You might not know it, but James Franco has a new movie coming out this weekend.
His documentary about the history of Saturday Night Live will be released on Hulu on Saturday evening, just in time for the show’s 40th-season premiere. But for Franco, one movie isn’t enough. Did you hear about his new book that came out this week? Hollywood Dreaming: Stories, Pictures, and Poems is Franco’s fifth book that he wrote all on his own (if you don’t count chap books, art books, collaborations, anthologies, literary magazines or Italy: From I to Y, which was written by James De Franco).
And even that isn’t enough. Just last week, the Oscar nominee debuted his new webseries, Making a Scene with James Franco, on AOL. Is there anything this guy can’t do?
Actually the right question is, “Is there anything this guy doesn’t do?” And no, there isn’t, and that’s the problem. James Franco is such a multi-hyphenate he will wear out the key on your laptop between the zero and the equals sign. It’s about time he stopped.
It’s not like he has a little side project or a hobby that gets disproportionate attention because of his stardom. He’s not Dennis Hopper with his paintings or Kevin Bacon with his little band. (Oh, Franco has a band too. They’re called Daddy.) No, this is something worse; something more insidious. This is James Franco being allowed to make just about anything his heart desires because the gatekeepers to the creative industries involved know it will all blow up if Franco’s name is attached, even if the resultant blogpost or newspaper article aims only to roll its eyes at his proficiency.
The problem with Franco’s output is that it is simultaneously pretentious and incredibly dodgy. Look at his poems. His ode to Sean Penn reads:
In Milk, you were such
A fine homo. And when
You and I kissed
On Castro Street, it was for a full minute.
Your beard was like my father’s.
As everyone learns in their first creative writing class, putting line breaks in the middle of declarative sentences does not poetry make.
Franco also wrote poems for his latest art show, James Franco: New Film Stills, which debuted in New York. There were 65 of them in the catalog for the show, which is about 20 more than Sylvia Plath published in her lifetime. The New York Times said of the exhibit: “Perhaps James Franco should just stick to acting. He remains embarrassingly clueless when it comes to art.”
That seems to be the general consensus when it comes to Franco: he is the worst possible thing, an excruciating dilettante.
He tries his hand at everything and can’t seem to do anything well – except acting. He’s still good at that. As the Times wrote of his first short-story collection: “With Palo Alto, Franco’s literary execution hasn’t quite matched his other performances.” Franco, while bearing lots of fruit, just doesn’t seem to have the creative juice to make everything successful. It’s like a pie with too little filling – Franco is all crust.
The general James Franco problem can be summed up in his approach to higher education. Since 2008, Franco has been enrolled in four graduate programs.
“I went for fiction – twice – I went for film, I went for poetry, and I went for art,” he writes in an essay for an anthology called Should I Go to Grad School? He was even enrolled in a PhD program at Yale.
He has yet to finish any of these degrees; there was the famous photo taken of Franco sleeping through one of his classes. One of his professors claimed that he was fired for giving Franco a D after he showed up to two of 12 classes in a semester. It seems his enrollment was secured not by his dedication as a student, but by the Klieg lights of his fame.
The same is true about the release of Franco’s SNL film, which is actually a student film he made in 2008 while studying at NYU. Though it debuted four years ago at the Tribeca Film Festival, this is the first time it has been shown to the general public. That’s because most student films aren’t good enough for distribution or even exhibition in a marquee film festival. But Franco, well, he gets in on his name alone – which is the same way he got unfettered backstage access to SNL in the first place.
Franco, like so many actors, makes money on endorsement deals, but can’t just be filmed for a commercial. This year he wrote, directed, and starred in a “short film” for Gucci, about sunglasses. It’s not that Franco thinks his shit doesn’t stink, it’s that he thinks that by calling his shit art we’re going to be fooled by it. On the contrary, it just makes it even stinkier, because it has aspirations to be something bigger and better than it truly is and fails miserably to reach those heights.
It’s not that Franco can’t have interests or output outside of acting; it’s that he has a problem with consistency and discipline. Just like Woody Allen, his flashes of genius are diluted by a prodigious output which seems half-conceptualized, barely finished.
There have been stars whose dedication has paid off. The Olsen Twins dropped out of acting and remade themselves as fashion designers very well respected in the field (though few who bought their VHS videos in the 90s can afford any of their clothing). Jared Leto didn’t take many acting jobs for years, while making 30 Seconds to Mars a successful band. Then he came back and won an Oscar, something Franco has yet to do.
Everything about James Franco is half-brilliant. I was thoroughly amused by one of the Making a Scene with James Franco mashups, which featured Batman characters re-enacting a scene from Beetlejuice. But the rest – a silent-movie version of Taxi Driver, a combination of Reservoir Dogs and Dirty Dancing, a rom-com version of The Shining – were pain-inducingly bad. This is what people dislike about Franco in general: his high-falutin movie project is really just a silly experiment he couches as some sort of intellectual exercise about his love of film. And most of that experiment is lousy.
Franco needs to come back down to earth and focus. Choose one (or maybe two or three) areas of interest and stick to them. Sadly, we live in a culture where everything a celebrity does is publicized and every whim indulged. Franco’s name might get attention, but it doesn’t recommend an imprimatur of quality – rather the opposite, in fact.
James Franco has put the vanity in vanity project. Since he can’t say no to himself, its time for the audience, and his enablers at artistic institutions, to start saying no for him.
