by James Franco
The Actor couldn’t stop. He had to be Ben. He had to fuck young girls. He had to own the rape.
During winter break, Diarrhea was visiting Cunty at the Mayor’s house in Cunt Point, Palos Verdes. They stayed up late one night and got drunk on the Mayor’s liquor, and Cunty let slip that she had been sleeping with The Actor in Paris. The girls got into a fight.
But it wasn’t The Actor’s infidelity that pushed Diarrhea over the edge; it was Cunty’s revelation that she, and The Actor, and everyone else who had been in the Pamplona hotel room had been laughing for months behind Diarrhea’s back about her record-breaking shit. The Actor had even turned it into an art video with a real asshole propelling real shit.
Diarrhea was devastated. She promptly called The Actor’s apartment, got the Angel on the phone and told her she had been fucking The Actor since France.
I now understood the second crumpled note written in The Actor’s hand that I had found at the apartment. It read:
“I’m a fool”
No one saw me as I approached the secret gate. I hoped the glasses would be enough of a disguise in case I did come across anyone.
To my great joy, one of the keys on the chain opened the secret gate. I slipped inside to the brick-paved patio area; thick, exotic shrubbery, heavy with rain, surrounded me.
I saw no one. I quickly crossed the patio to number 89. (I instinctually knew where to go).
The second key on the chain worked in the door.
Inside, I was quick about my movements. It was almost midnight.
The lights were off and I kept them off. I left the door open a crack and made my way to the kitchen. Somehow, I knew where it was in the dark.
In the kitchen, I found two small bottles of gin and quickly swallowed both. They burned. Then I opened a drawer where a knife would be. In fact, there was a knife there. I picked it up. It was a small steak knife. A knife that The Actor had used many times to cut the juicy Chateau steaks.
I took the knife, went to the bedroom, and slipped off my clothes, except for the sunglasses, and waited under the covers. The knife was under the covers too.
me is he him am I see will you? reversed actor the avenge to want.
…smeared ben like walls on it smear and blood diareahs take want i
me c u u c i toilet the behind devil of writing red, red write will i
anymore angel? no and love? no and acting no and hiding? no and end? No
TRADITION 5
Each film (or theatrical performance) has but one primary purpose… to carry its message to the public, to communicate.
Tristan
“YOU HAVE TO DO THIS.”
“But this director sucks… He sucks.”
“Doesn’t matter.”
“Doesn’t matter? It does matter. He did Robin Hood, he did fucking Robin Hood, he sucks, he’s terrible.”
“This movie is a movie that Brando would do, okay? This is a role that a young Brando would do.”
“Ummmm…”
“I’m serious. You don’t see roles like this anymore. Heroic roles, especially for young people. You just don’t see it.”
“I don’t know.”
“Of course you don’t. The actor never knows. That’s why the studio system was so great, the actors were told which roles to play and someone who was smart and knew what the people wanted put the actors in the right roles.”
Silence.
Teacher again. “The actor never knows. Trust me.”
“But…”
“Trust me. Okay? Trust me. You will have a sword, the girl, this script, you don’t know what this script is, this script is something that just isn’t made in Hollywood anymore. You don’t know how deep this script is. This is a very smart writer, very smart. This character, I’m telling you, the depth of a young Brando or an Olivier.”
I should have known. I should have known.
TRADITION 6
A performer (or film) must never endorse, finance, or lend its title to any related enterprise, lest problems of money, property, and prestige divert us from our art.
1. Tell a Lie
MY FATHER JUST PASSED AWAY. He died of a heart attack two days ago. Despite being educated at Stanford and Harvard, he hadn’t had regular employment for fifteen years. He and my mother had moved back to Palo Alto, California, after finishing business school in Boston because he had liked it while attending Stanford. He worked in telecommunications in Silicon Valley, at Rakem, IBM, and ROLM. When I was about to graduate high school, he tried to start his own company, some product that would help companies electronically organize their inventory. He was so excited and confident about this company; he would tell all his friends and family to invest in the company, not because he needed funding but for their sakes because he was so sure that this would be a huge success. Then, at the last minute, one of the major investors pulled out and the company folded and the technology was developed by another company and my father had nothing.
That seemed like the end for him. He had many other ideas after that. He tried to open a restaurant with a friend from recovery and a coffee shop with an Afghan refugee he had befriended, but those fell apart due to personality issues. He went back to school and took science classes because he believed there are gold particles in rivers and that there was a way to pull them out. He did experiments in the backyard, little containers of river water that we weren’t allowed to talk about with our friends. He was an alchemist. He did math problems that he claimed to work on for years, on notepads and napkins and then, once he had the answer, he would say that it was obvious all along and he needed a new problem. He would ask for arcane math books at Christmas, but I am not sure if he ever read them. He meditated a lot and got my brother into it, and now my brother works at an ashram.
My father helped with charities to give relief to Afghanistan and Iraq; he even traveled there during wartime. But when he got grants for these companies, he didn’t receive any operating fees. He made no money. I helped my parents keep their house in Palo Alto. I paid for Christmas presents and dental work and my brothers’ college educations and I don’t know what else. I felt like I became the father.
At the end, my dad was very sweet. He was supportive of my film career, and he even started saying good things about the roles I played and the films I directed. The last time I saw him was at a screening for my film about Hart Crane, The Broken Tower, at the Los Angeles Film Festival. At one time in his life, my father had wanted to be a poet and had actually gone to Stanford to study with Hart Crane’s old friend, Yvor Winters, but the year my father arrived was the year Yvor left (or died, can’t remember) and Ken Fields took over. I also knew that my father enjoyed the art films of Antonioni and Bergman and Kurasawa, and I think he saw me aiming for the greatness and austerity of those directors with my film. My mother said he was very moved by The Broken Tower. In it, I play Hart Crane, and I cast my real mother as Hart’s mother. Hart’s father was a millionaire, but he never gave Hart any real support, and then when Hart’s father died Hart expected a huge inheritance, and when it didn’t come he jumped off a boat and killed himself (there were probably many reasons he did this, not just the money). There were a few scenes where Hart argues with his father about following a career in poetry and his father tells him to be practical. I turned out better than Hart: I don’t have an addiction and I am able to support myself financially. I will not kill myself now that my father has died, and I don’t expect anything of his money.
But when I went home to arrange the funeral with my mother and my two brothers, my meditator brother told us that my father told him to burn all his journals. My father has hundreds of journals in which he worked out his problems using the I Ching. I guess my brother was closer to my father, and maybe there is some dark stuff in those journals—my father was involved in some weird things when he was a young man at Stanford—but by God, I want those fucking journals.
2. Tell the Truth
I wanted to tell the truth all
the time. I wanted to use my life as a model for my work. I thought that I was interesting enough that this would translate, truth = interesting stuff that people want to read. I could go around to everyone and say only true things, but would that mean anything? When would it get interesting? Who would I have to tell the truth to for it to be art, when would people begin to notice that I was doing something artful? I suppose I realized that it was the press that wasn’t used to people being honest, not that people always lied when they spoke to them, but the big celebrities were good at not revealing too much—K____ E_____ doesn’t sleep with tons of women, and M______ P_________ has never done drugs—and sometimes when celebrities did reveal too much they were crucified for it: Look at Tom Cruise jumping on Oprah’s couch because he was so in love. It’s the snarky little fuckers that write for South Park or Family Guy and hide behind cartoons that get revered. They are honest, but honest about everyone else, not about themselves.
But I couldn’t get the truth out, unadulterated. Everyone had a way they wanted me to talk about things, and even when I did speak the truth in full, these shows would cut up what I said and put it into a package that served what they wanted to say. And, in addition, what could I tell the truth about? What did I have knowledge of that was valuable if it was known? All I could do was reveal things the way they were; I had an insider’s knowledge of how things worked and from the inside I could begin to peek out to the outside and say, “Hey, look, this is what it’s really like, not like they show on TMZ or on Paris Hilton’s reality show.”
So, yes, I did it. I had lots of sex. Lots. Most actors seem to do it, capitalize on their celebrity appeal. It’s funny, lots of guys that become actors were shy or nerdy or sensitive when they were younger, so when they become famous they really cash in to make up for those years when they were overlooked and rejected. S_______ N_______ was one that cleaned up, man, he slept with (big time actress), really, and (big time pop star). A______ A_________ , N________ D__________ , S_______ M________ , ha, not only did these dudes have girls on the side, they also went out with the celebrity girls of their day. V_______ R________ , H________ P__________. M_______ P_______ had models (all ages), politicians, and actresses.
I had something going with most of my female costars and worked up a routine so that I could see someone every night. One of my favorite approaches was to ask the young girls that requested to take a photo with me to email me a copy of the photo; that way I can give them my info very quickly in front of a crowd of fans and later work out a way to see them. Usually this happens at an event, which means I am usually away from home, so I have girls I can see all over the world. Usually they are ready when I go back to that city, whether it is Rome, Portland, New York, Los Angeles, San Francisco, Detroit, Asheville, or D.C.
So I was in Toronto: It was 2010; we premiered 127 Hours; a person fainted during the arm amputation scene, then another one fainted before the movie ended. Ambulances were called. It was the first time we screened it for an audience, so we were not used to that kind of reaction, something that would become more common as we screened it more often. Danny and I went up onstage with Aaron Ralston and gave a Q and A. That was during the day. That night, we screened it again. As we entered, a girl, okay-looking, stepped out of the crowd and asked for a picture. I asked her to email it to me. We watched the film and a couple people passed out. Later, at the end of the festival, the girl emailed me the picture, but it was too late to see her in Toronto where she was going to school, and I had already spent the night with a Princeton student who was volunteering at the festival. But, as luck would have it, I kept in touch with both of them—in addition to a Berkeley student that gave me her info in front of a crowd that had gathered to listen to me talk to Peter Sellars—and the Toronto girl, Barbara, eventually came to New York to visit her grandmother. Well, in the intervening months she had sent me plenty of photos of her body and especially her ass bent over in a G-string, so when she arrived at my Lower East Side apartment, I was ready and she was ready. Not only did she allow me to do everything I wanted to her, she let me film it on my phone.
TRADITION 7
Every film ought to be fully self-supporting, declining outside financing.
Faith & Victory
THE ONE THING I HAD going for me was that I wasn’t an actor. Thomas and I were friends and I went to the clubs where all the actors were, but at least I wasn’t one of them. Going to acting class, doing scenes about abortions and being gay, going on auditions, thinking about yourself all the time, trying to be pretty, going to the gym, doing your hair, taking headshots, being vacuous and insecure, fuck that.
I drove through Silver Lake. Long streets of single-story buildings. Strange offices, acting schools, video stores, bars with old world signs, and new age coffee shops. Debris and graffiti. Everything was run down.
I was a volunteer at Faith & Victory Church, an orphanage/hospital for “retards,” way way west on Sunset, deep in the funky part of town, where paper and trash floated in the air and stuck to the bushes and scuttled on the sidewalks next to the cement embankments.
I worked with the retards because it made me feel good. Actually, I usually just worked with one of them, Miles. I didn’t like working with the others because they were too busted up. Most were missing their throats or pieces of their brains or their limbs so that they were just writhing things in messy sheets. They lay around and drooled out of deformed orifices and made disgusting wet noises that made no sense. It was stupid to talk to the ones that were that far gone. You could stand there and be a warm loving body for only so long. After a while you started to feel like a retard yourself.
But Miles had a working mind and was actually pretty funny. He was fourteen and told me he was banging the two good-looking Filipino nurses, Maria and Angela. He wasn’t. Miles had a mouth that looked like a ragged anus because his father and stepmother had abused him when he was a young child. Most of his teeth had been knocked out by a stick that was shoved in his throat and his stomach was messed up too.
The kids at Faith & Victory were all way gone mentally, and either their families couldn’t provide for their needs or didn’t want to. Lots of actors and agents volunteered at the hospital and did art with the kids. It was through a program called CALove. I suppose, like me, they all wanted to feel better about themselves. I wasn’t an actor, but my friend Thomas was an actor, pretty successful, and he told me about the place when he heard I was feeling bad.
Thomas used to party with me back when I was working as a production assistant on big movies, about five years ago. Monday through Thursday I would work on sets in the day, bringing actors coffee and shit, and then at night Thomas and I would go to the clubs. Then on weekends we would do speed and watch three or four movies in a row, in the theater and at his house. We watched so many movies. Mostly action shit, but we were into comedies, and sci-fi, and old foreign stuff too. But suddenly after a couple years of this, Thomas stopped, he told me it was over, and then he started trying to do good things. I didn’t.
Time passed. Then when Thomas called and told me he heard I was feeling bad, I hadn’t talked to him in a couple years. He was right, I was feeling bad. I hadn’t done any drugs in four months, so I felt like shit. I just lay around the apartment and watched television, and smoked cigarettes, and sometimes I would go to the shitty golf course and play a little. I used to hang around the Starbucks near UCLA and look for girls, but it stopped working after I let my beard grow. So I was at the apartment most days.
When Thomas told me about the volunteer work, I told him I was busy.
After his call I stared at my carpet for three days. It was beige and there were patterns that spoke to me. After that, I called Thomas. The next day I went to Faith & Victory Church for the first time.
Thomas was working on his TV show that day, so he didn’t come with me. There was one other newcomer that day, a tall and handsome blond guy in shorts who I hated immediately and didn’t want to look at. And there w
as Casey, a famous actress. She was probably twenty-four. She wasn’t the best actress, but she was hip and was not bad-looking. I used to see her around the clubs when she was eighteen or nineteen. She was always drunk back then. But here she was. It wasn’t her first time at Faith & Victory Church; apparently she volunteered all the time. We were briefed in the hospital lobby by a woman from Alabama. She was about twenty-eight and had started the CALove program. She and Casey were good friends.
Be loving and don’t be shocked by anything you see, the Alabama woman told us. The main thing was to just be available for the kids. They didn’t get any love in their lives, so just our presence was helpful. And be prepared, our clothes might get ruined.
Then Casey chimed in. She gave me and Blondie a serious look and said, “It can get pretty intense in there.”
“I bet,” said Blondie, as if he knew all about servicing retards.
“What do you mean intense?” I said. I stared hard at Casey. I was trying hard to pretend I was in the lobby with only Casey and the Alabama lady and tried to block out Blondie. He was part Swedish or something. He made me think of candy canes stuck in people’s asses, and gray rooms where people said nothing but inanities. Whenever I looked at him I started hating myself, and I would chant “suicide” in my head over and over; just a little whisper in my head. But when I tried hard, I could block him out pretty well.
Casey said, “The kids are so beautiful here. But it’s intense, that’s all.”