Actors Anonymous

by James Franco

  Jack Nicholson wrote quite a few screenplays for Roger Corman in the early days. He had almost given up on acting and thought he would become a writer/director/producer, but Easy Rider pulled him out of that.

  Warren Beatty thinks that everyone wants to be an actor because they all want to be in front of the camera. I’d say yes and no.

  After Easy Rider and Five Easy Pieces, Jack Nicholson cowrote and directed a film called Drive, He Said. It was about college students, basketball, and the Vietnam draft. It was not well received, and it didn’t make much money.

  After Nicholson became a star off Easy Rider and Five Easy Pieces, two films that he had filmed years earlier that had been shelved were released. One was a western; the other was a biker film. They didn’t do very well.

  I wonder what happened on Drive, He Said. He must have worked hard on it; he had good people around him. But it’s a bit of a mess.

  Nicholson didn’t direct again until Goin’ South; it’s nice, but pretty goofy. Later he did The Two Jakes, the sequel to Chinatown. The Two Jakes is not as good as Chinatown.

  Ben Affleck acted in a bunch of horrible movies. But now that he directs movies, he’s not too bad. Isn’t that crazy.

  Sometimes it’s good to act badly. It’s good to mix things up. When everything is so precious, it becomes difficult to grow. It’s hard to be around someone that takes himself too seriously.

  Jack Nicholson never does television interviews. It makes him mysterious.

  I make millions of dollars on some movies.

  I’ve spent millions on movies that didn’t make it back.

  Everyone likes to talk about movies because they think that they can. Everyone’s a specialist.

  Robert Bresson liked using nonactors. He called them models. His actors are almost blank, but they suggest something more, something transcendent.

  Yasujirō Ozu let the characters just breathe.

  John Cassavetes let the characters go crazy.

  Stanley Kubrick was a painter.

  The Dardenne brothers find great drama in the simple.

  W. C. Fields was great because he was so dark.

  Charlie Chaplin was great because he was an icon. The tramp could go anywhere and do anything.

  Laurel and Hardy, like creations out of Magritte or Beckett.

  Andy Kaufman was the greatest.

  If you read everything written about me, you won’t have a sense of me, but of how stupid our journalists are.

  If you are a film actor, get ready: You will be treated like a fool.

  If you are famous, you will be both a hero and a subject of envy. This is why the idea of building someone up and then tearing her down is so easily understood.

  Of course, the other problem is that some famous people are liked for doing one thing, and then they think that they will be liked if they do anything.

  Sometimes actors hate acting because it comes so easily to them. They want to break out of it because it makes them feel silly, especially when they are adults (dressing up, putting on makeup, playacting), but they are scared to leave it because it’s all they have. It’s hard to put work into something else and start over.

  I had a friend that had a great personality. He was a funny guy and came from money. But he did drugs from age sixteen to thirty-four. When he finally got clean, he wanted to break into the movies. Instead, he stepped in front of a train. It was probably pretty daunting to start life at thirty-five.

  Ken Kesey worked at the VA Hospital in Menlo Park while he wrote One Flew Over the Cuckoo’s Nest, not far from where I grew up. Jack Nicholson changed his role from what it was in the book. He made the character much more intelligent, more fully dimensional. The guy in the book was just a cowboy.

  The character in Five Easy Pieces is perfect Nicholson: a working-man who has great talent and intelligence. Nicholson didn’t want to break down at the end of the film in the scene with the father, but Bob Rafelson forced him to cry. I think it was okay because they were friends. Nicholson was nominated for an Oscar, so in hindsight he was probably fine with the crying.

  We think that movies are separate from our lives, but they aren’t; they are how we see ourselves. Actually, it’s television that is the mirror. Movies are now mostly fantasies.

  Superheroes.

  Money.

  Fame.

  Sex.

  If you’re an actor, you can get a lot of pussy. If you’re an actress, you can get a lot of dick. Or dick and pussy, or pussy and dick.

  If you’re an actor in film, people will think that you are like your roles. If you smoke pot onscreen, you are a stoner; if you kiss a dude, you are gay; and if you murder John Wayne, your career will be over.

  Most people don’t know the level of criticism that most actors have to deal with. You can understand why actors are insecure. If everyone in the world faced the kind of criticism that actors deal with, they would probably quit their jobs.

  Of course, actors—the famous ones—get enough good things to balance out the criticism: hot spouses, nice tables at restaurants. They can tell stupid jokes and people will laugh, they can always find friends.

  There was a time when I wanted to teach. I thought about working with kids, as a charity thing. But I looked at my skills and all I had was acting, I didn’t even know how to teach it. I felt like all I could do was put on different masks, and they weren’t even very good ones.

  Just relax.

  I guess this is a monologue about film acting, not other kinds of acting. But no one really cares about other kinds of acting because it’s theater and there is either no complete record of it, or because it’s television and it ages really fast.

  No one really cares about movie history either.

  So don’t worry about actors if you’re not an actor; they’re all going to become animated things after a while.

  And if you’re an actor, make some money if you can, and live it up while it lasts.

  STEP 2

  Came to believe that there is a power greater than ourselves, some sort of directing force, that could restore our “performance” to sanity.

  Peace

  AFTER I ARRIVED in LA, I started going to this acting class in the Valley. It was on Lankershim Boulevard down from Universal Studios. It wasn’t a glamorous area. There were car dealerships and apartment complexes and bars with names like Residuals and the Casting Office. Everything was run down, like it had been put up really fast, and then they tried to make the best of it by adding creative signage.

  The thing about the acting school was that it was serious. There are a ton of acting schools in LA, but most of them are scams. They claim to teach you how to book auditions or work well on camera. At my school, they did everything differently. It was like they didn’t care if you booked anything. They used plays to teach, not movie scripts, and they were above all the Hollywood stuff.

  I lived in an apartment close to the school with two other actors that also went to the school. They were called Peter and Pete. The rent was $650 a month, and I paid $150 and slept on the couch. There was a Taco Bell and a Jiffy Lube and a Ralph’s on the corner where our street hit Ventura Boulevard. An earthquake had hit the area in the mid-90s and everyone had scattered.

  All I did was go to class or prepare for class. I was nineteen, and I was one of the youngest. I worked as hard as I could at my acting, and it paid off because people in my class said I was pretty good. All the girls in their midtwenties said I was cute.

  There was one girl in the class who had had some parts in big movies. Maybe it helped that her father was a producer. Her name was Bree. She had blond hair and huge eyes, almost too big. They were just peculiar enough to make her even more pretty. She was a good actress but weird. When she was acting, it was like she was secretly laughing at everyone.

  Bree didn’t talk to me; I just did my work in class and hoped that she would be impressed. I did scenes from Hurlyburly, Glengarry Glen Ross, and Tea and Sympathy. I was pretty good in all
of them, even if I was too young for all but Tea and Sympathy, which was a play about a little gay guy and an older woman. Then one day something changed. I came out of the bathroom backstage, and Bree was there in the dark.

  “Hey, Jerry,” she whispered.

  I stopped and then stepped toward her in the dark. There was a scene happening onstage, and we were the only ones in the back.

  “You’re pretty cute, you know that?”

  Even though it was dark, I could see her big eyes from the light that spilled through the crack in the stage door. The roundness of them.

  “Thank you,” I said. “I think you’re great.”

  She smiled, and it made me realize how young I was. It was a sweet smile, but it was also like her smile when she was acting, as if she was secretly laughing at me.

  Then she whispered, “I think you’re really talented.”

  “Thank you.” Her eyes were there and her smile, and I was there with them, in the dark.

  “I’d like to do a scene with you sometime, okay?” she said.

  “Yeah, sure. I mean, yes, that would be great.”

  “Okay, cool. Let’s do one next week.”

  “Great.”

  She gave me her number and we planned to do a scene in a week or so. But then it was her birthday. She invited the whole class to her party. It was a big party at a huge house in Hancock Park. It was her father’s house, the producer. Everyone was in the backyard drinking beer and talking. I hardly had a chance to talk to Bree because she was so busy with her friends and her two sisters. One of Bree’s sisters was an opera singer and sang her a song in Italian, and then sang her a grand version of the birthday song. I stood in the grass in the backyard and talked to my two roommates, Peter and Pete. Peter was a nerd and Pete was a bodybuilder. We had nothing much to say, but we kept each other company. It seemed like Bree didn’t know I was there, but I also had this feeling about her and things.

  Before we left, we heard that Tobey Maguire and Leonardo were going to show up because they had been in a movie with her.

  The next day we rehearsed for the first time at her apartment in West Hollywood. It was a nice little place on the top floor with a great view. We picked a scene from a book of plays by John Patrick Shanley. It was a little one-act about two young people in love. The girl in the scene wears a red coat, and the boy talks about it. He talks about how much he loves the coat, but really, he is talking about how much he loves the girl. And she says she feels invincible in the coat. At the end of the scene, she asks him to kiss her.

  The characters were too young for us, but it was okay, because it was just for class. We read it over a few times, and when I got to the part about the red coat, I did it very passionately, because I wanted Bree to know that I had feelings for her. The third time we read it, at the part when the girl character starts talking about kissing, I leaned in and kissed Bree. She kissed back and I opened my mouth and kissed her that way too. She pressed her lips back at mine with an open mouth and her tongue was there, small and sharp. Then she broke the kiss and held my face with both hands so she could look right into my eyes.

  “That was pretty bold,” she said, with her face very close to mine.

  “Yeah,” I said.

  I felt good, but I knew that I needed to kiss her again—that if I didn’t kiss her I would lose her.

  “I’d like to introduce you to my agent,” she said.

  I didn’t kiss her.

  “I think you’re an amazing actor and you’re going to be huge.”

  “Thank you,” I said.

  “I’ll set it up,” she said, and stood up. I left soon after, and then we didn’t talk until the next class. But I thought about the kiss a lot, and I could feel her soul on my lips.

  In the next class, I saw her sitting in front. Then, at the break, she saw me. She handed me a piece of paper.

  “Here’s my agent’s number. She’s expecting your call.”

  I was in love with Bree. Not only was she beautiful and famous and unusual, but she was also helping me. I felt so indebted that I didn’t speak to her for the rest of class.

  That evening, I called the agent, a woman named Sabrina. On the phone, Sabrina was brisk and without emotion. We set up a meeting for the next day, and she told me to bring a headshot.

  The next morning, I took a good shower and put on one of Peter’s light-blue polo shirts and a pair of jeans. I didn’t have a headshot, so I brought a photo of me sitting in my Honda Accord just before I drove from Chicago to LA. I was smiling big with my head hanging out the window, and I was wearing black Ray-Bans. I looked happy.

  At the agency, the girl at the front desk directed me to Sabrina’s office. I knocked on the door and she opened it. She was about thirty-five, tight skirt, attractive. She said hello without smiling and walked back and sat behind the desk.

  “Did you bring your headshot?”

  I handed her my little photograph. She took it and looked. She said nothing. Then the phone rang, and she answered.

  “Oh, hey, Charles, yeah, hold on a second…” She tucked the phone into the crotch of her neck and said to me, “You look like Corey Feldman here.” Before I could respond she dropped the photo on the desk and continued talking to Charles. She said some things and absentmindedly pushed the little picture around on the desk with her forefinger. Then the call was over and she hung up.

  “Bree thinks you’re a good actor,” she said to me.

  “Thanks,” I said.

  Silence. She picked up the picture again, and then she put it down.

  “She said you are like a young Sean Penn.”

  “Wow, I love Sean Penn,” I said.

  “Yeah, he’s good.”

  “Yeah,” I said.

  “Dead Man Walking, amazing,” she said without any enthusiasm.

  “Amazing.”

  She handed the picture back to me.

  “Here, I assume you only have one of these,” she said.

  “Oh yeah, thanks.” I put the picture in my front shirt pocket.

  “You have a great look,” she said.

  I smiled at her. She didn’t smile back; she just stared at me for twenty seconds.

  “What kind of movies would you like to do?”

  “Um, I’d like to do dramas. Like Marlon Brando.”

  “Great,” she said. There was silence. Finally, she said, “Well, I’ll need to talk to the rest of the partners if we are going to take you on.”

  “Great,” I said.

  Then she began to mess with some papers on her desk. I stood up.

  One day, soon after the agent meeting, Bree and I rehearsed our red-coat scene before class in the park near our acting school. From where we were sitting on the grass, you could see the top of Universal Studios. We rehearsed a little, and then we talked.

  “Is it hard being a famous actor?” I said.

  “I’m not really famous…” she said, a little embarrassed.

  “Well, you’re in really big movies, and I know that people recognize you.”

  “That stuff doesn’t matter,” she said and looked toward some trees. Beyond them was the 101 freeway.

  “Oh,” I said, and looked at her white cheek. It made me aware of how we have skin over bones and there are different shapes underneath that are arbitrary. There was something under my skin that wanted to come to the surface and grab her.

  She looked back at me, and her eyes were large and wet.

  “You’re amazing,” I said, hoping that she would get the full meaning. I wasn’t just saying that. I meant a world of things, but I was using simple language.

  “You’re amazing,” she said. “You could be such a great actor, like Sean Penn.”

  “I love Sean Penn,” I said.

  “He’s the best,” she said, and I leaned in and kissed her. We were sitting in the grass and kissing, and I felt like I was turning my life into something great. We kissed for five seconds, and I licked her lips a little and they were soft. Then s
he pulled away and smiled. She looked into my eyes and I looked back.

  “Yeah,” she said, like she was answering a question.

  After that we went to class. In class we did our scene. When I did the part where I talked about the red coat, I tried to pour all my real feelings for Bree into the speech. As if everything my character was trying to say about the girl he loved through the red coat was what I was trying to say to Bree—as if the scene and the acting were my red coat. I felt like everyone could see how much I loved her, and it felt good.

  After the scene, we sat onstage, and Mr. Smithson critiqued us. He said Bree was good in the scene, real.

  “But you were forcing it,” he said to me.

  “I was?”

  “You don’t have to show us that you are in love with her, you just need to feel it.”

  “I was feeling it.”

  “No, you wanted the whole class to know what a great actor you are, so you hammed it up. That was actually the most in your head I’ve ever seen you.”

  I stopped talking and let him go on. It made no sense. I was usually a good judge of my acting, and I had never felt so emotionally engaged with someone before in my life. I looked over at Bree and she gave me a smile, but it seemed a little sad, like she was embarrassed for me, and I knew something that had been alive in the park had already died.

  The next day at 11 in the morning, I called the agent, Sabrina. It had been a week since our meeting. The assistant told me that Sabrina was in a meeting, but she would call me back.

  I had the whole day free. I got some movies on VHS from the library around the corner and sat at the apartment and watched. First I watched Taxi Driver and then East of Eden. I was alone in the apartment because my roommates worked. Peter was a tutor for kids at a private high school and worked until late. He thought he was really smart. And he almost was. He also thought he was really handsome, which he wasn’t. Pete was dumb. He was a trainer at a gym. He used to compete in Mr. Universe contests when he lived in Michigan.