Last week James Franco made a special appearance at Johns Hopkins University in Baltimore.
Franco participated in a Q & A session, along with American poet Hart Crane and Hopkins professor (and noted Hart Crane scholar) John Irwin, after a screening of his movie The Broken Tower, which he wrote, directed and starred in as part of his masters thesis at NYU. The film was also named after one of Crane’s most famous poems.
One critic who was in attendance panned the film, saying, “[it was] largely what you’d expect from an academic student film. It’s black and white. It is episodic, rather than a traditional narrative. There are lots of lingering shots of Franco’s Crane staring inscrutably off into the distance, and, yes, poetry is read and recited at length. Crane, a tortured artist if ever there was one, had an interesting and dramatic life, but I reached my limit about an hour into the film. Unfortunately for me, at that point, there was still about an hour left to go.”
Thanks to @DCCelebrity we have a few photos of Franco at the event which you can check out below. And check out James discussing his film in the video above.