If you’ve never even heard of James Franco’s The Color Of Time, it’s no wonder. Yet another ambitious project from the multi-hyphenate, it was produced over two years ago during Franco’s downtime during Oz: The Great And Powerful. Enlisting twelve of his most promising NYU students to direct the dozen segments which make up the movie, it was even granted a premiere before…. poof! It sort of slipped from view.
What’s most interesting about the film is that the cluster of big name stars attached have failed to evoke an aggressive marketing campaign. Perhaps the vignette style doesn’t attract wide audiences, hence its low-flying status in the last two years. Nevertheless, we’ve now got the chance to see a brief teaser of what exactly Franco and co. have cooked up.
Very loosely based on the work of Pulitzer Prize-winning poet C.K. Williams, his life and fiction are woven together in a tapestry of different narrative strands. Its different styles are what you would expect from a dozen different fledgling filmmakers. By the brief snippets on show here, this could be the first step off the starting block for some of them.
The Color Of Time arrives on iTunes December 2nd, followed by a brief theatrical run on December 13th.
James Franco, Mila Kunis, Jessica Chastain, and Zach Braff star in this dramatic and inventive look at the life and work of ionic Pulitzer Prize-winning poet C.K. Williams. Williams (Franco) has a beautiful, adoring wife (Kunis) and a young son. But as he prepares for a reading in New York City and struggles to create new work, he is haunted by memories of his past—from his first sexual encounter to a later tragic loss. An ensemble of 12 directors work with a star-studded cast to weave together this moving and unique story of a complex man and the relationships that defined him.
