by James Franco
Who says that a movie should be ninety to a hundred and twenty minutes? That idea is only in place because that’s how theaters maximize their sales, so that they can get as many people into their doors as possible, so they can sell the most overpriced popcorn and soda as possible.
Think about the camera on you: You’re on a set, there’s a script, but there are no lines; you have a character, but that character can change; if you want, you can change your character; you can do things like cut her hair, or dress her differently, or put her through college, or have her sleep around, or have her be chaste, you can give her a new religion, etc.
Now think about the set and the apparatus falling away; the camera still follows you, but there is no crew; it’s an invisible camera. It follows you everywhere; it records your every move.
The audience is there, but they too are invisible. Let’s call them your conscience, let’s call them the memory of you, let’s call them every-one’s idea of you.
To have an inside, there always needs to be an outside. The more elite the inside, the more people are on the outside. Get in there, but don’t live in there. Be on both sides.
The problem is that once you’re on the inside, people want to keep you on the inside, even if they hate you; they keep you behind the glass. You want to act humbly, but you are treated like royalty—especially on a film set. You can’t act humble because they won’t let you, so you need to act like a gracious knight.
The camera operators are the bishops, the director is the king, and you are the queen. The production assistants are the pawns; the wardrobe, makeup, and prop departments and the grips and electricians are the horses and rooks.
The queen is the tallest piece, the most conspicuous; you’re moving about the board like you’re the big cheese.
Everyone looks at the big cheese. They take pride in the big cheese. They all identify with the big cheese.
Sometimes I feel that making a movie is similar to a big fashion shoot. You get pampered and the shots are framed for maximum effect, and you’re lit in the right way. What’s the difference between this and a glamour shoot? In both, you just listen to the director.
But what is reality? When you go down to what Actors Anonymous calls the “veridic self,” of what does that consist? We like to think we have core values and passions, but where do those come from but the culture around us? You are either drawn toward your parents’ teachings or you are in revolt, but either way you have been shaped by them.
Genetics, okay, part of the character has been thrust upon us. Height, race, muscular build, sex: These things are harder to change in a character than worldview, cultural beliefs, religion, accent, education level, but they can be augmented. How many actors wear lifts, or change the appearance of their ethnicity, or have changed their sex?
The search for the real shows that there is no reality, not on the ground level. Think of the world as a grand set, think of all the designing and thought that has gone into that set. It’s fucking amazing.
The reason I can read on-set—any old book—up to the moment they say “rolling” is that I don’t need time to jump into character. I have played so many characters that acting is hardly different than living (or different than the book I was having a conversation with). Not only am I so used to being on sets—they are where I live half my life—I am used to the intensifying gaze of the camera.
Life before the camera is reality, the reality of performers acting out roles. Here existence is bracketed and highlighted. This is the way life works too: Life is choreographed, and we are subjected to invisible scripts imposed on us by family, school, and entertainment (movies, television, music, commercials, social networking, texts).
If everything is performance, maybe the most real performance is pornography. Two actors having sex on camera may be titillating an audience for pay, but they are still having sex. Their bodies are doing the act.
Something involuntary must be touched in them before they can come.
Maybe the search for the real is about playing the most roles and having the most sex.
TRADITION 4
Each film should be autonomous except in situations where other films are involved (sequels, etc.).
The Angel
SHE WAS THE ANGEL. The Actor’s girlfriend. Think of all the best attributes that can be found in a young woman, and those are what she consisted of. Everything perfect. Of course…
(Section missing)1
contingent on changing fashions over time; ever-varying opinions of how symmetrical or asymmetrical, large, round, slim, tall, or short one’s face, breasts, waist, or ass should be. There is no need to codify a list in the vein of Edmund Burke, who ostensibly determined objective principles for beauty, basically what is smooth and various: “I do not now recollect anything beautiful that is not smooth.” What is blindingly obvious to an enlightened twenty-first century reader of Burke’s treatise, On the Sublime and the Beautiful, is that while some of us might be breast men like Mr. Burke:
Observe that part of a beautiful woman where she is perhaps the most beautiful, about the neck and breasts; the smoothness; the softness; the easy and insensible swell; the variety of the surface, which is never for the smallest space the same;
there are others of us, such as Sir Mix-A-Lot, who “like big butts” and cannot lie: ass men. Earlier than Burke,2 in the English Renaissance, it was believed that perfect female breasts resembled apples, but I for one have never said, when admiring breasts, “Look at those Granny Smiths!” Or, if we were to measure female physical perfection by artist’s depictions, what could be said about Michelangelo’s bodybuilding Sibyls, or the undulating fleshy folds of Rubens’ Three Graces? I suppose today’s subscribers to Shemale or Big Beautiful Women (BBW) magazines might find the living actualizations of the masters’ depictions appealing, but I can’t; I am not into chicks with dicks, and I admit that I get a little queasy when I see the bouncing cottage cheese on the back of Marilyn’s legs as she runs into the ocean outside the Hotel Del Coronado in Some Like It Hot. Call me a pig. I am an ass man per se, but decidedly not a thick-ass man.
But the Angel was like none of this. She was small and blond, with large breasts (about the size of soft mangos) and a shapely ass, with no cottage cheese. She had a tight stomach, and a magic smile that tinkled and said natural and friendly and pretty. But this is all too specific; all that should be understood is that she was perfect. Whatever conception of that term might mean for your ideal composition, dear reader, conjure in your mind now. Be she (or he) black or white or Latino or Asian: perfection. Conjure it now, for this story is all of ours.
—This is ridikulus. I hate when peple list all the races like this and making generalizing so much that no one has any distinkt identity. They always say “purple” and “poka dotted” too when they make their lists. They want to show that even imposible races are ok too. So they kin say that no catergory should be beter than any other catagory. Unless you says “purple” and “poka dotted” are real races. this is third grade shit, to tak this ways about all the races.3
Let’s begin this little anecdote: The Actor was in France for the summer, working on a small art film, the Angel was back in Los Angeles working on a shampoo commercial. There was a night in France… No, there were a few: young American exchange students… Hmmm, well, how do I begin? Let’s see, okay, The Actor could be very charming if he wished. Well, no, he wasn’t always charming. Actually, maybe he wasn’t charming at all. When he was younger he had a difficult time talking to girls. In fact, he was very shy. Before he started acting, before he was The Actor, when everyone called him Shrimp, if a girl talked to him, it felt like his mouth was stuffed with a thick sock and he said nothing. It was only after he became recognizable from his movies that he became “charming.” The fame allowed him to be as shy as he liked; his faltering speech was transformed into an attractive mysteriousness by the chameleon light of his celebrity. In actuality, he probably wasn’t charming at all.
<
br /> —That’s right you wasn’t. You was just a dopy fuck that won the dork lottery and became famous and you cashed in. Don’t believe the hype little shit. And no more autobiografy! All you do is just write about yor conqests and pretend that that is litrature!4
(I’m sick of it too, Shrimp. I mean I know you think it’s innovative to do this split personality thing,5 but I think it’s just you covering because you can’t write a straight story. It’s like you can’t tell a story from beginning to end, so you hide behind all this shit.
And please, we all get women, are we supposed to be impressed because you seduced a few American undergrads in France? Your alter ego, “The Devil”6 or whatever he may be, is dead on: This roman à clef is as transparent as fuck. Why are you writing about yourself? You’re not that interesting! You’re just a stupid actor that is taking advantage of these young girls, and then telling on yourself.)#
Despite the angelic beauty of his girlfriend, the Angel, when she wasn’t around, The Actor had an uncontrollable need to fuck every young thing he could. In France that summer, he fucked.
There was a tourist club on a barge called Concorde Atlantique, which was docked on the other side of the Seine from The Actor’s rented flat. One evening, The Actor ate two cones of pistachio gelato, purchased from a stand down the street, and watched Band of Outsiders on his laptop. He then fell asleep watching Weekend. He woke up at one in the morning and caught the three-minute shot at the end, which follows some of the murder happy crew through the forest over to a man playing drums on the edge of a river, while a French narrator compares the ocean to hell. After watching the shot, The Actor pressed the space bar on his laptop and paused the film. He got up from the low French couch and went outside. He went down the dark circular stairwell to the street. The night was warm, and it was okay that he forgot to take his jacket. He lit a Parliament and walked to the footbridge, just across from the Louvre.
The bridge was filled with youths of all nationalities, sitting in the dark air on the wooden slats of the bridge, drinking wine and smoking. The river flowed wide and gaping below them. Lit cigarette ends moved around like glowing mites, and French laughter breathed out from the seated groupings. The Actor didn’t stop; he crossed over to the Left Bank and walked north along the water. He passed a few drunken French people: a couple of twenty-something women in black skirts and spiderwebbed leggings, and a group of three loud, bald men, who thought they were clever, but The Actor couldn’t understand what they said. One man pissed in the street with his pants down past his ass.
Just before the Musée d’Orsay, The Actor found himself at the Concorde Atlantique, the club-barge. For lack of anything better to do, he walked across the gangplank and paid the cover charge. The club was fairly empty. It was mid-July, and most young locals had left the city. On the top deck of the barge, a spattering of twenty-somethings sat around small round tables. Mostly thin French guys with greasy hair, sitting amongst themselves without women. The Actor ordered a water from the bar at the capstan and sat down at an empty table on the side. He looked out over the river. It was romantic.
Soon after he sat down, a young American girl came up. She was not pretty. Brunette and chubby, with bad skin.
“Are you?” and she asked if The Actor was The Actor.
He said he was.
“I love your movies.”
This was always embarrassing, because The Actor’s movies were terrible.
He said thank you.
The ugly brunette asked, “Will you come sit with my friends and me? So we don’t get harassed by the slimy French guys?”
The Actor joined their table. There were four of them, two ugly and two pretty. They were all sorority girls. They all knew who he was, and he didn’t have to say much after that.
(Section missing)8
…ended up sleeping with the queen of the group, I’ll call her “Diarrhea.” She had a wonderful ass that he loved gripping while doing her from behind, despite the fact that she had let loose a loud spattering shit early one morning, after a long night of carousing in Spain.
This loud shit took place a week after the Concorde Atlantique meeting. The Actor, his friend, The Villain, and the four sorority girls were on a weekend trip to Pamplona to see the running of the bulls. After the first night, they all lay down to sleep at 10 a.m. The six of them shared the room: The Villain and three girls in the bed, and Diarrhea and The Actor on the floor. The curtains were closed, and the room was as dark as the bulls they had seen earlier that morning. Soon after everyone was settled and ostensibly asleep, Diarrhea went into the bathroom. The Actor tried not to listen, but the sound that followed was undeniable. Like a trash bag of wet guts being ripped open and dropped into a vat. The Actor and the four in the bed all pretended that they were asleep. But nobody was. After, Diarrhea came back and wrapped herself up with The Actor in the blanket on the floor. Then she gave him a blowjob.
—(Stupid idiot).9
That famous shit, talked about endlessly by the five earwitnesses, was probably caused by the nine-hour drive from Paris to Pamplona, eleven hours of carousing, the rude ingestion of tapas, churros, and Alhambra beer, and watching Spaniards and tourists being gored under the rising sun. It made things especially uncomfortable for her and The Actor later when they spent an otherwise romantic day at the Pompidou and ended up watching Paul McCarthy and Mike Kelley’s Heidi House, a video in which dolls were made to simulate prolonged shits into a bowl. While watching Heidi House, Diarrhea’s squeamish reactions (fingernail biting and audible groans), might have seemed normal if she hadn’t already proved herself to be the splatter queen of Spain. The Actor tried to ignore her reactions and pretended that the video was the most interesting thing he had ever seen, just as he tried to block out the memory of the echoing toilet sounds in Pamplona, which inevitably plagued him on a memory loop whenever he thrust into Diarrhea’s beautifully sculpted backside. During sex he was never sure if the shit smell was psychosomatic or real.10
In addition to Diarrhea there was the smaller and less attractive “Cunty,” another sorority girl who was not quite as pretty as Diarrhea, but was the daughter of the mayor of Cunt Point in Palos Verdes. She had no qualms about letting everyone know who her father was and what a special position she was in as the daughter of such an illustrious man. “My dad is the most connected man I know.” Certainly, young Cunty.
Cunty was actually very good at French, and gave The Actor a few lessons in her room at the Hotel Excelsior Latin, where all the students stayed. After the lessons, The Actor would cuddle up with her on the tiny cot provided in the cheap apartment-style accommodations. She was not great at much other than tutoring in French, but there was something nice about fooling around with her young body and having her say things like “You’re fucking the mayor’s daughter” over and over while they did it. Fucking her was also a turn-on because she was a friend of Diarrhea, and Cunty knew that The Actor was fucking Diarrhea too, so the late night French/sex sessions were an underhanded way for both of them to get back at the sorority queen. Get back at her for what was unclear, unless it was Diarrhea’s sorority girl air of everything being perfect, when everyone in the Pamplona hotel room had heard her take the shit of the century, that soggy full-bodied alarum cautioning that all was not well in Pleasantville.11
But Diarrhea and Cunty were nothing; they were easy, compared to the crowning fuck of the France trip. Not to say that the crowning fuck wasn’t easy, it was, but it was different in that the situation was unexpectedly, maliciously perfect. The crowning fuck involved a maneuver in which The Actor fucked the Angel’s sister. He took her virginity, and did so without anyone finding out. It is almost too great to contemplate. A young blond virgin, out in Paris, late night, right on the Seine.
The Angel’s sister was coincidentally studying French in France that summer. She came over to The Actor’s flat one night, under the pretense of spending time with her sister’s boyfriend. Maybe they would get some crepes or watch a
movie in subtitles. The Actor knew that the sister (let’s call her the Virgin) must have liked him for a while, as many girls must love their sister’s boyfriends. The Angel had told him that the Virgin owned several of The Actor’s films, her favorite being ____________ , a piece of romantic schlock, which was particularly popular with teenage girls.12 The Actor knew when she agreed to come over that she was his. No matter how close the Virgin was to the Angel, how loving their family was, The Actor had the unbeatable charm of being a famous actor. The seduction of the Virgin was as smooth as a bullet through a birthday cake.
Within five minutes of the Virgin’s arrival at the rented flat, the crepes and the movie plans had evaporated into kissing on the low French couch. The Angel’s sister wasn’t a bad kisser. Her legs were tight and firm. The Actor gripped them while kissing her. Her thigh muscles were strong, and there were light blond hairs higher up where she didn’t shave. The Actor slipped off her panties from under her dress and he put his face down there. Her pussy was hairy, like Courbet’s Origin of the World, which he had recently seen in the Musée d’Orsay.
The Actor licked her hairy pussy for twenty minutes. It was hard to tell if it felt good or not because the Virgin gave little reaction. After twenty minutes, The Actor asked the Virgin if she had come, and she said that she had. He told her to hold him behind his neck, and when she did, he picked her up and carried her in front of him toward the dark bedroom. As he carried her, she wrapped her legs around his waist, and the slit in the back of her dress ripped upwards toward her back. He lay her down and unzipped the torn dress. Soon they were both naked.
He was looking down at her in the dark.