The Literary Life of James Franco

The Los Angeles Times has taken note of James Franco recently buying up a lot of literary properties for potential movies.

From the piece...

On Tuesday, D.J. Waldie sent around an e-mail announcing that James Franco had bought the rights to "Holy Land," Waldie's memoir of growing up in Lakewood in the 1950s. New housing tracts! Fallout shelters! Strange neighbors! Suburban ennui! According to Waldie, Franco read "Holy Land" while an undergraduate at UCLA.

It seems like Franco has been on something of a literary shopping spree. Two weeks ago, news spread that he was optioning Stephen Elliott's "The Adderall Diaries," a book that is, for the most part, also a memoir. "If it were to be made, the idea is that James would write, direct and star in it," Elliott told the Observer. "He seems like a pretty busy guy, so I don't know when he's going to find the time for it, but I hope he does."

In 2009, Franco told a New Yorker Festival audience that he'd optioned "The Broken Tower," a biography of poet Hart Crane, and Franco's brother Dave told GQ that the two were working on an adaptation of Charles Bukowski's "Ham on Rye."

Also recently, Terry Gross at NPR interviewed him as our modern day Renaissance Man.

From that piece...

In his latest film Howl, Franco again portrays a real-life person — this time the Beat poet Allen Ginsberg. The non-linear film traces Ginsberg's life during the 1940s and 1950s and reenacts Ginberg's 1955 debut performance of his famous poem Howl. Franco says that he was excited to immerse himself in the beatnik culture of the 1950s.

"I loved the Beats and I had been reading them since I was about 15, and ever since I got into acting I always dreamed about doing a movie about the Beats," he explains. "But I never thought that I would play Allen. I always thought I would play [Jack] Kerouac or [Neal] Cassady."

Even after he was offered the part of Ginsberg, Franco says, he still had lingering doubts about the role.
Palo Alto by James Franco

"I thought 'Hmm. Will I be of service to this movie playing Allen? Can I really do that?'" he says. "So I went back and looked at some of the photographs of young Allen and then watched Robert Frank's Pull My Daisy, which was made in 1959. ... Most people, when they think of Ginsberg, they think of the older Ginsberg, the heavier and balder and bearded Ginsberg. And that would have been a stretch. But the younger Ginsberg is actually close to my build and we have similar coloring. And he had hair."

Franco scheduled his time on Howl's set around his class schedule. In the past few years, he's attended graduate school at Columbia University, New York University, Brooklyn College and Warren Wilson College — and currently takes classes at Yale University and the Rhode Island School of Design. Several of the stories he wrote in fiction classes at Columbia and Brooklyn College will be released in his upcoming collection Palo Alto: Stories.