James Franco Wrote A Surprisingly Thoughtful Essay On Acting

Of course, it's being graded on a curve where his last published work represents the low water mark. Still, it's a pretty straight-forward discussion of acting, the role of director vs. performer, and a lot of head nods to the film greats. All in all, not obnoxious! Not obnoxious at all! Except for the title, "The Limits of Control" which may have been the journal's idea anyway.

Props to all the grad students getting their papers published, and slightly less props to all the really famous grad students getting their papers published in places that would really love to publish them anyway. I'm assuming he did the thing where you write a broad paper for one class and recycle it in another class. (Or in James Franco's case, writing a broad paper for one class and then recyclying it in a literary magazine.)

Regardless, nice essay. It would have been just as well without the Ezra Pound line about it taking ten years to learn your craft and ten years to unlearn it, because MEH. And he didn't have to bring up the merits of soap operas, because these merits are obvious to us all.