James Franco2013-05-25T16:37:16-04:00James Francohttp://www.huffingtonpost.es/author/index.php?author=james-francoCopyright 2008, HuffingtonPost.com, Inc.HuffingtonPost Blogger Feed for James FrancoGood old fashioned elbow grease.Thoughts on Alan Cummings' One-Man Macbeth, The New Heaven's Gate Reissue, And Moretag:www.huffingtonpost.com,2013:/theblog//3.31786092013-04-29T12:01:12-04:002013-04-29T13:10:07-04:00James Francohttp://www.huffingtonpost.com/james-franco/ The Testament of Mary was quite excellent, wasn't it? I think the engine or raison d'etre of that play was to make the familiar new. How do you tell the crucifixion story so that it can hit an audience with new significance and avoid all the Sunday school and Bible tales familiarity? You tell it through a new person, Mary. Make this person a woman who will talk about Christ as a human and a son and not about him as if he were already considered the Son of God. Make the account embodied and human. There may have been some criticism about the production design, but it too was in place to make the story new. The moment where she drops into the portal filled with water and stays under... simply amazing.
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Macbeth with Alan Cumming: another dazzling and brilliant one-person show. Yes, Macbeth as a one-man show. I am so jealous; they did it so right. Johnson said that Shakespeare held the mirror up to nature; well, yes, if we say that the mirror is reflecting the essence of nature but not a realistic view of nature. Here is a way to do Shakespeare as realism; you have a single madman in a hospital reciting all the parts. In that way the Elizabethan dialogue is no longer high Shakespearian; it is the expression of a mad character. His portrayals of the familiar Scottish murderers can't be over the top because the characters are being played by an insane character. Macbeth is not Macbeth; it is a portrayal of Macbeth by a man losing his mind in an institution. Cumming is superb.
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I wonder how much these two shows that deliver old stories in new ways depend on the audience's prior knowledge. But I guess everyone knows Macbeth and the Jesus story nowadays, right?
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Orphans. Good. I saw this a while ago, in previews and forgot to write about it. I heard, as everyone did, that Ben Foster replaced Shia Labouf in the role of Treat. Ben is very good. Reminded me of a young Sean Penn for some reason, a combination of being tough and vulnerable. But also a bit awkward, in a good way. All three actors are very watchable.
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Nikolai and the Others at Lincoln Center is the collaboration of Balanchine and Stravinsky; it's directed by the great David Cromer. Everyone is good -- Michael Cerveris as Balanchine is perfect mix of detached passion. The play is designed to feel like observed behavior; it's not structured in a tight way, but more like a Michael Cimino movie where all the characters come together for a big event and, amidst the unfolding of the group action, individual motivations are revealed and tension is created.
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Assembled Parties is a fun time. A troubled family in the order of Salinger or Franzen. Actually, more likeable than Franzen and less into the idea of young geniuses than Salinger. A kind of happy Long Day's Journey Into Night. Ha. Not really.
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Here Lies Love at the Public is great. A video/musical/dance/nightclub extravaganza conceived by the inimitable David Byrne. You stand the whole time and even dance yourself as the performers and images swirl around telling the recent history of the Philippines. Palm trees, music, news footage, death, prison, love, violence, dancing.
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FILMS ON DVD:
Heaven's Gate on Criterion is my new favorite film. It is incredible. I can't believe it has such a bad reputation. Watch the Criterion version. Truly amazing.
The American Friend -- Wenders' take on Ripley. Crazy Dennis Hopper and great Bruno Ganz.
The Talented Mr. Ripley -- Jude Law is unstoppable in this film. The movie is a love song to Italy, the locations are dazzling. Matt Damon is great, and a Ripley who is filled with longing to belong, much more than he is in the book.
Let's Get Lost -- Bruce Webber on Chet Baker. Sad, moving, beautiful.
***
FILMS IN THE THEATER:
To the Wonder - Malick takes The Tree of Life and sucks out most of the voice-over. A movie that truly uses images to speak about the subtleties of love.]]>Some More Books: Part 4tag:www.huffingtonpost.com,2013:/theblog//3.31396072013-04-23T12:10:21-04:002013-04-23T12:10:37-04:00James Francohttp://www.huffingtonpost.com/james-franco/
I went to the book fair at the Los Angeles Museum of Contemporary Art a couple weeks ago, and in one of the many booths selling art books I found a book by David Robbins on comedy in art called Concrete Comedy: An Alternative History of Twentieth-Century Comedy. I immediately started into it because it dealt with many of the issues that I'm interested in and that are moving toward where art and consumerism and entertainment intersect. Robbins is an artist and critic who deals with comedy as his medium, and he has developed his own theory of comedy as an artistic practice that he calls concrete comedy. Concrete comedy is the comedy of behavior, reality, performance and concept; it is proposed in contradistinction to conventional comedy of stand-up, spoken gags, and wacky situations. Robbins is interested in comedy that engages with the real world, that gets its power and significance from its connection. One of his main examples of such an approach is Andy Kaufman, a man who whose work both resided in the fictional world of television and crossed over into more slippery stunts that resided somewhere between performance and real actions with real connections to the audience, outside of their role as passive recipients of information. In his wrestling extravaganza in particular Andy played the villain; he wrestled only women and made a point of verbally abusing the sex because it was part of his character and because it brought the women to full, rage-filled engagement with what he was doing. Robbins attributes much of the success of Andy's ongoing stunt to the deadpan delivery that Andy used at all times. The way that Robbins relates Andy's practice in his book makes the subject doubly interesting because he is essentially showing how a particular kind of comedy works. You would think that this would not be the most entertaining or helpful activity; Sacha Baron Cohen makes fun of such analysis of comedy in Borat, but here the intention is not to be funny, it is to conceptualize a new kind of comedy. In doing so, Robbins becomes a very compelling writer because he gives a portrait of a character who is performing very complex concepts that otherwise might be missed.
All of Kaufman's projects were dependent on his deadpan attitude and delivery; he never broke what he was doing to say, "Hey, I'm a comedian and I'm just kidding." He played the roles on stage and off stage, which caused him to be conflated with his performance personas, which in turn opened him up to particularly harsh forms of criticism. Not only were his characters sexist, he was considered a sexist asshole. I supposed this is what Andy wanted, and even though he knew he was putting on a performance that would engage with the audience in a very direct way -- he would address the audience directly and insult them for being women, or being Southern -- in order to make himself the villain of the piece. But Andy, not the character, became the villain because he never revealed that the whole thing was a planned act. This is a way to make everything an artist does part of the act. Stephen Colbert, a man who uses a persona for his work, also writes his books in his persona so that the arrogant, stupid, right-wing ass that is his character comes through in the writing. This is how Andy worked on everything, but one of the tricks is that it takes tremendous fortitude to keep up such an act when critics and fans have bought the act so thoroughly that they hate him.
Robbins plays a different and important role in this situation. He is the artist who comes after Andy has given all of his performances -- the performance that was his life -- and explicates the real significance of the work. Not that Andy needed it or sought it, but Robbins redeems Andy by revealing the plan behind the act and the deep conceptual underpinnings that supported the wacky performances. In effect, Robbins is our ambassador in the world of Andy; he goes behind the scenes and allows us to see the artist behind the performance. He shows us how to laugh with Andy. The Milos Forman film did much of this work, but, because it was a film, it couldn't get into the intricate analysis of what Kaufman was up to. In the book form, Robbins is able to give a moving portrait, a compelling argument, and a deep analysis of Andy's work. I think if there were some way for the two kinds of work to be done in conjunction or by the same person it would be incredibly powerful -- if Andy were able to write about his work after he did it. But I suppose keeping the veil in place is one of the things that gave Andy's work so much of its power, and if he were to explicate it, it still would have needed to be done with some distance. As John Cage said, don't analyze while you're making work; they're different muscles.]]>Thirty-Fivetag:www.huffingtonpost.com,2013:/theblog//3.31128162013-04-19T08:23:22-04:002013-04-19T08:32:21-04:00James Francohttp://www.huffingtonpost.com/james-franco/
If I look back that far, I can see that I have actually grown; I still wouldn't be able to beat Mr. Roland at pull ups, but I have a profession now -- albeit an odd one, I get paid to pretend to be a person like those people with no empathy for others, or at least in this film I do. It's nice to know that if you're open, life does change and get better.
Here's a poem I wrote on my 31st birthday. I have done a few things in the past four years, but this poem still captures how I feel on my birthday.
31
It was birthday thirty-one
I was in Suffolk, Virginia, directing
A short film called Herbert White.
We stayed at the Hilton Gardens,
The only hotel in town,
The rest are motels, rented monthly.
There are no restaurants, but plenty of strip malls,
Prefabricated houses and little swamps;
People sit in their cars in gas-station lots
And eat and smoke.
This is eating out in Suffolk.
The actor that fucks a goat in my film
Was home-schooled because his parents didn't
Want him to be subjected to drugs, guns and violence.
"And blacks," I think.
Indian River, the school is called.
Tyrone is his name, a handsome, dumb-faced kid.
There were baby goats; they ran around their pen on stiff, stumpy legs.
*
I've had good and bad birthdays.
And boy do they make me think
About when I was younger,
When I had no friends and my mom drove me to school
Because I lost my license drunk-driving, and we wouldn't talk,
We would listen to Blonde on Blonde
Every morning, and life was like moving through something
Thick and gray that had no purpose.
And now I see that everything has had as much purpose
As I give it, or at least it can all make its way
Into my poem and become something else,
And in that way all that shit, and all those bad birthdays,
And the good ones are markers in an anniversary line -
And they carry less and less of their original pain,
And become emptier, just markers really, building blocks,
To be turned into constructions and fucked with.
]]>Some More Books: Part 3tag:www.huffingtonpost.com,2013:/theblog//3.30687932013-04-12T09:58:59-04:002013-04-12T09:59:10-04:00James Francohttp://www.huffingtonpost.com/james-franco/
9am, Los Angeles.
Hi, it's James. Not feeling so great. Just overwhelmed. I'm at my place in L.A., but I've just been around the world for this Oz press tour. Berlin, Tokyo, Daytona, Moscow, London, and back and forth between L.A. and N.Y.C. a few times, sometimes within a 24-hour period, and three or four times within a 72-hour period. I also went to Austin just now for a little, probably 12 hours, to show one of my students' projects, Tar, based on the poems of C.K. Williams. I am beat. I have been reading and writing a bunch and seeing what I can of each city, but the press drains one. Especially because it's my face that gets projected out into the world, so it seems as if I want to do all this press, and then people criticize me for being overexposed. And it's a children's film, so I am asked a specific kind of question, over and over and over: "Did you learn magic?" "Any funny stories from set?" "Did you feel a lot of pressure doing a prequel to such a beloved film?" "If you had one magic power, what would it be?" To the last one I always say that I would hope for the healing touch so I could help sick people, but if I've been asked it a bunch in one day, I usually say, "I do have a magic power; it's X-ray vision." Then they usually blush or move onto the next question.
I'm very happy with the film, and the other film I'm in that came out right after, Spring Breakers, but all the press has been a lot. I'm about to go to Hollywood Boulevard, to get my star on the Walk of Fame. It's a big honor but also surreal. I really never expected this.
***
Teddy Wayne's novel The Love Song of Jonny Valentine tracks the faltering tour of an 11-year-old pop singer in the mold of Justin Bieber. It is a first-person account from the boy, so the story is filtered through his limited worldview. This kind of funneling through a child's perspective is not new, the most famous being Holden's incomparable persona in Catcher in the Rye, but usually the young person's perspective is just that: young and inexperienced. In Wayne's novel, one of the most salient aspects is the way that this young mind has been shaped by his unique position as a pop star.
I'm sure that almost every Bildungsroman involves the forming of the protagonist's identity through a struggle between the influences of his environment and his own burgeoning sense of self, and his determination of right and wrong on his own terms. But in this coming-of-age story, the circumstances are unique. He became a celebrity before he was even a teenager, so he is going through the regular trials of growing up -- puberty, redefining his relationship with his parents, becoming interested in sex, learning to socialize in a larger context -- at the same time as he is being pressured to carry an extremely public career. He is being asked to do a job that would be hard for an adult -- maintain a composed public persona while being scrutinized every day of his life -- while he is still learning about who he is. The result is that his persona, and even his veridic self, are being shaped in concrete ways by his career because his career is his life -- a phenomenon that compounds the confusion, because his career is exploding during such an important formative stage.
The situation is exemplified by the confused conflation of his mother and manager. He can no longer distinguish motherly love from career guidance; each has become the other. And, for that matter, she can no longer distinguish the two because her son has become her ticket out of working as a small-town checkout girl in a second-rate supermarket. And, of course, this is all a way to talk about the more universal phenomenon of coming of age in a digital world where we all look at each other in closeup and are hyper-aware of how we present ourselves to one another. Two ways that Wayne shows the encroaching influences on young Jonny Valentine are to infuse Jonny's thoughts with a hyper-awareness of his career and public image when most kids are only thinking about being picked for the fifth-grade dodgeball team, and to show the way his inner vocabulary and trains of cogitation are hijacked by words and phrases taken from the sources around him.
Just as Holden Caulfield's personality is revealed by the way the loss of his brother and his implied breakdown are discussed with a faceless therapist, Jonny's personality is framed and shaped by his experiences and struggles on his tour. He has teachers of many sorts: His mother is the overall guide for his career; his school tutor gives him lessons about slaves which are used as a parallel for his situation as a product manufactured by a label; his singing and dance coach teaches him about how to present his onstage persona and his music so that he sells the most records and tickets possible. The result is that he hardly has a choice about how to behave; he knows that he loves singing and dancing, but now that he has achieved national fame, he needs to be aware of a whole host of things that no teenage boy should need to be conscious of: He worries about his carb intake to the calorie, he has to face the snarky reviews of his work by critics three times his age, he has to sing songs that are written for him, and he isn't allowed friendships with children his own age because he is always on the road or because his friends before fame aren't considered cool enough to fit with his manicured persona. The closest he gets to a relationship is an arranged, phony paparazzi-style photo shoot with a young female pop star to make it look as if they're dating and, finally, a blow job from a chubby groupie who doesn't even like his music -- she just wants the story.
The wedges within this façade of tween stardom are his tutor and his own efforts to find his dad through the Internet. His tutor gives him an essay question about the pros and cons of slavery for both the masters and the slaves, an obvious prompt for Jonny to question his own situation, and his father is someone from outside his career-oriented circle who might be able to show him something of a real life away from the lime light. But unfortunately for Jonny, even though he can see the cons of his position as an artist who doesn't control his own art, or even his own life, the pros of a career filled with fame and fortune are too powerful to countermand. And the father, who holds the most potential to give Jonny some unconditional love, turns out to be a recovering drug addict who has sought out Jonny in order to get some of his money. So Jonny is not to blame for retreating into the warm safety of stardom at the end; it's the only place he gets positive feedback, and isn't stardom what everyone wants anyway? Why should he give that up for a life of drudgery and dreaming, where one is just as empty and shaped by outside forces to the same extent? Of course he will choose his career over a self-motivated life, because at least while he's famous he gets good food, girls scream for him, and he can play video games all day.]]>Some Playstag:www.huffingtonpost.com,2013:/theblog//3.30525272013-04-10T11:08:20-04:002013-04-10T11:08:43-04:00James Francohttp://www.huffingtonpost.com/james-franco/
As you know, I've been in New York working on a film. They arranged my schedule in a horrible way so that I worked for a day and a half and then had two weeks off. As you know, I've spent a bunch of those days going to plays on Broadway; we went to one together, the one with all the names in the title that were plays on Chekhov characters with "Spike" at the end of it. That was a bit broad, wasn't it? But people seem to like it. A brief rundown of the others I've seen:
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Lucky Guy is a tribute to the late Nora Ephron starring her old friend Tom Hanks and directed by my friend, the great George Wolfe. A group of theater regulars I met one night at Café Centrale did not have nice things to say about the play itself, although they thought that Hanks was well cast in his Broadway debut (I knew he had done stage work in Cleveland early in his career) and that Wolfe did the best he could bringing the material to life, but they objected to the predominance of direct address to the audience. Indeed, the performers say at least 50 percent of their lines directly to the audience, so it becomes a case of telling rather than showing. I didn't find this to be a fault as much as a device that altered the theatrical form from one of dramatic, self-contained scenes to an open, storytelling orientation that broke the fourth wall. Audiences are well accustomed to the fourth wall coming down, but maybe when over half the play is done this way it is off-putting for drama veterans. "Yeah, there was a standing ovation," said the Café Central cabal, "But that's because they paid $150 a ticket. They'll stand and clap for a dog doing tricks with that price tag. And they get to see Hanks." True, but maybe there is something about Hanks in likeable American grub street role that makes the heavy direct address kinda nice, like having your favorite uncle tell you about the old days of journalism.
It's also interesting that this is one of a number of plays that features an expressive discipline that is not dramatic theater within the arches of the theater -- in this case journalism.
***
Breakfast at Tiffany's was a more loyal take on the novella than the Blake Edwards/ Hepburn movie, meaning they kept the protagonist gay and they followed Holly's escort storyline closer and more or less followed the structure of the book (although no adaptation I know if has included the mad horse rampage through Central Park and into the streets.
After the play I went back to my hotel and watched the film. It was funny to watch Hannibal from The A-Team play a sensitive writer, albeit a straight one. Wikipedia says that Capote was very upset that Marilyn Monroe pulled out of the project -- Strasberg told her to play against type and she ended up having a horrible time on The Misfits -- but in hindsight it's hard to see Holly Golightly as anyone other than the spritely Hepburn. She makes the sexual side of the character seem innocuous; she's the blithe spirit next door, rather than the cheerful whore. The actress in the play was a brunette (unlike the book), a mix between Hepburn and Monroe, sexed up, but pleasant. We also got a little extra stuff about gay sex at the magazine office (not in the book).
***
I went to the opening night of previews for I'll Eat You Last; it's a one-woman play about Sue Mengers, a Hollywood agent who had been famous for her client list, parties and personalities. The real Sue came from an era before; I stupidly told my companion that she was the publicist who was murdered in her car not long ago -- that was Ronni Chasen. I soon learned everything I needed to know about Mengers because that is what the play is: some private time with Sue as she dishes about her friends and her life. John Logan knew that all the stuff that surrounds Hollywood -- all the agent stuff, all the business side of the film business -- is just as interesting as most movies. We're put into Mengers' living room and treated like her intimate friends, so we get to be the Streisands, the Redfords and the Coppolas that used to frequent her parties; we're brought to the inner circle.
Fabulous to hear references to Julie Harris in Member of the Wedding or about Gene Hackman casting lore -- we get dished the juice from bygone eras. The audience was either especially old or -- as Mengers says in the play -- "Everyone in the theater is gay." As I put my backpack on after the play, I almost hit an elderly woman. When I asked if she was okay she reacted as if I tried to mug her.]]>Some More Books: Part 2tag:www.huffingtonpost.com,2013:/theblog//3.30373752013-04-08T11:03:29-04:002013-04-08T11:03:37-04:00James Francohttp://www.huffingtonpost.com/james-franco/
I have been busy as usual. I've been directing a low-budget film about Charles Bukowski's childhood. It is not based on his book Ham on Rye; we got the rights to one of Bukowski's biographies, and we're working from that. I think it's going to be pretty special. I think one of the things that Bukowski does best is turn pain into comedy. He had an incredibly rough childhood that he relates with candor in his work, but because of the way that he does it, it becomes entertaining and funny. He achieves pity as well, but it is always couched in comedy. This is the kind of tone I hope to achieve in the film, to show the horrible abuse his father inflicted but to make it palatable by giving the father funny lines. This approach makes the father a kind of pathetic figure whose outlook on life is askew, which he imposes on his son and wife. The thing about Bukowski is that, as hard as his life was when he was a child and adult, it all turned into work, work that is harsh but humorous. He always casts himself as the loser, but in the end he is the winner because he turns his losses into art. The Larry Brown you had me read felt very much like this.
***
Larry Brown's final story/novella at the end of Big Bad Love, "92 Days," is essentially a story about a struggling writer, Barlow, trying to get published. It is broken into a series of numbered sections that break Barlow's story into bite-sized pieces; the pieces involve a number of activities that recur as Barlow attempts to find time to write amidst struggles to make money from house painting, pacify his crazed ex-wife's demands for alimony payments, meet new women, suffer rejection letters from publishers, and other things of the like. Interspersed in these episodes are snippets of stories that Barlow is working on, quoted passages from rejection letters, dreams and, early on, overviews of his friend Raoul's poems. These interstitial sections that focus on writing, publishing and Barlow's inner life all take the story out of the present in Mississippi and serve as counterweights to the narrative. These sections do a couple specific things: Because Barlow is a writer, much of his life is spent in his head and in his imaginative work, so these sections take the reader into the writer side of his head and show how he processes his life though his creativity. Because we see Barlow's struggles to survive as a writer and estranged father and also see his writing and dreams, a relationship between the sections is created so that the interstitial sections provide a commentary, filtered through his consciousness, on his life. In addition, Barlow's writing and the pursuit of being published become the engines for the entire piece because they are what Barlow is actively pursuing; everything outside of the writing could happen to a non-writer character who is just floundering in life, but the writing sections give Barlow a center, a motive, and a goal, all of which give the story direction.
Early in the story, Barlow's friend Raoul wants Barlow to read some poems that he's written. Barlow is resistant because he doesn't think they'll be any good. The reader doesn't get to see the poems themselves, but we hear about them through Barlow's brusque summaries. There's a bullfight one with a cowardly matador that he hates, clearly a rendition of bad Hemingway; but then there is one he likes that Barlow says has everything in it -- drug use, sex and even gorillas that have escaped from the zoo -- and he is envious because he wishes that he had written it. He is also upset because he knows that Raoul doesn't live and die by his writing like he does -- sacrificing his family for it -- and that Raoul will probably get published when all that it means for him is his name in print. The inclusion of these poems in this way does a few things: It breaks up the narrative so that we get art within art, a summary of writing by characters within the piece; we get a sense of what Barlow appreciates in writing, as he likes the one with everything real, the one that loads on all the crazy experiences grounded in reality -- which is what he in turn puts into his story; and, finally, it shows how badly Barlow wants to be published. Later we will hear about some of the stories he wrote, in overview or through the brief summaries the rejection letters contain, and eventually we will get a section of a story as the character wrote it -- although he was ostensibly intoxicated when he composed it. At first Barlow's writing seems more intense than Brown's writing about Barlow because the overall story contains so much humor, but then the humor gives way to true loss (his daughter) and desperation (a drinking problem), so the stories within the story are actually at a tonal equilibrium with the rest of the story.
The stories within the story and the drive to be published act as reprieves from the rambling life of squalor that Barlow lives; they are the white-hot nuclei of the story because they are the materialization of the main motivation of Barlow's life. If the stories and the attempts at publication were not included we would be left with a sad and aimless character trying to survive for survival's sake. Because the stories are talked about and shown we can at least understand why Barlow is living as he is: He does everything for his art. This intransigent devotion to his work is what makes him a more interesting character; if not for that, he would be a meandering deadbeat and a reprobate father with no purpose. Because the story spends so much time wallowing though the most impecunious and vulgar circumstances, it gains relief from the literary sections. Not that the character or Brown think that literature should shy from portraying such debasement -- they both admire how Raoul put everything real into his poem, which is what they both try to do in their work -- but it seems that life of this order would not be worth living without the writing. Why walk through the flame if you're not going to write about the experience?]]>Burning for Goslingtag:www.huffingtonpost.com,2013:/theblog//3.30148532013-04-04T11:20:00-04:002013-04-04T11:20:10-04:00James Francohttp://www.huffingtonpost.com/james-franco/The Place Beyond the Pines at the Arclight. It being a Monday, the theater wasn't packed, but it was not a bad crowd considering. Also, it's a damn long film for what it is: an earnest character study done in a realistic style with a Shakespearian frame of sins of the fathers being handed down to the sons. Its style is part Cassavetes, part Dardenne brothers by way of The Wrestler. It's told in three parts to show how the lives of different strangers are intertwined, and each episode is a passing of the focalizing baton. We start with Gosling, move to Bradley Coops and then 15 movie-years later to their sons, played by Dane DeHaan and some young goomba whose connection with his character is so tight it's magical, like a Jersey Shore thug contextualized by serious circumstances so that his personality isn't played for cheap MTV laughs but instead for the terror such brutish and reckless superficial personalities can inspire. All actors are excellent, and this is one thing that Cianfrance can do: make the simple and desperate feel as epic as a symphony.
***
I loved the whole film and was engaged every moment of the way. But what I want to talk about is the first section, the Gosling section; I want to make love to this section.
***
It starts with the sounds of a carnival over black. The first image we see is Gos's toned six-pack, framed tight so that his head is cut off in order to focus our attention on the full spread of idiosyncratic tattoos and the impressive opening and closing of a butterfly knife, a skill Gosling mastered -- he is the king of eccentric character behavior -- as the character anxiously paces; in the same take, the character (we later learn his name is Luke) sticks the knife overhand into the wall and walks out the door shirtless; we still haven't seen his face but we know it's the Gos: the hair, the head, the strut; as we follow him through active carnival grounds the Dardenne behind-the-head shot is kept active by the developing activity of Luke: first he puts on his signature black Metallica shirt -- pay close attention to all of Gosling's clothes in whatever he does, he is a master at evoking character through dress: The Drive Scorpion jacket; the Blue Valentine two-tone leather, I mean, come on giiiiiiirl; and here a red jacket, more nondescript than usual Gosling but still cool -- and then the cigarette comes out, but we only know this from the smoke that rolls back over his shoulders; as he winds though the dinging rides and flashing booths he is crowned by the chintzy glamour of the multicolored lights, and this is just so right, because this is what the character is: the smoking, brooding carnival king who will ride his motorcycle like no other into the burning twilight of legend; but the shot doesn't stop, he enters a buzzing tent just as he is announced by the ponytailed MC; he mounts his bike next to two other riders; the camera moves back and forth across his badass face, the first time we see it; he has a cross tattooed below his left eye and some erratic squiggly writing below his neck -- still no cut -- and then the three riders enter a porous metal sphere, and they're off; is it Gosling in there riding loops with the other two? Is this possible? There is no way that the filmmakers would risk their star in such a way, but it was all so seamless! The character is already a legend, already fused with his bike and cemented in the pantheon of mythic motorcycle rebels.
***
The rest of his section is more of the same beautiful Gosling brooding and motorcycle riding. I hear he learned to ride the bike for the role, as he should have. This role is a mix between McQueen in The Getaway and some '80s metal head kids I used to know at summer camp. Yes, please, more of this. Look at how he smokes; look at the other t-shirts he wears inside out; look at the holes! Look at how he dances with the little dog; look at the homoerotic relationship with his partner in crime. The only thing that killed me was that he has to challenge a black dude for the love of his child's mother. It suddenly made it clear that the black dude should be the outsider, the challenger, the misunderstood outlaw. But this is not Gosling's doing; he played the role to a T. Look at the funny glasses he wears when he robs banks, green on the sides; look at the writing on the bike before he paints it black; Gosling touches, all, I'm sure of it.
***
The rest of the film is great, but the following two sections can't hope to burn with the same intensity of the Gosling section, they're not designed that way. It's not the actors' faults, it's just that Gosling was cast as the shooting star, and he sucked up all the oxygen. I could watch that first section over and over and over and over. Because it portrays a character who is beautiful because he has a ticking clock around his neck, he's every James Dean-style kid, every burning hot rock star, Lenny Bruce mother, who speaks with his motorcycle and his style: the intelligence of style and behavior. A behavioral and sartorial genius.
***
Burn hard baby.]]>Some More Books: Part 1tag:www.huffingtonpost.com,2013:/theblog//3.30007212013-04-02T15:14:16-04:002013-04-02T15:14:28-04:00James Francohttp://www.huffingtonpost.com/james-franco/
How are you? Busy? Have classes started? What are you teaching, and how? My new classes have started and they're good, more like continuations from last semester. I have an undergraduate creative writing class at UCLA that is not like a regular writing class; I have them do everything from writing, to making videos, to reading, to going on trips with me. This quarter we are planning an in-depth look at the way a studio promotes a multi-million dollar move (Oz: The Great and Powerful), I will take each of them on one leg of my press tour around the world (Japan, Berlin, London, Moscow, New York, etc.). I realize now that this is very similar to what Dunne did with his book The Studio. It is a way to give them access to the inner workings of something they normally wouldn't have access to. Our other focus is Disney and how Disney itself is an indelible presence in all our lives, for both good and bad. My other UCLA class is a graduate film class; these students have adapted Boswell's stories from Heyday of the Insensitive Bastards and are now casting and getting ready to shoot them. The third class is at USC, another graduate film class that will film their own versions of Borges-like stories.
I am also shooting a movie about Charles Bukowski's childhood. We just started, and it's going very well. One of my frequent collaborators, Tim Blake Nelson, said he loves working on my films because of the temerity my company has for making the kinds of movies we love. We choose difficult subjects and often authors who are difficult to adapt, either because their writing is so complicated (Faulkner) or their subjects are so dark (Cormac McCarthy), but we find a way to make them with a responsible budget so that we can a) just get them made and b) make them in the artistic ways that their sources demand. The Bukowski project has its own challenges, mainly tonal: how to find the mixed tone between humor, sorrow and depravity that Bukowski's own writing had, and how to do it with kids. When Bukowski wrote about his own childhood he was doing it decades removed, so he was infusing his childhood self with all the heft of the adult writer, the heft coming from the way he wrote about it; he doesn't necessarily give the young version of himself more insight than he would have -- although sometimes he does do that -- but by including specific things at specific times, and by inflecting the episodes in ways that the humor and terror of each situation is emphasized, the child's world is depicted for an adult audience.
***
John Gregory Dunne's The Studio is the result of diligent observation he conducted after receiving permission to access any area of Twentieth Century Fox's wide production net in 1968; at the time their projects included everything from Dr. Doolittle (the original with Rex Harrison) to The Boston Strangler (still a fresh case at the time) to Planet of the Apes (the original) to science fiction pilots that carried all the marks of '60s ideas of the future (the project was called 25th Century Man) that seem so silly in hindsight. Dunne's approach was to observe, sit in meetings, take no notes, and then, after an episode, retreat to private quarters and jot down everything he remembered. This approach bears many similarities to camera-based observational documentary approaches, where the central material is gathered through uncritical capturing -- of course there are always choices about where to put the camera and certainly in the editing room critical choices are made, but in the "production" stage the documentarian doesn't play a part in the action. This comfort his subjects felt was a special thing Dunne had to achieve that video documentarians would also need to achieve, but something they would have a harder time doing because cameras can feel intrusive. Even Dunne was surprised by the access he was granted, and he smartly didn't take notes in the presence of the subjects so that they would feel more comfortable being themselves, so it's hard to imagine camera crews going everywhere that he went -- certainly in that day, before the full onslaught of reality television and everyone's new familiarity with being on camera and viewing life as a performance. A key aspect of Dunne's approach was the unobtrusive façade he presented while actually being as intrusive as possible, and because of that façade he was able to gather enough material to allow him the flexibility to create a diverse and dynamic portrait. Meaning, he used material based on life, and, knowing what to study and how to put it together, he could tell a compelling story.
As with documentary films, here the subject matter does half the work; because he has been granted unlimited access to such diversified and flashy subject matter, he has much to work with if he but observes and records. With some projects it is enough to be a camera, and maybe this is more generally true with non-fiction projects, but here Dunne didn't even need to do much prior research -- the research is part of the project. Yes, he was probably served by the fact that he had written screenplays and had movies produced because those projects would give him insight into what to look for, but ultimately he could have done the observing with very little prior knowledge about his subject. This was a subject, like many documentary subjects I've explored, that didn't need much help, if any from the observer; like the Maysels' brothers with their documentaries Salesman, Grey Gardens, and Gimme Shelter, all that needed to be done in the capturing stage was to point at the right thing. All Dunne had to do was be in the right room at the right time and listen to the right conversations. The book is presented as a series of dialogue scenes with marginal amounts of set up between to establish place and who the players are.
Because the book is now 44 years old, much of the primary material that would have been cutting edge upon the book's release, material that might have made featured characters uncomfortable or angry, is now sucked of its power. What remains is a well-crafted portrait of the way a studio worked in the late '60s, a particular beast that was transitioning from the old-fashioned oligarchic system to the newer, slightly more democratic system. But in particular the movies whose productions are recorded are interesting but, I think, dated, and they are not exactly the classics that at least I would want to know the details about. What this means is that the particular details are less important than the record of how the business operated, and to some extent still does. If, for example, the productions of The Godfather or Chinatown had been explored, then the minute facts of what went on would be of more interest for creative, biographical, and other reasons (which is why a book like Easy Riders/Raging Bulls was written and is more popular now than The Studio). But the studio is unique and important not because of the movies it explores but because of how it explores them. Easy Riders/ Raging Bulls was created entirely after all the events it recounts, decades after, while the material for The Studio was generated as it was happening. Not to say that one approach is better than the other, the different approaches are comparable to the Maysles's observational style versus Errol Morris's research/recreation/ interview style. Morris paints compelling pictures, but there is something indelible about the Maysles's capturing of real drama as it unfolds before their lens. We can't say that Dunne's pen has quite the same immediacy as a camera, but his on-the-scene reportage allows for more details and blow-by-blow accounting. And in the end he can still edit it to fit whatever structure he wants.]]>Search for the Real -- Romatag:www.huffingtonpost.com,2012:/theblog//3.21708552012-11-21T11:20:45-05:002013-01-21T05:12:01-05:00James Francohttp://www.huffingtonpost.com/james-franco/La Dolce Vita and Mastroianni. The street is no longer as it was in that film back in the '60s (I think); it still has restaurants, but they are mainly for tourists and not the center of the Roman nightlife. Last night my NYU graduate students and I presented our collaborative film Tar at the Rome Film Festival. Tar is based on C.K. Williams' collection of poems; each student picked one of the poems and adapted it into a short. But the difference between this film and other omnibus films is that from the start the students worked to make a unified piece. Each step of the way they critiqued each other's work, not in the usual MFA workshop manner where it feels like one against the group (just the nature of this kind of set-up) but with the aim of helping each other build toward a connected piece. In addition we developed a set look for the cinematography and set design, and the casting bridged all the shorts, so if a character was in more than one section he would be played by the same actor. The final result is quite stunning. It feels unified, but not only that: It tells a story through poetry and imagery; it is not linear but a Proustian plunge into the past, and then back into the past, and back, back, back into the past, only to come up to the surface every so often to ground everything. I play the poet in his 30s, and the real C.K. makes appearances reading his work.
Many of my students came out for the screening in Rome, and it was fun to share their first feature premiere with them. They got to do all the things that seem ridiculous to me now: walking the red carpet and going blind from having your picture taken by rows of photographers. They also got to experience watching their work in front of a paying audience, which is something that they don't experience at school. They also got to experience critical response from both good critics and bad critics. After the lights came up on the movie, I was so moved and proud of them I cried uncontrollably. It was pretty embarrassing, but I didn't really care. It was a new experience for me: being a guide into the world that I have known for years. The response at the festival was wonderful, and the critics have been pretty positive. I hope my students understand that the people who blog and write about films wish they were making films themselves, and if anything negative was said, the students should keep in mind the innovative nature of the film (collaboration, poetry as a source). Of course it was inspired by Terrence Malick, but why should similarities to the Tree of Life be seen as a negative? It's not as if every movie out there doesn't copy some other movie. And if the style of this film resembles certain DIY techniques found on the Internet or shares images or subject matter that we have seen before, it can be argued that it does so in order to capture the spirit of the age while engaging with poetry of the recent past. I hope they know that what they accomplished is fairly unprecedented and hasn't been done by any group of students at any film school. At least as far as I know, and I teach at a bunch of them.
***
I've been reading Mailer. In The Executioner's Song, Mailer uses a simple, restrained voice that modulates slightly according to the character whose personality he is trying to capture while writing in close third person. All the characters in the first third of the book are working class, and Mailer describes them in ways that reflect a modest level of diction and psychological sophistication. In fact, much of the power of the book comes from the restricted point of view, which situates the reader in a world where the opposing forces are above his head, just like they are for Gary Gilmore and most of the other supporting cast. Because the events told are true -- whether Mailer is exacting about his work's verisimilitude is irrelevant here because the book is posed as fiction -- Mailer can use a quieter style and hang longer on mundane details, which inevitably become less mundane and more interesting because of the attention paid to them. Like a reality television show or a documentary the story can linger on finer details like Gilmore's frustrations while learning cobbling -- a sequence irrelevant to the murder but important to the character's development -- or the details of a motel room (down to the rubber door pad and the snake-like lamp cords) seen through the eyes of Gilmore's hallucinating companion April on the night Gilmore committed the first murder. April is a side character, but we get a whole section where her LSD-influenced thought process takes us in and out of her memories of rape. Mailer is able to wander down these strange detours because the destination is known and is extreme (two senseless murders and the death penalty), and in turn the looseness of the narrative becomes the strength of the piece because we get to see multiple dimensions of the players involved in such a horrific situation; the human details are crafted with a humble hand so that a tabloid story starts to feel real, complex and relatable, just like life. But because it's the heavy Mailer who is behind this nimble approach, the plainspoken narrative is transformed into the universal and the poetic.
***
Last night A____ and I walked down the Via Veneto and over to a great restaurant called Tullio. It didn't open until 7:30, so we sat on a stoop and I read her Cheever's story "The Swimmer." I know Mad Men has revived the world of Cheever, but it was great to go back to the source. A______ didn't really get the story, but I couldn't blame her, by the time I got to the end we were inside eating mozzarella and artichokes. It was the best mozzarella I ever had, halfway between cheese and truffles. One aspect of the story struck with me: the way that we don't grow up close to the earth anymore. That if he is going to swim across the country he thinks he needs to do it by swimming through swimming pools, because everything has become domesticated.
***
My friend K______ is desperate for me to visit Far Rockaway to help with the relief. I'm trying to get back there. I miss New York.
***
After dinner A_____ and I walked down the block to see Breaking Dawn 2 in Italian. Before I fell asleep I saw Bella running at supersonic speeds, I saw Taylor Lautner take his shirt off, and I saw his character "imprint" on a baby. They were speaking in Italian, but I knew that "imprint" stuff was coming, so I was ready for it. It reminded me of the old radical Mormons in Krakauer's book, Under the Banner of Heaven, who select young women for their brides before the girls are even through puberty. But hey, it's just werewolves and vampires, right?
At least the last movie started to own up to how sexual the whole series is. She's a teen mom! She could be on a reality show. Except, unlike the real teen moms, she gets the deux ex machina of immortality, so everything is fine. But I guess those teen moms who get to be on TV are given something similar -- they get attention and praise and money for being as screwed up as possible. As long as it's interesting, they get the cushion of fame.
***
The next night we went to pizza (gluten free for A____) and saw Bertolucci's new film (in Italian) Me and You. This was very easy to follow despite the language. A clear story about two lost souls coming together -- a bit like Last Tango with teens.
***
Tonight we're going to the master house! My Italian book translator has invited us to dinner at Bertolucci's. I'll let you know about any stories he tells me about Brando taping his lines to other actors' chests.]]>A Search for the Real -- Teaching and Thingstag:www.huffingtonpost.com,2012:/theblog//3.21173592012-11-12T11:54:11-05:002013-01-12T05:12:01-05:00James Francohttp://www.huffingtonpost.com/james-franco/
Dear R___________,
I'm on a plane flying from New Orleans to Los Angeles, my weekly trip. I have to say I love this teaching thing. I guess I love the purity of the situation, the smaller, bite-sized egos instead of the huge gorilla egos of the professional world. Of course there are a few in every bunch who don't understand how hard it is to make it in the professional world, who think they're better than they are because they are still in the sheltered world of the university, untried in the realm of professional competition. I find more of the latter type among undergrads, but among this younger crowd I also find more students who are open to suggestions. But the flip side of this situation is when one finds a student who is truly talented, one who is doing incredible work at such a young age. I don't know if I have any of those among my current undergrads; maybe, they're pretty keen. I think there are some graduate students in the film programs that will go on to have careers (if they are in a MFA program they have already been vetted to an extent). So, in these cases, the super-talented weird ones, I suppose the key is knowing when and how to stand out of their way and how to guide material that has tons of potential but is slightly askew.
Anyway, I am teaching six classes in all different kinds of disciplines, on both coasts. And I have turned all of the classes -- whether they are performance classes, directing classes, art classes, or writing classes -- into production-oriented, class-wide collaborations. I love when they make stuff because I can frame each class in such a way that the work can go out into the world. The level of work doesn't matter because it is an honest portrait of the students. The honesty is primary; the portrait quality of the work makes it feel like a kid's drawing framed by an adult's concept. It's also nice to be able to control the material studied and how it's talked about. I had so many classes, especially creative ones, where I hated what we were doing or the kinds of material my peers were interested in. In my current position I can guide the subject matter, especially in the classes where I bring in the source material to be adapted.
***
The election stuff is pretty cool. It feels like we can all exhale for a minute. I know a few people who got raped, and they were waiting to find out if it was God's will or not. Good to know it wasn't.
***
I saw a few films. Turns out that Flight is an addiction film. I had no idea. The editing of the first half is thrilling. Most of the film is spent watching an alcoholic hit bottom. Denzel plays an emotionally destitute man to the hilt, a pilot who drinks and does coke before flying: a pretty risky role to play, putting his stardom on the line. He even shows himself out of shape with his shirt off. It's pretty cool, realistic; I like it. But he also gets to have two affairs with the most beautiful women possible: a sexy exotic stewardess and a recovering junkie who looks like she was shooting up whole milk instead of heroin, a redheaded girl-next-door type. Denzel's crumbling drinker also conveniently has an old farmhouse straight out of House and Garden that he can escape to. Oh yeah, and his alcoholism didn't lead to any problems on the plane; his drinking was incidental to any of the deaths -- you see, he is the greatest pilot who ever lived. That's all to say Denzel plays an alcoholic very well and gives a very vulnerable performance, but he still gets to be the coolest alcoholic hitting bottom who has ever been portrayed.
***
The Sessions is also not bad. Mesmerizing. How they make a story about a paralyzed man interesting for 90 minutes is praiseworthy. Much of it is due to John Hawkes's performance, and much is due to the subject matter: sex, baby. We love sex even if we say we don't. So it's nice to have a movie that embraces the essentials of the sex act. Helen Hunt can't call herself a prostitute, which is fine; maybe she isn't. But she is being paid for sex, and we love her for it. It's nice to acknowledge how important human interaction is. It takes a movie about a 40-year-old virgin who can't even masturbate to allow us to embrace sex as a storytelling device -- as opposed to gratuitous schlock -- but that's fine; I'm glad it is happening.
***
Hmmmm, what else? My first chapbook came out, Strongest of the Litter, but people seem to be more interested in who I'm dating than poetry. Oh yeah, I got nominated for a National Entertainment Journalism award for these HuffPost blogs, but no other outlet is going to run that story, right? Hahaha -- why would Gawker or the New York Post want to publicize that an actor/Yale doctoral candidate is nominated for an award for something that they are doing themselves? I'm pretty proud of it, but I can see why they must hate me.]]>The Search for the Real -- Octobertag:www.huffingtonpost.com,2012:/theblog//3.20098902012-10-24T12:32:30-04:002012-12-24T05:12:02-05:00James Francohttp://www.huffingtonpost.com/james-franco/
I am on a plane in L.A. about to take off for Jackson, Mississippi via Atlanta. I have been going back and forth between Jackson and L.A. on my days off for four weeks now in order to teach. I am teaching both undergraduate and graduate students in film, creative writing and performance. I taught film at NYU last year so I am used to teaching production classes in a film program, but teaching creative writing and performance is new to me. If I were teaching these subjects in a conventional MFA format I think I would know exactly what to do, but I am trying to do some things a little differently. The main difference is that I like to organize my classes as unified groups that work on a single group project that will have a life outside of the classroom. What I mean is that the film classes will work on individual pieces that will eventually be put together into a feature-length film; the creative writing class will do a series of writing projects that will add up to a collective series of monologues or pieces that will hopefully feel connected by theme, place and certain similarities of character. In addition, there is a performative element in the writing classes where they each read a short piece each week, Spalding Gray-style, and are recorded on video. Eventually there will be a larger adaptation project where the students will take some source material (probably poems by Komanyaaka) and merge it with their own lives in order to make a video that both uses their own experiences and elevates them by merging them with something larger than those experiences -- namely, Komunyaaka's experiences in the Vietnam War.
***
I'm also happy to report that the efforts of the first of these kinds of classes has resulted in a collaborative feature film called Tar, which will premiere at the Rome Film Festival (headed this year by former Venice curator Marco Muller). Not bad. I'm so proud of my NYU roots; it's nice to see my peeps' work come together like this. I hear James Van Der Beek in Don't Trust the B---- in Apartment 23 is trying to outdo me as an NYU teacher; well, now he has something solid to compete with. The New York Post has also been sniffing around for academic gossip because they can't write about me stumbling out of clubs. I think Tar says it all: They can kiss my ass.
***
So, I reread Holy Land and interviewed D.J. Waldie for a project I'm doing with my students at CalArts. I can see even more clearly how this book is in line with what I want to do with much of my own work. Waldie said that before he wrote Holy Land he attempted to write a series of short stories based on the same content that's in Holy Land, essentially people and places in Lakewood, Calif., but his friends said the stories were slack and unconvincing. After that response he was led down the road to writing what would become Holy Land, which, compared to a Winesburg, Ohio take on the material, is much more spare on narrative and includes much more factual and historical information. But one of the tricks of the book is the way the more nonfictional material is juxtaposed with personal material; because of this juxtaposition, the slivers of personal information are made more mysterious and the segments of factual and historical information are given life. It's similar to William Carlos Williams' dictum, "no ideas but in things."
On all levels of the book, Waldie uses an evenhanded approach and pulls from opposing sides of each issue, which creates a potent, ineffable quality. What I mean is that Waldie juxtaposes opposites: opposite kinds of content, opposite kinds of inflections, opposite styles. There are sections about the founding of Lakewood by the three men who bought the land in the early twentieth century, side by side with sections about a man climbing an electrical tower, next to segments that are strictly lyrical and not imagistic at all. He also includes situations where the residents have lost things, as well as gained things, by living in the community. There is a sense of community and love alongside a sense of conformity, racism and misunderstanding. In this way the community is elevated to something greater than its surface-level significance; it becomes the proving ground for the enlightenment of the residents. It's called Holy Land for several reasons, two are: to counteract the criticism of suburbs that argues the suburbs are evil and destructive places, and to pair the religiously transcendent idea of holiness with the secular pedestrianism of suburbs. Because of all of these contrasts and evasive gestures, it becomes very hard to place any single tone or final judgment in the book. Instead what we get are elusive glimpses of great emotion, much like poetry.
Because Waldie abandoned his short story collection about Lakewood and wrote the more poetic, fragmented version using the same subject, his book has less of a narrative and more of an intense focus on details. What happens is that we read into the details in many different ways: We experience the personal interactions through young Waldie, we experience the growth of the community through the community as a whole, and we experience the more lyrical and poetic parts through either Walden's own mind or through our own purely intellectual engagement. What I mean is that we are not experiencing the book through a fixed set of characters; rather, the community is presented to us in lyrical form so that we are almost reading the history of the place as from a history book, with the important distinction that the historical material is contained in bite-sized portions interspersed with personal sections. The history gets another level of significance because we now feel the character and the writer behind the less subjective and engaging scenes. We feel the collage artist in Waldie using old facts; he takes information of all sorts of different sources and melds them together, creating a different kind of inflection for both the factual and personal sections.
***
Some other things to catch up on:
I saw On the Road at the Toronto Film Festival. I remember auditioning for that movie three or four years ago opposite Josh Hartnett -- needless to say neither of us got the roles based on young Kerouac and Cassady. I played young Ginsberg in Howl soon after that. It has taken a long time for On the Road to come out and over the course of those 50 years the material has changed, because we have changed. When Marlon Brando died, an unanswered letter from Kerouac, written in the '60s, was found in his house. The letter asked Brando to play Dean Moriarty opposite Kerouac as Sal Paradise; I'm pretty sure the idea was to actually drive across the country on the routes that were depicted in the book and film the adventure on 8 mm. This sounds like an amazing idea, and I'm sad that Brando never took him up on it. The other funny part about that story is that I heard Kerouac actually hung around The Actors Studio for a while because he was thinking about dabbling in acting and filmmaking (see also Robert Frank's Pull My Daisy, the narration for which Kerouac wrote and read -- Ginsberg stars); an impulse that shows his need to break from the page after his initial brush with and extreme dislike of literary fame; an impulse that probably pushed Kesey and the Pranksters onto the road after he wrote Cuckoo's Nest and Sometimes a Great Notion (the idea of behavior and film as writing); the same impulse that pushed Kaprow to move from the canvas into performative Happenings.
Anyway, it seems that a movie version of On the Road would always have the challenge of making the material feel as raw as the book felt when it first came out in the late '50s while at the same time capturing the period accurately -- if Brando had followed Kerouac's idea, the locations would still serve and the two could just behave and that would be the film. But in 2012 the film needs to recreate most of the locations and recreate behavior and scenes that are 50 years old while not making it feel like a museum piece. As I watched I kept thanking Walter Salas for making the film. The images were so beautiful; it was like he was fulfilling a duty to the dead Beats. The actors were all great. But I also kept thinking about the documentary I heard Salas made during his years of research -- it did take such a long time -- that consists of his journey through all of the actual locations. Somehow I feel like this, when we get to see it on the DVD extras, will take us all the way onto the road.
***
I also hear that I've been dating Selena Gomez, Kristen Stewart and Ashley Benson. Hot damn, am I a lucky guy. I wish I had actually gotten closer than the 13th row of the theater in Toronto where Kristen gave her On the Road Q and A, but I didn't; not only did I not talk to her, I didn't even go to the SoHo house where I supposedly asked her out on a date. As for Gomez and Benson, those are Bieber's girls and I wouldn't dare tangle with the Biebs. I heard he wants to kick my ass. Yikes!]]>A Search for the Real: Summer Is Overtag:www.huffingtonpost.com,2012:/theblog//3.19301022012-10-01T15:27:13-04:002012-12-01T05:12:01-05:00James Francohttp://www.huffingtonpost.com/james-franco/
I have been very busy. I don't know if I've been busier than usual, but a lot is going on. I am down near Jackson in Mississippi working on the Faulkner film. It's the largest movie I've yet directed, moneywise, but it also has more characters than any other movie I've worked on. I think that the kinds of things this larger cast has made me consider have much that can be applied to writing. The past three features I directed focused on a single, isolated protagonist: The Broken Tower (about Hart Crane), Sal (about the last day of the actor Sal Mineo's life), and Cormac McCarthy's Child of God (about a murderous necrophiliac in the woods). In those films I could focus on the minutiae of each character's behavior. They were small films that worked through the details and were not dependent on dialogue (spoken or through body language). When a character is isolated in a film, he still communicates his feelings to the audience, but the axis of communication is shifted from character-to-character (something that the audience oversees and overhears) and becomes more of a connection between character and audience. I don't mean that the characters break the fourth wall, and I don't mean that they are not engaged with their environment or don't engage with struggles within themselves, but one channel of communication is taken away when other characters are not there to interact with. So, an isolated character is still realistically responding to the world and challenges around him, but he doesn't need to communicate his feelings to other characters, only to the audience through his behavior and actions.
In a book, an isolated character can speak his thoughts through interior monologue, or the third-person narrator can tell the reader what the character is feeling and thinking. Of course this can be done in voice-over in a film, and it is often very effective, as in Terrence Malick's The Tree of Life, where image and voice-over are both drawn from simple places and incidents: A family grieves a son's death, a brother thinks back to when he and his brother were children. But the sweeping way the images are delivered, tied together by an epic sense of things in the voice-over, makes the combination much greater than the parts. So, books, I guess they deal with similar issues of focus and expression; a writer must consider which character he will tell what through and what the distance will be. In the book As I Lay Dying, each chapter is told from a different character's perspective -- not like Rashomon, where the accounts conflict (although there is a tiny bit of this), but in a cumulative way, so that their stories build on each other. In addition, there is a huge contrast between the way they speak out loud and the way they speak in their interior monologues. The spoken dialogue uses a level of diction that one would expect from Mississippi farmers in the early 20th century, while the inner monologues are more advanced than these characters would be able to articulate. So in the film, we are going for a combination of approaches to capture the dichotomy between the inner and outer and to find a way to give a sense of the constantly shifting perspectives without making a mess. That's often a big issue with novels and stories isn't it? Finding the perspective to stick with, or finding ways to transition perspectives.
***
I also found this strange book by Joe Wenderoth in my stack to read and opened it not knowing what to expect. I think this is exactly the way to read this book: Come at it with an open mind, because it defies categorizations of fiction and verse, high and low levels of reference, and often sanity. I was immediately drawn into the book because it became clear early on that the addressee in the title is not a person but is instead the fast-food chain Wendy's -- or maybe one Wendy's outlet in particular -- being addressed as if it were a person. I am usually drawn to work, especially written work, that deals with the world of mass consumerism, popular culture, and advertisements because it often feels more familiar to me than books about war, or police work, or settings around the world. Not to say that engagement with the unfamiliar is something I don't like in some books, but I find myself very attracted to work that uses the flashy opacity of fast food and modern living to critique and examine the way we live now. In addition, the apparent shallowness of the subject is matched by the equally dense and twisted perspective of the faceless narrator, or writer figure, who seems to be part philosopher, part poet, part psychopath, part straight, and part gay. He, like his focus of attention, Wendy's, encompasses a wide range of identities and ideas so that the subject and object of the epistles swirl around a wide variety of definitions; the superficial becomes dense, and the complicated becomes pop.
The pages are each dated and written, as the title suggests, as if they were letters written over the course of little more than a year in the mid '90s. From entry to entry, Wendy changes -- from a woman, to an actual fast food store, to an idea and signifier, to an abstraction that has little to do with the concrete or common understanding of fast food in our culture. Sometimes the letters are almost love letters to a woman; sometimes they address the specific food items that can be bought at a Wendy's; sometimes they detail the ostensible writer's daily actions like watching porn or his frequent visits to Wendy's; and sometimes they fuse intense references to sex and body parts with the surface actions that take place in Wendy's. The result is that a multi-colored and multivalent variety of impressions is created, both concrete and abstract. The epistolary structure of the book -- one short letter per page -- returns us back again and again to a familiar set-up: a strange and vague man writing to a restaurant/woman/idea/himself. So, like Barryman's Dream Songs, the work can roam and become more abstract because the structure is regular. It's like a musical beat that underlies the irregular fluctuations of content and meaning. In fact, I think The Dream Songs are this book's main source of inspiration; not only are the entries given a regular structure, but the fusion of high/low references, the exploration of inner demons both sexual and murderous, and the constant shifting of voice, subject, and object all owe a debt to Barryman's poems.
This is a book that takes on pop culture and the dark sexuality and violence beneath it without flinching. It uses regularity of form to frame irregular and messy approaches to sticky subjects. I guess this is everything that I am interested in.
***
I also watched the pilot episode of Jersey Shore and Soderbergh's documentary about Spalding Gray. And I'm going to show episode 2 from the second season of Breaking Bad to one of my classes.]]>The Search for the Real: Part 3tag:www.huffingtonpost.com,2012:/theblog//3.18688362012-09-09T15:15:57-04:002012-11-09T05:12:01-05:00James Francohttp://www.huffingtonpost.com/james-franco/
I'm on my way to Venice for the film festival; the film I made with Harmony Korine, Spring Breakers, is premiering there. I'm very excited for people to see it. I think the best way to describe it is the way Harmony always spoke about it before we made it: a Britney Spears video meets a Gaspar Noe film.
Anyway, I had a great time in New York. It's funny that Newsies was your favorite thing you've seen on Broadway. Of all the things we've seen. I admit it was entertaining, but also funny -- you kept wondering why I was laughing when all the cute little newsboys in their Depression-era outfits started doing cartwheels and back flips. I guess because it was so joyously "Broadway" -- I think that's what they call the shows that appeal to the gay side in all of us. One Man, Two Guvnors was also good wasn't it? That James Corden is great. So charming. When he called up those guys on stage, they were real audience members. It happens every show, he brings people up and jokes with them and spanks them; when Donald Trump was in the audience he pulled him up and spanked him all over. It's funny how scared you were that he would drag you up. I guess we're used to the performers staying on stage and the audience staying in the dark. The one thing that was not planned was when the guy threw the sandwich on stage. That really threw James, didn't it? That was a real moment. I also saw Peter and the Starcatchers. It was pure fantasy, but the way they created the impression of sea travel and the dimensions of a boat with simple ropes and props and sounds was fantastic; it showed the gears of the spectacle just like the stage version of Warhorse, and I think that is very appealing in the age of Avatar and The Avengers. People also want to see the DIY aesthetic, and in the theater spectacle will never match the fireworks of computer-age films. But then again, it doesn't need to; that's not why we go to theater, is it? In fact, those flipping newsboys would look pretty silly on screen, but on stage, because we see it actually happening before us, it's entertaining.
*
So, I've been reading The Warren Commission On The Assassination of JFK. I found its structure and approach fascinating. I suppose because there have been so many books and movies about conspiracies behind the assassination, the material feels very familiar, almost like it's a classic novel. The characters: Lee Harvey Oswald, Jack Ruby, J.F.K., Jackie, the secret service, Zapruder and his film; the locations: the Book depository, the grassy knoll, the underpass after the shots, the hospital, the movie theater where Oswald was caught; they're as familiar as anything in Dickens, or Moby Dick, or The Scarlet Letter. But in the Warren Commission Report everything is still fresh; the investigation goes back to the beginning of the case, before all the conspiracy theories started to rise like myths, and the cast of suspects and conspirators expanded across the country and world. I started reading the book because the great New Wave German director, Werner Herzog -- now known largely for his documentaries, like Cave of Forgotten Dreams, Grizzly Man, and Into the Abyss -- said that he has his students read it for an intensive filmmaking class that he teaches at an airport hotel conference room once a year. He said it was as good as any crime novel and when he first read it he couldn't wait to get home to it every night. If I think about his films, there is a correlation between the accrual of facts behind a huge event like the Warren Commission Report and Herzog's own investigations of death, mystery and human struggle. The attraction for me is the balance of an approach into the subject using very minute steps and the immensity of the subject itself.
One of the fascinating things about the assassination, regardless of conspiracies, is the way that it pairs such widely disparate strata of society and pulls their divergent stories together in an intimate way. The Report allows the reader to get very close to the characters in different ways: Oswald is profiled at the very beginning, and in that way he is an early protagonist or anti-hero. At the same time, J.F.K. is treated like a distant deity; the commission had no motive for looking into the president's personal history (although this would be done by others later). Instead what we get is a whole section on the details of the medical procedures and players after the president was rushed to the hospital. Oswald's family history, his upbringing, his trouble in school, psychiatric examinations, his above average intelligence, his military record, his proficiency with rifles, his marital problems, his strange fabrications of Cuban support groups in New Orleans of which he was the only member, and his employment at the Book Depository are all documented. These are all details and events that could just as easily be employed in a work of fiction, they are the materials that combine to make a character. But one of the big differences here is that none of the information is embellished with figures of speech. The style is just about the facts ma'am, no asides from the narrator, no inflection given to the information. This approach could easily result in a very dry recounting, but it is extremely readable for two reasons: the subject matter is so grand and intense -- the little man who shot down the biggest man in the country -- and the sparseness in the language creates an open field for the reader's imagination. I know that this was not the intention of the Warren Commission, but their lack of literary embellishment created a minimalist style that allows the reader to do the literary coloring in.
Much like how the factual recounting of Oswald's past delivers a compelling story because of its pairing of a small life with an era-defining event and because of simplicity in approach, the details of the president's medical examinations take the reader into extremely close proximity to the larger-than-life figure of J.F.K. We hear about where the bullets entered and exited his body; we hear about his brain matter propelled about the car; we hear about his heart rate and about when he was declared dead; we know the names of the doctors who worked on him and their specialties and what they did to him. It would be hard to get any closer, physically, to the man who was formerly known by the general public from afar, either behind a podium or across a television screen. And, because this really happened, the details are that much more concrete. These are not things made up by Dashiell Hammett or the writers of CSI in order to support a mystery narrative, they are the pieces that make up one of the greatest and most public crimes in our country's history. Because of that connection, everything becomes interesting; the damn color of his underwear would be interesting because of its connection to an event of such immensity.
*
I also finally watched Tiny Furniture. It reminded me of you because we used to watch Girls together. Even though it seems like a pilot episode for Girls, it's still pretty good, I can't get enough of Lena Dunham's awkward characters and that Lower East Side/Village vibe. I also saw Lola Versus -- same genre, I guess: people working on relationships, being smart but poor, being artists and writers, being offbeat sexy in NYC.]]>The Search for the Real: Part 2tag:www.huffingtonpost.com,2012:/theblog//3.18577882012-09-05T11:21:33-04:002012-11-05T05:12:01-05:00James Francohttp://www.huffingtonpost.com/james-franco/
I had such a good time with you the other day, although I know things are a bit weird. When I invited you to the Whitney it was because I wanted to spend as much time with a friend as possible, but you know how I am -- I need to always be doing something; I can't just sit and bullshit. That's why I insisted on reading to you in the museum café before we saw the Yokoi Kosama show. In case you couldn't follow everything we read because of the noise or because I picked it up in the middle, I'll tell you that Spalding Gray's Morning, Noon and Night is charming and disarming. It is so simple: A man has a child with a woman with whom he shares one other child and a stepchild; the family has recently moved to Sag Harbor; the man talks about a single uneventful day in his new environs with the new family configuration.
I kept wondering how this book could be so engrossing while being so deceptively simple. I think there are two things that are going on that make what would ordinarily be the bland stuff of everyday life interesting and insightful: He is writing about himself in a frank and beguilingly earnest way; and he is layering his simple narrative about yoga, shopping with his son, and sex with tangential anecdotes and thoughts that involve much more dire and complicated material. In this way he gets at the complexity of life, even the seemingly mundane material of simple family life.
Yesterday I watched a film called Compliance, which is ostensibly based on true incidents that took place in over 70 restaurants where an anonymous caller impersonated a police officer and used his false authority to get the employees to do horrible things to each other. The movie was very well made -- especially considering its minimal budget -- meaning it maintained great tension throughout. In some ways not much happens, while at the same time there are huge character shifts and everyone is pulled into the horrible situation. One thing that my fellow movie-watchers -- one of whom works in human resources and knows all about the rules of employee relations -- kept whispering to each other was how stupid the characters were to fall for such a ruse. While it is true that the characters are undermined in obvious ways, the deceiver's approach is made obvious to the audience because we were made privy to his side of the conversation. The audience isn't kept in the dark about who is calling, and the ironic distance highlights the characters' missteps. I could imagine the situation feeling much different if one were in the middle of it. In addition, the incident is framed by the structure of the film, meaning that the incident is no longer a private thing happening in the back room of a fast-food joint -- it is being projected to a larger audience. The characters are experiencing the private moments in the back room while the audience is watching it on a huge projection; a strip search that was done for two people becomes a strip tease show for a whole theater. This also connects the caller to the visual component of what is happening on the other end of the line, when in fact he can't see what's happening, he can only hear and imagine (which shows how much rape can be about power rather than direct sexual gratification). Sorry to digress, but I use this film example as a way to show the use of the true to tell a narrative in a particularly simple and frank way.
I think there is something similar happening in Spalding Gray's book: We hear about the relatively simple activities of one day, but, because they are presented as things that actually happened, they carry a different kind of weight. An additional factor, which Gray probably didn't plan when he wrote the book five years before his death, is that everything is tempered by the mysterious circumstances of his apparent suicide. The seemingly happy life in Sag Harbor with his young family is haunted by the specter of his impending death -- any of his positive resolutions about family life after a tumultuous love life prior to this and any of his solutions to dealing with the prospect of death are all swallowed by the fact that he probably killed himself not long after he wrote this book. But, with or without the specter of his death, the book works; it still has inherent power to pull in the reader despite the shadow cast by the circumstances of the writer's life. And I think that is the power of the truth. He is not trying to fabricate a fictional happy family, and if he were he would probably need to make the family dysfunctional because no one wants to read about happy people in fiction -- we want obstacles. But because he seems to write about true things as they happen to him, he can write about smaller things. It's not a very long book, and maybe he couldn't sustain this kind of thing for much longer -- part of its charm is its fast-flowing whimsy and brevity. But like the way we accept the seeming stupidity of the employees in the film Compliance because we are told this actually happened, we are engrossed by Spalding Gray's relatively simple activities because he is not making them up.
In addition to his simple and frank telling of his daily activities, Gray fills out the narrative with his own interior monologue in which he ponders death (including a brief mention of his mother's suicide); recounts his past marriages and infidelities; and goes into some of his performance work with The Wooster Group, as a solo monologist, and as an actor for hire on Fran Drescher's The Nanny. These digressions deepen the surface activity of his day by giving a sense of a mind at work. We are all engulfed by our own subjectivities; each day is filled with experiences shrouded by all the experiences we've accumulated up until then. No one lives so in the present that he isn't partially living through the aggregate experiences he's had already; and Gray gives an impression of this multilayered phenomenon of being in the world with his mixing of surface experiences with inner thought. But in addition, the inner thoughts are made much deeper because they are contrasted to more pedestrian activities: yoga, reading the paper, getting the kids ready for school, picking out movies to rent, eating dinner with the family, putting the kids to bed, etc. The reader gets a sense that this character, Spalding Gray, is a kind of Socratic figure measuring life by each small incident that happens to him. By inference he can contemplate the deepest things in life -- love and death -- while not having to be an authority on either subject. His subjects are himself and his family, but he can move from these to more universal subjects because of the way he uses them as a jumping-off place for contemplation.
I thought Into the Woods was not bad. But my favorite part was walking from the Whitney through the park to the Shakespeare in the Park theater (the white Kosama paintings with the basket-like brushstrokes were the best, yes? As well as that film where she was painting red lily-pads in the lake and then the paint was on the surface of the water). Actually, I think my plan was better in my head than what actually happened. I wanted a fun artsy day, something you'd see Woody Allen characters doing on a date: the Whitney, reading in the park on a rock outside the theater, seeing a classic American musical under the stars and then maybe going to a late dinner at Joe Allen's. But I guess you were mad about some stuff.]]>Search for the Real: Part 1tag:www.huffingtonpost.com,2012:/theblog//3.18348432012-08-27T19:40:50-04:002012-10-27T05:12:03-04:00James Francohttp://www.huffingtonpost.com/james-franco/
Part One is just the reprinting of a letter I wrote to a writer friend:
Dear R______,
How are you? I am sitting poolside at the top of the SoHo House in New York. The weather is nice, things are going well, and I suppose I have a good life.
I am happy and proud to report that I sold my first collection of poems. Most of it consists of poems I wrote over the three years I spent in the low-residency poetry program at Warren Wilson College. During my time there, Alan Shapiro and Alan Williamson helped me reshape the manuscript a bit, and then Tony Hoagland and Frank Bidart did a lot of heavy editing with me after I got back to New York. Publishing is pretty exciting, but it also makes me feel amorphous. I am aware that I do a lot of things. I try to take all of these endeavors seriously, at least the ones I care about. But I am also known primarily as an actor -- or nowadays maybe I am known in some circles as someone that dabbles in everything -- so it feels as if any criticism I get on anything I do is always tied back to my acting. As the years go by and as I spend more and more time working on other things like writing, I think the emphasis of my career will gradually shift away from acting, both in my own eyes and in the eyes of others, but for now I am still figuring things out.
And when I look at the book of poems, it's a funny experience because it is now my first book of poems. It's so actual and final. It's similar to a person in his mid-20s or early 30s looking back on his life so far and realizing that everything he has done adds up to his actual life. The childhood time for imagining what a life might become or what a book might be is over, choices have been made, and themes and motifs have been laid down, both in life and in one's work. So I guess what I'm saying is, it's a funny experience to look on the kinds of things I've made and written thus far because they are the elements that define me as an artist. As a young artist you usually look up to other artists whom you like and think, "I want to be an artist like that," but then you realize that as a real artist you might be very influenced by other artists, but you will always add something of yourself to the mix. Always. Even in cases of direct appropriation, the act of selection and re-contextualization changes the original work. So what I'm saying is that it's funny to look at myself now and realize, "Oh, I'm that artist. That's what I do."
But it is also tricky for me because I want to be invested in all the work I do, while at the same time I like that I am relieved of needing to make a living off of anything but my acting. What I mean is that I don't necessarily need to be liked as a writer, or at least I don't depend on it as much as I depend on being liked as an actor. I have been acting for over sixteen years. It has taken me at least a decade to get to a place where I am respected as an actor; I can demand a high salary, and I can get artsy movies off the ground because of my involvement. Much of this is dependent on a mix of parts in both commercial and artsy independent features. Now I only do movies that I care about -- aside from the odd day's work on a friend's film as a favor -- but I am still aware in the back of my head that playing the Wizard in Oz makes it a lot easier to play a sinister drug-dealing rapper in Harmony Korine's dark indie, Spring Breakers; and that Oz makes it possible for me both to afford to direct a movie about a murdering necrophiliac (McCarthy's Child of God -- I paid for the whole thing) and to get backing for As I Lay Dying, Faulkner's swirling narrative about a family's burial of their matriarch, a book that has not been brought to the screen since its publication over 80 years ago.
What all this means is that if I am careful I can make work that is pure. Of course I always want to communicate to others -- that is one of the main reasons to make work -- but I don't have to define my criteria for success by how many people buy my work or buy tickets to it. I don't even need to worry about the critics because I am not really making the work for recognition either. I have had a lot of different kinds of success in films: I've been in huge blockbusters, and I've been in films that have won Oscars. In some kinds of movies I think commercial and critical success is important, especially if hundreds of millions of dollars were spent on them, like Oz. If Oz isn't a huge commercial success, I think it can safely be considered a "failure"; the money it cost to make sets the stakes.
But books or movies about Hart Crane from the get-go have a slim chance of attracting the same kind of mass interest that something like Spiderman had, and in addition they are made in such a way that the critics will jump on their abnormalities as if a "good" book or film has a prescribed, homogeneous form and any deviations are just fodder for critics trying to look like they are justifying their roles as the gatekeepers of standards. Anyway, I like critics -- at school all we do is criticize and analyze -- but I don't like superficial critics, and those tend to be the ones that my work attracts. I guess because I was in Spiderman.
I know you agree with all of this, but it's what was on my mind as I considered my poetry book.]]>
