Arts & Entertainment A weekly guide to music, theater, art, movies and more, edited by Rebecca Wallace Palo Alto native James Franco can act, direct, write — and, in his upcoming Ginsberg biopic, howl by Peter Canavese ark Twain once turned over Socrates’ famous chestnut thusly: “The unexamined life may not be worth living, but the life too closely examined may not be lived at all.” Local-boy-made-good James Franco has puzzled over this conundrum in his own way. With impressive drive, the Palo Alto High School graduate has striven over the last 15 years to be a modern Renaissance man: a scholar, essayist, fiction writer, screenwriter, film director and producer, artist and actor. His success as an actor has made him something else entirely: a star, with all attendant scrutiny from press, paparazzi and fans. Still, Franco hasn’t let living under a microscope cramp his style. In recent years, he has become particularly adept at making the media work for him, precisely because of his refusal to be pigeonholed. Take his recent stints on the long-
M
running daytime soap “General Hospital.” Playing Franco, a multimedia artist with a show at Los Angeles’ Museum of Contemporary Art, James Franco simultaneously held his own show at the same museum. Then, lest he be misinterpreted, the star of “Spider-Man,” “Pineapple Express” and “Milk” wrote an article for The Wall Street Journal explicating his daytime-acting experiment as performance art. It’s obvious that Franco speaks with a unique voice amongst his generation of actors. Franco’s disdain for boundaries and love of literature dovetail with his latest role as Allen Ginsberg in the independent drama “Howl,” which comes to movie theaters later this month. Rob Epstein and Jeffrey Friedman’s prismatic look at the famous poem “Howl,” its attendant controversy, and its creator finds Franco recreating the poem’s initial public reading in 1955 San Francisco, as well as giving an intimate interview with a reporter for Time Magazine. And so it is that interviewing Franco about “Howl” is tantamount to joining him in a hall of mirrors. As to tackling the poem’s volume of words, Franco admits in a recent interview in San Francisco: “I’d never done a film performance that had required that of me. But I’ve
done plenty of interviews, right? I’m doing that now, so I know what it is to give an interview. “And I know what it’s like to read poems aloud and prose aloud. I’ve done a fair amount for girlfriends and also in front of audiences. So I kind of had that experience. But the trick was then ... in the interview scenes, to say those scripted lines as naturally as I’m just saying this, off the cuff.” We wander deeper into the labyrinth when I suggest that the investigation required of acting is much like journalism, which Franco first practiced as a writer for Paly’s Campanile newspaper. “Very much so,” Franco agrees. “And I imagine, like, one of the things you must love about being a journalist is — at least when you get to work on stories that you’re interested in — you get to go and learn about them. All the topics that you want to learn about. And you get to do research about it. “And it’s the same thing as an
actor, but here’s one of the reasons that I went back to school (to several graduate programs),” Franco says. “When I was only an actor, I’d put tons of work into the roles. Sometimes I’d sign to a movie ... nine, 10 months in advance. I would prepare every day for 10 months for a role. Now the problem with that is ... a film role is never going to be able to utilize every bit of research that you do. Not that a story could either, but as a journalist ... in, I guess, the ideal case, you get to choose the arc of the story, what you’re going to include, what you’re going to focus on, how you’re going to shape it. “As an actor, you’re serving a bigger film, and so there might be like a really juicy bit of research that you found or something that you practiced that you’re really good at,
so you can ride on a horse standing up while it’s galloping or something. But there’s no place in the movie for that! It’s not gonna happen. So I would do all this research, and then it felt to me like 80 percent of it was always just like ending up nowhere ... And then I’d see someone else come on a few days before, and they’d get the same kind of reviews that I got.” With so much he wants to do, Franco has learned to manage his time more wisely. “I work very hard on the roles now,” he explains, “but I’m very clear about the kind of preparation I do. I wanna do what’s necessary, so with Ginsberg, I’ve studied his whole life, but I knew that it was his life up to a certain age, so that’s what I’m going to focus on. I’m not gonna worry so much about what he was thinking about when he was 70.” With the time he’s saved by not making himself crazy with re(continued on page 37)
From top: Julia Roberts cozies up to James Franco in “Eat Pray Love”; Franco with Aaron Tveit in “Howl”; Franco (at left) with Danny McBride and Seth Rogen in “Pineapple Express”; Franco in “Howl.”
A modern
Renaissance man
*> Ê Ì Ê7ii ÞÊUÊ-i«Ìi LiÀÊ£ä]ÊÓä£äÊU Page 35