Boy-next-door porn actor James Deen, born Bryan Matthew Sevilla, recently wrote a first-hand account of his experience working on The Canyons for DailyBeast. Considering the source material, his account is a truly impressive combination of compelling yet un-gossipy. Okay, so he does call James Franco a dick at one point, and of course I’m going to blockquote that:

After my first meeting with Paul, he mentioned he was going to a James Franco party for an art piece he commissioned called “Rebel Dabble Babble.” “I’m in that!” I told him. I ended up crashing the party with Bret, but that’s another story. My not receiving an invite to a party to celebrate a project I was part of is the point. One, Franco is a dick. Two, I would be fighting an uphill battle. Paul and his wife were not the only ones who thought of me as a party trick. Other than Braxton, Bret, and in time, the crew of The Canyons, everyone I met and worked with saw me as a joke.

To be fair, I’m not sure James Franco can even keep track of what art installation he’s doing with what male porn star on any given day. Anyway, this excerpt sort of sums up the theme of the piece: that no one in Hollywood respects actors, and that especially no one respects porn actors. They only enjoy them as a novelty.

Braxton and I spoke about cameras, my experiences on movie sets, and the personality types of most “actors.” No one likes actors. They are commonly referred to as “meat puppets.” Every person involved in movies thinks of actors as a joke. Braxton laughed as I ranted about the incompetence of every actor I’d ever met. He seemed refreshed and excited to get me involved.

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Poor Lindsay Lohan has been having a rough time lately. First, there was the 7,000-word profile in New York Times magazine about what a pain in the ass it was to work with her on The Canyons. Then The Canyons got rejected from Sundance. And now, it’s been rejected by South by Southwest, with a source saying the film has “an ugliness and a deadness to it.” And that’s just when they were looking into Lindsay’s eyes! You’re welcome, Jay Leno, now you don’t have to write that joke tonight.

Sources tell THR that SXSW has joined Sundance in rejecting the erotic thriller. A festival insider tells THR that the Bret Easton Ellis-penned, Paul Schrader-directed Canyons — which features tons of nudity, including au naturel shots of Lohan — suffers from significant “quality issues.”

Says a festival insider, “It’s got an ugliness and a deadness to it.” Canyons producer Braxton Pope says the filmmakers are still awaiting official word from the festival. [hollywoodreporter]

Moar like the CanYAWNS, am I right? If I saw this Lo-han-ging piece of Pope, I’d drive Easton until my car James Deened into a tree. /fakeGeneShalit

I haven’t seen the film, but I’ve seen some shithouse films at film festivals (*cough* Buried *cough, cough*), and to me this smacks of film festivals desperately needing to assert that they’re somehow “above” this kind of celebrity. See also: Robert Redford slamming Paris Hilton for showing up to Sundance. So yeah, it’s fun to make fun of Lindsay Lohan being a train wreck, but festival organizers don’t get a pass on being smug hypocrites either. They’ll say it’s about the quality of the film, but more likely she just doesn’t have the right kind of celebrity for them. They want stuff like Adrien Grenier doing a documentary about paparazzi, or Turtle’s lyrical, semi-autobiographical think-piece about the nature of celebrity (doesn’t exist yet, thankfully). The movie itself will be just as insufferable as The Canyons, but the star will show up and wear a nice scarf and pretend it’s all about the art while collecting the same gift bags, and everyone’s happy. Why, we can’t have Lindsay Lohan coming here turning our nice fart-sniffing festival into some playground for dilettantes! Think of the scandal!

By the way, how were the reviews for the last Bret Easton Ellis-scripted film presumably of sufficient quality to be admitted to Sundance, hmm?

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I didn’t cover the NY Times’ epic piece on the Bret Easton Ellis-scripted, Paul Shrader-directed, Lindsay Lohan-starring The Canyons, only because the extent of Lindsay Lohan’s fascinating yet predictable brand of crazy would be hard to fit into a block quote. Basically, she was constantly late, would disagree with her director and fight with the cast and crew, would disappear for days on end, run up huge bar and restaurant tabs that kept the crew from getting paid, lock herself in rooms when she was supposed to be shooting, and generally be a huge pain in the ass. Pulled a Lohan, say. Yet through it all, director Shrader still wanted to cast Lindsay in his next film and even felt confident about The Canyons getting into Sundance.

Welp:

The producers of Lindsay Lohan’s film, “The Canyons,” are stunned that their flick has been rejected by The Sundance Film Festival and they think it’s largely Lindsay’s fault.
We’re told the Sundance people reached out to producers to screen the movie, and we’re told producers were led to believe it was a shoo-in.
But we found out Sundance passed on the film recently, and the film’s producers believe it might be due in part to the hijinks of its troubled star.  They think Lindsay was a “turn off” to the highfalutin Sundance folks.
“The Canyons” producer, Braxton Pope, tells us his agents William Morris/Endeavor are having a screening for buyers at the end of the month and a number of big companies are interested. [TMZ]

“Braxton Pope” is the most Hollywood rich kid name I’ve ever heard, but if they thought having Lindsay Lohan in their film was going to help them get into Sundance, they severely misjudged their audience. For Sundance you’d be better served casting Jennifer Lawrence’s brother or Adrien Grenier’s band, and the movie better have someone living with a disability, or living a rich fantasy life. “Hushpuppy Hears a Who,” starring Braden Lawrence and 30 Odd Foot of Grunts, say.

This? This just looks like a porno but with fighting instead of sex. So… like another Lifetime movie, I guess. Also, Paris Hilton already did the “oops I can’t find my phone thing.”

Why does he have an iMac on his bookshelf?

Here’s how they describe this scene in the NY Times piece:

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If you’re not in a member of critic’s organization that gives year-end awards or a guild (director’s, writer’s etc.) that does same, chances are, you may not have heard about the controversy over whether Kathryn Bigelow’s Zero Dark Thirty (which has been nominated for best picture by virtually every critic’s association and guild) is “pro torture.” There’s something unspeakably obnoxious about a controversy over a movie no one in the general public has seen, not to mention awards going to a movie no one but awards voters have seen. Anyway, I was content to ignore it for as long as possible (or at least until I’d actually seen it), and normally I’d value John McCain’s opinion somewhere below John McClane’s opinion, but as a normally-hawkish person who has actually experienced torture, McCain’s input on this one might board some water. Uh, hold some water. And he says it gets the facts wrong.

Sen. John McCain watched the movie Monday night and says it left him sick — because it’s wrong.
McCain, who spent 5 1/2 years enduring brutal treatment by his North Vietnamese captors during the Vietnam War, has insisted that the waterboarding of al-Qaida’s No. 3 leader, Khalid Sheikh Mohammed, did not provide information that led to the bin Laden’s compound in Pakistan.
Yet the movie, of copy of which McCain said he received Monday, indicates that’s how the United States found the al-Qaida leader. The filmmakers fell for it hook, line and sinker, McCain, R-Ariz., said Tuesday.
Last year, McCain asked then-CIA Director Leon Panetta for the facts, and he said the hunt for bin Laden did not begin with fresh information from Mohammed. In fact, the name of bin Laden’s courier, Abu Ahmed al-Kuwaiti, came from a detainee held in another country.
“Not only did the use of enhanced interrogation techniques on Khalid Sheikh Mohammed not provide us with key leads on bin Laden’s courier, Abu Ahmed, it actually produced false and misleading information,” McCain said in a speech on the Senate floor. [Yahoo/AP]

Whoa, bro, how about a “spoiler alert?” Anyway, like I said, I HAVEN’T SEEN THE DAMNED MOVIE, NOR HAS HARDLY ANYONE ELSE… And while you can trust John McCain to speak with some authority about the value of torture, I’m not sure how to take his interpretations as a film critic. I guess we’ll see. Personally, I don’t know much about waterboarding, I just think it’s a crime what they did to that poor man’s collar.

Also, I don’t want to alarm anyone, but it’s two days before the Mayans predicted the apocalypse and John McCain and Bret Easton Ellis are agreeing.
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Bret Easton Ellis wrote Less Than Zero, Rules of Attraction, and American Psycho, and for that he’ll always have my respect (I also enjoyed Lunar Park, though Glamorama was absolute drivel). But there’s no denying that the guy is

Meanwhile, he’s been closely following the development of a Fifty Shades of Grey movie adaptation, which seems odd for a guy with arguable literary relevance, to be interested in Twilight fan-fic originally published under the name Snowqueen’s IceDragon (this is true, by the way, not something I’m making up). Bringing us to yesterday, when Kelly Marcel was officially hired to write the Fifty Shades of Grey movie adaptation. BEE… did not seem pleased:

Kelly Marcel?!? KELLY MARCEL?!? Kelly Marcel is WRITING the script for “Fifty Shades of Grey”?!? THIS is the movie they want to make? ARGH.

— Bret Easton Ellis (@BretEastonEllis) October 9, 2012

All I really know about Fifty Shades is that the idea that anyone would be interested in Twilight fan-fic scares the sh*t out of me, let alone it taking up the top four spots on the best-seller list. Ellis tweets apparently sparked a mini-feud with the Fifty Shades producer, but my only real dog in this fight is its potential to produce more entertaining Bret Easton Ellis Twitter battles. So far so good.

After the jump, a few favorites.

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