14 DAY TRIAL // Some time ago, a Lindsay Lohan-made list of celebrity men she’d slept with emerged online, and James Franco took serious offense at seeing his name on it, because, he told Letterman, they never had relations. They did kiss though and share an awkward night at the Chateau Marmont, when she wandered into his room.
That night has now been immortalized in a short story published in Vice magazine, called “Bungalow 89.” You guessed it, it’s Franco who penned it, the same Franco who laughed off the reports of a romantic affair last month, the same Franco who said some things should never be discussed publicly.
Of course, if it’s art, then it’s ok to talk about your more or less romantic encounters. Franco makes sure he protects himself from all criticism by saying he’s talking in the story about a “fictional” woman who could just as well be called Lindsay. However, she does identify herself as “Lo-han.”
The fact that the piece comes with Lohan’s photo as header, and that it sounds exactly like Franco’s version on Letterman about the encounter are just coincidences, of course.
All this aside, it does seem like Franco was – and still is – worried about Lindsay: worried because she stopped trying to break the vicious cycle, that she started believing her own hype, that she lost herself completely as a person and has become this tabloid figure that we all know.
How much of this is real concern and how much is feigned we have no way of saying. But Franco does manage to turn Lindsay’s story into a cautionary tale on the fragility of the self in an industry that relies so much on its destruction – because only drama sells this well.
“I ran my fingers through her hair and thought about this girl sleeping on my chest, our fictional Hollywood girl, Lindsay. What will she do? I hope she gets better. You see, she is famous. She was famous because she was a talented child actress, and now she’s famous because she gets into trouble. She is damaged,” Franco writes.
“For a while, after her high hellion days, she couldn’t get work because she couldn’t get insured. They thought she would run off the sets to party. Her career suffered, and she started getting arrested (stealing, DUIs, car accidents, other things). But the arrests, even as they added up, were never going to be an emotional bottom for her, because she got just as much attention for them as she used to get for her film performances,” he continues.
“She would get money offers for her jailhouse memoirs, crazy offers. So how would she ever stop the craziness when the response to her work and the response to her life had converged into one? Two kinds of performance, in film and in life, had melted into one. But I suppose a tabloid-performance run is limited for anyone. After a while it’s just an out-of-control vehicle running on fumes,” Franco says.
In his account of how Lindsay pretty much broke into his room because she wanted to sleep with him (he turned her down and read her Salinger instead), Franco also manages to slip in a diss at her mother, who was never more than an enabler for her, he says.
The full “Bungalow 89” story is available at the link. *Please note that discretion is recommended, because it contains language that might offend.