Directing Herbert White

April 28, 2014
In his surprisingly vivid first collection of poems, film and TV star Franco writes what he knows: sonnets, sequences, and terse persona poems that explore the traps and trips of adolescence and the seductive, sometimes fatal paradoxes of Hollywood. Aggressively ragged in line and stanza shape, productively coy in their play with who speaks and for whom, Franco’s pages address “the life I made for myself” along with the lives of less fortunate media darlings: Heath Ledger, Sean Penn, Sal Mineo, Lindsay Lohan. The title refers to the film Franco made from Frank Bidart’s poem about a necrophiliac killer; there and elsewhere, Franco portrays himself as actor, director, writer, teenager, adult, and self-haunting ghost, never away from an imagined lens. Poems titled after Smiths songs reimagine doomed friends from eventful teen years—“I found I had the love life of the octopus,/ Groping and grappling.”—and establish his feel for life offscreen. As with his fiction, some readers will say that the book leans too hard on his prior fame: and yet fame, and its effects, are Franco’s primary subjects. The best of these poems are works no one else could have written, bright reflections on the author’s ambitiously dizzying time in the spotlight—or is it a hall of mirrors?

March 15, 2014
Franco's commitment to poetry has heretofore been expressed in films. He played Allen Ginsberg in Howl; created and starred in The Broken Tower, a film about Hart Crane; and made a short film based on Frank Bidart's searing poem about a necrophiliac child-murderer, Herbert White. This volume's title poem is an homage to Bidart, who, like Franco, grew up in California, albeit when, as Franco imagines, being gay was a secret so dark that he could tell no one. As in his novel, Actors Anonymous (2013), Francoprotean, determined, sly, and armed with five MFAs, including one in poetrywrites audaciously about the perversities of Hollywood and how it decimates the vulnerable. He portrays such movie-industry casualties as Lindsay Lohan, River Phoenix, and Sal Mineo, and reveals his own grappling with the largesse and absurdities of celebrity and, ultimately, a confusion of selves: This fake me is louder / Than the real me, and he / Is the one everyone knows. Franco's bold and magnetic examination of life in the mirrored hall of make-believe and fame taps deeply into our collective mythology.(Reprinted with permission of Booklist, copyright 2014, American Library Association.)