No one can call James Franco unambitious. From attending six schools to continuing to film movies and TV, to working sporadically as a performance-artist, to teaching one course on film and collaborating on another class on himself (yes, himself), Franco is a man of many, many parts.
Breadth of talent is certainly impressive, but doing a million things is not the same as doing a million things well. This is like calling someone who knows just a few words in many languages "multilingual." And for this, there are no better examples than James Franco's careers.
It all started with the Green Goblin's return to UCLA.
Consider this from a drooling GQ profile from September 2008:
"I think I broke the record for the number of units I'm taking this quarter," he says. The standard limit is nineteen, though students sometimes manage to take a few more. Twenty-three, say, or twenty-four. Franco is taking sixty-two.
What does that really mean? Classes in the humanities at UCLA generally vary from three to five units. Let's average it at four. That would have left Franco with about 15-16 courses, while the "average student" was only allowed to take about four. And while courses vary in hours per week from one to five (between discussions and lectures), let's go with an average of three hours a week per class (on the low side). That would leave him with a low-balled average of 45 hours per week of pure, on-campus class time.
And finals? Many courses have three-hour finals scheduled into set blocks that most undergrads wouldn't dream of toying with. Clearly some exceptions were made for the future performance artist, because even if we, again, underestimate his finals week load, he must have gone through about 25-30 hours of testing, not to mention any essay writing.
UCLA Magazine noted that Franco was able to carry that workload while simultaneously working on movies. And, for good measure, he maintained a GPA above 3.5.
And he wrote a novel for his honors thesis.
Really?
After finishing his UCLA degree, Franco went on to simultaneously enroll in three master's programs: Columbia's MFA, Brooklyn College for creative writing, and NYU's Tisch School of the Arts for directing (where he earned a D in acting, not for want of good work but for poor attendance -- he happened to be filming a movie).
He's now at Yale studying for a Ph.D. in English, enrolled at the Rhode Island School of Design, Warren Wilson College for poetry, teaching a class at Tisch on film and collaborating on a course at Columbia College Hollywood on... himself.
He's also reportedly returning to NYU in May for a second MFA in film editing (despite that D at Tisch).
The question isn't so much "Is James Franco really that smart?" He very well may be. But it's clear that regardless of the amount of effort he actually seems to be putting into his academic and literary pursuits, it's patently obvious that were it not for his acting and modeling career, he could not simultaneously enroll in so many programs on so many prestigious campuses.
So how is the work? The Oscars broadcast he and Anne Hathaway helmed was ranked among the worst in the Academy's history, the New York Times called his first art show "a confusing mix of the clueless and the halfway promising" and his short story published in Esquire was pretty widely panned.
Really, here's a taste of his fiction:
Joe smokes. His window is all the way down, and he breathes his smoke out the black gaping gap.
Later:
"Fuck you.""Fuck you, Joe, you're an idiot."
"You're an idiot."
"I know," I say. And I am. I am friends with a slug, and my other friends are pigs and wolves. I never make friends with nice things, just the shit.
Fellow Yale Ph.D. student Craig Fehrman plucked another gem from Palo Alto, the Scribner collection of his stories:
In "American History," another one of Palo Alto's better stories, a tough black guy tells someone to "break off this motherfucking honky." Here's Franco's gloss on this: "It came out of his cruel face like a rocky stream." What does that even mean? Are the words the rocks or the water? And what does that make the face?
Ferhman notes that in a blurb for Palo Alto, Franco's Columbia fiction prof Ben Marcus gushes about his pupil's "intense artistry," and goes on to compare him to Kathy Acker. What did Marcus have to say about Jonathan Franzen? Ferhman rightly includes that Marcus derides the author of The Corrections and Freedom as "creating a performance that was sometimes more compelling than his own fiction."
Franco's celebrity is clearly not beside the point. It is the point.
It's tempting to gloss everything Franco is doing as some postmodern exercise in performance, as though he's consciously operating on some Baudrillardian level of hyperreality. Universities and colleges in different states, movies and TV shows, novels, short stories, museum exhibits -- why not? If Andy Warhol can urinate on a canvas and show it in a museum, clearly Franco should be able to get away with hosting a nationally televised award's show with that "Damn right I don't give a damn" smirk.
But there's a real problem with what New York Magazine calls "The Franco Project": By accepting Franco into their universities and publishing houses with such gusto, these institutions create a mockery of themselves. Though it's fine for UCLA to blush about the astounding course-load of its dropout turned megawatt literary creation, many close to the campus were stung not only by the school's decision to offer Franco the commencement speech (having a fellow student impart wisdom on you doesn't seem that appealing, it seems) and his last-minute cancellation, but also by his gleeful parody of the incident on Funny or Die.
And though it's cute for Franco to fist-pump and name-check NYU at the Oscars, it's less charming when the nationally-respected university offers a graduate-level teaching gig to someone who is clearly too busy to provide a meaningful academic experience (he'll be skyping into the Columbia College Hollywood class on himself "depending on his schedule").
The joke, it seems, is on them.
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I agree that he doesn't have to be a genius (and I didn't include any judgment on his intelligence): "The question isn't so much "Is James Franco really that smart?" He very well may be." The point was to leave the question of how smart he is aside, as you ably do in your comment.
The thrust of the blog is that all these various institutions are so breathlessly trading on his celebrity that no one pauses to wonder if it's "possible" to do things like take 62 units at UCLA at once.
Cheers.
Princeton years ago had to defend letting Brooke Shields in by trying to claim that her SAT scores were close to their average....close being a good 60-100 points lower.
Were the Olsen Twins really qualified to go to NYU? etc...
It worked for Hermione...
But Drew hasn't put it all together. Specifically, Franco has just started up a collaboration with appropriation guru Richard Prince (drawing for Palo Alto). Who is also friends with Terry Richardson (Franco poses for him...almost daily). And both of whom are friends with James Frey (they all did a small book together). Interesting that James Frey was courting Columbia MFA students in creative writing for Full Fathoms Five while James was attending the program, no? I would not be surprised if the whole academia gig is primarily to secure ideas to appropriate for other Gagosian artists...
I mean, how else would James land a spot at Gagosian Gallery (it's his, what, fifth exhibition??)..
And just in case you're thinking this is too conspiratorial: http://www.artinfo.com/news/story/37097/james-franco-and-gus-van-sant-at-gagosian-la/
Notice that the title on that pages has been changed...the photo gallery still has the original title...looks like Jeffrey Deitch may have tried to salvage at least a small part of his reputation.
His UCLA credits claim sounds suspicious. If he took that many credits in one quarter, it meant he did the work of 4 quarters in one quarter. Did he enroll in the courses at all, enroll and complete, or enroll and complete some/many later on?
What is the offical information on his activities? What you recited sounds like spin from a media flack. Maybe there's an elment of truth to the tales, but not the entire truth.
Maybe if I were a celebrity I could have gone with my original plan.
Even if you are taking BS classes, 60-something credits is ridiculous. He was also a drop-out before doing that...I don't know what the significance of that is.
Franco is probably not a happy person when you peel away all the layers...
I remember first reading about the 62-unit quarter in GQ. When I read about it again in UCLA Magazine, I was extremely disappointed that Franco's claim was "true," but I was even more disappointed that the author of the UCLA Magazine article drops the claim like a bomb and simply keeps on going without even acknowledging the improbability of it all. Any UCLA undergrad knows that a 62 unit-per-quarter schedule is highly dubious (see the comments in the article). So for a university publication to tout it without so much as explaining how the logistics of it were worked out is really puzzling.