In September 2014, James Franco wrote a meandering, free-form poem about his “muse and friend” Lana Del Rey for V magazine. At the end of the piece, Franco writes, “I wanted to interview Lana for a book, and she said, ‘Just write around me, it’s better if it’s not my own words. It’s almost better if you don’t get me exactly, but try.’” Franco is now cowriting a book with author David Shields about the “Summertime Sadness” singer, Flip-Side: Real and Imaginary Conversations With Lana Del Rey. Experimental side projects are, of course, old hat for the writer-director-actor-singer-artist. Here, seven of his greatest hits.
Franco wrote an op-ed for The Wall Street Journal in 2009 about why his stint on General Hospital was actually performance art. “I disrupted the audience s suspension of disbelief,” he expains, “because no matter how far I got into the character, I was going to be perceived as something that doesn t belong to the incredibly stylized world of soap operas.” He also supplemented his piece of performance art with a MoCA exhibition based on his soap opera experience.
Franco became the subject of mixed-media artist **Carter’**s video project, Erased James Franco. Here, the actor turns himself into a character, performing scenes from **Todd Haynes **s Safe, John Frankenheimer s Seconds, as well as his own role from Spider-Man.
Franco appeared in drag on the cover of Candy magazine, “the first transversal style magazine,” in 2010, in a portrait shot by Terry Richardson.
In 2011, the actor backed a project called the Museum of Non-Visible Art, an invisible art show that is “composed entirely of ideas.”
Franco created a “homo-sex-art-film” with erotic film director Travis Matthews, Interior. Leather Bar., which reimagines a lost chapter from the 1980 gay thriller Cruising.
In 2013, he debuted a solo art show in Berlin called “GAYTOWN,” a collection of images, accented with brightly colored, often offensive scribbled messages. The show explored issues of “adolescence, public and private persona, stereotypes and other societal concerns such as society s preoccupation with celebrity.”
Franco started a conceptual art-school band, Daddy, with his fellow RISD MFA student, Tim O’Keefe. This year, they’re releasing a Smiths tribute album, Let Me Get What I Want, based on Franco’s ten-poem sequence, “The Best of the Smiths: Side A and Side B.” Every song on the album will have a video to match, which together comprise an art film. Teenagers at Palo Alto High, where Franco’s mother had organized a filmmaking program, are reportedly making all the videos. Talk about synergy!
