by James Franco
Other Books by James Franco
The Book of Happiness
Moving Pictures/Moving Sculptures: The Films of James Franco
Actors Anonymous
A California Childhood
Strongest of the Litter
Rebel
Dangerous Book Four Boys
Palo Alto
Directing
Herbert White
POEMS
James Franco
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This edition published in 2014 by
House of Anansi Press Inc.
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Library and Archives Canada Cataloguing in Publication
Franco, James, 1978–, author
Directing Herbert White / James Franco.
Poems. ISBN 978-1-77089-457-0 (pbk.), 978-1-77089-458-7 (html)
I. Title.
PS3606.R34D57 2014 811’.6 C2013-907009-5
Cover design: Kyle G. Hunter
We acknowledge for their financial support of our publishing program the Canada Council for the Arts, the Ontario Arts Council, and the Government of Canada through the Canada Book Fund.
“How can I lose? In one hand I’ve got Marlon Brando yelling, ‘Fuck you,’ and in the other, Montgomery Clift asking, ‘Please forgive me.’”
—James Dean to Dennis Hopper
To Frank Bidart in the left hand and Tony Hoagland in the right.
And all the other great ones between.
I.
Because
Because I played a knight,
And was on a screen,
Because I made a million dollars,
Because I was handsome,
Because I had a nice car,
A bunch of girls seemed to like me.
But I never met those girls,
I only heard about them.
The only people I saw were the ones who hated me,
And there were so many of those people,
It was easy to forget about the people who I heard
Liked me, and shit, they were all fucking fourteen-year-olds.
And I holed up in my place and read my life away,
And I watched a million movies, twice,
And I didn’t understand them any better.
But because I played a knight,
Because I was handsome,
This was the life I made for myself.
Years later, I decided to look at what I had made,
And I watched myself in all the old movies, and I hated that guy I saw.
But he’s the one who stayed after I died.
Film Festival
Don’t be in a rush.
I have compiled a few movies,
A little film festival.
Watch and judge, you are the jury.
A little film festival in your mind.
I think you’ll hate these films, because they’re mine.
And I’ve created some sick
Things that are not nice for people to see.
First I bored everyone
And then at the end
I put in a shot of my dick
And another one with some blood.
A little film festival just for me.
All movies suck. Which ones are good?
The ones that are good, even they are no good.
You have to like no-good movies to like movies.
Now I am watching my little film festival.
And I’m my biggest fan.
It’s nice when you know what you like, and I do.
I like the shape of my face and how I sit
Curled in a pose-non-pose.
James, thank you, thank you, your festival is the best.
Dear James, I don’t understand your festival. You were so great in
Freaks and Geeks, why don’t you stick with that kind of stuff?
I also killed a few people.
A little film festival just for me.
Editing
The devices make it easy now.
Smooth is what the old timers say
Is best. The Godfather proceeds
From scene to lapidary scene
So inevitably, who is aware
That someone arranged these shots?
•
But me, I like a bit of fast pace
Mixed with slow. I don’t cut
Unless I have to. Long takes,
Give it to the actors,
Let them have their pacing
And emphasis. Viewers are too used
To polished performances from which
The editor has taken away all the messiness.
Bring in
The seams when possible: a shot that goes
Out of focus, an actor stumbling on
A line. In Paranoid Park there is this
Punk girl that keeps looking straight into
The camera when she speaks,
It’s like she’s speaking to us.
That’s non-professional and only calls
Attention to the filmmakers.
So what?
Who’s not aware we’re watching film?
Even when the Brothers Lumière
Shot that train coming toward the camera,
And the audience got up and ran,
I’m pretty sure they knew
What was really going on.
•
It’s fun to react. It may be less
Intrusive, doing long takes—
Never cutting, so
The audience is lulled into a long,
Slow meditation, a space where actor,
Director, editor, and audience
All come together and feel something.
In Jeanne Dielman, we sit with the prostitute
At her kitchen table,
As she pounds the meat onto the flour,
Rolls it all with an egg—two slabs—
And puts them into a bowl, and covers them,
For later, for her son.
Chateau Dreams
I picture them all, in different positions,
And the same positions,
And I, like a sculptor, would position them, and mold them.
Or like a choreographer put them through the same paces,
Again and again.
At the center of the arrangement of chalk bungalows
There is an oval pool like a blue pill,
Huddled by ferns, palms and banana trees
Tended to be wild,
Webbed by a nexus of stone walkways.
In the day,
Mermaids and hairy mermen drape the brickwork.
At n
ight the underwater lights electrify the pool zinc blue,
The surface cradles the oven-red reflection of the neon Chateau sign
Above Sunset, above the paparazzi and miniskirts.
There is a painting of a blond sailor,
Dressed in blue and red and white,
A stoic version of myself.
For nine months in ’06, while fixing my house,
I stayed in the bungalows,
First in 82, next to the little Buddha in the long fountain
Trickling.
Lindsay Lohan was about.
The Chateau was her home, the staff her servants.
She got my room key with ease,
She came in at 3 a.m.
I woke on the couch, trying not to look surprised.
I read her a short story about a neglected daughter.
Every night Lindsay looked for me.
My Russian friend Drew was always around like a wraith
—He, like the blond painting, was my doppelganger—
Writing scripts about rape and murder.
A Hollywood Dostoevsky, he gambled his money away.
We played a ton of ping pong.
•
In ’82, John Belushi died from a speedball in Bungalow 3;
In ’54, forty-three-year-old Nick Ray
Fucked fifteen-year-old Natalie Wood in Bungalow 2;
In 2005, Lindsay Lohan lived in room 19 for two years
Because “she didn’t want to be alone.”
Ambulance calls were the regular antidote to her demon nights.
Midway through my stay,
I changed to Bungalow 89.
In that room,
I read a bunch of Jacobean plays
About revenge, seduction, and lust.
In Bungalow 89
There was the sailor on the wall,
Glass eyed and pale.
The room was on the second level,
The exterior walls hugged by vines.
Every night Lindsay looked for me and I hid.
Out the window was Hollywood.
Marlon Brando
I remember when I first watched
Brando in his wife-beater
And thought I had discovered him.
And then realized three generations
Had already succumbed to his power.
He has the strength of all that America
Has to offer from its art,
He is the bull and the ballerina.
I love Stanley Kowalski and Terry Malloy
Because they are the brutes
Puppeteered by a genius.
Instead of performances
They are manifestations of a wild mind
Wrestling with its crude incarnations.
Marlon Brando is man vs. nature
And that is what we want in a man.
Like Tennessee and Blanche
We want our poetic selves
Destroyed by handsome brutes
In wife-beaters and oiled hair,
The poetry of being fucked to death.
Los Angeles Proverb
The bricks of LA were mortared with thick Indian blood,
Girls so gorgeous brown, pounded into mush and then made into stories.
Then the Spanish blood flowed in the rivers, down south, and was gone, except
In Sepulveda, Van Nuys, Los Feliz, Pico, San Vicente;
The streets of the City of Angels tell stories.
The movie palaces were built with the bones of ten million actresses,
And the great mansions of Bel Air and Beverly Hills and Brentwood and the Palisades
Are the mausoleums of naked, drugged, stupid, happy, young actors,
all gone.
There are deals made, and they all mix and stink like the tar pit at La Brea.
LA sprawls:
Gangs, cars, palm trees, beaches, strip malls, 7-11s, smog, beaches,
Secret hideaways in the hills above Sunset,
There are four square blocks downtown, around Los Angeles Street
and 4th
That are nothing but crack addicts.
Hollywood is an idea.
I want to get into the thix of it.
Movies won’t be around forever.
II.
The Best of the Smiths
Side A
1. There Is a Light That Never Goes Out
I waited in the shadow of my stupid house.
The Mustang rolled up in the low black water,
Growling softly, then it stopped and purred.
Dark green paint like a deep flavor,
Like hard, sour-apple candy catching in my throat.
A hint of his blond swoop, the red button of his cigarette.
Smoke out the window. Sterling:
His name like a sword reflecting light in a dark room.
I’m the sword swallower.
And the grass licked my shoes.
2. Please, Please, Please
Now the picture had him in it
Up the red path
To my house
In his coal tux
Slicked like a wet cat.
I did my best in a lime-green dress.
All his gang from school:
Inside they each had some from his flask;
And Sterling smiled a toothy smile, yellow and sharp.
And then we danced.
Not to one song, but ten songs.
It was the scene where the audience came over to my side,
Because I got what I wanted.
I was in love with a cliché.
Boys his age have bodies like knives.
I was holding one by the blade.
3. Ask
I used to think about playing guitar,
Now I just listen.
With girls,
Just push and it gets there.
As soon as you hit puberty, go.
Take what comes, ugly is okay too.
With Erica, you were on someone’s brother’s bed;
Pothead Mormons—listen—
A flower-covered comforter, blue ground;
A drum kit in the corner of the room,
Bass drum like a bulldog and a couple of sleeping flamingo cymbals.
Gentle, but you weren’t.
Love came—like viscosity filling a tube—
And you killed it with a bunch of thrusts.
Right in the middle she had to leave.
The second time she was better. Boring.
•
In the bathroom I sat naked on the floor.
Blood blooming.
—Science and fiction.
This is the rite of passage.
I am the vessel.
He is the instrument.
4. Stop Me If You Think That You’ve Heard This One Before
When I was in seventh grade I put kids in three categories:
Sports kids, smart kids, and social kids.
Some kids played football well and were dumb and ugly;
Some kids got great grades and their only friends were their parents;
There were others that danced among us
And made us all look like the kids we were.
They were big, daring, and sexual.
I wasn’t much in any of the categories.
But in high school I met Sterling and I had something.
At this one party I was drunk and so was everyone else.
The sofas and chairs were floating,
And the people were shifting in their spheres,
I sat on a couch
and took a ride.
Through a door to the kitchen, I saw a circus.
Plenty of colors: red and yellow and white.
There were a few ringmasters barking out things
And some lions in green letterman jackets
And this huge black seal, bonking down on this one guy, Ivan.
Bouncing him like he was a ball of air.
Until Ivan was slouched halfway to the linoleum.
One of the others hit him on the crown with a frying pan,
Like a cartoon, Ivan went all the way down and lay flat.
Sterling was on the side of it all.
Pouring foamy, piss-colored beer
Over Ivan’s bloody pale face,
Laughing his electric eel grin.
His sharp dogteeth.
On the car ride home,
He drove us drunk through the dark
Like a boat
On a flat, starless sea.
5. Girlfriend in a Coma
Megan McKenna had a skinhead boyfriend,
He crashed his car into a pole.
The paramedics lifted her out of the crumpled car,
And laid her on the cement. They cut away her jeans.
Sterling and I fought all the time,
Driving around in his rotten green Mustang.
I was the sweetest sixteen,
And when we hit the other car
Darkness met me at the windshield.
My father kept Sterling from the room.
I was plastered and sutured and puffed up.
When I go to heaven,
I’ll think of Sterling.
I’ll think that I loved him.
I’ll think that he was human.
That he was a poor little brain in a dangerous body.
III.
Acting Tips
When I played Saul
In Pineapple Express
I said, fuck it,
Acting should be fun.
No more twisted
Self-centered
James Dean demons.
There was one thing
That was important:
Saul should love Dale.
That was the secret
That made Saul