While Allen Ginsberg might have “seen the greatest minds of [his]generation destroyed by madness,” the Lower East Side’s Metrograph theater hosted some of the greatest minds of ours on Sunday, October 7th, to celebrate the seventieth anniversary public reading of Ginsberg’s Howl in San Francisco’s Six Gallery, an event that announced the birth of the Beat Generation in 1955. To commemorate the occasion, Metrograph screened the 2013 feature, Kill Your Darlings, directed by John Krokidas and produced by Christine Vachon, which is about a 1944 New York murder that embroiled Ginsberg and the other Beat writers, including Jack Kerouac, Lucien Carr, and William S. Burroughs.
Krokidas and Vachon were joined at the screening by the cast of the film, including Daniel Radcliffe, who portrays Ginsberg, Ben Foster who plays Burroughs, Dane DeHaan who portrays Carr, and Ira Sachs, writer and director of Keep the Lights On, Passages, and Peter Hujar’s Day, who moderated the discussion. Screenwriter Austin Bunn was also on hand. The screening and panel discussion were for Metrograph members only and sold out in thirteen minutes, which Krokidas took as “a lucky sign.”
Krokidas said of Howl: “It fought against conformity and was queer as fuck.” The poem was banned in the United States and reviewed by the California Supreme Court, which decided that it had social value, despite being explicit, and ruled in favor of the poem. “The crazy thing,” said Krokidas, “would the courts rule that now?”
“In this movie, the fascists were overseas, and I think we all know that they’re around the corner right now,” said Krokidas. “We made this movie to document the birth of a generation who was not going to take no for an answer and was going to fight back to make sure their voices were heard. I hope tonight inspires all of you to come up with your own howl.”
While the first half of Kill Your Darlings explores the Beat writers during their college years at Columbia University, their becoming, the second half chronicles Carr’s murder of Columbia professor David Kammerer, a killing that would implicate Ginsberg, Burroughs, and Kerouac. The repeated, insistent demands made by Kammerer on Carr led to a violent altercation in which Carr stabbed Kammerer to death in Riverside Park. Disturbingly, Ginsberg, who wrote Carr’s deposition, used “honor killing” as a defense, which stated that a straight man could justifiably kill a gay man if he felt the gay man was making aggressive sexual advances at him. This was essentially an early version of the “gay panic” defense. As odious as that sounds, it was also, in the case of Carr, who was homosexual, untrue. Carr ended up serving only two years on a manslaughter charge. Burroughs and Kerouac wrote about the crime in And the Hippos Were Boiled in Their Tanks in 1945, but the book wasn’t published until 2008, long after all the Beats had died.
Kill Your Darlings took ten years to get made, and Radcliffe’s involvement facilitated funding, Vachon said, to which Krokidas added about the long gestation period: “It gave us a lot of time to do research, and we had to put the fact that they were legends aside, only reading up to the point the movie takes place, and we didn’t want to hint at anything that came later. We just wanted to portray who they were at the moment the movie takes place.”
Krokidas said he and his co-writer, Bunn, spoke often during the writing of the script about the “violence that comes with the birth of the self,” which became the theme of the film, the notion of killing one’s darlings, their idols and sacred totems, all that was once known and clung to, to emerge as something new. The notion also informed the emergence of the Beat poets themselves as part of a cultural movement. “You have to surpass your heroes,” said Krokidas, also referencing a now well-known filmmaker who initially fostered his development as a director, but only to a point because that person was ultimately focused on their own success. “Some people want to inspire us, but only so much.”
Radcliffe said that the movie marked a turning point in his career, as it was the first time he worked outside the UK and his first adult role, something he called “incredibly liberating.” Radcliffe also said Krokidas asked him how he wanted to be directed and what his process was, to which Radcliffe responded: “I’m at zero, do you want to help me get one [a process]? John showed me something I hadn’t done before, rather than being inhibited by my past as playing Harry Potter.” Radcliffe also met his girlfriend, Erin Darke, with whom he now has a child, on the set of the film. She played Gwendolyn, the librarian who performs oral sex on him during a psychologically complex and humorous scene that also featured DeHaan’s Carr, with whom he makes eye contact.
Asked what it was like playing a gay character, Radcliffe said: “I didn’t think of it in those terms, at all. I just read the script and thought it was so great, and it was such an incredible story, and I was looking to prove that I could do something else. It was a fascinating exploration. I’m hugely proud of having made it. It’s crazy that it was John’s first film. It gave me so much in my life.”
DeHaan said of his experience making the film: “It captured the idea of having a vision and acting on that vision,” something he’s not sure he still believes. DeHaan also said it’s a “tricky thing” playing a real person, something he’s done several times this past year alone. “You want to do them justice and find their essence. You use the events of their lives to inform the actions in the script. At the end of the day, it’s about telling the story of the script. The character becomes a combo of the movie version and the real-life person. When that person isn’t around, it gives you the freedom to investigate their life and look at them from afar, and it’s informative and invaluable. You try to honor the person they were as truthfully as you can.”
Foster said reading the Beats and playing Burroughs “marked [him], changed [his]mental trajectory.” He went on to add: “What I love about this film is that it says, why not, and countering and going further, and that’s something that independent film, by nature, has to champion. It’s something that still gets me up in the morning. It still remains a thrill to say, why not?”
“The pendulum of the zeitgeist swings back and forth,” said Vachon, when discussing why the film took a decade to get made. “The zeitgeist wasn’t ready when we first tried to make this movie. The great thing about the Beats is that every generation who reads them thinks they’re discovering them for the first time, but that’s fantastic because it’s what keeps them alive and young and current.”
Of Vachon, Krokidas said: “She is one of the reasons I wanted to become a filmmaker and, in many ways, deliberately this was an ode to New Queer Cinema, and it was my vision for where I fit into that. We got this movie made for $4 million through the ingenuity of everyone who worked on it. It felt like a family, and I haven’t had that feeling since making this film.”
Brian Alessandro co-edited Fever Spores: The Queer Reclamation of William S. Burroughs (Rebel Satori Press).
