By MELENA RYZIK
VANCOUVER, British Columbia - The actor James Franco is on a quest to be an artist, not merely a celebrity. His paintings and video installations have been exhibited at galleries. He is studying for advanced degrees at various colleges, writing short stories and composing poetry, and appearing on the ABC network’s “General Hospital” while still flirting in big-budget movies like “Eat Pray Love.”
His cross-cultural meandering has sparked chatter on blogs and in print, sometimes with the help of Mr. Franco himself . In “Howl,” Mr. Franco, 32, plays the poet Allen Ginsberg as a young man; for most of his screen time he is giving an interview to an unseen interlocutor.
The film opened this year’s Sundance Film Festival and will begin a wider release on September 24. Mr. Franco met its filmmakers, Jeffrey Friedman and Rob Epstein, on the set of “Milk” - its director, Gus Van Sant, is an executive producer of “Howl” - and signed up even before it was financed. “It was a huge boost and gave us a lot of credibility,” Mr. Friedman said of enlisting Mr. Franco, who may be best known for appearing in three “Spider-Man” films. Mr. Franco prepared by watching interviews, reading biographies, talking to experts, wearing the Ginsberg glasses.
His belief that the young poet was an eager communicator even as he was just discovering what he wanted to say applies to his own path. “I have joked that he’s a 21st-century beatnik,” Mr. Epstein said of Mr. Franco, “but he really does have that sensibility. He’s really interested and excited about experimentation and exploring the possibilities of how one can be an artist.”
While preparing for “Howl,” Mr. Franco was enrolled in master’s degree programs at New York University (for film) and Columbia University and Brooklyn College (for writing). For months he would walk to class in New York listening to Ginsberg read “Howl” on his iPod. “I’d have the little book with me, and I’d listen to him, and I’d just read along with him to just ingrain that voice in my head,” he said .
Mr. Franco has made three short films about poems for school and is at work on a feature about the poet Hart Crane that he will adapt (from Paul L. Mariani’s biography), direct and star in. And he is in his fifth semester in yet another graduate program, for poetry, at Warren Wilson College near Asheville, North Carolina.
Academic overload is not what actors are known for, but Mr. Franco has gone beyond that . His New York art debut is on view at the Clocktower Gallery. His first book, “Palo Alto,” a story collection set in his California hometown, will be published in October. After that comes “127 Hours,” Danny Boyle’s dramatization of the true story of Aron Ralston, the hiker forced to amputate his own arm after being trapped in a Utah canyon; Mr. Franco again spends much of his screen time alone.
This autumn he begins a Ph.D. program at Yale University, in Connecticut, for English. “I shouldn’t say I’m doing so many things, because it starts to sound ridiculous after a while,” Mr. Franco said, rightly. The poetry projects and his book are the least influenced by his celebrity, he said, though he knows people will view them through that prism.
“As hard as I work in film, it’s my day job,” he said. “Those are, I don’t know, pure expression.” Some of his hyperproductivity is the result of his upbringing. His parents’ interests included painting, software development, educational reform and children’s books. “I guess you could say that we have a very strange, artsy family,” said Dave Franco, the youngest of the three Franco siblings, and also an actor.
Mr. Franco’s transition from leading man to intellectual does not surprise Seth Rogen, Mr. Franco’s co-star on the cult TV show “Freaks and Geeks.” “If anything, it was really weird that he was ever pursuing the straight-ahead movie star path,” he said. Mr. Franco is happier as an artist now, even if his efforts beyond film so far have not been critically successful. “All I can do,” he said, “is put the work in.” He’s an ambitious student, not a superhuman.
