James Franco takes on his 2nd straight gay role as poet Allen Ginsberg
Posted on November 20th, 2008 by Hot Momma
James Franco attended the Cinema Society and Details screening of “Milk” at the Landmark Sunshine Theater earlier this week and talked about his next movie. The actor co-stars in “Milk” as Scott Smith, longtime partner of gay rights martyr Harvey Milk, played by Sean Penn. Franco’s performance is already drawing Oscar buzz, and for his next role, he’s chosen to play gay poet Allen Ginsberg in the movie “Howl. Never mind that Franco doesn’t look much like the tubby, balding, bearded Ginsberg of the hippie era. Hollywood still seems to like its heroic gay characters played by straight men, and Franco isn’t bothered by perceptions. He told the NY Daily News at Monday’s screening of “Milk”:
Back-to-back gay roles “don’t make any difference to me. Ginsberg has been one of my heroes, and this movie” - about the 1957 obscenity trial over Ginsberg’s most famous poem - “is just so important. I’m playing him when he was in his late 20s, just after he went to Columbia,” said Franco, who happens to be a student at the same university. “We work with the old pictures. He has hair, he doesn’t have a beard and he’s not huge.”
Franco, who came to fame in the “Spider-Man” movies,doesn’t think much of the move to boycott Robert Redford’s Sundance Film Festival in Utah to punish Utah’s Mormon Church for helping finance California’s Proposition 8, which banned gay marriage. “Sundance has no connection to the Mormon Church that I know of,” he said.
“Milk” director Gus Van Sant agreed. “I don’t think I endorse it,” he said of the boycott. “So everything in Utah is just, like, off-limits?”
Josh Brolin, who plays Milk’s murderer, Dan White, offered that the one good thing about Proposition 8’s passage was that “it’s got people fired up. So I’m almost glad about that.”
Older (Possibly) Related Posts:
Of course everything in Utah is off limits. There is no way to hold a major even tin Utah without financing Mormon caused discrimination and violence. The festival should have never been in Utah in the first place.
The Sundance Channel will remain blocked on my cable until the festival gets the heck out of the Hate State. I don’t care what Gus Van Sant says.