamm. Meanwhile, Jon Gosselin is stepping out with his new girlfriend, and Conan O'Brien will have to part ways with Triumph, the Insult Comic Dog. Check out PopSugar Rush now!