Some collaborations between Hollywood people and non-Hollywood artists yield magical results -- take Spike Jonze and Dave Eggers' work on Where the Wild Things Are, for example -- but in the case of Erased James Franco, the hour-long art film made by the artist known as Carter with Hollywood actor James Franco occupying the central role, the results are confused, mundane, and borderline pretentious. Billed as a riff on Rauschenberg's "Erased de Kooning Drawing" (which is owned by the SFMOMA), the film is meant to be an "erased performance" in which Franco appears in a non-descript setting reading random lines from all of his previous work, including the Spiderman films and the TV show Freaks and Geeks (at the time of shooting, in June 2008, Milk had not yet been released). There are a few inspired moments in the piece, but they mostly involve performances not originally given by Franco, where he performs monologues from other films like Todd Haynes' Safe or John Frankenheimer's Seconds, which starred Rock Hudson -- we especially enjoyed a brief telephone conversation Franco has with Julianne Moore, with her words clipped from lines from Safe. But the majority of the film features long, labored shots of Franco writing on loose-leaf paper, waving his hands, drinking water, answering phones, moving a chair around, and walking in and out of a room.

Carter, whose work we had not known before now, has worked previously in sculpture and drawing and one description of his drawings from the Saatchi Gallery website reads, "Carter uses abstracted drawing as a means of investigation into the shifting concepts of the human body and personal identity." He got an MFA from UC Davis in 1997, and had a piece in the 2006 Whitney Biennial, but near as we can tell this project with Franco represents his biggest PR boost to date. Franco appeared on stage with Carter at this screening of the film, and the audience was filled with picture-taking fans who were mostly just there to be in close proximity to a Hollywood hunk.

And that brings us to what we unfortunately feel the thrust of this collaboration is -- rather than seeming like a mutually beneficial bit of envelope-pushing and creative expression, Carter appears to have opportunistically sought out a big-name actor whose career he could, in a sense, play with for the sake of art. Franco's much blogged about upcoming appearance on the soap opera General Hospital, playing some weird meta version of himself named Franco, turns out to be Carter's doing as well, and the stunt will figure in an upcoming feature film that the two are collaborating on. Say what you will about Hollywood and its ripeness for mockery, we're just not sure how we feel about an artist taking advantage of an actor's openness just for publicity bait. We wouldn't be saying this if we thought this was a truly engaging, meta, ironic, and inspired piece of art being made here. Being John Malkovich it is not.

Franco appeared on stage with Carter at the Castro last night following the screening, and the two talked about the strange experience of making the film, which included Carter directing him to do 100% of the mental work to re-enact each performance, but to give only 10% on screen. For those familiar with Franco's acting, he's not exactly high-energy, and we feel like this is one of many failures of the piece -- way to make something that's already high-minded and boring that much more lazy-seeming and boring.

Erased James Franco may focus on moments not often focused on in feature film acting -- like walking, eating, and drinking milk -- but that doesn't, in our eyes, elevate it to great art. It is confusing to start -- why add these bits from movies Franco wasn't in? -- and frustrating more than anything. Sure, some could argue that that alone makes it successful. But in our mind, frustration shouldn't be the goal of narrative, time-based art in which an audience is asked to sit for an extended period of time. And if that kind of boredom and frustration is the goal, that's just hostile. We can hardly wait until these two make a full-length feature film, and we can almost hear Franco's career circling the drain.

Filed in Arts+Events and tagged carter, Castro Theater, erased james franco, james franco, sfist_reviews

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