Better safe than sorry, Seth Rogen and James Franco have cancelled all of their press appearances relating to their embattled North Korean comedy The Interview due to threats of 9/11-esque violence from the group that hacked Sony, BuzzFeed reports. And BuzzFeed would know, because the actors pulled out of an appearance at BuzzFeed Brews today.
In an experiment seemingly inspired in equal measure by Marina Abramović and Subservient Chicken, James Franco obeyed the commands of random Internet users Saturday afternoon, smearing on makeup, licking a sock puppet and spraying himself with whipped cream just because some nice folks asked him to.
"I'm sorry, I'm losing my mind," Tommy Wiseau said to me seconds after I shook his hand in the lobby of the Four Points Sheraton in SoHo two Sundays ago. That was more believable than most things he would go on to tell me that afternoon.
Jimmy Fallon turned 40 years of old yesterday and to celebrate, people at the Tonight Show office arranged a special surprise for him, inviting his two sexy friends to dance out of a cake. Seth Rogen and James Franco shake it for the show host, but only as a sensual preamble for the real surprise.
James Franco's beef with Gawker stretches back to at least 2008, but recently it intensified after my colleague J.K. Trotter wrote a post called "James Franco Is Living With a Man" based on an innuendo-filled New York Times piece that probed Franco's relationship with an actor he has directed multiple times and is sharing an apartment with in Brooklyn this summer, Scott Haze. Haze is Franco's muse, no homo...well, maybe (big winks all around). In response, Franco, a self-identified straight man, said that Trotter, a gay man, was being homophobic. That's 2014 for ya! Isn't the world a crazy place?
Middlebrow culture jammer James Franco is very mad at us for writing up a New York Times story that all but said he’s dating his roommate and longtime actor pal Scott Haze. “GAWKER—always getting the cutting edge, homophobic scoop!!!” he wrote on Instagram. It was as if Franco had forgotten that he and Haze have spent the past month playing gay—or their towel-snapping version of it—in order to generate publicity for their new movie, Child of God.
A few days ago, The New York Times published a short item about writer-actor-poet-director James Franco’s various collaborations with the actor Scott Haze, such as Franco’s recent film adaption of Cormac McCarthy’s Child of God, in which Haze plays a necrophiliac named Lester Ballard. Another role Haze appears to be playing: Franco’s live-in boyfriend.
Actor/Ph.D candidate James Franco was on the Colbert Report last night to promote his movie opening this week, Child of God, and generally just act like James Franco. Whatever. You can skip everything until the very end of the interview, where Franco slyly tries to get an in-character Stephen Colbert to discuss his impending move to The Late Show.
Last we heard from North Korea on James Franco and Seth Rogen's Kim Jong-un assassination flick The Interview, friend-of-the-regime Kim Myong-chol said it showed the "desperation of the US government and American society." The country's foreign ministry gave a much more strongly worded review today.
James Franco published a terrible short story at Vice this week. People don't and shouldn't take Franco seriously as a writer but that often keeps us from discussing the precise nature of his badness. It is this: He is the kind of bad that suggests the End of Literature would be no skin off anyone's nose.
