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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The Canyons famously stars sometime porn actor James Deen and Lindsay Lohan, and, after getting rejected by both Sundance and SXSW, was probably well on its way to obscurity, leaving behind little but a really good NY Times profile. But now it seems that it will hold onto its fame a few minutes longer, as Vivid has offered James Deen the unprecedented opportunity to direct and star in in the XXX parody of his own movie. Normally, I’d say something like this was a cheap publicity stunt – and it is a cheap publicity stunt – but the guy’s already a porn star. It’s not like there’s anything stopping him. In my experience, porn stars aren’t especially picky about their scripts.

Here’s the letter, from Vivid Entertainment’s Steve Hirsch. Forgive the grammar/spelling errors, he is a pornographer.

Hi James,
We’ve been following the news of your mainstream movie “The Canyons” with great anticipation, and we have a business offer that we think will intrigue you.
As you know Vivid is widely recognized as the leader in adult parodies and we would like to produce aVividTV parody of “The Canyons” directed by you, and starring you.
It would be a first in parodies…the actual star of a mainstream movie also starring in an X-Rated version of that same movie! How cool is that?

“Hi James?” Not even “Hi, James?” Man, somewhere, the Microsoft Paperclip is telling anyone at the bar who’ll listen, “See? I told you these motherf*ckers would be lost without me.”

Anyway, it’s ironic that Lindsay Lohan’s co-star, who she was convinced was stealing her thunder (rightly, I might add), is the one getting offers to play the porn parody version of himself. We always assumed it would be Lindsay who’d be the first to play the porn parody version of herself (I mean, career-wise, she’s already 70 percent there). I have to commend commenter Jacktion! for leaving the following prescient comment way back in May 2010:

Jacktion! says: I think Lindsay Lohan is playing Linda Lovelace in the porn remake of the Linda Lovelace biopic.

Almost, buddy. Almost.

[banner image via]

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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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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