Author Topic: The James Franco Project Continues:What It’s Like To Be James Franco’s Professor  (Read 78172 times)

Offline serious crayons

  • BetterMost Moderator
  • The BetterMost 10,000 Post Club
  • *****
  • Posts: 22,712
Re: NYMag: The James Franco Project (Dicknose in Gucci)
« Reply #10 on: August 27, 2010, 09:29:04 pm »
This is both an interesting second-person first-person piece about how an actor prepares, and a study in how to suggest truths beyond the scope of a text.

AN ACTOR PREPARES
Finding the Beat
Capturing the young Allen Ginsberg, as the author did for this month’s biopic Howl, means tweaked ears, a New Jersey accent, and a thorough understanding of what fueled the Beat poet’s masterpiece—and a landmark 1957 obscenity trial.
By James Franco
September 2010


Allen Ginsberg was a struggling artist until Lawrence Ferlinghetti published his Howl and Other Poems, in 1956. Ginsberg was 30. An obscenity trial in San Francisco, following fast on the heels of publication, served only to bring Ginsberg and his work to wide attention. Fame never made Ginsberg rich, but it did make him a public figure. He read his poetry around the world with his fellow Beats. He became a political activist. Unlike his friend Jack Kerouac, who responded badly to fame and died in his 40s, Ginsberg lived into his 70s, finding a place in the counterculture of the 60s and the punk scene of the 80s. He taught college students until the last year of his life.

But you don’t really need to know most of this to play the young Ginsberg. Young Ginsberg—the Ginsberg who went to Columbia, whose work was read by Lionel Trilling and Mark Van Doren, who was kicked out of college (and institutionalized) in part because he was gay—is not a familiar character. Everyone has an image of the large-bellied, bearded, balding Buddha figure that Ginsberg became. But to play the young Ginsberg, you, the actor, must be slim and clean-shaven and must dye your hair black—your full head of hair. You must wear thick-framed glasses. You must apply prostheses to your ears to make them stick out.

To play the young Ginsberg you will be required to read his poems in character—and will want to catch the distinctive New Jersey accent (he was from Paterson), and the determined lilt that varies in tone from ironic-tragic to wryly comic. So you will need to listen to recordings, and listen to them a lot. There is little film footage of Ginsberg from this time, but there are plenty of audio recordings. Notice how on the earliest ones his delivery is staid and serious—he even tells hecklers to shut up. On the later recordings, 35 years on, he is loose and funny, a practiced performer. If you are going to play the young Ginsberg, you will want to meld a variety of these readings. If you are completely faithful to the early ones, your performance could be flat. Use the early readings as a model for the scenes where Ginsberg is just starting out. Use the later ones to provide a sense of Ginsberg’s evolution. Regardless, listen to all of the recordings, every day, for months. Walk around New York doing this. Put the recordings on your iPod and walk. Get your voice in tune with his. Don’t worry about people looking at you. In New York, this is not weird.

There are 8-mm. home movies of Ginsberg taken on the Jersey Shore, but they show a boy too young for your needs. The closest thing to the period you want will be the film Pull My Daisy, by Robert Frank and Alfred Leslie. It came out in 1959, only three years after Howl. There is no sync sound on the film, only a voice-over by Kerouac, so you won’t hear Ginsberg speak. But you’ll see how he sits. You’ll see his jaunty movements when he walks, dances, moves his arms. The other valuable piece of footage for your purposes is an interview with Ginsberg, filmed at the City Lights Bookstore, in 1965. Granted, this material is more than 10 years after the period you wish to depict. But the gesticulations are the same. Ginsberg loved to talk with his hands.

All of this is the external work on the character. You will also need to know the inner Ginsberg, the developing-artist Ginsberg, the Ginsberg who was earnest, confused, and insecure. His father was a high-school teacher and a poet, though a fairly traditional one in style and content. His mother faced severe mental illness and was lobotomized. It was Ginsberg who authorized the procedure, and the ensuing guilt and sorrow never left him. You can read about all this in “Kaddish,” a poem so personal and deeply sad that Robert Lowell, it is said, once had to excuse himself from a reading, because he would have broken down if he hadn’t. You will need to know that when Ginsberg entered Columbia, in 1943, he was inexperienced, intellectually naïve, and a virgin. His friends Lucien Carr and Jack Kerouac taught him about drinking, about French Symbolist poetry, about culture more generally. An older William Burroughs helped Ginsberg find his way as a gay man in the 1950s, when public models were few. You will also need to know that, while these friendships were at their most intense, Lucien Carr, in a sociopathic haze, murdered his hometown friend and gym teacher, David Kammerer, and threw his body into the Hudson. (Kerouac helped Carr bury the victim’s eyeglasses in Morningside Park.) Later, Burroughs shot his wife in the head, killing her, reportedly while pretending to be William Tell. Events like these will have an effect on a young man—perhaps prompting fears for his own sanity. They will find their way into “Howl,” so if you are going to play the young Ginsberg, above all you will need to know that poem.

You should probably know it anyway.

http://www.vanityfair.com/hollywood/features/2010/09/james-franco-on-howl-201009?printable=true#ixzz0xrMCZfpN

Offline Aloysius J. Gleek

  • BetterMost Supporter!
  • The BetterMost 10,000 Post Club
  • *****
  • Posts: 10,011
Re: NYMag: The James Franco Project (Dicknose in Gucci)
« Reply #11 on: August 27, 2010, 10:43:19 pm »


This is both an interesting second-person first-person piece about how an actor prepares, and a study in how to suggest truths beyond the scope of a text.

AN ACTOR PREPARES
Finding the Beat
Capturing the young Allen Ginsberg, as the author did for this month’s biopic Howl, means tweaked ears, a New Jersey accent, and a thorough understanding of what fueled the Beat poet’s masterpiece—and a landmark 1957 obscenity trial.
By James Franco
September 2010



Great article--thank you so much, Katherine!
Again, I have to say--young Mr. Franco is not  the average bear (that's as in YOGI Bear, not, you know, bear--

 ;) ::) :laugh:
"Tu doives entendre je t'aime."
(and you know who I am...)


Cowboy Curtis (Laurence Fishburne)
and Pee-wee in the 1990 episode
"Camping Out"

Offline Aloysius J. Gleek

  • BetterMost Supporter!
  • The BetterMost 10,000 Post Club
  • *****
  • Posts: 10,011
Re: NYMag: The James Franco Project (Dicknose in Gucci)
« Reply #12 on: August 27, 2010, 11:36:31 pm »



Unlike his friend Jack Kerouac, who responded badly to fame and died in his 40s, Ginsberg lived into his 70s, finding a place in the counterculture of the 60s and the punk scene of the 80s. He taught college students until the last year of his life.

(....)

Everyone has an image of the large-bellied, bearded, balding Buddha figure that Ginsberg became. But to play the young Ginsberg, you, the actor, must be slim and clean-shaven and must dye your hair black—your full head of hair. You must wear thick-framed glasses. You must apply prostheses to your ears to make them stick out.


      


   


   
"Tu doives entendre je t'aime."
(and you know who I am...)


Cowboy Curtis (Laurence Fishburne)
and Pee-wee in the 1990 episode
"Camping Out"

Offline Aloysius J. Gleek

  • BetterMost Supporter!
  • The BetterMost 10,000 Post Club
  • *****
  • Posts: 10,011
Re: NYMag: The James Franco Project (Dicknose in Gucci)
« Reply #13 on: August 28, 2010, 12:28:01 pm »
 8)


[youtube=425,350]http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=tIZeJmGpKeg&feature[/youtube]


[youtube=425,350]http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=RvRxkH8NDUs&feature=channel[/youtube]


"Tu doives entendre je t'aime."
(and you know who I am...)


Cowboy Curtis (Laurence Fishburne)
and Pee-wee in the 1990 episode
"Camping Out"

Offline Aloysius J. Gleek

  • BetterMost Supporter!
  • The BetterMost 10,000 Post Club
  • *****
  • Posts: 10,011
Re: NYMag: The James Franco Project (Dicknose in Gucci)
« Reply #14 on: September 12, 2010, 06:36:46 pm »

http://www.nytimes.com/2010/09/12/movies/12ryzik.html?hpw




The New Season Film
The (Extremely) Creative Ferment
of James Franco


James Franco as Allen Ginsberg in “Howl,” which is set for release on Sept. 24.

By MELENA RYZIK
Published: September 8, 2010

VANCOUVER, British Columbia


JAMES FRANCO has prepared for this interview. Overprepared, perhaps, but that wouldn’t be anything new; he loves research. Sitting in his hotel room here last month, where he’s filming the prequel to “Planet of the Apes,” he’d read my Twitter feed and watched some videos I’ve done about music and movies.

“It’s almost as if we’re in a relationship,” Mr. Franco said, crinkling his eyebrows, “where, like, I’m the actor and you’re the director.” He paused, uncrinkled. “And it’s weird because usually when I pick the film or a television show or whatever, I know who the director is going to be, I know what they’ve done in the past, and I choose if I want to work with them. But in this situation I don’t really choose, so I guess the least I can do is find out who you are.” He quoted my Twitter posts back to me for the rest of the day, even though he said he doesn’t use the site himself.

Which is also weird, because Mr. Franco, 32, loves referential commentary and the confluence of media. Lately he has embarked on a quest to be an artist rather than a celebrity, exhibiting his paintings and video installations at galleries and studying for advanced degrees at various colleges, writing short stories and composing poetry, appearing as a menacing artiste named Franco on ABC’s “General Hospital” while still flirting in big-budget movies like “Eat Pray Love.” His cross-cultural meandering has sparked water-cooler chatter on blogs and in print, sometimes with the help of Mr. Franco himself, who has written about it, adding another layer to the post-modern riddle of his shifting persona.

Meta? Or does he, like most Hollywood heartthrobs, just like talking about himself? “I used to not like it,” he said. But a few years ago, at the premiere for “Spider-Man 3” in London — around the time Mr. Franco was having second thoughts about the direction of his career — he discussed interviews with the young British painter Nigel Cooke. “He said, ‘I love it, I can talk about my work all day,’ ” Mr. Franco recalled. “And then it kind of clicked.



James Franco as an agitated Harry Osborn in "Spider-Man 3."


“There’s a certain kind of thought and preparation that goes into his work. I envied that. And so now that I’m engaged with a lot of other things that I’m interested in, I don’t mind talking. It also feels less like I’m just selling a studio’s product and more like I can just have discussions about things that I enjoy.”

Good thing too. In “Howl,” the next movie he is discussing, not selling, Mr. Franco plays the young Allen Ginsberg; for most of his screen time he is giving an interview to an unseen interlocutor. The film, the first feature from the documentarians Jeffrey Friedman and Rob Epstein (“The Celluloid Closet”), is less a biopic than a triptych, moving among the Ginsberg interview, the 1957 obscenity trial that followed the publication of “Howl,” and the reading of the poem in a smoky cafe, interspersed with bright, fanciful animation. It opened this year’s Sundance Film Festival and will be released on Sept. 24.

Mr. Franco met the two filmmakers on the set of “Milk” — its director, Gus Van Sant, is an executive producer of “Howl” — and signed up even before it was financed. “It was a huge boost and gave us a lot of credibility,” Mr. Friedman said of enlisting Mr. Franco.

As the filmmakers raised money, Mr. Franco was able to prepare with his usual gusto: watching interviews, reading biographies, talking to experts, wearing the nerdy Ginsberg glasses (still available at Moscot in New York). His take — that the young poet was an eager communicator even as he was just discovering what he wanted to say — applies to his own path. And it’s clear on screen, where Mr. Franco vibrates with intellectual energy while recognizably laconic in his delivery. “I have joked that he’s a 21st-century beatnik,” Mr. Epstein said of Mr. Franco, “but he really does have that sensibility. He’s really interested and excited about experimentation and exploring the possibilities of how one can be an artist.”

While preparing for “Howl” Mr. Franco was enrolled in master’s programs at New York University (for film) and Columbia University and Brooklyn College (for writing). For months he would walk to class listening to Ginsberg read “Howl” on his iPod. “I’d have the little book with me, and I’d listen to him, and I’d just read along with him to just ingrain that voice in my head,” he said. Mr. Franco has made three short films about poems for school and is at work on a feature about Hart Crane that he will adapt (from Paul L. Mariani’s biography), direct and star in. And he is in his fifth semester in yet another graduate program, for poetry, at Warren Wilson College near Asheville, N.C.



As hard as I work in film," Mr. Franco said, "it's my day job."


Debra Allbery, the director of that program, where students work remotely except for 10 days on campus each semester, declined to talk about Mr. Franco’s writing specifically. “This is a place where he can come be an apprentice like everybody else,” she said. “We worked very hard to protect him here.” But she allowed that he managed to fit in. “As far as the commitment, the focus, the dedication, the skill, he’s right in line,” she said.

Academic overload is not what actors are known for, but Mr. Franco has gone beyond that as well; he is creatively outstretched. His New York gallery debut, “The Dangerous Book Four Boys,” is on view at the Clocktower Gallery in Lower Manhattan. His first book, “Palo Alto,” a story collection set in his California hometown, will be out in October from Scribner.

After that comes “127 Hours,” Danny Boyle’s dramatization of the true story of Aron Ralston, the hiker forced to amputate his own arm after being trapped in a Utah canyon; Mr. Franco again spends much of his screen time alone. This month he begins a Ph.D. program at Yale, for English.

“I shouldn’t say I’m doing so many things, because it starts to sound ridiculous after a while,” Mr. Franco said, rightly. Then he described a few other projects.

In the weeks this summer he spent in Vancouver filming “Caesar: Rise of the Apes” — a title whose campiness drove him to an eye roll — he spent his off time holed up in the hotel, shooting short videos for Sundance or editing those and his other projects with an assistant. He sneaked out only to see “Inception” and “The Twilight Saga: Eclipse.” “I like how they get away with making everything about sex, but not having it,” he said of the “Twilight” series. Romantic coyness suits him.

In person Mr. Franco is casual but intense, sharply charismatic. He closes his eyes in thought and grins at his ideas as he describes them, as if he’s in the midst of a particularly fulfilling internal dialogue. The poetry projects and his book are the least influenced by his celebrity, he said, though he knows people will view them through that prism. “As hard as I work in film, it’s my day job,” he said. “Those are, I don’t know, pure expression.”

Some of his hyperproductivity is no doubt the result of his upbringing. His parents’ interests included painting, software development, educational reform and children’s books. “I guess you could say that we have a very strange, artsy family,” said Dave Franco, the youngest of the three Franco siblings, and also an actor. (Tom, the middle brother, is a sculptor.) And James has always been industrious.

“I would write scenes for ‘Freaks and Geeks,’ and Franco would come over and help work on them and read them,’ said Seth Rogen, his co-star on that cult TV show and later in the pot comedy “Pineapple Express.” “I remember at the time thinking it was crazy that he would do that.” Early on, Mr. Franco made a painting for Mr. Rogen — a really dark one, Mr. Rogen recalled. “It had the words ‘cancer’ and ‘death’ written on it. He was going through a phase, it was kind of reminiscent of Basquiat.” Mr. Rogen requested a “happier, more colorful” painting, and Mr. Franco obliged. (“I realized later that was maybe a really insulting thing to ask an artist,” Mr. Rogen said.)



Mr. Franco with Seth Rogen playing lazy stoners in "Pineapple Express."


Mr. Franco’s transition from leading man to intellectual does not surprise Mr. Rogen. “If anything, it was really weird that he was ever pursuing the straight-ahead movie star path,” he said. “Knowing him, it just seemed like the last thing in the world that he would be happy doing.”

By his own admission Mr. Franco is happier as an artist now, even if his efforts so far have not been wholly critically successful. A short story published in Esquire  received withering responses; his art show also drew uneven reviews. In The New York Times,  Roberta Smith called it “a confusing mix of the clueless and the halfway promising,” though she added that it made her rethink her own art biases.

Mr. Franco was pleased with this critique. He is open about still developing his ideas, even if they sometimes appear before a skeptical public. “All I can do,” he said, “is put the work in.” He’s an ambitious student, not a superhuman.

“Any movie that I’ve ever seen with him, I can’t remember him staying awake through,” Dave Franco said.
"Tu doives entendre je t'aime."
(and you know who I am...)


Cowboy Curtis (Laurence Fishburne)
and Pee-wee in the 1990 episode
"Camping Out"

Offline Aloysius J. Gleek

  • BetterMost Supporter!
  • The BetterMost 10,000 Post Club
  • *****
  • Posts: 10,011
Re: NYMag: The James Franco Project (Dicknose in Gucci)
« Reply #15 on: September 12, 2010, 09:32:53 pm »

http://www.nytimes.com/2010/09/13/arts/design/13beat.html?hp








Last Chance
Poet With a Kodak and a Restless Eye

By HOLLAND COTTER
Published: September 12, 2010








WASHINGTON — The poet Allen Ginsberg, who died in 1997, adored life, feared death and craved fame. These obsessions seemed to have kept him, despite his practice of Buddhist meditation, from sitting still for long. He was constantly writing, teaching, traveling, networking, chasing lovers, sampling drugs, pushing political causes and promoting the work of writer friends.

In the early 1950s he began to photograph these friends in casual snapshots, meant to be little more than souvenirs of a shared time and ethos. Years later his picture taking — often of the same friends, now battered by life or approaching death — became more formal and artful, as if he were trying to freeze his subjects’ faces and energies, and to show off his photographic skills, for the history books.

Nearly 80 pictures, early and late, many with handwritten inscriptions, are on view through Thursday in “Beat Memories: The Photographs of Allen Ginsberg” at the National Gallery of Art here. Some are familiar; others rarely seen. As arranged by Sarah Greenough, the senior curator in the museum’s department of photographs, they form a continuous narrative. In the space of two small galleries we watch legends take shape, beauties fade, an American era come and go.

Ginsberg began his photographic chronicle of what would become the Beat generation in earnest in 1953, when he was in his late 20s and living on the Lower East Side of Manhattan. He had known the group’s crucial personalities — William S. Burroughs, Gregory Corso, Jack Kerouac and their communal muse Neal Cassady — since his student days at Columbia. He regarded them collectively, himself very much included, as a new literary vanguard. The work they were doing in the early ’50s seemed to confirm his faith. And his early pictures, taken with a secondhand Kodak, project a buoyant confidence.

We see figures who would soon enough become cultural monuments still vital and mercurial. In one much-published picture Kerouac, smoking and brooding, is already a romantic hero, but in another he’s a mugging cut-up on an East Village street “making a Dostoyevsky mad-face,” to quote Ginsberg’s caption.

And we also see a surprisingly seductive version of Burroughs. The world would come to know him as a dour presence in business suits and Burberry raincoats, but Ginsberg photographed him lying in bed like a half-nude odalisque eyeing the camera. When the picture was taken, the two men were briefly living together as lovers, with Burroughs deeply smitten, and Ginsberg primarily focused on editing Burroughs’s new novel, “Queer.”

By December of 1953 there were major shifts. Burroughs left for Morocco. Ginsberg hit the road for adventures in Mexico and Cuba, eventually landing in San Francisco. There in 1954 he met the teenage Peter Orlovsky, who would become his life partner. The relationship proved extremely complicated, but Ginsberg’s initial photos of his new mate have a distinct glow of tenderness that extends to pictures of other San Francisco friends. It’s as if the Summer of Love had arrived a generation early.

When Ginsberg first read his lacerating anti-establishment poem “Howl,” to a San Francisco audience in 1955, he found himself instantly famous. After “Howl” appeared in book form, he was notorious. United States Customs officials seized a second printing of the book and charged its publisher, the poet Lawrence Ferlinghetti, with selling obscene literature. Ferlinghetti was acquitted, but the 1957 trial put the Beat phenomenon squarely on the countercultural map. (A film titled “Howl,” which both documents and dramatizes the censorship incident, opens in New York this month with the promotional slogan: “The obscenity trial that started a revolution; the poem that rocked a generation.”)

Ginsberg was out of the country during the flap, wandering here and there, photographing wherever he went. We see his portraits of Burroughs and Paul Bowles in Tangier, then of Corso in Paris. By 1962 Ginsberg and Orlovsky were in India, taking drugs, chatting up holy men. With his full beard and long hair, Ginsberg looked like a proto-hippie at this point, but he was also still an avid sightseer, a kind of cultural tourist, snapping shots of erotic sculptures on Hindu temples.

After the mid-’60s the production of photographs drops off for almost two decades. There are some fine pictures still: one of Orlovsky doing a nude handstand on an old farm he and Ginsberg had bought in Cherry Valley, N.Y., and a final portrait of Kerouac in his early 40s, bloated, alcohol soaked, almost unrecognizable. But at some point Ginsberg lost a couple of cameras and was too busy to replace them. He let photography go.

Two decades later, though, he picked it up again in a serious way. In 1983 he came across pictures from the ’50s he had long forgotten about, many in the form of undeveloped negatives or cheap drugstore prints. He realized he was holding history in his hands. And, more aware than ever of the passing of time and of the increasing stature the Beat movement had earned, he wanted to preserve that past, and to extend it through photography.

So he bought a new camera. He consulted experts — Berenice Abbott, Robert Frank — about picture taking and printing. He reprinted old images in larger formats and with lots of blank marginal space for written annotation. (The captions on all his photos, however early, date from the 1980s onward.) Soon he was exhibiting and, not a minor consideration for a person who supported many old friends, selling work. Photography became a full-fledged second career.

Roughly half of the pictures in Washington date from the 1980s and 1990s. Most are conventional solo portraits, interesting because the sitters — a glum white-haired Corso, a tousled, tired Yevgeny Yevtushenko — are of interest, but also because of Ginsberg’s fine, avid eye, which was present from the start. Only Orlovsky is seen in a group shot. In a wrenching 1987 picture, he sits protectively with his mother and a haunted-looking brother and sister, all of whom suffered from mental illness.

Ginsberg was always eager to photograph pop stars, and there’s a portrait here of Bob Dylan, who was also a friend and collaborator. But the celebrity Ginsberg cared about most in the end was himself, and we get a couple of late-career images of him in this show. In one, a self-portrait from 1991, we see him, grizzled, paunchy and nude, reflected in a motel-room mirror. In a second, from 1996, taken — by Ginsberg himself? by someone else? — on his 70th birthday, he stands in front of his Lower East Side kitchen window, nattily dressed, self-possessed, fresh from a star turn at an exhibition devoted to Beat culture.

My favorites among the later photographs, though, are three of a different kitchen window in an earlier apartment, this time with no one in sight and Ginsberg present only behind the camera. He shot the pictures in different years in the 1980s, but apart from changes of season the view is the same: the window with a cluttered table in front of it, and outside a tenement backyard with scrappy trees, facing walls and patches of sky above.

Basically these are still lifes; undramatic, domestic, emblems of circling time. Or maybe you could think of them as images of everyday altars. In an inscription across the bottom of one he wrote, “I sat for decades at morning breakfast tea looking out my kitchen window” and “one day recognized my own world, the familiar background, the giant wet brick-walled Atlantis garden.” It’s a different world from the one we see in the rest of the show, plain, calm and unstriving. In art, Ginsberg sat still for a while.


“Beat Memories” continues through Thursday at the National Gallery of Art, Fourth Street and Constitution Avenue NW, Washington; (202) 737-4215, nga.gov.
"Tu doives entendre je t'aime."
(and you know who I am...)


Cowboy Curtis (Laurence Fishburne)
and Pee-wee in the 1990 episode
"Camping Out"

Offline Aloysius J. Gleek

  • BetterMost Supporter!
  • The BetterMost 10,000 Post Club
  • *****
  • Posts: 10,011
Re: NYMag: The James Franco Project (Dicknose in Gucci)
« Reply #16 on: October 07, 2010, 12:20:37 am »


 ::)




This ought to open up several creative-casting options: James Franco appears in drag on the cover of the latest   magazine, “the first fashion magazine ever completely dedicated to celebrating transvestism, transexuality, cross dressing and androgyny, in all its manifestations.” He was shot by fashion photographer Terry Richardson in blue-eye shadow and red lipstick with jewelry and slicked-back hair.


http://www.thedailybeast.com/galleries/1637/1/?redirectURL=http://www.thedailybeast.com/blogs-and-stories/2010-05-17/men-in-tights/?cid=hp:mainpromo9
"Tu doives entendre je t'aime."
(and you know who I am...)


Cowboy Curtis (Laurence Fishburne)
and Pee-wee in the 1990 episode
"Camping Out"

Offline Front-Ranger

  • BetterMost Moderator
  • The BetterMost 10,000 Post Club
  • *****
  • Posts: 30,288
  • Brokeback got us good.
Re: NYMag: The James Franco Project (Dicknose in Gucci)
« Reply #17 on: October 23, 2010, 04:38:27 pm »
Well, methinks he makes a better looking gal than a guy!
"chewing gum and duct tape"

Offline Aloysius J. Gleek

  • BetterMost Supporter!
  • The BetterMost 10,000 Post Club
  • *****
  • Posts: 10,011


http://insidemovies.ew.com/2011/01/05/james-franco-gay-roles/


James Franco on playing gay characters:
'You know what, maybe I'm just gay'

by Keith Staskiewicz
Jan 5 2011
03:49 PM ET




“Is James Franco gay?” is a favorite query of the pop-cultural chattering classes. It’s not like it’s unique to him: Having the public ponder your sexuality is a celebrity rite of passage. But the thing that makes Franco’s case so interesting is that, unlike the loud denials from some stars and even louder silences from others, the response from the 127 Hours  star (who, for the record, has been in a years-long relationship with actress Ahna O’Reilly) is actually pretty nuanced. Franco addressed the rumor-mill mentality in an exclusive interview with EW  for our recent cover story.

“It’s funny because the way that kind of stuff is talked about on blogs is so black-and-white,” Franco says. “It’s all cut-and-dry identity politics. ‘Is he straight or is he gay?’ Or, ‘This is your third gay movie — come out already!’ And all based on, gay or straight, based on the idea that your object of affection decides your sexuality.”

The actor definitely doesn’t let the speculation inhibit his choice of roles; Franco’s filmography is packed with gay characters, from Allen Ginsberg in Howl,  to activist Scott Smith in Milk  and poet Hart Crane in his just-wrapped feature The Broken Tower.

“There are lots of other reasons to be interested in gay characters than wanting myself to go out and have sex with guys,” he says. “And there are also lots of other aspects about these characters that I’m interested in, in addition to their sexuality. So, in some ways it’s coincidental, in other ways it’s not. I mean, I’ve played a gay man who’s living in the ’60s and ’70s, a gay man who we depicted in the ‘50s, and one being in the ‘20s. And those were all periods when to be gay, at least being gay in public, was much more difficult. Part of what I’m interested in is how these people who were living anti-normative lifestyles contended with opposition.

"Or, you know what, maybe I’m just gay.”
"Tu doives entendre je t'aime."
(and you know who I am...)


Cowboy Curtis (Laurence Fishburne)
and Pee-wee in the 1990 episode
"Camping Out"

Offline louisev

  • BetterMost Supporter!
  • BetterMost Moderator
  • The BetterMost 10,000 Post Club
  • *****
  • Posts: 16,107
  • "My guns and amo!! Over my cold dead hands!!"
    • Fiction by Louise Van Hine
*snicker*.  He is only outdone by Johnny Depp, who during an interview about his acting career was asked if his character of Captain Jack Sparrow was gay.  His prompt reply was "All of my characters are gay."

“Mr. Coyote always gets me good, boy,”  Ellery said, winking.  “Almost forgot what life was like before I got me my own personal coyote.”