James Franco has big plans, always.

Andrew Medichini/AP 

 

What is James Franco doing?

People started asking this question, in earnest, somewhere around the time he went on General Hospital in 2009. Up until then, he'd been a young actor whose path was relatively normal: he was on Freaks & Geeks, and in Never Been Kissed, and he played James Dean on cable. He was in the Sam Raimi Spider-Man movies, and then into Apatow country. Occasional forays into super-artsy stuff like films that showed in museums? No big deal. Nothing you wouldn't see from, say, Ethan Hawke or somebody like that. Swerves between, say, Pineapple Express and Milk, but that happens. Mork wound up in Good Morning, Vietnam, after all.

But then: General Hospital.

Appearances in mainstream stoner comedies are one thing, when it comes to changing up the highness of your brow and toying with the expectations people have of what you would and wouldn't do. But ... a soap? A real, straight-up soap? The same one Luke and Laura were on? Even knowing that he called the appearance a form of performance art, it continued to raise the question...

What is James Franco doing?

Right now, he's releasing his first alleged novel, Actors Anonymous, but we'll get back to that.
It's not like he needs another line of work. He has a band. He writes short stories. He hosted the Oscars. He was roasted on Comedy Central. He's taken many, many classes — and taught some, too. He makes offbeat art and appears in other people's offbeat art. He's played a hot guy on single-woman network sitcoms (both Tina Fey's and Mindy Kaling's).

At the time of a 2010 profile in New York Magazine, the question Franco predicted would be asked about him — and the writer told him was already being asked — was whether he was spreading himself too thin. But in fact, by doing so much, Franco may have achieved something that's almost impossible: he has no meaningful image other than as himself. There is nothing James Franco could do at this point that would move the needle.

What could he do that would seem out of place? What could he do that you really wouldn't expect? He wouldn't really surprise people if he won an Academy Award. He wouldn't really surprise people if he decided to take a one-day role in a Virgin Airlines video demonstrating seatbelts. He could show up in oil paintings, on a sitcom, as a Jeopardy! contestant, as the announced star of So Fast & Extra Furious 8, or in hard-core pornography, and nobody would really think it was anything other than a further example of Well, That's James Franco For You.

"I might be surprised if somebody else did that, but I can sort of believe it, coming from James Franco," is what a lot of us would say about literally anything he did with his career. Aside from something nefarious, even in his personal life, what could he really do now that would require a comeback, or a rehabilitation tour, or a second chance, or an audit of how audiences feel about him?

At times, he's seemed like the kind of guy who's obsessed with pretending he only touches the avant-garde — a self-styled intellectual who disdains everything that's not from art museums. But he's also perfectly happy to do Rise Of The Planet Of The Apes and Oz The Great And Powerful, two huge moneymaking films that have little connection to short films that wind up in museums. This year, he did This Is The End, a proudly stupid gross-out apocalypse comedy in which he and his friends play themselves.

Blockbusters, both self-consciously respectable and not so much? Fine. Obscurity? Fine. School?
Fine. Art? Fine. Poetry? Fine.

And now he's published that "novel," Actors Anonymous. It's not really a novel; it's really a collection of ... stuff. Loosely — like, "XXXL shirt on XXXS body" loosely — based on the 12 steps of addiction treatment programs, it consists of short stories, snippets of scripts, and what it's hard not to envision as Things James Franco Wrote Down On The Back Of A Receipt One Time About Acting And Being Famous.

Among these snippets, there are flashes of insight — like, "I performed for money, and I performed for free. It's better to perform for money if you hate the director; it's better to perform for free if you love him." But there are also things nobody would pay money to read under normal circumstances — like, "There are some people that are very serious about their acting. But the ones that are too serious are boring and usually end up strangling their own performances." That would probably not make the cut if he said it in an interview; it's not really book material.

The fiction sections are stories about actors, but other themes tie them together: mostly, they are about young men driven nearly mad by some combination of generalized rage and a specific desire to have sex with, and sometimes to dominate and possess, women. They're far too inconsistent to be really satisfying, but they simmer with a sometimes intriguing frustration. Franco loves to intersperse signs that certain stories are autobiographical and that he's appearing in the book as "James Franco" or "The Actor," but there are also tweaked details that are meant to hold the reader at a slight distance and retain some sense of disorientation with regard to truth and fiction.

In other words, it's the James-Franco-iest book he could have written, because there's nothing to wrap yourself around. It's not very good, but it's not unambitious, and it's not lazy. It's about him but it's not, it's revealing but it's not, and in the end, it's interesting but it's not.

It's impossible for a celebrity to have an image that's a true blank canvas; we are far too voracious for that. But Franco has perhaps achieved the next best thing: a canvas onto which he's spilled so much paint in so many patterns that it ceases to look like anything, and anything you could add to it would look like it belonged there. And, of course, if you stare at it long enough, you can see patterns emerge and then recede — a poseur, a poet, something jarringly authentic, something painfully manufactured. Even, if you squint, the Last Honest Man In Hollywood, who puts out a book that demonstrates that like a lot of us, he has a certain number of sharp thoughts and an awful lot of mundane ones.

Lots of actors go high-low — the Steven Soderbergh "one for them, one for me" thing. But this is different; Franco has achieved a lack of definition that's unthinkable for a guy like George Clooney, no matter what combination of art-house movies and blockbusters he might make.

There was a lot of talk after Franco's Comedy Central roast about the number of jokes that focused on the idea that he's gay. If nothing else, you'd expect the people who were there to roast him, like Seth Rogen and Nick Kroll and Andy Samberg, to expect a little more from themselves than gay-panic har-har-ing like it's 1998. Even if they didn't worry that those jokes — 26, by BuzzFeed's count — would be offensive, you'd expect them to worry that after 26, they'd seem tired, as Aziz Ansari eventually pointed out that they were.

But maybe people who would normally know better remained stalled at lame gay jokes because roasts are usually focused on making fun of an image of the roastee that the audience will recognize, and Franco offers up less material in that regard than you might think. Hard to make pseudo-intellectual jokes at the expense of a guy who cheerfully made Your Highness. Hard to make dumb-stoner jokes at the expense of a guy who spends so much time pursuing advanced degrees.

It's really hard to know how much of this is on purpose. If it is — if this splatter-painting on his own image to achieve a certain imageless state is something he planned — it's nearly genius, but rather cynical. If it's accidental, it's almost sweet.

But the result is the same either way. He has a strange kind of freedom that comes from a very successful campaign of obfuscation, not so much about his personal life as about his sensibility. So he floats around, and he does what he wants, and none of it changes anything.

Franco has 13 projects listed on his IMDB page that are (or are rumored to be) somewhere between concept and execution — and those are just acting. There's also directing, writing, cinematography, and an unbilled job as the provider of morning pastries for the cast of NCIS.

That last one is a lie, but for a minute, you believed it.

Port Charles has an Oscar nominee in its midst! Well, sort of.

James Franco, who's up for an Academy Award for his work in 127 Hours, is returning to ABC's daytime drama General Hospital as performance artist Franco.

The actor, who is also hosting the Oscars with Anne Hathaway, will appear the soap on episodes airing Feb. 25 and Feb 28 (at 3 p.m. ET) to "wreak havoc" on the fictional town of Port Charles, according to a release from ABC, and to "make an important phone call to his nemesis Jason Morgan" (played by Steve Burton), who appears in a behind-the-scenes shot with Franco.

Keep up with James Franco in the pages of PEOPLE Magazine by subscribing now.

Following a two-month stint on General Hospital in 2009, Franco reprised his role as the mysterious and dangerous artist in the summer of 2010.

"Working on General Hospital was a great experience," he told PEOPLE at the time. "I love the cast, writers, directors and producers. They have become a new family for me."

At one point in the instant cult classic Spring Breakers (in limited release March 15), one of the film’s girls gone mega-wild poses a question to their rapper-gangster quasi-chaperone, played by James Franco: Is he being serious? James Franco, festooned with cornrows and teardrop tattoo, answers with another question: “What do you think?”

James Franco seems to put a lot of people in a questioning mood. “Who Does James Franco Think He Is?” asked Macleans. “Is Franco Being Frank?” asked The Columbus Dispatch. “What Does It All Add Up To?” asked Esquire. Performance artist Marina Abramovic, who is making a film about James Franco, recently told Elle, “I’m interested to explain to [people] ‘Who is James Franco?’ and ‘Why is he doing what he’s doing?’”

“What he’s doing” is a lot. At the moment, he’s about to appear not only in Spring Breakers but the 3D Disney extravaganza Oz the Great and Powerful (in theaters March 8). That means that audiences can conceivably plan a James Franco double bill featuring a freaky, gun-fellating thug and a classic storybook character—and this just weeks after he hit the Sundance festival with no less than three films, all of them sex-centric. But James Franco isn’t just an actor (known for Freaks and Geeks, James Dean, Spider-Man, Milk and Pineapple Express, to name just a few). He directs. He’s a published author. He co-hosted the Oscars. (He was nominated for one, too, for 127 Hours.) He paints. He’s in a band. He’s a poet. He was the face of Gucci. He’s making a documentary about Gucci. At the Daytona 500 on Feb. 24, he served as Grand Marshal.

“Who is James Franco,” on the other hand, is simple: James Franco is the 21st century’s first great public intellectual.

Really.

These days, public intellectuals don’t get a lot of cred. Or maybe they would, if you could find more of them. Where are the thinkers who have become celebrities by speaking to the general public about the topics of the times? The American breed is identified with the essay-happy New York Intellectuals—Edmund Wilson, Mary McCarthy and the Trillings, among others—who held sway from the 1930s through the ’50s. The decline and near-extinction of this cultural species was charted in the 2001 book Public Intellectuals: A Study of Decline, in which author Richard Posner placed some of the blame on a shrinking market for their work and increased specialization within the academy. A few folks have had a go at the “public intellectual” gig in the last decade or so—Christopher Hitchens was often called one—but nobody really pulls it off anymore. At least not well.

Unlike Hitchens, James Franco isn’t known for critical essays. But as Robert Boynton points out in a 1995 Atlantic Monthly piece about the rise of African-American intellectuals, nothing says public intellectualism has to come in one format. The term was invented decades before the New York Intellectuals chose the essay as their preferred medium; today, their analogues—like Cornel West, to take one of Boynton’s examples—are better known for their Daily Show appearances than their writing. James Franco does write commentary (he took to the Wall Street Journal in 2009 in defense of performance art), but the rest of his work fits the bill, too. Though there’s no hard-and-fast definition of a public intellectual, Posner does enumerate a few signature qualities; if you boil down Posner’s terms to a checklist, you discover that just about everything Franco does helps make a case for him as a bona fide public intellectual. Even Pineapple Express. Here’s why:

Because a public intellectual is a generalist. Two years ago, following James Franco’s poorly received stint as Oscars co-host, the Weekly Standard posited that at some point James Franco would have to pick one career and stick with it. Nope. That kind of decision is anathema to the public intellectual, who must be versed in multiple topics, and James Franco shows zero sign of narrowing his focus.

Because a public intellectual has academic credibility but, if possible, isn’t tied to a university.
James Franco dropped out of college the first time around. Now, he has or is in the process of earning degrees from a half-dozen institutions, including Yale, Columbia and the Rhode Island School of Design. He’s also a teacher, with credits that include the class “Editing James Franco…with James Franco.” But he’s not linked to a single institution, which could encourage specialization of his knowledge—a no-no for the public intellectual.

Because a public intellectual is a celebrity. James Franco is a celebrity.

Because a public intellectual confronts norms. It’s no coincidence that James Franco’s Sundance hat trick was made up of the near-porn Interior. Leather Bar. (which he co-directed and appears in); the BDSM documentary Kink. (which he produced); and Lovelace, in which he plays Hugh Hefner.  James Franco returns again and again to art about sex and sexuality, even and especially when the subject matter makes viewers squeamish. Case in point: his 2010 short film Herbert White, with Michael Shannon, dealt with necrophilia. (It’s possible that the residue of all these adventures may also rub off on the family entertainment Oz the Great and Powerful, at least for the Franco-literate adults in the audience.)

Because a public intellectual examines society rather than merely participating. When James Franco appeared on General Hospital, he played the mysterious, mononymous artist Franco, who had a show at the Los Angeles Museum of Contemporary Art. At the same time, James Franco made a film about his General Hospital experience—and showed it at the Los Angeles Museum of Contemporary Art. And then explained in his WSJ piece that he went on General Hospital as a performance-art project about the nature of high and low art. “My hope,” he wrote, “was for people to ask themselves if soap operas are really that far from entertainment that is considered critically legitimate.”

Because a public intellectual is motivated by an ideology. James Franco has ideas—ideas that others have suggested are an extension of queer theory, which rejects binaries in sexuality and other areas of life; in fact, James Franco has cited queer theorist Michael Warner as part of the reason he chose Yale for his Ph.D. A 2010 New York magazine profile of the actor smartly proposed that he’s “queering celebrity” by “erasing the border not just between gay and straight but between actor and artist.” As he told the New York Daily News last spring, he sees art as raw material for more art.
James Franco twists existing works into new ones: poems into short films, soap operas into contemporary art. He goes beyond queer theory to create mash-up theory. It asks: What is art? What is celebrity? How do I fit into these worlds? How do we create judgments about what entertainment we consume? And why are you just consuming when you could be creating?

So James Franco is asking the same kinds of questions that those headlines do—and he’s answering them. That’s the general, academic, confrontational, ideological work of a public intellectual. Love him or hate him or hate-love him, he does make you think. And sometimes what he makes you think is that he’s fooling you into liking him, cackling evilly behind your back as he uses you without your consent for a grand, life-long art project about celebrity. But fear not: James Franco’s life doesn’t have to be art to be about art. Unlike his wizard of Oz, James Franco shows us what’s going on behind his curtain. Is he being serious? Absolutely. All that’s left is for the rest of us to take him seriously, too.

In the hours after our brief meeting, and then in the months that followed, I would come to believe that everything important about Franco and his career could be derived from that mystifying wink. The only problem was that I had no idea, really none at all, what he meant by it.

2. The Everything-ist
 
“Believe what you want. But here’s a clue. The secret to life: Anyone can die at any time.”
“So what do we do about it?”

“Amuse ourselves. Don’t live by rules or boundaries. And take what you want, when you want.”
—Franco and Maxie, General Hospital, November 24, 2009

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Not so long ago, James Franco’s life and career were fairly normal. He grew up in Palo Alto, California, where his parents had met as Stanford students. Young James was, at his father’s urging, a math whiz—he even got an internship at Lockheed Martin. As a teenager, he rebelled, got in trouble with the law (drinking, shoplifting, graffiti), and eventually migrated toward the arts. His hero was Faulkner. He fell in love with acting when he played the lead in a couple of dark and heavy high-school plays. After freshman year, he dropped out of UCLA, very much against his parents’ wishes, to try to make a career of it. He was good, lucky, and driven, and within a couple of years, he got his first big break: Judd Apatow cast him in what would become the cult TV series Freaks and Geeks. When the series was canceled after just a season, Franco landed the lead in the TNT biopic James Dean. He played the part with a slumping intensity that seemed like a reasonable replication of the real thing—or at least much closer than anyone had a right to expect from a TNT biopic—and the performance won a Golden Globe. Soon after, he was cast as Robert De Niro’s drug-addicted son in the film City by the Sea. That same year, he entered mainstream consciousness as Peter Parker’s best friend in Spider-Man.

Franco had become, in other words, a working Hollywood actor. An unusual actor—he overprepared for minor roles, read Dostoyevsky and Proust between takes, and occasionally drove colleagues crazy with his intensity—but still identifiably an actor, with an actor’s career. As he climbed toward leading-man status, however, Franco had a crisis of faith. He found himself cast in a string of mediocre films—Annapolis, Flyboys, Tristan + Isolde—most of which bombed. He felt like he was funneling all his effort into glossy, big-budget entertainment over which he had no control, and of which he wasn’t proud.

At age 28, ten years after dropping out, Franco decided to go back to college. He enrolled in a couple of UCLA extension courses (literature, creative writing) and found them so magically satisfying—so safe and pure compared with the world of acting—that he threw himself back into his education with crazy abandon. He persuaded his advisers to let him exceed the maximum course load, then proceeded to take 62 credits a quarter, roughly three times the normal limit. When he had to work—to fly to San Francisco, for instance, to film Milk—he’d ask classmates to record lectures for him, then listen to them at night in his trailer. He graduated in two years with a degree in English and a GPA over 3.5. He wrote a novel as his honors thesis.

It was interesting timing. As soon as Franco decided his Hollywood career wasn’t enough, his Hollywood career exploded—which meant that his intellectual pursuits got picked up on the radar of the A-list Hollywood publicity machine. Which was, of course, baffled by all of it. Plenty of actors dabble in side projects—rock bands, horse racing, college, veganism—but none of them, and maybe no one else in the history of anything, anywhere, seems to approach extracurricular activities with the ferocity of Franco.

Take, for instance, graduate school. As soon as Franco finished at UCLA, he moved to New York and enrolled in four of them: NYU for filmmaking, Columbia for fiction writing, Brooklyn College for fiction writing, and—just for good measure—a low-residency poetry program at Warren Wilson College in North Carolina. This fall, at 32, before he’s even done with all of these, he’ll be starting at Yale, for a Ph.D. in English, and also at the Rhode Island School of Design. After which, obviously, he will become president of the United Nations, train a flock of African gray parrots to perform free colonoscopies in the developing world, and launch himself into space in order to explain the human heart to aliens living at the pulsing core of interstellar quasars.

Franco says all of his pursuits are possible, at least in part, because he’s cut down on his acting, but he’s still doing plenty of that. In the next year or so, he’ll be appearing in the films Eat, Pray, Love (as Julia Roberts’s boyfriend), Howl (as Allen Ginsberg), 127 Hours (as the one-armed hiker), Your Highness (a medieval comedy), William Vincent (an indie film by one of his NYU professors), Maladies (put out by his own production company), and Rise of the Apes (a prequel to Planet of the Apes). And of course there’s his epically weird stint on General Hospital—the crown jewel in the current science project of his career.

I was recently treated to an early prototype of a dessert that Marina Abramović, 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. Abramović 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."

Performance art is enjoying a moment of validation from the art world establishment. Next month, the Guggenheim Museum will showcase the work of Tino Sehgal, the Berlin-based artist whose "staged situations" have involved uniformed museum guards dancing around a gallery singing, "This is so contemporary, contemporary, contemporary!" The renowned art fair Art Basel Miami dedicated evenings to performances by visual artists, including Claire Fontaine, whose work consists of a Body Opponent Bag (BOB) punch mannequin that professional fighters will beat silly. The P.S.1 museum in New York's Queens borough is in the middle of "100 Years," a three-week-long series chronicling the past century of performance art, so all the oldies but goodies can be studied.

When most Americans think of "performance art," they probably think of its golden age in the 1970s and the early 1980s. That was the time when the artist Chris Burden was creating pieces that entailed being shot in the arm or crucified on a Volkswagen Beetle and Marina Abramović and her one-named partner Ulay were performing "Rest Energy," a piece where they faced each other and held a taut bow with an arrow pointing at Ms. Abramović's heart.

But performance art of this vein got its start as early as the 1950s, when art students started putting down their paintbrushes and cameras and turning to their bodies as instruments. Art critic Harold Rosenberg defined Jackson Pollock and Willem de Kooning as "action painters" and their canvases as records of a performance. Art was no longer to be viewed passively, but something to engage with.
Hans Namuth's 1951 film "Jackson Pollock 51" shows Pollock improvising with his painting, making marks and then responding to those marks. Clearly, the process had become part of the art. It was only a matter of time before artists would start discarding the final piece altogether, like Yoko Ono's "Cut Piece" (1965), where the audience was invited to cut Ms. Ono's clothes, or Allan Kaprow's "Fluids" (1967), where a team constructed an enormous ice structure, only to leave it to melt.

Performance art can seem pretentious, but it can also be quite mischievous and playful. Just as Marcel Duchamp rocked the art establishment in 1917 with his found urinal called "Fountain," performance artists of the 1960s and 1970s presented entire practices and occupations as art. In today's version, the artist Fritz Haeg packages lawn care as art—his ongoing series "Edible Estates" consists of designing and implementing ecologically productive front lawns. As Mr. Haeg said at a talk at Columbia University last month, "Being an artist is the one profession where you can wake up and say, 'What do I want to learn about and participate in today?' " What could be more fun than that?

 

In her 1973 piece "Rhythm 10," Ms. Abramović, the co-inventor of the lychee-and-gold pastry, recorded herself playing five-finger fillet, often cutting her fingers in the process. Then she played the recording back in front of a live audience and recreated the "performance" with the finger slicing put in the exact same place. Thus, the second time around may be a recreation of an act that already took place, but when she cuts herself the second time she still bleeds, and the past action is also taking place in the present tense. It's trippy stuff.

Most performance pieces before the 1970s were not well recorded. All that remains of some works are scraps of various media. This wasn't simply a result of oversight. Chris Burden never intended his early pieces to be filmed because he was concerned that the films would be seen as the work rather than as a record of the work. He was more interested in completing the act than getting the greatest number of people to see it. He worried that people would regard the film as the full experience when anyone who has watched a stage play on film knows, it is never the same as seeing it live.

The gulf between film and performance art has dwindled in the years since Mr. Burden crawled naked across glass. These days, contemporary performances often are staged for a camera and the record of the act becomes primary. The world of performance art has incorporated many of the materials and methods that it once shunned. Contemporary performance artists such as Matthew Barney, Paul McCarthy and Ryan Trecartin depend heavily on film and video to make their work. Mr. Barney relies on Hollywood special effects to achieve his elaborate costume and set design. And Mr. McCarthy's ketchup-and-mayonnaise-loving elves and madmen would be hard to conceive without the precedent of Disney films.
 

When New York's Museum of Modern Art celebrated the opening of the performance-art retrospective at its sister museum P.S.1 last month, the band Fischerspooner put on a concert in the museum's main atrium. Casey Spooner, a singer who contains great passion under his cool exterior, stopped the show and complained that the audience wasn't engaging with the music enough. Later it was revealed that the complaints were all part of the act and the entire piece will later be presented as a film about a fictional musician.

The folks at "General Hospital" informed me that in three days of filming we backlogged enough material for 23 episodes. There will be one more step. After all of the Franco episodes are aired, my character's storyline will be advanced in a special episode filmed in a "legitimate" New York gallery. One more layer will be added to this already layer-heavy experiment. If all goes according to plan, it will definitely be weird. But is it art?

—James Franco is an actor who appeared in "Milk" and the "Spiderman" movies. He is currently enrolled in NYU's MFA filmmaking program and Columbia's MFA program for fiction writing.