James Franco wanted to be in the final "Twilight" film

Here's a fun game — guess the reason why James Franco wanted to be involved in the Twilight film franchise: 1. He is trying to woo Kristen Stewart away from Robert Pattinson. 2. He's a huge fan of the books. 3. He is trying to woo Robert Pattinson away from Kristen Stewart. 4. It's part of a meta-textual multimedia project he was involved in while at Yale.

If you guessed number four, then you are even slightly familiar with Franco and how he operates. Because nothing he does can ever be that straightforward (you should see him make toast — so existential), Franco's desire to be one of the shimmer disco vampires came from... well, I'll let him explain it:

I was working with a Yale undergraduate who had written an autobiographical play about putting on a theatrical production of Twilight in which I was a character. So I was interested in Twilight because I was going to be part of that play. I thought what a great connection it would be if I were also involved with the real Twilight.

I will never have enough coffee or mescaline in my system to understand that logic, so I will have to take his word for it. And so Franco actually contacted Breaking Dawn director Bill Condon and petitioned him for a part, even if it was a small one. Unfortunately for us all, Condon didn't take the bait, as he recently explained to MTV:

For a moment it was like, what could James Franco play that doesn't feel like "Where's Waldo?" I really thought about it for a second, and nothing made sense...

If it had made sense, and frankly if I had called and said "do you want to play that vampire from that country," it would have involved hanging around for two months in a scene with 80 people, and I don't know if he really would have wanted to do it.

Wrong move, Condon! Because I actually might have seen the movie if Franco showed up, even for a moment. (On Netflix, of course. I do have some dignity.)