Actors Anonymous

by James Franco

  Although Brando was pretty damn funny in The Island of Dr. Moreau.

  Anton LaVey was inspired by H. G. Wells’s Island of Dr. Moreau. He had naked women with animal masks.

  Masks can be great. When you act, essentially you’re wearing a mask; it’s liberating because it’s not you. But wearing an actual mask can be even more liberating. You can take off all your clothes, or shove things in your ass and even though people know it’s your body, you can still deny it.

  Masks also put more emphasis on the body because the face is no longer expressive. They turn us into archetypes. Or bodies.

  Sometimes it would be nice to wear a mask in the outside world. Just stay anonymous for a while.

  Or maybe not anonymous? The mask that draws attention to itself; a dragon mask.

  Mike Meyers was inspired by Brando’s relationship with the little person in Dr. Moreau; it led to Dr. Evil and Mini-Me in Austin Powers.

  Think of all the pieces that go into a movie. It’s crazy to think that it’s all about one person, an actor.

  Although it can be deceiving because there are so many people working to make the actors look good. Makeup people, hair people, the lighting people, the props people, the effects people, the stunt people, the editor, the music people, the color correction people, and the director. It’s as if everything is lined up to make the actors come off in the most interesting way possible. I guess that’s from an actor’s perspective.

  Sometimes I like to forget about story and focus mainly on character. In that way it becomes more like life. Life is organized by character, not by story.

  Then again, there are so many characters in life, it’s a shame when you only think about your character.

  But when we follow groups of characters we can lose sight of the human and think only in generalities.

  I also hate the idea of the insiders, the ones who get the best parts and then continue to get the best parts. But I also know that I am an insider, maybe not all the way inside, but pretty far inside. So, I hate when it’s just about me, me, me. But then again, I am pretty much about me.

  Try to force yourself out of yourself. To teach. To give back. To give time, love, and money. The big picture is more important than you.

  When I am the lead, I make sure that the character is well served, that his story is told with verisimilitude. That the supporting actors don’t take away from his part in the film.

  When I am a supporting character, I support. That’s the best way to stand out as a supporting character: be supportive. I think of the supporting characters as good butlers: Just serve the main characters. It ain’t your time to shine.

  But of course, there are exceptions to all of these things, and sometimes you want to just screw the lead and chew the scenery. I guess in that scenario you don’t care about the movie. But you don’t need to care about every movie.

  Life. You don’t need to care about every experience in your life, but you should note them, even the boring ones. Life is the material for art, and when you cut down the barrier, life is art.

  Art, when worked on too much, becomes too crystalized. It’s too hard. It doesn’t have the randomness of life, the little rough parts.

  You need to know how to fit yourself to the film, to the other actors, to the flow of life.

  There is a Great Director who is marshaling everything together, every little thing, but you just need to know how to follow your instincts in line with her direction.

  What I mean is, get skilled, work hard, but then surrender to the world around you. And then, every once in a while, bite back.

  Especially in art (art within life, not life as art). Art is where you can go crazy. But make it about the art, not about yourself.

  We come together as a crew to make something together. Everyone does his little job. Think of acting as a craft, just like all the other crafts contributing to a film.

  Sometimes it’s hard to know what the tone of the film is; it’s hard to slip in and be a part of, or to stand out in a good way, to feel like you’re contributing something valuable. I suppose then it’s about just doing your job as well as possible and not worrying about the glory.

  The glory is nice, but the glory is fickle. And once you have the glory you need to spend all that time and energy trying to keep the glory.

  Sometimes you can just let yourself go after you get the glory, but too many guys have done that for it to seem cool: Jack Kerouac, Charlie Sheen, Jim Morrison, Val Kilmer, Marlon Brando.

  Sometimes you just quit midstride: J. D. Salinger, Rimbaud.

  Also, don’t get plastic surgery if you want to play natural-looking people. If you want to play people that have had plastic surgery, go for it.

  Kazan said actors acquire the look of waxed fruit.

  TRADITION 2

  For our film’s purpose there is but one ultimate authority—a kind and firm-handed “Director” who guides according to the dictates of collaboration. Our leaders are trusted collaborators; they are not masters.

  Palace

  HMMM. WELL, DOING THAT FILM introduced me to a lot. And I think you could say that I probably wouldn’t have been involved in everything bad that happened after if I hadn’t been in it. I mean, you know, the public toilet thing, and, well, all the stuff they were saying about my drug use, et cetera, which was kind of true, but not really how they put it. But I’m not complaining. They didn’t get it right, but the real story is a whole lot worse than they said.

  But it was the movie, I know it. I mean, at least it definitely had an effect. Yeah, yeah, yeah, Eliot tried to make it okay for me because I was only ten at the time and so he tried to make it seem like it was just a regular movie and not about a molesting coach that gets his little players to fist him. They actually went to a great deal of trouble to hide it all from me. Like there was a completely different script just for me, a kiddie script, which didn’t have any of the molester stuff written in it. Like in the scenes where we’re in his kitchen, it would just describe everything up until the point where he blows me or whatever. As if the kid I was playing was just hanging out in Coach’s house alone like two buddies and nothing else was going on. And then I guess when it got to the parts where he was supposed to be making moves on me they would just shoot it in close up bits and use a dummy when Coach had to kiss my stomach or whatever. When I eventually saw the movie, like four years later, I was pretty impressed with how they put it all together. It looked like Coach and I were really getting it on. I had no idea about any of it at the time.

  But I did know. Seriously. I mean I had an idea that stuff wasn’t right. Not with the movie, but with Eliot. I mean, my mom knew what the movie was about, she had to have known. And they had to have known what was going on with Eliot. I mean it was almost like with Coach in the movie! Like almost the same exact situation. My mom would take me to the Chateau Marmont. And it was like a routine: We would call Eliot’s room, and then they would let us into the pool area where all the bungalow rooms are with all the palm trees and bushes and it’s all lush and everything. And it was summer, so it was always nice back there. I remember that. The sun reflecting off the pool and sexy people lying about in their bathing suits. And my mom would go and wait by the pool and read magazines and I would go up and rehearse with Eliot in Room 89.

  That’s why hiding all the stuff from me in the script and on the set and everything else was just bullshit. I mean, it was like the exact same thing. It was like whatever they cut out of the script to make it seem like they were protecting me, that’s exactly what Eliot and I did up in the room. Everything. Like the blowjobs where he would put everything in his mouth, my dick and balls at the same time. And the fisting. He would use Vaseline and go on all fours on the bed and tell me to do it. And if I got up to the elbow, then I got twenty bucks. I mean it was almost the script exactly. But I didn’t know. I mean I didn’t know it was bad. Well, I knew it was bad because I didn’t tell my mom about it, I knew that much, but what I didn’t know was tha
t it would fuck me up.

  That’s what was going through my head when I finally saw the movie when I was like fourteen. My mom said it was okay for me to see it because it would teach me about child molesters and that it might be difficult material for a fourteen-year-old, but at least it would keep me from getting into situations like those in the movie. Ha ha ha. Oh shit, that just makes me laugh. Ha ha ha. I mean, not only because I had already lived through those exact fucking circumstances, but because when I actually saw the movie and saw what I had just lived through, it didn’t wise me up, at least not the way my mom hoped. It made me into a madman. I swear. Maybe you want to blame my drugs and everything on the child-actor-growing-up thing, but that’s bullshit. I didn’t give a fuck about acting. Really, I didn’t. That was my mom’s thing, I mean that’s why she let me go to Eliot’s room alone, I’m sure of it. Even if she didn’t know what was going on, she knew what was going on—I mean, who leaves their kid alone in a fucking dude’s hotel room day after day after day? She wanted me to be a star so bad she was willing to prostitute me out, I swear to God. So, everything that happened after, it’s not because I couldn’t make it as an adult actor. It’s because I loved what happened with Eliot.

  Of course you all want to say it was wrong. And of course you want to blame the movie, and Eliot and my mom and gays and everything else. And I do too, and I think I do blame them. But on another level, I don’t. I mean, I am almost grateful to Eliot. Okay, he introduced me to a whole bunch of shit way too early, and I shouldn’t have been touching a grown man’s balls at age ten, but then, on another level, Eliot gave me a lot of love. I mean he gave me attention. He called me “Superstar.” That was my nickname, Superstar. And as stupid as that sounds now, it was more than my dad ever gave me. Eliot taught me about being an adult. You want to say that he fucked me up as an adult, that all my sexual experiences are a result of what he did to me. And maybe they are, but I’ll tell you what, I bet you a million bucks right now that my sex life is better than yours.

  Okay, the bathroom. Whatever. I lived near the beach, in Santa Monica. Me and Mom moved out there after the movie and after I did the television show, so yeah, it was on my money. And then after she met her boyfriend she moved to Burbank, but I stayed in Santa Monica. That’s where I spent my late teens and early twenties. It was cool. I would boogie-board, hang out with friends, have parties, barbeques, go to clubs, whatever, I was your typical LA kid. But the fucking drugs were so good. Coke, and then crank, and then speed. And that was it, I was on fire. I would do crystal and I could fuck three guys in one night. And all the time I’d be thinking, okay, this is out of control, you’re out of control, Corey, but I never really had a crash, you know. I felt like I was storing all these experiences up and someday I would stop, but until then, I would just do it all, ya know?

  So it wasn’t my idea, the bathroom. It started as a crazy discussion. Like what if you just fucked a bunch of strangers on the beach? Like my friends and I would go to Zuma or whatever and look for guys and there would be so many of them, and we just wanted all of them, so someone suggested a fuck-train in the bathroom. It was all a joke at first. But then I thought about it and I thought, why not? I kept seeing this image from the movie The Doors, where Ray Manzarek and Jim Morrison are on Venice Beach and they’re talking about what to name their band, and there is this quote from William Blake about how if the doors of perception are cleansed then everything will appear as it really is, but I got the quote all mixed up with this other quote from Blake about how the road of excess leads to the palace of wisdom. And that is exactly what pounded in my head for weeks whenever I thought about the bathroom idea, until I finally said Fuck it.

  I had my friend Dan set it up. We put the word out that there was going to be a big “sex event” on this one Saturday. We didn’t know how else to do it. We just went around to all the beaches in the area and spread the word to anyone that we were interested in. Rollerbladers, volleyball dudes, sunbathers, lifeguards. We walked up and down the bike path that runs along all the beaches for about a week. All we told them was that it would be at the bathroom near the boardwalk, which was this horrible cement thing with steel toilets, graffiti, and dirty water on the floor, and rust everywhere.

  That Saturday, wow. By noon, there must have been a hundred. Dan and I had planned for me to take all comers, but there were too many. I swear to God it was fucking Rome in there. I have images of asses, cocks, graffiti, green walls, grime, and cum. It was fucking amazing. And when someone was done, he would just run out across the hot sand and jump in the green ocean. I kept thinking about Blake’s palace of wisdom and I knew that that cement bathroom was the palace of wisdom! You can call me fucking sick, and I know that the public loves to think about how I did that movie and then was caught with twenty other dudes in a public men’s room, but I’ll tell you something, that movie fucking saved me.

  TRADITION 3

  The only requirement for membership into the acting fold is a desire for reality.

  The Memory of You

  MANY OF US HAVE entered into this craft (amateurs as well as professionals) as a way to escape reality, but in fact reality is the only place in which to act.

  We are all pieces on the board. Players. Players. Think about what you’re playing for; extend your imagination into the future and see yourself getting everything that you want. What’s there?

  Once you extend your imagination into the future and see what you’re doing it all for (fame, recognition, happiness, money, sex, enlightenment), you realize that there is nothing as meaningful as the process itself.

  And once you realize that it’s the process that is primary, you realize that it’s the same for life. It’s the living that is primary. The art of living. Your life is your finest performance.

  The problem is that so many of these performances are forgotten (literally billions, trillions?) because they are not recorded. I like to think about how they’re all recorded on the parchment of God, on the videotapes of heaven, on the databases of angels, and every performance, large and small, is appreciated by the Holy Spirit.

  When you think about all the performances that have ever happened in life, it seems silly to worry about the ones shaped by movies. It seems like a whole lot of work for the very same thing that happens so easily in life. Like creating the intricacy and web of a single leaf using synthetic materials. Even if you did it and it felt and looked and smelled like the real thing, it wouldn’t have the life of the real thing.

  But then when you think that way it seems like the manufactured is better because it gets the spotlight. It is on a pedestal, it is raised to the rarefied level of art. It is inflected and framed.

  Do you want to mix it up with life, or do you want to live in the cold museum halls of the precious and unapproachable?

  I hate the deities of the cinema who stand apart, who hand down their wares from on high, who don’t share the wisdom behind their endeavors. Hollywood has always been a private club. I open the gates. I say welcome. I say, Look inside.

  In the golden age of film, Hollywood ruled the country; films were so pervasive Hollywood was a synecdoche for America. What happened in film captured the temper of the country; art was life and life was art.

  In that sense, you could critique the country by critiquing Hollywood. This is what people like Nathanael West and Horace McCoy and F. Scott Fitzgerald tried to do. There is a frame within a frame that is framing the frame; it’s like a four-dimensional object.

  There will be people who tell you not to think this way, to think about film and performance as something separate from life, or that this kind of thinking is pretentious or that it has all been said before—and it is true, it has—but it doesn’t mean that this kind of thinking isn’t valuable.

  Seeking your place, that is reality. Seek your purpose and how to best fulfill it. And if your place is not amongst the people of your time, then do your work for other times, for the times to come, or do your talking with you
r heroes of the past.

  The sad thing about having the greats die is that it feels like you lose an appreciative audience. But then you think about Brando at the end—would he really care about a good performance? He got over acting a long time before. He just didn’t give a fuck.

  Or maybe he did. But does it matter? He was holed up in his house on Mulholland, living next to Jack Nicholson, not going anywhere. Would it have mattered if he appreciated a performance? Maybe.

  So, that makes you realize that the main audience is an idealized audience. There will be some people that will appreciate greatness at some point, even if it’s in a college classroom.

  Freedom to make what we want. Do we have it? We need to take into consideration how things are made, the costs; these are things that can prevent something from being made. If you have money and backing, then you can make anything, at least once.

  Think about your context, and if you fulfill the expectations of your context, then you can keep making. But you are also an artist, and an artist shouldn’t seek to fulfill expectations but search for new ways, or turn the old ways into new ones. Politicians serve, artists lead. Athletes compete, artists reflect. Lawyers use the laws to make money; artists break the laws to find truth—or to make money.

  Money says that something is valuable. Movies sell tickets, art sells objects, music sells units, writing sells mass produced objects. This means that these things are generally made with different ideas in mind.