by James Franco
Mr. Smithson’s face was blank. I looked down at the tabletop. From the corner of my eye, I could see him working the rubber band.
“You’re a little young,” he said. “We usually like people with some life experience. You need to have something to act. You understand? You need to be a little brokenhearted and a little beaten down. Does that make sense?”
“Yes,” I said.
“Have you ever been in love?” he said.
I thought for a second, then said no.
“Right, well, what have you done?”
I didn’t know what to say. I hadn’t done anything in my life. I was proud of nothing. I really did hate myself. I was just boring Ben.
“I don’t think I’ve done anything. That’s why I want to act.” Then I said, “My father died.”
He made a noise but said nothing else. I kept going,
“I want to live in an imaginary world because my world is so stupid. I mean my dad died when I was twelve, and it was so dumb and worthless. Like I couldn’t even feel it, or I didn’t let myself feel it because it seemed like such a cliché, and so many people lose their dads, so who cares? Nobody really felt bad for me. I mean, not really. Not to the point that I ever felt like talking about it with anyone. Even my mom, she was so wrapped up in herself, I couldn’t talk about it with her.” Now I was crying as I spoke. It was the first time that I had cried in a long time.
“And my dad was okay, but he wasn’t like a great guy or anything. He just owned a few fast-food places, and then he had a heart attack and died. It’s so boring, I hate to even think about it. And my grandpa died, and my cat died, and that’s about it for people dying. And I went to college for a year and studied literature and took a little acting, but it was so horrible, not like here.”
“University acting courses are worthless,” said Mr. Smithson.
“I know, they just made us pretend we were animals and it was so pointless that I would just pretend that I was a tree and stand there and no one cared; I would just stand there while everyone else was slithering on the floor, or growling, or jumping around. I stood in the corner with my arms down, a limbless tree, and no one said anything. After a while even that was too much, so I pretended I was a rock and sat on the floor.”
Mr. Smithson didn’t say anything; he just worked his rubber band.
I didn’t know what else to say. Then I said,
“I raped a girl once. Well, it wasn’t rape, but I guess it was.” I didn’t look at him, I looked down at the tabletop. The story came out while I looked at the pattern of the wood grain, little rivers of different shades of brown. “We were both drunk and I think that she liked me. I mean, we were getting along before it happened and we kissed and everything, but then we were watching a movie and she passed out. I knew that I should have probably waited, but I didn’t.” All this stuff poured out, and I felt small but also like it was stuff I should say, and Mr. Smithson was the guy I should say it to.
“I never saw that girl again. Her name was… well, I can’t think of her name right now. I think she might have left school after that. Maybe I ruined her life, I don’t know. I just did it, and it didn’t seem real, but then she woke up for a minute and looked at me, and then it felt so real. So I guess that is something. I mean, I have feelings about that. I mean, I shouldn’t have done that. I know that now, but I can’t take it back. And I’ve never told anyone about it until now. You’re the first person I’ve ever told about that.”
I was crying, I was crying so much and it wasn’t stopping. I felt so great.
STEP 6
Were entirely ready to have the Great Director remove all these defects from our “character.”
Windsor Girl
I’M JUST A STUPID little girl who wants to be an actor. James wouldn’t want me writing this but I’ve taken over. I know I’m young, and everything I have to say is a cliché, but I also feel like I have a right, because he took my virginity. Maybe he took a lot of girls’ virginities, I don’t know. Well, maybe I do know, and yes he did. But I’m pretty damn sure he didn’t like any of them, at least the young virginal ones, as much as me.
I was a student at NYU (still am). I was raised in Windsor, Canada, just across the river from Detroit. I was a virgin through high school, but I hung out with punks and idiots and actors and did some stupid stuff anyway. My parents are from Croatia. Actually, I was born in Croatia and my parents had to put me in a bag and keep me quiet as they crossed the border to escape from the war. My father held his hand over my little mouth. So I was in Croatia for only a year. But I’m still Croatian. I go back to visit family: my grandmother, who I love, but she is also a typical Croatian woman, meaning she is dumb and does whatever my grandfather says.
My mother is a nurse. She is also a typical Croatian woman and she lets my father say whatever he wants to me. He is the boss in the house, but I tell my mother everything. We have a close relationship. Now that I’m in New York, my mother texts me all day long. We talk every night. I told her, but not my father, when I had sex with James. Sometimes my mother is annoying and I get bratty in return, but I still love her so much. I just don’t want to become her.
I want to be an actress like Meryl Streep. Or more like James Dean or Marlon Brando (I wish I was a boy sometimes). I don’t want to be a girly girl (sometimes I do), and I don’t want to be a Croatian bride. I want to be a punk rocker riot grrrl. I want to be able to show my pussy out loud. But I’m shy of my pussy. I’m afraid it smells. It doesn’t, and it’s not an ugly pussy, but I’m still shy of it. I’m prouder of my tits. I have perfect tits. I’m very comfortable with showing them. I’ve shown them in a bunch of James’s projects. But that was all later.
My father drove a cab in Canada while getting his law degree. He worked very hard for me and my little brother. In Croatia he was a very successful lawyer, but he needed to pass the bar in Canada too. He yells a lot, but only because he’s passionate.
My parents are supportive of me going to Tisch drama school, but only if I work hard and get good grades.
Kurt Cobain is my god. He is the most beautiful man that ever lived. Except maybe James. I used to hang out with punks in Windsor. We’d go to this old abandoned house and have little concerts in the basement. Death metal type stuff. At NYU I had a band with my dormmates. We were called DaDa. I wanted to tag all the stop signs around NYU so it would say “STOP DaDa” everywhere. Like Stop Daddy. But also like the art movement. Chaos.
My first month of being in New York, I lost my virginity. Just like Marlon Brando. He wrote about it in his autobiography, Songs My Mother Taught Me. Maybe I’ll have a book someday, or people will write about me.
I kinda doubt it, I don’t know if I’m good enough at anything.
Going to New York was the most exciting thing in my life. I signed up for all my classes. I was put in the Stella Adler program—NYU has different studios that students are assigned to for their four years: Stella, Strasberg, Musical Theater, the Atlantic Theater (David Mamet’s place), and Experimental Theater. I thought Stella was a good fit. It’s where Robert De Niro and Benicio Del Toro and Marlon Brando went (but when Stella was alive, oh well).
One month after I got there, I was hanging in my dorm room one night (it’s in a big tower on 14th Street), and I got a text that James Franco was at the Starbucks near school. Me and this redheaded girl from acting class I was rehearsing with jumped in the elevators and ran the three blocks, giggling, to Starbucks. It was the wrong one. So we made our way over to the one near Washington Square Park, this time walking. As we walked, I told the redhead everything I loved about James and his work. After seeing Freaks and Geeks, I knew he was a kindred spirit (I was like the Freaks in high school), and after seeing him in James Dean I knew he was a genius. He was the actor I wanted to be like. I also watch a lot of cartoons and comedies. I’ve memorized everything he says in Pineapple Express. Saul is a character for my generation. Pure genius.
We walked down to the park and too
k a left to hit the corner of West 4th Street. It was October and chilly; I wore black leggings and my muscular legs looked pretty damn good.
Romance.
I want to be the voice of a generation. I want to be an artist. I want to be famous.
When we breached the frame of the window, I could already see the crowd of undergrads surrounding him, whispering and giggling to each other; I wanted to hate them, but they were just like me.
What is a person? Nothing. Destroy the person. But also I want to be a special person. This is a way to destroy the person that I am, that I hate. I don’t like my nose, a Croatian nose, my father’s nose. And I have big eyes, but they’re blue and pretty. Or so I’ve been told. Mostly my mother is the one who says I have pretty eyes. I’ve had one boyfriend. He was an asshole. A wannabe punk who liked to beat me a little bit. I mean, not really, but he pushed me a couple times and was emotionally cold when I tried to be emotionally warm.
How many times must I give myself to others, be a good friend, open myself up, and then get squashed? I want to be loved. Like James Dean, I need to be loved. I will act and make music in order to be loved.
Inside, a group made up mostly of giggling Asian girls went over and asked him something. He didn’t look up right away; he finished his page and then lifted one side of his large headphones and asked them to repeat. I couldn’t hear, but there was more giggling, and then they were obviously asking for a picture. He turned them down.
I got my hot chocolate with the redhead. Then, with a glance, we silently decided to go over. Like with the Asians, he didn’t look up right away, but then he did, and slipped off one side of his Bose headpiece. He was smiling. We told him we were actors and that we really admired him. We didn’t ask for a picture, and he kept talking to us. I told him about Stella, our school, and about the different classes we had to take: History of the Theater, Ibsen, Shaw, Chekhov, etc. Then he got my number. He got the redhead’s too, but I figured he was just doing that to look uninterested in me. Just a hunch I had. It was cold out, so we ran all the way back to my dorm. We screeched down Broadway, yelling because we wanted our voices to sew themselves into the night, because it felt like New York had opened up, like a big orifice, a ragged mouth or vagina, and in a deep, unheard voice said, Here is your wish come true.
We were liberated cunts and legs in the winter wind, whipping, flapping, and flying. We must fly. We were students and we were sirens. At least I was.
I was so obsessed with Kurt Cobain that I wrote a short story about him. Not exactly about him like a biography, but about a teenage boy who was like him (and like me too, if I was a boy) who was so depressed and artistic he committed suicide. Later I showed this story to James—this was much later, after he had come into my life, when he talked to me about marriage and children, after I had started working with him on his art projects, but before I had traveled the world with him—and he read it in my dorm room, but he didn’t have much response. He said it was good and smiled like he knew something.
After Starbucks, James didn’t call me. Later, when he was in my life, we would talk about that time, back when I was just getting to know him, and I would tell him how upset I had been then, but how I felt like I couldn’t be because what could I have expected? He was James Franco and I was a stupid NYU freshman. I went to my classes and tried not to think too much about him. I focused on Arthur Miller, but James was the only thing alive in me. All I had to hold onto was a crinkly-eyed smile, because we hadn’t really talked much. I tried to warm myself from the impression that was still inside me, to make his face visible in my mind, the version of it that looked right at me and was conscious of me, and maybe if I made it clear enough in my mind it would send out energy to him and he would know I was thinking about him.
One week after I met James, I got a text message from him at 10 o’clock at night asking me what I was doing. I was reading The Glass Menagerie. I wrote back that I was doing homework. He asked if I wanted to come over later, and I said yes.
At 11:30, I went to the address on 13th Street. He buzzed me in, and I walked up a twisting stair to the third floor. His apartment was a three-story place with its own circular stair inside. He offered me water, and we went over to a leather couch in front of a flatscreen television. It was dim in there, but I could see books all over the place. He showed me some pictures on the wall. One of them was an early Warhol, a sketch of a boy’s face that looked like James Dean. We watched a little bit of a weird art film called Scorpio Rising, gay guys on motorcycles. Then he kissed me. His tongue was in my mouth. It felt good. I was pretty surprised. I had kissed four guys in my life and none really like this. Then he asked if I wanted to go upstairs. I said sure. We went up the winding stair past pictures of naked girls (later I learned they were photos by Francesca Woodman), and then we were in his room. It was small, with a mattress on the floor next to the window with a view of the street. There were a couple shelves with more books next to the mattress.
It was dark except for the streetlights through the window. I kept thinking of the word haunted for no reason. Nothing else was in my head except that I was from Windsor, Canada.
We got into the bed. And pretty soon after we were kissing. Then my shirt came off and then my bra and my good tits came out. And then my pants were off. He tried to go down on me but I wouldn’t let him. I was too shy about that, so I pulled his head up. Then I went down on him. I wasn’t that confident, but I tried my best and he guided me a little. Then he put on a condom and we were trying to have sex. He was on top of me, pushing, but it really wouldn’t go in. It felt like it wasn’t supposed to fit. I was pulling my torso away in an awkward way while trying not to make a noise because I was so embarrassed. Then it was making its way inside and then it was all the way in. I managed to whisper, “Slow. Go slow,” and he did at first, but then it started moving easier and he went faster.
I really didn’t know that this was going to happen, or if I did, I kept it from myself so that when it did all start happening I just went with it like I was innocent but also because I really wanted it.
I had to stop him in the middle because it hurt, and I was embarrassed about the blood. But then we kept going.
Later that night, I woke and lay there beside him. His arm was over me, and I was naked under the covers except for my panties. I looked out at the lights. We were high up enough that the streetlights were level with us. There was one just outside his window; it was in an old-fashioned style, as if it were from a London fairy tale, even though I’d never been to London. I felt like I was in Mary Poppins and I was about to fly out to Never-Never Land.
For a second.
STEP 7
Humbly asked the Great Director to remove our “character’s” shortcomings.
McDonald’s I
I WAS BORN IN THE LA and I never left the LA. I lived in the Valley. For about six years, I did heroin all the time. I had two boys, but I never saw them. They lived over the hill with my ex in West Hollywood. I was twenty-seven at the time. And then I stopped using heroin. I moved back in with my parents in North Hollywood. My mom didn’t work and my dad was a priest at a little church on Magnolia. He was happy to tell the church that his son was now clean and was trying to get his life together. He said it right in front of the whole church one morning so that everyone would be happy for me.
After the service I talked to all the people. “Sean, you keep praying and the Lord will deliver.” I shook their hands and smiled. I always had a good smile. The heroin had worked on my face a little, but I was still a good-looking guy. Maybe my hair was going a little in front.
I went to these alcohol and drug meetings, and before I knew it, I had six months without using heroin or any drugs. I liked going to the alcohol ones because they were more organized than the drug ones. I still had a car, and every morning I went to this men-only meeting on Vineland Boulevard, called the Valley Bucks Meeting. It met in this little burrito place called El Jardin Encantado at 7:15, before the res
taurant opened. The guys were there every morning; what a group of characters. The men were all ages. Some were professionals in suits and others wore sweatpants and let their balls show in bulges. Some sat in the booths and others sat at the actual bar. I never talked, I just sat and listened, but they all told jokes and talked about their wives and about God.
I got to know all the guys there because I went there every morning. I got a sponsor named Sonny. Sonny was a washed-up actor. He was a million years old, but he acted like he was twenty. He loved to talk about acting, which was okay with me because a long time ago I had wanted to be an actor. Sonny had been onstage with Bert Lahr, the Cowardly Lion from The Wizard of Oz. They traveled all over the states doing a play about aliens back in the ’60s. Sonny didn’t work anymore. He had turned his daughter into an actress, and when she got on a hit TV show, he used her money to buy a house. She was my age now and was crazy and now that she wasn’t a cute child star anymore she couldn’t get work. But Sonny had his house. So he just went to the alcohol meetings every day and hung out at his big house in the valley. He always wanted me to come over.
I’d go about once a week. He would keep me there for hours. We’d lie on his bed in front of a huge TV and watch old movies. I’d lie on his wife’s side of the bed. She was never there during the day because she worked as an extra. It was great at first. We’d watch Chaplin, and Laurel and Hardy, and the Marx Brothers. We’d watch Dracula and Frankenstein, the old versions, with the slicked hairstyles and the funny monster makeup. They were all old-fashioned and stupid, but also good because of that. And he’d tell me stories as we watched.
“I did Picnic in Miami. It was the premiere run in Miami, and William Inge had me over to his house. Funny man with a high voice. So I didn’t know what was up. I mean, I knew some gay guys in the theater, but this guy… he went into the bathroom and while he was in there I saw this container of Vaseline on the dresser. The cap was off and when I looked in I saw there was a little bit of brown shit in it.”
