James Franco's Broken New Flick: "This Is Not Pineapple Express"

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You probably won't be seeing James Franco's new movie The Broken Tower coming to a megamultiplex by you anytime soon.

Even the 127 Hours star knows that.

What went wrong? Nothing really. We'll let Mr. Franco explain...

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Not only does Franco star in this dense black-and-white biopic about Hart Crane, a gay American poet who committed suicide at age 32 in 1932 by jumping off a steamship, but he also wrote and directed it. He's one of the producers, too.

"This is not Pineapple Express," the Oscar-nominated actor said the other night at the Los Angeles Film Festival screening of the movie. "[It's] a slow film on purpose. It's going to take a little patience but it's made that way on purpose. We really just wanted to explore this man, Hart Crane, in a way that I felt couldn't be done if it had been made it on a larger scale."

Broken costars Franco's brother, Dave, and Boardwalk Empire bad guy Michael Shannon. He was first inspired to develop the movie after reading Crane's autobiography about seven years ago.

"I didn't know how to make it," he said. "I remember doing interviews at that time and people would say, 'Well, who would you like to play?' and I'd say, 'Hart Crane'... I was waiting for somebody to make the movie, waiting to jump on board as the actor, and nobody did."

Despite his artsy-fartsy ways, Franco has no plans to abandon mainstream moviemaking. He stars in the upcoming reboot of Planet of the Apes. He's also gearing up to play the Wizard of Oz in Oz: The Great and Powerful.

"I never thought I'd play the Wizard of Oz," Franco told us. "[But] I truly was a huge fan of the Baum Oz books when I was a kid. I read all of them when I was a kid, and they were some of the first books I read on my own, so I have been a fan for over 20 years."

VIDEO: More from Franco's premiere

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