via
The Guardian: After eight years of seeing his face reflected in a knife blade across the buses of Los Angeles and New York, in his role as blood-spatter analyst/serial killer Dexter Morgan,
Michael C. Hall is finding it nice to talk about a different character.
His role in the beat generation drama Kill Your Darlings is the least known figure in a largely forgotten murder scandal that engulfed the proto-beats, and perhaps even fashioned them into the movement we now recognise. In New York City in 1944, Allen Ginsberg (Daniel Radcliffe), William S Burroughs (Ben Foster) and Jack Kerouac (Jack Huston) were all inspired by an epicene beauty from the midwest, Lucien Carr (Dane DeHaan), who liked to stand on the university library tables and read out the raunchiest bits of Henry Miller's still-taboo Tropic of Cancer to scandalised squares.
Carr had arrived at Princeton University pursued by a mysterious, infatuated mentor and possible ex-lover, David Kammerer, played by Hall. Carr later murdered Kammerer in Central Park and was sentenced to two years in prison after claiming homosexual harassment. Carr was the dedicatee of Ginsberg's Howl, but asked for his name to be removed from subsequent editions, and lived the rest of his life as a respected editor at news agency UPI. Burroughs and Kerouac collaborated on a novel about the killing, And the Hippos Were Boiled in Their Tanks, a year later, which remained unpublished until 2008, three years after Carr's death. And now, Kill Your Darlings may stand as one of the best and most persuasive of all the movies about the beats.
So we know about the survivors; what about the corpse?
"I knew the story beforehand quite well myself," says Hall, who is just back from Bangladesh and suffering a dose of jet lag that occasionally manifests itself in the form of long, spacey pauses, for which he apologises. "I was surprised no one had ever made a movie of it beforehand. There was remarkably little known about David Kammerer, considering what happened to him, but there was enough there for me to build upon when it came to filling in the blanks, of which there were quite a few. I did what I could with research and information about the times. There were real-time entries in Ginsberg's diaries – meeting Kammerer for the first time." Read the rest of the article below!
