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Summary
Summary
The actors in James Franco's brilliant debut novel include a McDonald's drive-thru operator who spends his shift trying on accents; an ex-child star recalling a massive beachside bacchanal; hospital volunteers and Midwestern transplants; a vampire flick starlet who discovers a cryptic book written by a famous actor gone AWOL; and the ghost of River Phoenix. Then there's Franco himself, who prowls backstage, peering out between the lines--before taking the stage with fascinating meditations on his art, along with nightmarish tales of excess. "Hollywood has always been a private club," he writes. "I open the gates. I say welcome. I say, Look inside ."
Told in a dizzying array of styles--from lyric essays and disarming testimonials to hilariously rambling text messages and ghostly footnotes--and loosely modeled on Alcoholics Anonymous's Twelve Steps and Twelve Traditions, Actors Anonymous is an intense, wild ride into the dark heart of celebrity.
Author Notes
James Franco was born on April 19, 1978 in Palo Alto, California. He enrolled at the University of California, Los Angeles as an English major but dropped out after freshman year to pursue a career as an actor, taking acting lessons with Robert Carnegie at Playhouse West. After 15 months of training, he began auditioning in Los Angeles California and got his first break in 1990 after he was cast in the leading role of the television series Freaks and Geeks. His first major film was the romantic comedy Whatever It Takes. He was later cast in the title role of the 2001 TV special James Dean. He received a Golden Globe Award and nominationations for an Emmy Award and a Screen Actors Guild Award. In 2002 the superhero film Spider-Man was released and James Franco played Harry Osborn, the son of the villain. Spider-Man was a commercial and critical success. In the same year he was cast in the drama City by the Sea. The following year he co-starred in Robert Altman's The Company. With the success of the first Spider-Man film he was able to reprise the role in the sequel Spider-Man 2 in 2004. The movie was well received by critics. He continues his acting career with roles in films such as the Great Raid, Annapolis, Flyboys and Wicker Man. He is a successful actor, director and screenwriter.
(Bowker Author Biography)
Reviews (4)
Publisher's Weekly Review
Franco's debut novel, following his short story collection Palo Alto, is an assemblage of chapters whose organizing factor is a parody of the Alcoholics Anonymous manual Twelve Steps and Twelve Traditions. Each chapter is headed by a step or a tradition, such as step three: "Turned our will and our 'performances' over to the Great Director." Some chapters are first-person narratives, ostensibly by different narrators, though it's hard not to think of the author as the sole narrator, since the tone and voice of each is identical to the others-flat, Bukowskian recitations of acting classes taken, sex had, and drugs done. Elsewhere, readers encounter uninspired maunderings about the nature of acting: "Kazan said actors acquire the look of waxed fruit." The chapter headed "Step 4: Made a fearless and searching moral inventory of our 'character' " is composed of sophomoric poems about River Phoenix. At one point, a narrator named James receives a note from a professor that says, "Stop writing." Another chapter includes the pronouncement, "Writing sells mass produced objects." This mass-produced object will likely appeal only to Franco's most devoted fans, but you can't fault a guy for trying. Agent: Richard Abate, 3 Arts Entertainment. (Oct.) (c) Copyright PWxyz, LLC. All rights reserved.
Guardian Review
Self-consciousness in a writer can get in the way of letting a story do its thing. The actor-writer-director-producer-musician-artist and eternal PhD candidate James Franco is a phenomenon springing from an excess of self-consciousness. Actors Anonymous, a novel that follows 2010's short-story collection Palo Alto, is both about, and doomed by, the egregious non-anonymity of its author. It takes the 12 steps of Alcoholics Anonymous as an organising structure. Step one, for example, is rendered as: "We admitted that life is a performance - that we are all performers, at all times - and that our 'performance' had left our control." The steps each form a chapter, as do the "Twelve Traditions of Actors Anonymous" that follow, but the scant narrative strands tying these 24 entries together fail to create any kind of coherent whole. "Excremental", in fact, is an appropriate word for this work of fiction. I think Franco may have anticipated the adjective, such is his delight in having shitty things, literally, happen to his characters. (In searching the ebook for one quotation I found that the word "shit" appears on 66 of its 304 pages). One character, or a character's character - the levels of metafictionality become too wearisome to plot - is nicknamed "Diarrhea" due to an explosive bowel movement. The Actor, as our protagonist is now titled, nonetheless has sex with her, as well as with her "smaller and less attractive friend" whom he nicknames "Cunty". Elsewhere, there's an encounter in a McDonald's toilet. Sean, a recovering heroin addict, performs sexual favours on a co-worker for cash. The man, Juan, is "shaped like a soft triangle with a huge bulging groin area and a super small head"; his "little tapered fingers" are "sickening". After Sean has spat Juan's semen into the toilet the scene ends with: "There was a turd in there." The sentence seems as unnecessary and eminently flushable as its referent. Self-consciousness is one step away from self-love, which is another term for onanism, and perhaps the stickiest-paged passage is the one titled "Windsor Girl". "I'm just a stupid little girl who wants to be an actor," the narrator begins, before giving an account of how James Franco took her virginity. "Kurt Cobain is my god," she tells us. "He is the most beautiful man that ever lived. Except maybe James." Ah, James, there you are, I wasn't wondering where you'd got to. When Franco is able to forget himself he inhabits a character on the page as convincingly as he does on screen, but these moments are rare. Performance is a worthy subject and "is there a veridic self underneath?", which the author asks more than once, is a more than worthy question. But Franco makes the sophomore's mistake: performing writing about performance. Here's a possibly fictive-within-the-fiction creative writing professor advising a character called James Franco: "James, I am going to be as frank as I can be: Stop writing. You don't have the facility for it. You have the love, but not the skill. As I have said innumerable times, you throw in a lot of flash, to hide a lack of substance. I think this comes from your deep fear that readers won't accept you as an actor and writer. Well, if you continue writing about a character called 'The Actor', of course they won't accept you as a writer!" To order Actors Anonymous for pounds 9.74 with free UK p&p call Guardian book service on 0330 333 6846 or go to guardianbookshop.co.uk. - Hermione Hoby "Excremental", in fact, is an appropriate word for this work of fiction. I think [James Franco] may have anticipated the adjective, such is his delight in having shitty things, literally, happen to his characters. (In searching the ebook for one quotation I found that the word "shit" appears on 66 of its 304 pages). One character, or a character's character - the levels of metafictionality become too wearisome to plot - is nicknamed "Diarrhea" due to an explosive bowel movement. The Actor, as our protagonist is now titled, nonetheless has sex with her, as well as with her "smaller and less attractive friend" whom he nicknames "Cunty". - Hermione Hoby.
Kirkus Review
Actor Franco's experimental first novel (Palo Alto: Stories, 2010) focuses on the field he knows best--acting. Part aphorism, part instruction manual, part reflection, part short story and, seemingly, part memoir, the narrative is a pastiche of forms and moods. We find a narrator who's occasionally called "James Franco" and a reminder (in a footnote) that this work is a fictional creation. We also find an order of sorts, for he breaks the narrative into two major sections: "The Twelve Steps of Actors Anonymous" and "The Twelve Traditions of Actors Anonymous." The first part is casually based on the Twelve Steps of Alcoholics Anonymous and includes steps such as "[We] turned our will and our performances' over to the Great Director" and "[We] made a fearless and searching moral inventory of our character.' " The "Twelve Traditions" include "Every film ought to be fully self-supporting, declining outside financing" and "We should remain forever artists, but we can employ technical workers." As is clear from these rubrics, some of this advice is either overly obvious or to be taken with a grain of salt. Gnomic statements abound: "Your characters need to love something, otherwise they will be unlovable" and "The grammar of film is more complex than the grammar of text." In the interstices, Franco (or his alter ego) presents his ideas through anecdotes and semiplausible fictional incidents, with plenty of inside references to Hollywood actors. Loosely structured in the extreme, the novel seems to have been written in odd moments while Franco was taking a break from his acting career--and it was probably more fun for him to write than it is for the reader to read.]] Copyright Kirkus Reviews, used with permission.
Booklist Review
After establishing his literary cred with his story collection, Palo Alto (2010), actor and director Franco ups the ante in this canny first novel. It purports to be an assemblage of confessional tales told by members of Actors Anonymous, a 12-step support group relying on a higher power, the Great Director. Each mordantly funny and unnerving actor-wannabe struggles to cope with the abyss between dream and reality and the peculiar identity crises intrinsic to performing. Jerry is fiasco-prone. Corey's ambitious mother colluded in his sexual exploitation as a child actor. Sean speaks in fake accents when working at McDonald's, hoping to seem exotic. The ringleader is James Franco, or the Actor, a notorious deflowerer of virgins and a metaconstruct that allows author Franco to gleefully, bawdily, and scathingly dissect the cult of celebrity and the paradoxes of acting, blur the line between autobiography and fiction, and dispense genuinely resonant artistic advice. Though the pastiche of clever narrative modes doesn't always click, Franco is provocatively revelatory in this mask-on, mask-off inquiry into delusion and illusion, hubris and art.--Seaman, Donna Copyright 2010 Booklist
Excerpts
Excerpts
Preface We of Actors Anonymous are more than fifty men and women who have recovered from a seemingly hopeless state of mind and body. In this volume, we relate our experiences in dealing with existence, modern society, and identity, in order to find suitable ways of acting and being in the world. Sometimes it is painful to be oneself; at other times it seems impossible to escape oneself. The actor's life has provided escape for many that find their lives too dull, painful, and insular. But the actor-escape artist can go too far as well. If one puts on too many different personas or goes too far into character, one is liable to lose oneself. Some have believed that this loss is a positive, and perhaps it is for those that enjoy a rootless swirl of personality in the void, but others, like those who have come to comprise Actors Anonymous, believe that there is a balance to be struck between life and art, between self-creation and the veridic self. We have put down our experiences in these pages in order to guide others--professional actors, amateurs, and nonactors alike--to a way of life that both defies psychological determinism on the one hand, and freewheeling insanity on the other. We are people who work in the world as professionals, whether we make our money from acting or not, and it is important for us to maintain our anonymity. There are centuries of prejudice piled on the actor and thus it is important that no one of us is thrust into the spotlight. (God knows that some of us get enough of the spotlight as it is.) So much money is made off the aggrandizement and defamation of actors already that we ask the press, especially the tabloid press, to hold their pens, video cameras, paparazzi flash blasts, and blogs, and respect our organization's anonymity. This is a serious text that is intended for actors: "actors" in the most essential sense, not necessarily actors of stage and screen, but actors in the sound and fury of life. Anyone who wants this message is encouraged to glean what she will. We are not an exclusive club; the only requirement for membership is a desire to change oneself, to be able to act decently in a controlled manner. Everyone can act, but not everyone can act well, and not everyone knows how he actually presents himself to others. We have no spokesperson, and there is no hierarchy. We have no dues or fees, and we are open to all regardless of race, religion, nationality, or acting style. We do not oppose anyone--even those actors trained by I_____ C______ or L_____ M____ or any of the other charlatan acting teachers sucking actor blood in dark classrooms across the Los Angeles sprawl. Our simple desire is to help. Not to train, but to save individuals from training, whether that training was given in a classroom, by a parent, or by what can only be called contemporary life. We of Actors Anonymous subscribe to the following twelve steps and twelve traditions, not because they were handed down from on high by a bully studio, nor from a dictatorial director; we have no concern for deskbound screenwriters proclaiming Napoleonic ambitions of control, and we are certainly not adherents of the steps and traditions because we are beholden to the hordes of critics, both high and low, who proclaim to know something of which they write and speak but hardly do, these sideline vipers who sting and snare and then duck into their holes when the real animals of acting turn on them in anger. We salute and live by these principles because they were generated by the blood experience of those who have lived through the profession, its trials both on and offscreen, on and offstage, for surely the pitfalls of everyday life are increased in proportion to the heights one reaches in the realms of performance. One cannot live solely in the airy realms of the imagination. Let these steps and traditions guide you to a balanced life of creativity and truth in a world of surfaces and untruths, through realms of materialism and jealousy, past the vortices of public humiliation, and the private, tooth-ringed maws of self-doubt. We are here for you. Let us love you and guide you. We speak of what we do. The Actor's Opinion We of Actors Anonymous believe that the reader will be interested in a professional opinion regarding our situation. There are so many hucksters in the world of performance training that it is important to receive some corroboration from a professional with experience on all levels of the acting strata. To Whom It May Concern: I have been a professional actor since I was eighteen. I trained for eight years, and I have been working as a professional actor for fourteen years. I have met many actors from all over the world. It is hard to find a common denominator, but there are many similarities in most of the actors I meet. There is usually an ingredient of self-hatred that underlies actors. This hatred manifests in different ways; sometimes it is so buried that it is virtually unnoticeable, but don't be fooled, it's there. Anyone that is driven to play dress-up for a living is trying to hide something either from himself or from others. Or the self-hatred may be manifested in the drive for success and fame, the algorithm being: "If many people love me, then I must be important." This can be written a different way: "I hate myself, but I am going to transform myself into something charismatic so that everyone loves me, and if people love me, then I won't hate myself anymore." Most actors are doomed, because the self-hatred never goes away--even for the few that achieve the kind of success that is recognizable by the greater population. I speak about fame . Roughly one tenth of SAG is made up of actors able to support themselves by their acting alone, and only 2 percent approach what might be called famous. So even for those fortunate few, the demons of self-doubt inevitably whisper songs of unworthiness, or else the subject is so insulated in fantasies of grandeur that he lives a life of hermetic madness: He might function in the world, but his eyes see hardly beyond his own pumpkin head. Nothing lasts, not even the films themselves: Look at Edwin S. Porter's Jack and the Beanstalk, Life of an American Fireman, and The Great Train Robbery and George Cukor's A Star Is Born-- works of art, ripped and deformed. This speaks of the destruction of film classics, the ostensibly most durable vehicle and storage facility for actors' souls, nonchalantly defaced--and these are the respected films of their day, goodness forbid the contemplation of the fates of the lesser known films, ships of fool actor souls adrift and lost in the tides of eternity. So, the actor is someone with the need for immortality who will never find it, often a locus of intensely driven ambition that can only flare out or burn up in a quick bright moment. This situation has left generations of actors broken on either side of the divide of success, and until now there has been little consolation outside of SAG-funded actors' homes for the elderly. I can honestly say that until this volume I thought actors were fucked, but here hope has miraculously touched down on earth, one hundred years after the advent of the moving picture, six hundred years since Everyman and the religious morality plays, four hundred years since Shakespeare played Hamlet's father's ghost, and thousands upon thousands of years since the Lascaux population did ritualized dances for campfire roasted venison. Here is a collection of experiences that can give the actor not a way to act better, but a way to live better. For so long actors have carried the conscience of the world across screen and stage and in their personal lives, but they have received little consideration for their pain. They are considered arrogant and self-centered by their fellows, at the same time that they are being applauded for their brave explorations of the darkest places of human experience. Now, with the advent of computer-generated images, actors glance timidly at the future in which their luminosity will be dimmed to the dullness of the poet, novelist, and painter. But all is not lost; there are others who understand, and that understanding in conjunction with a spiritual connection is already guiding dozens if not hundreds out of the wasteland of Hollywood into Elysian Fields. Peace, James Franco Excerpted from Actors Anonymous by James Franco All rights reserved by the original copyright owners. Excerpts are provided for display purposes only and may not be reproduced, reprinted or distributed without the written permission of the publisher.
