The Broken Tower is a 2011 American black-and-white

Black-and-white

Black-and-white, often abbreviated B/W or B&W, is a term referring to a number of monochrome forms in visual arts.Black-and-white as a description is also something of a misnomer, for in addition to black and white, most of these media included varying shades of gray...

 docudrama

Docudrama

In film, television programming and staged theatre, docudrama is a documentary-style genre that features dramatized re-enactments of actual historical events. As a neologism, the term is often confused with docufiction....

 directed by James Franco

James Franco

James Edward Franco is an American actor, film director, producer, screenwriter, author, painter, performance artist and instructor at New York University. He left college in order to pursue acting and started off his career by making guest appearances on television series in the 1990s...

. The film is about American poet Hart Crane

Hart Crane

-Career:Throughout the early 1920s, small but well-respected literary magazines published some of Crane’s lyrics, gaining him, among the avant-garde, a respect that White Buildings , his first volume, ratified and strengthened...

, who committed suicide in April 1932 at the age of 32 by jumping off the steamship SS Orizaba. Franco appears in the starring role and edited, co-produced, and wrote the screenplay. Michael Shannon

Michael Shannon (actor)

Michael Corbett Shannon is an American stage, film, and television actor. He was nominated for the Academy Award for Best Supporting Actor for his role in Revolutionary Road...

 also stars in the 90-minute film. The Broken Tower made its world premiere in April 2011 at Boston College

Boston College

Boston College is a private Jesuit research university located in the village of Chestnut Hill, Massachusetts, USA. The main campus is bisected by the border between the cities of Boston and Newton. It has 9,200 full-time undergraduates and 4,000 graduate students. Its name reflects its early...

. It will be shown at the 2011 Los Angeles Film Festival

Los Angeles Film Festival

The Los Angeles Film Festival, presented by the Los Angeles Times is an event held annually in June in downtown Los Angeles, California. The Los Angeles Film Festival began as the Los Angeles Independent Film Festival in 1995. The first LAIFF took place over the course of five days in a single...

 (LAFF) in June and theatrically released sometime in 2012.

Production

Franco thought of the idea for the film while reading Paul Mariani

Paul Mariani

Paul Mariani is an American poet and a professor at Boston College. He grew up on Long Island, the eldest of seven children...

’s biography of Crane, also entitled The Broken Tower after the name of one of Crane's poems

The Broken Tower

The last new poem meant to be published in Hart Crane's life, 'The Broken Tower' has been widely acknowledged as one of the best lyrics of Crane's last years, if not his career...

, on the set of his 2002 movie Sonny

Sonny (film)

Sonny is a 2002 film starring James Franco, Harry Dean Stanton, Brenda Blethyn, Mena Suvari and Josie Davis. Director Nicolas Cage has a small cameo role. Sonny was co-produced by Cage's production company Saturn Films.-Plot:...

. The poet's tortured life as an artist attracted him to the material:

"He was trying to write in a way that was atypical for his time; he was not understood by most of his peers; he was struggling both with his financial circumstances and within himself to produce his work. He drank, he had lots of sex, he had one great, if short-lived, love", Franco told The Jewish Journal of Greater Los Angeles

The Jewish Journal of Greater Los Angeles

The Jewish Journal of Greater Los Angeles is an independent, nonprofit community weekly newspaper serving the Jewish community of greater Los Angeles, published by TRIBE Media Corp. The Journal was established in 1985. As of 2010 it had a verified circulation of 60,000 and an estimated readership...

. "And so I thought, ‘That’s a story that lends itself to a film, easier than a story about someone like James Joyce

James Joyce

James Augustine Aloysius Joyce was an Irish novelist and poet, considered to be one of the most influential writers in the modernist avant-garde of the early 20th century...

, [who] wasn’t as readily dramatic or tragic. Although it could be done, it’s not quite the same kind of tortured life.'"

Franco used the story as his masters thesis for New York University

New York University

New York University is a private, nonsectarian research university based in New York City. NYU's main campus is situated in the Greenwich Village section of Manhattan...

’s Tisch School of the Arts

Tisch School of the Arts

Tisch School of the Arts is one of the 15 schools that make up New York University ....

. Eventually, he decided to star in it himself. Later on, he also chose to direct the movie as well as produce it and write its screenplay. By October 2010, Franco was reported to have been in deep pre-production with The Broken Tower, and principal photography

Principal photography

thumb|300px|Film production on location in [[Newark, New Jersey]].Principal photography is the phase of film production in which the movie is filmed, with actors on set and cameras rolling, as distinct from pre-production and post-production....

began in November. By December, filming had finished. Franco chose to shoot The Broken Tower in black-and-white. The film also features graphic sex scenes.

Release

Its world premiere was held at Boston College on April 15, 2011. Franco chose to debut it at that venue since Mariani is a professor of English there. The Broken Tower was screened at the 2011 Los Angeles Film Festival on June 20. It was among more than 200 feature films, short projects, and music videos from more than 30 countries to be selected.