Haters Gonna Hate
made by rockin_graphix
This long James Franco Playboy interview has been around for a week but I didn't have the time to read it. Anyway It's a nice interview which should not be missed. I like most of his answers here.
(Fortunately I saved James' pics in my old photobucket account so it won't be a plain text post.)
(Credit to purpleafternoon @ tumblr)
James: I have a film coming up that I directed about the poet Hart Crane, and I give a blow job in that movie.
[OH MY. How graphic will it be?]
Interviewer: After playing movie icon James Dean, a male prostitute in the 2002 movie Sonny, Harvey Milk’s activist lover in Milk, Beat poet Allen Ginsberg in Howl-let alone the exploration of masculinity in your book Palo Alto and the homoerotic imagery in your short movie The Feast of Stephen-is it fair to say you have a fascination with gay or bisexual characters?
James: "Straight" and "gay" are fairly recent phenomena. One of the things the great book Gay New York: Gender, Urban Culture and the Making of the Gay World, 1890-1940 is about is the way those labels have changed behavior.
Between World War I and World War II, straight guys could have sex with other guys and still be perceived as straight as long as they acted masculine. Whether you were considered a "fairy" or a "queer" back then wasn’t based on sexual acts so much as outward behavior.
Into the 1950s, 1960s and so on, the straight and gay thing came up based on your sexual partner. Because of those labels, you do it once and you’re gay, so you get fewer guys who are kind of in the middle zone.
It sounds as though I’m advocating for an ambiguous zone or something, but I’m just interested in the way perception changes behavior.
[OMG I lUV HIM. It does sounds like he is advocating an ambiguous zone, though, and I have no complaints with that if it's true.]
Interviewer: Although you’ve often invited dialogue and speculation about your screen image and your offscreen life, one area you’ve kept pretty quiet is your long-term relationship with actress Ahna O’Reilly.
James: It’s over. That lasted about four or five years. We’d been living together in L.A. and then came to New York to go to school for two years. Then I signed up for more school at Yale. I think that was it for her.
[It's been a rumor that James is a closet gay while Ahna is a beard and James actually decides to announce the end of this public acknowledged relationship right after his ambiguous zone speech. I'm in love.]
James: I was so pissed about that I was deliberately going to fall onstage and hopefully my dress would fall off or something-they couldn’t blame that on me; I was in high heels.
The plan had been that I was going to sing as Cher and then Cher was going to come out onstage; that got axed when Cher and the song from Burlesque weren’t nominated. I told them, “Look, this is the thing people are going to talk about, the images they will take away from the show.”
I mean, think about it- Anne Hathaway sang a song about Hugh Jackman, who not only wasn’t nominated, I don’t think he even had a movie out last year. So whatever. I just didn’t want to fight anymore, even when they said, “You’ll come out as Marilyn Monroe. It’ll be funny.”
Me in drag is not funny. Me in drag as Cher trying to sing like her is a thing. That didn’t happen, so then I just didn’t want to argue anymore.
I was going with their program; I wanted to do the material they gave me, not be one of the many cooks doing the writing. There were a lot of cooks who shouldn’t have been cooking but were allowed to. There were some cooks my manager tried to bring in, like Judd Apatow, who wrote some very funny stuff that wasn’t used.
[Sometimes the critism on him is unfair. While I don't appreciate his apathy in Oscars, I feel sympathatic to his situation and I don't think he is the ONLY one to be blamed.]
Interviewer: Soon after the Oscars, you took your Twitter account private. Cause and effect?
James: Someone at an event asked, "Why is your Twitter account closed?" I said, "Yeah, it’s over. I’m not on it anymore," and suddenly it became "James Franco declares social media is over." Which is like saying nobody’s going to talk on the telephone anymore.
[See? This kind of critism is wrong and unnecessary.]
Interviewer: Was that actually a photo of your hand down the crotch of your jeans-and even possibly a glimpse of your junk-to which you allegedly tweeted a link to your 350,000-plus followers?
James: I couldn’t do Twitter the conventional way. I resisted the idea of posting comments, opinions; I felt they weren’t worth anything. I also felt that if I had something worth saying, I’d put it in an essay or a story, not on Twitter. So I thought Twitter was where I’d post cool photos and videos-a kind of collage, an outlet where I could just throw my scraps-and I posted some of a big art project I was doing. I knew people in the art community would see them as art, but they were perceived as something else.
Interviewer: Like maybe subliminal porn?
James: I thought, It’s my account; I can post anything I want here. But I had underage followers on Twitter. Don’t follow me or Lady Gaga if you’re underage. Some companies I work with reminded me that my image is now connected with their image and they were not happy.
[He dodghes the questions. It makes me believe it's really was his cock. Oh my.]
James: It’s a great thing. When people heard I was in all these academic programs, the reaction for some person I don’t even know was to take a picture of me sleeping at Columbia. It wasn’t even in class; it was a 10 p.m. optional guest lecture. But people love to post that picture on the internet and criticize me for taking a spot away from somebody else who would really care about the lecture. People sleep in class at all my schools all the time and nobody posts their pictures.
[It's disrespectful to sleep in front of the lecturer or the speaker. I would have to agree with them if people are criticizing his rudeness.
However, people are saying he should not waste a seat as if he doesn't want to study, which is a wrong accusation because James is passionate in education.
It's not like we sacrifice one's opportunity for James' benefit. He did the application himself and he got accepted in various programs because of his ability. I think his academic accomplishment proves enough.]
Interviwer: What was it like for you in 2008 when Page Six of the New York Post ran a blind item about a hunky closeted gay actor who got nicknamed the Gay Rapist? You were among the actors most often guessed by Gawker readers.
[...]
James: When my lawyer called and asked about it, the guy freaked out and said, "Oh yeah, I heard about that too. So weird. I don’t know James." It stopped the story.
Then Gawker picked that up and did this "Gay Rapist" story that was so fucking offensive because I have friends who have been raped. They did a very classy online reader’s poll asking which actor who had a big movie out that summer had beaten up and raped his boyfriend and then paid him off so it wouldn’t go to court. The poll had me, Will Smith, Christian Bale and maybe Tom Cruise or some others, and the readers voted for me. Because it was just an innocent poll, they could report this.
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