James Franco TV - Funny Or Die

The Art of Elysium, a non-profit 501(c) (3) organization founded in 1997, encourages working actors, artists and musicians to voluntarily dedicate their time and talent to children who are battling serious medical conditions. We provide artistic workshops in the following disciplines: acting, art, comedy, fashion, music, radio, songwriting and creative writing.

Palo Alto is the debut of a surprising and powerful new literary voice. Written with an immediate sense of place--claustrophobic and ominous--James Franco's collection traces the lives of an extended group of teenagers as they experiment with vices of all kinds, struggle with their families and one another, and succumb to self-destructive, often heartless nihilism.

Purchase at Amazon | Barnes & Noble | Borders

Contact: Email
Hosted By: Fan Sites Network
Launched: March 8, 2004
Users Online:
Fan Sites Network • Privacy Policy • DMCA

James Franco’s real life mother is pulling double duty these days – she’s also playing his mom on TV.This Friday (Jul. 2), author Betsy Franco will star on ABC’s General Hospital as part of James Franco’s returning storyline, playing his onscreen mom.

This marks Betsy’s first ever TV role and her first time acting alongside her famous son – one of her ultimate wishes.

Betsy, who’s been taking acting and sketch comedy classes at Stanford for the past six years, says James considered her for a role as his mom in one of his movies once before, but didn’t think she was “mean enough” for the part.

This time, however, she was ready to show her range, and prepared by running lines with James beforehand as an “ice breaker.”

Once the cameras started rolling, she was calm – and completely awestruck by her son’s commitment to the craft, which officially gave her the “acting bug.”

Source.

The Museum of Contemporary Art, Los Angeles (MOCA), taped a special episode of ABC’s Emmy Award–winning daytime drama General Hospital on the occasion of the return of character Franco the artist, played by artist and actor James Franco, on the Pacific Design Plaza next to MOCA Pacific Design Center. Conceived by James Franco as part of a performance work titled SOAP at MOCA: James Franco on General Hospital, the taping was observed by a select live audience. This special episode will commence on ABC on Thursday, July 22, 3pm EST/2pm PST.

In this special episode, Franco, James Franco’s character from General Hospital, had an exhibition at MOCA Pacific Design Center, during which time Jeffrey Deitch, the new director of MOCA, and the characters from Port Charles from General Hospital made their West Coast debut. The character’s exhibition included full-scale models of the locations in which he encountered mobster Jason Morgan (Emmy winner Steve Burton). To the musical accompaniment of his artistic collaborator Kalup Dashinel, played by critically acclaimed video and performance artist Kalup Linzy, who performed live during the taping, Franco attempted to lure Jason and others into his art-trap. If all goes to plan, mastermind Franco will turn both Jason Morgan’s life and his own death into art, a performance to end all performances.

Continue reading »

TV Guide Magazine sat down with the star to find out why he’s such a show-biz nonconformist. 

TV Guide Magazine: I’m guessing that most of your movie-star pals would consider it ridiculous — if not downright suicidal — to take a role on a daytime soap. What makes you so different?
Franco: I’ve come to realize that maybe this is my only life, so I’m pursuing everything I’m interested in.

TV Guide Magazine: Still, you seem to find value in even the slimmest of experiences, like when you cameo’d as yourself in a game-show sketch on Saturday Night Live and didn’t have a single line of dialogue. You’ve done countless movies without a screen credit. You put your film career on hold to go back to college. You do not go with the flow.
Franco: I went back to school because I wanted to pursue writing. Rather than trying to do it solo, I needed to be around other serious writers. That’s why I go on SNL to try comedy, because those are some of the funniest people around. Why not work with the best?

TV Guide Magazine: Were you raised to be this open and experimental? Is it a Franco family trait?
Franco: My parents didn’t consciously infuse that kind of thing. But they met when they both were art majors at Stanford. My mother’s been an author of children’s books. She’s now a novelist for young adults. My grandmother and my uncle are art dealers. So I grew up around the art world and I’ve been branching out and trying new things since I was a teenager.

Continue reading »

James Franco makes his big return to General Hospital at the end of this month. But this time, he’s bringing backup. James’s mom, Betsy Franco, will show up playing — have you guessed? — Franco’s own mother.

OK, first of all: how adorable that James Franco got his mom a gig on GH? But also: how freaky of a mom would you have to be to raise a murderous psycho like our onscreen Franco? We’re predicting a lot of scarves.

Look for Betsy to make her Port Charles debut in early July.

Source.

James Franco is returning to General Hospital!

The 32-year-old actor, who played Franco during a stint on the show last fall, will return next month for a “wild ride of mystery, music, murder and mayhem”. James‘ first airdate back is Wednesday, June 30!

“We are so thrilled to welcome James back to General Hospital,” Executive Producer Jill Farren Phelps said in a statement. “We had such a great time with him and are very excited that he decided to return to Port Charles to take care of unfinished business.”

“Working on General Hospital was a great experience,” James said in a statement. “I love the cast, writers, directors and producers. They have become a new family for me. I can’t wait for the work we will do this summer.”

Source.

Something a bit different from the Sundance Film Festival. James talks about his stint on General Hospital.

For months we’ve obsessed over the reasons behind James Franco’s bizarre-but-fascinating decision to join the cast of General Hospital as a murderous artist named Franco. So when we ran into the coy actor Monday night at a Cinema Society screening of his Sundance-bound Allen Ginsberg biopic, Howl, we asked for — nay, demanded! — a straightforward explanation for his soap-opera move. And he finally gave it to us.

The idea came to him while preparing a second movie with the artist Carter. The new film (which will also feature Catherine Keener) is called Maladies, and Franco plays a former soap star. “Now, just because I’m playing a character who was formerly on a soap opera doesn’t mean I had to go on a soap opera, right?” said Franco. “So going on General Hospital isn’t directly related to Maladies. But we got to talking, like, ‘Hey, what if I really did a soap opera? That would be kind of amazing!’”

It turns out Franco has been a soap fan for a long time. “I was home sick a lot because I didn’t like school when I was little,” he said. “So if I wasn’t watching my VHS copy of Ferris Bueller’s Day Off, or Whoopi Goldberg’s movie Jumping Jack Flash — because those were the only two movies we had the foresight to record — I guess I was watching soap operas.” So he called up the folks at General Hospital, who were, of course, ecstatic. He only gave them one bit of direction: “I said, ‘I want to play an artist, and I want him to be crazy.’ And they wrote this character that was better than I could have ever asked for. It was their idea to call the character Franco. I said, ‘That’s crazy. Thank you.’” It was only after he’d signed up that he decided to bring his own crew along to film the filming, he said, “because I wanted to really have ownership over the piece.” (This footage would be part of his yet-to-be-confirmed performance-art show at Deitch Projects’ Long Island City space this spring. And, in true meta form, that show might in turn be taped for a special episode of General Hospital.)

Click here for the rest.

Thanks to Rachel for the heads up on these! Here’s several more stills and behind the scenes images of James on General Hospital.

GALLERY LINKS:
- Television Series > 2009 | General Hospital > Behind The Scenes
- Television Series > 2009 | General Hospital > Production Stills

Also, here’s a video of James speaking about his character and General Hospital.

James Franco has said that his stint on General Hospital as “bad boy” artist Franco is part of a larger art project, and he’s working on making good on that promise. Though his story arc ends later this month, Franco tells us that this spring he’ll participate in a gallery show at New York’s Deitch Projects that will be shot for a subsequent “special episode” of GH. (This episode will be co-directed by Franco himself.) The Deitch exhibition will relate “to what I’ve already shot on GH,” Franco says. (A spokesperson for the gallery says plans for the exhibition and filming are not yet finalized.)

Of course, Franco has been worming his way into the art world for some months now: teaming up with the video artist Carter for the art film Erased James Franco; schmoozing the booths at Art Basel Miami Beach; presenting at the Guggenheim’s Art Awards; and buddying up to the new head of P.S.1 Contemporary Art Center (and MoMA chief curator at large), Klaus Biesenbach.

Continue reading »

James wrote this article for the Wall Street Journal about his stint on General Hospital. Check it out!

A Star, a Soap and the Meaning of Art
Why an appearance on ‘General Hospital’ qualifies as performance art

I was recently treated to an early prototype of a dessert that Marina Abramovi?, the “grandmother of performance art,” created with the pastry chef Dominique Ansel. It’s a cylindrical pastry with a lychee center sprinkled over with chili powder and raw gold. I was instructed to kiss a napkin that had been printed with a square of gold powder that would transfer to my face before eating the dessert. This way the dessert would pass through a golden gateway before it was ingested. I did as told, then suggested to the chef that it needed more chili. Was this art?

I have been obsessed with performance art for over a decade—ever since the Mexican performance artist Guillermo Gómez-Peña came to visit my class at Cal Arts summer school. I finally took the plunge and experimented with the form myself when I signed on to appear on 20 episodes of “General Hospital” as the bad-boy artist “Franco, just Franco.” I disrupted the audience’s suspension of disbelief, 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. Everyone watching would see an actor they recognized, a real person in a made-up world. In performance art, the outcome is uncertain—and this was no exception. My hope was for people to ask themselves if soap operas are really that far from entertainment that is considered critically legitimate. Whether they did was out of my hands.

As Ms. Abramovi? told me over our dessert tasting, performance art is all about context. “If you bake some bread in a museum space it becomes art, but if you do it at home you’re a baker.” Likewise, when I wear green makeup and fly across a rooftop in “Spider-Man 3,” I’m working as an actor, but were I to do the same thing on the subway platform, a host of possibilities would open up. Playing the Green Goblin in the subway would no longer be about creating the illusion that I am flying. It would be about inserting myself in a familiar space in such a way that it becomes stranger than fiction, along the lines of what I’m doing on “General Hospital.”

Click here for the rest.

And here is the video where James interviews Marina Abramovi.

I’ve added a few images to the gallery over the last few days, including two more photos from James’ spread in i-D magazine. So check them out!

GALLERY LINKS:
- Television Series > 2009 | General Hospital > Ep. #11941
- Movie Productions > 2010 | Date Night > Theatrical Trailer Screencaptures
- Magazine Scans > 2009 > i-D Magazine (Fall 2009)

And here’s the trailer for Date Night! Can’t wait to see James in action for this one, it looks like a great movie!