James Franco Has Fun With Hollywood Genres in a New Web Series
James Franco’s artist experiments can sometimes be baffling, but his latest is pure entertainment. “Making the Scene With James Franco,” an AOL original web series, features Franco and a small production team creating unlikely mash-ups of classic movies, with Franco (naturally) in the starring role. Some of the short films recreate a well-known movie scene in a different genre, while others blend together two unrelated scenes. To add an element of randomness, a crowd-sourced list of movie scenes is written on a giant wheel, which Franco spins at the beginning of each video. It’s a perfect set-up for comedy, though at first, the actor-director didn’t see it that way.
“We thought it was going to be just weird,” Franco told AOL during an introductory Q&A. “I mean, we really foregrounded the idea that these [movie scenes] were not our choice, so that there would be less pressure to make something that made sense… But they ended up being really funny, unintentionally.”
Franco may have been inspired by high-minded experimental films like Lars Von Triers’s The Five Obstructions (which he mentions in the Q&A), but the short movies in “Making the Scene” are indeed hilarious. Batjuice, for example, envisions the dinnertime scene in Beetlejuice populated by the characters from The Dark Knight Returns, complete with Batman lip-syncing Harry Belafonte’s “Banana Boat Song.” Dirty Dancing Dogs begins with the infamous ear-slicing scene from Quentin Tarantino’s Reservoir Dogs, then segues into the finale of Dirty Dancing.
The other two videos play with genre. Here’s Jimmy turns Stanley Kubrick’s horror classic The Shining into a romantic comedy (coincidentally, a concept also explored by this mock trailer a few years back). Silent Taxi Driver (above) is exactly what it sounds like: scenes from Martin Scorsese’s violent 1976 drama, augmented with Scott Joplin ragtime and title cards.
Ridiculous as they are, these movies do raise some interesting questions about filmmaking tropes. Dirty Dancing Dogs dares its audience to notice the similarities between a movie dance scene and a torture scene. Here’s Jimmy draws attention to the fine line between the stalker-ish behavior of some rom-com heroes, and the predatory nature of horror villains. (“He likes running after me, and I love running away from him. He’s a dream!” the Shelley Duvall character gushes about her mad, murderous husband.)
The thing that really makes the series click, though, is Franco himself. The actor has an uncanny ability to capture the essence of each lead character, whether he’s duplicating Christian Bale’s Batman voice or channeling Michael Madsen via Patrick Swayze.
Franco made 10 episodes of “Making the Scene,” four of which are available now. According to Variety, the remaining six episodes include variations on Grease, The Godfather, Titanic, Wayne’s World, Twilight, and When Harry Met Sally.
Photo credits: AOL
