James Franco Wrote A Fairly Offensive Short Story About Lindsay Lohan
In it, she calls him a "bookworm punk blogger faggot".
When he went on Howard, James Franco, denied having sex with Lindsay Lohan.
The allegation had come from Lohan herself — namely, from a misplaced list she had written of all of the famous men she’d had sex with — but Franco told a different story: “I never had sex with her. We were at this hotel during a very dark period of her history … and it seemed pretty damn clear that she liked me. She’d come out to the pool area and find me … She even broke into my room one time … I open my eyes and there’s Lindsay in my room at 3 a.m, and it’s like, ‘Okay, what do I do now?’ I read her a story.”
There were some questions to be asked. Why was Lindsay Lohan stalking James Franco? Is he telling the truth, or is he being James Franco again? And, more importantly, what story did he read her?
The answer to at least one of those questions has been answered in the most James Franco-like way possible: in a piece of writing that contains all the pieces of narrative Franco claims to be fact, but which is published in the ‘Fiction’ issue of Vice magazine. SAH META.
The piece is called ‘Bungalow 89‘, and is a snapshot in the life of a celebrity who is pondering his existence as a celebrity. He tells a story about River Phoenix, that Gus van Sant told him: “River was pulled over by the cops for wearing jeans with a hole in the front so big that his dick hung out.” He tells another about the shooting of My Private Idaho, when Sad Keanu was ready to quit: “River came into Keanu’s little hotel room, drunk from being in the bar with Udo Kier, and jumped on Keanu’s bed and pretended to be the Incredible Hulk, to make Keanu lighten up.”
And he tells the tale of Lindsay Lohan, showing up at his door in bare feet and pyjamas, before he read to her two of J.D. Salinger’s saddest stories. (Warning: the piece contains a huge spoiler of ‘A Perfect Day For Bananafish’. Read ‘Bananafish’ first. But only if everything in your life is going okay.)
“Once upon a time a guy, a Hollywood guy, read some Salinger to a young woman who hadn’t read him before,” Franco writes. “Let’s call this girl Lindsay. She was a Hollywood girl, but a damaged one. I knew that she would like Salinger, because most young women do. I read her two of the Nine Stories, ‘A Perfect Day for Bananafish’ and ‘For Esmé—with Love and Squalor’. ‘Bananafish’ was great because it has a nagging mother on the other end of the phone line, nothing like Lindsay’s real mother, but still, the mother-daughter thing was good for her to hear.”
Franco goes on to talk about Salinger, and his “obsession with innocence”. He writes about the 2011 Oscars he hosted, and how Lindsay leaked a story to the press about shooting a sex book with Franco and Terry Richardson. And as he lies in bed with her — “I wasn’t going to fuck her” — he strokes her hair, and ponders the demise which led her to this point.
“I ran my fingers through her hair and thought about this girl sleeping on my chest, our fictional Hollywood girl, Lindsay. What will she do? I hope she gets better. You see, she is famous. She was famous because she was a talented child actress, and now she’s famous because she gets into trouble. She is damaged. For a while, after her high hellion days, she couldn’t get work because she couldn’t get insured. They thought she would run off the sets to party. Her career suffered, and she started getting arrested (stealing, DUIs, car accidents, other things). But the arrests, even as they added up, were never going to be an emotional bottom for her, because she got just as much attention for them as she used to get for her film performances. She would get money offers for her jailhouse memoirs, crazy offers. So how would she ever stop the craziness when the response to her work and the response to her life had converged into one? Two kinds of performance, in film and in life, had melted into one.
“But I suppose a tabloid-performance run is limited for anyone. After a while it’s just an out-of-control vehicle running on fumes.”
The story also contains a visitation from a demon, and a story Lindsay tells about fucking “a big-schnozzed, big-dicked, drunk motherfucker”. It’s actually not a terrible piece of writing, if you can get through the James Franco of it all.