Dear James Franco: Please Don’t Write What You Know
It’s hard to nail down everything that’s wrong with Franco’s new short story, but we’re sure going to try.
The dime-store advice to all writers is “write what you know.” However, in James Franco’s case, writing what you know always seems to add to his aura of dastardliness. Lindsay Lohan, who has already suffered several low points as of late (chief among them starring in a “docu-series” on the OWN channel), is Franco’s subject matter in “Bungalow 89,” which serves merely to kick her while she’s down. Had the short story actually been decent or even truly “fictional,” it might be worth enduring Franco’s assessment of the former child star. Instead, it reads like a slightly more literate version of Regina George’s burn book.
Alternating between first and third person at random, Franco establishes that he wants us to know he’s trying, really trying to be experimental. When you work so diligently to wear so many hats — actor, producer, director, student, teacher, musician, Academy Awards host, full-time James Francoist — adding the title of author to the list seems as if it should be easy. Alas, not everyone can be a writer merely because they have the inclination to write. Then again, if they already have the fame, well, that’s another story, as Franco has proven time and time again. The actor, who has yet to risk dabbling in novel-length prose (unless you count his memoir, A California Childhood), is also responsible for the short story collections, Actors Anonymous and Palo Alto. (But why bother reading it when you can see the movie?)
What you take away from these works is that Franco needs to be reminded of one thing: The world already has their Bret Easton Ellis. Franco’s attempt at emulating the same level of grit and nihilism fails to come across every single time. An example from “Bungalow 89”:
I ran my fingers through her hair and thought about this girl sleeping on my chest, our fictional Hollywood girl, Lindsay. What will she do? I hope she gets better. You see, she is famous. She was famous because she was a talented child actress, and now she’s famous because she gets into trouble. She is damaged.
It’s as though we’re reading a crude draft of Less Than Zero.
Like Ellis, Franco is also fond of name-checking — the difference in the way Franco does it, however, is that it’s far less parsimonious. In the span of a single paragraph, he mentions Gus Van Sant, Lukas Haas, John Belushi, Martin Scorsese, Kurt Cobain, Harrison Ford and Leonardo DiCaprio. While it’s possible that this is a way of legitimizing his credibility as an author (“I know all these important people, therefore you have to take me seriously”), it might just be a way to fill a word count quota.
