Kelly Lawler

USA TODAY

Hollywood overachiever James Franco is at it again.

The actor/director/producer/writer has a new book, Hollywood Dreaming: Stories, Pictures, and Poems, arriving Sept. 23 (Insight Editions). The fictional book follows a Franco-like aspiring actor named Shrimp through a series of interconnected stories, poems and visual art. The book made headlines earlier this summer when a story, in which Shrimp was intimate with Lindsay Lohan, was excerpted in Vice.

USA TODAY has an exclusive excerpt from the book, featuring a portion of the introduction and two poems, A Place in the Sun I and A Place in the Sun V. Read the excerpt below.

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BECOMING

AN INTRODUCTION

I am The Actor.

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I am The Writer.

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I am the creator of this book because I am the liver of this life, and at the same time the cut-and-paster of this life.

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I am a player in the world, and I am an eye on the world.

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I can make two kinds of movies: one where I go out and (expletive) with things in the world, where I am the catalyst; and one where I melt into the walls, just an invisible eye, not of the world, only taking it in, where I am in my little hole making sense and order of what I see.

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Michael Moore in Roger & Me or the Maysles brothers on Salesman.

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I am a moviemaker on the page and I am a poet onscreen. I am a clown performer, sometimes! I'm a fun funnyman on Sundays, Mondays, Tuesdays, and Fridays, and oh so serious on Saturdays, Wednesdays, and those black, black Thursdays.

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When I say I'm a clown, it means that I don't fear embarrassment. That means that my inhibitions are nil; that I know how to take off the restraints and dance; that I can dance, and sing, and write, and perform in such a way that I can make people laugh. I have the power to make people laugh. Yes, I can make them cry too, but it's the power of laughter that is more valuable.

*

The power to make 'em laugh, it's the best power, you know why? Because laughter is the response I pull out that connects them all to me. When they cries, they does that on the inside, in isolation, in that warm safe place covered in hair. But that laughter, we all hears that, and it connects us — it says, You is my hyena pack, you is my peoples, my spotted peoples, and we love our spots, we luxuriate in our spots, and we gonna cackle and feed on the corpses of those fallen elephants of culture, those dead corpse monoliths that are still filling this earthbound existence. We feeding and laughing, and the blood is flowing, and that blood flow is art, because we destroyin' but also because we is connected! We communicatin'!

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That be the power of laughter, communication! An' we all wants that. We in a sea, in a soup — it all mixed up, but if you in the nexus of laughter, you is never alone.

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When I say I have the power to make laughter, it means that I need to be in the right place, at the right time, doing and saying the right things. It be like the magician that needs to be on the right mountaintop, to say the right incantation, in just the right way, and then the lightning will strike his staff, and the people will see, because everything is illuminated. Many of these factors are not up to me, or not solely up to me — I need other collaborators. Sometimes these collaborators are other actors, sometimes writers, sometimes directors. And most importantly, the members of the audience are the collaborators, always, because they provide the expectations that I subvert in order to create the laughter. The laughter is the sound of presumptions crashing; the laughter is the noise of me breaking from the mold and going to new places and doing new things. And the laughter is the sound of them coming over to the other side, to the side I'm on, to my side, the shadow side, that is sometimes the side of light — the light that shines behind the shapes to make the shadows. Come into my cave; your laughter is the audio that goes with the dance.

Pg. 57

A PLACE IN THE SUN I

His leather jacket kicks it off so well,

Under the opening credits — printed large —

As he hitchhikes on the side of the road;

An indelible image that was Kerouac,

Jack London, Tom Cruise, Matt Dillon,

And my acting infancy.

Now I watched the film with a part-Irish,

Part-Cherokee beauty, with a cheekbone face

And a long elfin body to match, slung

In a cherry-red G-string and nothing else, bundled

In a cloud of Chateau sheets. She remarking

On the close-up beauty of young society Liz;

I silently noting the deft reticence of Clift when caught

In the woods: the leather, now with a Hawaiian shirt.

Pg. 61

A PLACE IN THE SUN V

When asked I should say that A Place

In the Sun is my favorite film,

But I rarely do, I guess because I forget

How effective the black and white

And the wide shots that let the action play;

And the very selective use of close-ups,

Saved primarily for hazy, angelic filter shots

Of Angela Vickers— that's Elizabeth Taylor —

Beauty shots that establish her as the young man's

Objex of desire, establish his subjective lust.

Not even Monty gets a close-up in some of these scenes.

Also, one close-up toward the end, the scene

When Monty's caught, there's a strange old man waiting in the woods.

The shot feels most real of all: his scruffy face releasing cigarette smoke.

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Excerpted from Hollywood Dreaming: Stories, Pictures, and Poems by James Franco, published by Insight Editions. Copyright © 2014 James Franco

Readers may buy this book at your local independent bookstore or online at: Amazon, Barnes & Noble or Insight Editions.