Back in September I was sitting in my lil' cube on an afternoon much like today and I got a message from my lovely friend Hannah, saying, "Hey! You wanna go see a cool movie and hear Gus Van Sant and James Franco talk about it?" Of course, I said, "Hell yes."
Apparently, when James Franco and Gus Van Sant worked together on Milk a few years back, they got to talking about River Phoenix / My Own Private Idaho, since that is Franco's favorite film of all time, and it inspired him to go into acting. Eventually, Van Sant ended up showing Franco some footage that they'd cut from the movie, and Franco had the cajones to ask if he could use that footage plus the actual movie to come up with his own cut of the film, with Van Sant's more developed directing style in mind. Cool idea, right?
Fast forward to the September 24, 2011, and Hannah and I are posted up for the evening to watch Van Sant's original 1991 film in preparation for the exciting movie event to take place the next day.
The movie was fabulous. Keanu is actually really great and River Phoenix is BOMB. Also, Hannah and I kept commenting on the Shakespearean flavor of the dialogue until we realized that the movie draws heavily from Henry IV, and even borrows some dialogue from the Bard. Not only did I nerd out over that fact in particular, but I loved the story, the style, the acting, the whole shebang. Great stuff.
So what the hell did Franco do with it? Well, he made My Own Private River -- and it ended up as a lovely free-form tribute to River Phoenix, to the original movie, and to one of his favorite directors. If we hadn't watched the real movie the night before it would've been totally unintelligible, but since we were familiar, we were able to appreciate it as a genre-defying-film-art-tribute thing that was quite nice. After seeing it, it totally made sense that they showed it in a couple of art galleries before it was seen at the Hollywood Theater in P-town. It was moving art.
But! The part of the day that I found the most interesting was Memories of Idaho, a little pet project of Franco's that he made in LA with an earlier version of the original script of My Own Private Idaho, and which he screened for funsies following the main event. (Are you starting to get how obsessed this dude is with this movie?) He wanted to make it with "non-actors" -- he was in search of a couple "chicano" boys to play the leads and make the flick real and kinda gritty. Alas, such is the curse of being super-famous that he does not have access to such people... He ended up with two polished LA rich kids --very sweet but totally clueless. Even the dog was played by a ridiculous purebred St. Charles Spaniel with a bejeweled retractable leash. I kept thinking, "These kids cannot begin to imagine being homeless, and why don't they just sell that $500 dog?" It was sort of a surreal hour of my life, I have to say, sitting through this movie star's pet project and realizing that, when you are at that level you can't flow between strata so easily, and you're kind of isolated from different worlds because of your success. While Franco was very PC and polite and positive in talking about the project beforehand, I definitely sensed that he knew he had fallen victim to himself a bit with the project, and he also admitted that he was showing it simply because he had a captive audience. Ah well. It was a nice try. And you're still super fly, Mr. Franco. Keep doing cool projects and getting random degrees in stuff and kickin' ass.
And doing soap operas!
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