Howl Premiers Tonight!

After so many years, some 9 years in fact, Howl premiers in NYC tonight and opens in NYC & SF theaters Friday and nationwide (US) next week. Congratulations to Rob Epstein and Jeffrey Friedman for completing this monumental project, to Eric Drooker for the herculean task of animation design, & John Hays at Wild Brain! for shepherding Drooker through that task, Werk Work Works for coming in and financing the project, to Jawal Nga who jumped in at the very beginning before anyone had a clear idea of where the film would go or even if it would ever happen, the best cast and crew NYC has to offer and of course Oscilloscope as the hippest distributors in the business.



Reviews keep coming in, but we'll direct you to Ron Silliman's review since he's pretty much as poetry-centric as it gets.

"I saw the best exposition of a poem in a major motion picture, Rob Epstein & Jeffrey Friedman’s Howl, coming to art theaters starting on the 24th & also, I believe, available thru various video-on-demand services. Howl is also perhaps the only major motion picture I’ve ever seen that is, in both form & function, the close reading of a text. I have never seen a film based on a work of literature that even remotely approached Howl’s devotion to the words on the paper. If you’re a writer, or care about poetry, you are almost certainly going to love this film. Howl was made for you, with intelligence & more than a little cinematic bravery, and it shows. Howl is a wonderful motion picture." Read full review >>

ITALIAN HOWL

Howl's been officially picked up in Italy with apparently a large enough market for them to dub it instead of going with subtitles.




With everything going on, we forgot to wish Leonard Cohen a happy Birthday, for which we'll direct you over to Frank Beacham's blog that has fun shots of Allen with Leonard Cohen at a booksigning in LA back in 96. Happy B' day Leonard!

And just to follow up briefly on the saga of 437 East 12th Street, New York Times' East Village blog introduces us to the new tenant, an employee of Yelp! no less, which of course lends itself to some fun wordplay in the title...