James Franco Pre-Festival Event
Running time: 90 mins
James Franco (Pre-Festival) Storytelling Reimagined Event occurs February 28th in Palo Alto, CA. The Maverick Spirit Award Presentation will occur as part of this James Franco Storytelling Reimagined Event. If you want to try to pin down James Franco, youd better be really quick and have a lot of pins nearby. Much heralded and much analyzed, this bona fide, modern-day Renaissance man doesnt dabble; whatever he takes on, its the full plunge, with both feet, arms, head, and hearthis entire being. Actor, director, producer, writer, author, performance artist, meta-explorer, and teacher, Franco lays waste to the phrase multi-tasking. Attempting to label him would be a mistake, but if you called him a mega-tasker, youd at least be somewhere in the ballpark. Even as a boy, growing up in Palo Alto, Franco approached life with intensity and a thoroughness of purpose. When he was presented with a set of building blocks, for instance, the ensuing, usually complex, structure incorporated every single one. Possessing boundless curiosity and seemingly unlimited energy, he is in perpetual motion, swimming furiously, yet gracefully, in his personal sea of creativity. Does he ever rest? Never, Franco says. Its an impossibility. I dont even like to sleep. I feel as if theres so much to do. Following high school graduation, Franco headed south to UCLA and took a theater class to overcome shyness. Bitten by the bug, he committed completely to becoming an actor, dropping out of college, and enrolling in the intense and rigorous program at the renowned Studio 4 Playhouse West. In 1999, he was fatefully cast by director Judd Apatow in the short-lived, but critically acclaimedand eventual cult hit television series Freaks and Geeks. Co-stars included Seth Rogen and Jason Segel. Francos breakout role came in the 2001 TNT biopic James Dean for which he received a Golden Globe Award. Robert De Niro was so impressed with Francos performance that he personally cast him as the junkie son, Joey, in City by the Sea. Since then, Franco has amassed well over 100 acting credits, including 127 Hours, (Best Actor Academy Award nomination), Milk, Spider-Man trilogy, Pineapple Express, Oz the Great and Powerful, Rise of the Planet of the Apes, and Eat, Pray, Love. One of his strangest, most interesting gigs was a self-initiated, 54-episode stint (2009-2012) on the soap opera General Hospital, as a crazy artist and serial killer named Franco. With enthusiastic endorsement from the shows producers, actor Francos idea was to create a new way of watching the long-running program, where the Franco character almost knows hes an actor on a soap opera. The result was the creation of a bizarre meta vortex of images that, as performance art, examined the very nature of the viewing experience. Eager to continue the education hed abandoned earlier, Franco, at age 28 (then a steadily employed actor), returned to UCLA for a BA in Creative Writing. Concerned that other students would think he was being given a pass because of his celebrity and acting credentials, he took on additional mega units to demonstrate the seriousness of his intentions. He loved the course work so much that after UCLA, he immediately entered graduate degree programs in filmmaking (NYU), English/fiction writing (Columbia, Brooklyn College, Yale), and poetry (Warren Wilson College in North Carolina). One of the products of his studies is the short story collection, Palo Alto, published in 2010. Now, at 37, Franco has also donned the instructors mantel at NYU, USC, and UCLA. I've been very fortunate. I had to work hard but had opportunities to do everything that I wanted. That's one of the reasons I'm teaching. I'm trying to give back to other people. That's what I guess I want to do nowcontinue to be creative in a way that I can give back. - P.D. Crane