Recently, New York Magazine featured a stunningly honest portrait of actor James Franco. He is a man whose eccentricities have catapulted him to Hollywood fame, yet whose real persona is anything but that of an A-lister.
James Franco is a graduate student in no less than four different arts programs and who, next year, will be beginning a PhD program in Yale along with another graduate program in some other university, all the while acting, directing, publishing, producing, and breathing. One must wonder when he even has time to take a shower.
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.
-- Sam Anderson, New York Magazine
Admiration and awe is what I took away from this article.
He’s not a savant or an obvious genius—he’s someone of mortal abilities who seems to be working immortally hard.
-- Sam Anderson, New York Magazine
It's fascination how driven James Franco is. Be it luck or the fame game, a person [insert graduate student] cannot fake achievements and productivity. Given that his name and reputation as a Hollywood A-lister will preceed him anywhere--including offers for publication and acceptances to top graduate programs in the arts--one cannot but look on with awe at how a person can just eat, breathe, and live something that they love. And his drive to do everything all at once while he can is the exact drive that any graduate student of any profession can only hope to have... and not lose track of.
...it kind of puts things in perspective for the rest of us mere mortals.
He may not be the kind of genius Orson Welles was, but James Franco's driven nature should undoubtedly be admired.
We don't know what fate has in stored for him, but we do know one thing: that he paves his own path and blazes the trails as he goes forth.
The imperfections of James Franco's work leaves that mark of humanity and vulnerability and personally, it makes watching his very public struggle and progress all the more fascinating.
In his first year at New York University, he once sat on a couch next to me. After a quick glance and acknowledgement that the seat beside me was empty, not a word was uttered. But I looked over and wondered if he was, indeed, in this for a real education, pursuing a higher level of understanding for his profession... or was he just another Hollywood face making a mark at the university to add to the list of uninteresting an failed students (like the Olsen twins).
A year and a half later, Sam Anderson's portrait of Franco's journey shows that he is unlike any other. For my part, I only hope he succeeds at everything that he has on his plate... because I can only relate to his drive... the difference is that James Franco is actually getting his cake and tasting it, too.
