Marching to the beat of Ginsberg's drummer

“I saw the best minds of my generation destroyed by madness, starving hysterical naked, dragging themselves through the negro streets at dawn, looking for an angry fix, angelheaded hipsters burning for the ancient heavenly connection to the starry dynamo in the machinery of night . . .’’

Robert Frost this was not. Yet veteran documentarians Rob Epstein and Jeffrey Friedman have transformed the 3,600-word poem into film. “Howl’’ the movie opens Friday, and is as stunning for its intricate structure as the acting of James Franco, who plays the young Ginsberg.

Epstein and Friedman have made a number of documentaries with gay themes. Epstein won an Oscar for “The Times of Harvey Milk,’’ which he made in 1984 before teaming up with Friedman. Together, they won another Oscar for the movie about AIDS “Common Threads: Stories From the Quilt,’’ in 1989. They went on to make “The Celluloid Closet,’’ a hundred-year history of gay and lesbian characters in Hollywood movies, and “Paragraph 175,’’ about the Nazi persecution of homosexuals.

Neither Epstein nor Friedman sat bolt upright at 2 a.m. with a vision to make this movie. Bob Rosenthal, Ginsberg’s long-time secretary, called Epstein in 2003 as the 50th anniversary of the poem’s reading neared.

“He had the notion that some kind of film was in order,’’ recalls Epstein, 55. “He approached us and we said yes, with no clue what to do with it. It’s a film about language and text, so how do you make that cinematic?’’

He and Friedman, 59, who together wrote, produced, and directed the movie, knew they had to create something special. “It could have been a biopic or a documentary, a traditional treatment,’’ says Epstein. “We had to come up with something that makes people sit up in their seats.’’

Ginsberg, after all, was a major American poet. He was a significant influence on artists like Bob Dylan. “He created a new language. He changed the culture,’’ says Friedman. “Everything we take for granted now — how we want to dress, how to not conform to our surroundings. He opened up the windows.’’

So the pair faced the double challenge of insightfully rendering Ginsberg’s life on screen for those aware of the man and his work, and introducing Ginsberg to a vast audience of younger people who have never heard of the guy, let alone read the poem.

“Howl’’ the movie was a long time coming. Nothing much happened from 2003 until last year, when the movie was shot in 14 days in New York City on less than $5 million. It debuted at the Sundance Film Festival in January of this year.

It was not only subject matter that made “Howl’’ the most challenging film they’d ever made. “This was a big leap for us to work with actors on a production of this scale,’’ says Friedman. “We were working with people who are experienced at giving you those moments of truth you’re looking for. When you ask them to steer right, they know how to turn right.’’

Few films have as many moving parts working in unison as “Howl.’’ There’s Franco as Ginsberg, reading the poem for the first time at Six Gallery in San Francisco; Ginsberg at 29 giving a long interview in his New York apartment; Lawrence Ferlinghetti’s obscenity trial in 1957 for publishing “Howl’’; grainy, black-and-white flashbacks of Ginsberg’s earlier life with Jack Kerouac, Neal Cassady, and his long-time lover, Peter Orlovsky; and startling animation that accompanies parts of the poem.

Over the course of the movie, Franco reads all of “Howl,’’ along with a complete, if condensed, version of the obscenity trial. Ginsberg’s long interview was based on one he may have had with Time magazine in Rome. There is no evidence that it ever happened, says Epstein, but the idea of it was the basis for the extensive time Franco spends talking into a tape recorder in New York.

The animation, to the surprise of many, was Epstein and Friedman’s first idea, which anchored the rest of the movie. Friedman had seen Eric Drooker’s illustrations for the Ginsberg book “Illuminated Poems,’’ released in 1996, and asked him to design original animation for the movie. He agreed.

Drooker’s images vary wildly with the verses of “Howl.’’ Friedman explains: “Eric knew the style of the poem, the animation language, the rhythms of the poet. It ran from Blake to Cezanne to Bebop to the Old Testament to Buddhism.’’

It was director Gus Van Sant who recommended Franco to Epstein and Friedman while he worked with Franco on the movie “Milk,’’ the biopic of openly gay San Francisco Board of Supervisors member Harvey Milk, who was assassinated in 1978. “Gus said Jim was an actor, artist, poet, a student of literature,’’ recalls Epstein.

Their script had been accepted by the Sundance Institute, famous for its tough love. “They rip every script to shreds and make you rethink every element,’’ says Epstein. After reading the script that emerged from the Institute experience, Van Sant signed on as executive producer.

Franco came on to the project early and spent a lot of time with the two directors parsing the script. He did a camera test reading from the book and, according to Epstein, “He blew us away. He had so much power and character in his performance.’’

The re-creation of the obscenity trial brought its own challenges: how to convey the essence of the trial in the face of brutal concision; how not to make a buffoon out of the prosecuting attorney played by David Strathairn; how to bring alive in limited time characters like Ferlinghetti’s defense lawyer played by Jon Hamm, the lead hostile witness played by Jeff Daniels, and the judge played by Bob Balaban.

Both men stress how much they liked working with actors, so it should come as no surprise that they have two feature-length dramas in development. The first is about the early years of Tennessee Williams, and the other, “Lovelace,’’ is about the late porn star Linda Lovelace. The latter feature is competing with another biopic starring Lindsay Lohan, whose legal problems make the production’s fate unclear.

Epstein and Friedman loved every minute of making “Howl.’’ “The whole process of creating that world was magical,’’ says Epstein. And it was not only the actors. The scale of the movie dwarfed anything they had done before.

“We had a crew of 60. We normally have five, if that,’’ says Epstein. “It felt like we were shooting ‘Gone With the Wind.’ ’’

Sam Allis can be reached at allis@globe.com.