James Franco recently told an MTV interviewer (our old pal “Cuddly Josh” Horowitz, same guy from the last post) that he’d have no problem doing “sex for real” on camera for the right role. Oh, you mean the guy who watched a male prostitute have gay sex, carved “Brad Renfro” into his arm for art, sold people “invisible art“, filmed naked dudes playing basketball, and used money from Gucci to film himself walking around Paris with a dick strapped to his face is willing to do crazy things for his art? Friends, please recommend a good pearl cleaner, for I fear I’ve smudged mine from all of the clutching.

Things get really real in “Interior. Leather Bar.” — including the sex scenes.
The film is James Franco’s re-examination of Al Pacino’s 1980 flick “Cruising,” and it has some real-life sexy times in it. While Franco avoids getting in on any of the action in the NSFW flick — which just debuted at the Sundance Film Festival — he did tell MTV News that, for the right project, he would consider pulling a Shia LaBeouf and have sex for real with the cameras rolling.
“I’d say under the right circumstances. There are a lot of circumstances,” he said, with co-director Travis Mathews by his side. “Who’s involved? Both behind-the-scenes, behind the camera, in front of the camera.”

Oh please, Shia LaBeouf is like a child’s crude drawing of James Franco. Shia LaBeouf only does weird stuff in the hopes that someone might subconsciously associate him with James Franco and start thinking of him as something more than a cut-rate Logan Lerman. The weird thing about Franco is that once upon a time, he seemed genuinely, refreshingly self-aware. Taking money from Gucci to walk around Paris with a dick strapped to his face in particular was brilliant, Bill Murray-level performance art. But at some point, between bragging about his blogging awards and feuding with Gawker, and writing a name-droppy poem for Obama, all his self-awareness seems to have evaporated. Is the combination of fame and academia simply so corrosive that it leaves one defenseless against the inevitable onset of self-seriousness? Or is this just Franco’s long game, setting us up for an even deeper dicknosing? The only person who can answer that is Brad Renfro, and Brad Renfro is dead, my friend. But I hope so. I so adore a dicknosing.

Clearly, it went much better than this MTV interview: