Navigate to News section

James Franco Is All In, With Looks to Kill

In ‘King Cobra,’ James Franco plays a producer of gay pornography who wants to buy performer Brent Corrigan out of his contract and will go to great lengths to see it through

by
Rachel Shukert
September 29, 2016
King Cobra The Movie / Facebook
James Franco (R) and 'KIng Cobra' co-star Keegan Allen.King Cobra The Movie / Facebook
King Cobra The Movie / Facebook
James Franco (R) and 'KIng Cobra' co-star Keegan Allen.King Cobra The Movie / Facebook

James Franco will debut the latest entry in his rapidly expanding and diverse filmography on October 21, with the release of King Cobra, a film about gay porn star Brent Corrigan, and the murder of director Bryan Kocis (Christian Slater). Franco and Sean Paul Lockhart (whose stage name is Brent Corrigan) play two aspiring producers who want to buy Corrigan out of his contract. From its recently released trailer, it seems to be a festival of hairless bodies, pouting young boys pulling off their tank tops on the orders of leering older men, and Franco at his most gym-honed and charmingly sinister in what is being called his “most unhinged performance.”

Most importantly, King Cobra will join the ranks of Franco’s other porn-themed projects. In his 2013 semi-documentary Interior. Leather. Bar., Franco and co-star Travis Matthews interrogate and attempt to recreate some 40 minutes of lost footage from William Friedkin’s explicit and controversial 1980 film Cruising. (My husband has still not quite recovered from my suggestion that we watch it together on Valentine’s Day). And there’s alsohis upcoming David Simon (The Wire) HBO series The Deuce, about the rise of the porn industry and HIV in 1970s and ’80 New York City. And let’s not forget his turn as legendary Playboy publisher Hugh Hefner in Lovelace, the 2013 biopic featuring Amanda Seyfried as Deep Throat star Linda Lovelace. He also starred in or maybe wrote and directed some movie about a brothel that someone told me about once, but which I can’t find any documentation of, which knowing Hollywood, doesn’t mean it didn’t happen.

Suffice it to say, James Franco is seriously into porn to the degree that he’s building if not quite a porn empire, than an empire of stuff about porn.

But where does that interest come from? Is he still assiduously combating the fall out of his days as a teen idol/nice Jewish boy? Excavating some dark part of himself? Is he out to shock people, or genuinely artistically drawn to the subversive, the erotic, the margins of society (to the extent that any of that still applies to porn, which people mostly don’t even bother to erase from their web browsers anymore)?

But if he’s looking to expand, I’ve got a great idea for him, the story of another nice Jewish boy, this one from Brooklyn, who started out as a photojournalist (taking pictures of then-First Lady Jackie Kennedy on her state visit to Pakistan, no less), and having passed through the hedonistic crucible of the ‘60s, founded a magazine that seriously reviewed sleazy Times Square peep shows and erotica by Anais Nin alike; that published probing profiles of the perversion of J. Edgar Hoover and guides to gonorrhea, a magazine which gleefully described itself as “so filthy, not only do you have to wash after every page, but every reader must disinfect after reading!” That man was named Al Goldstein, and the magazine he founded, Screw, more than deserves the Hollywood treatment. And James Franco is the only guy weird enough, subversive enough, and seemingly unconcerned with his career or likability to do it. Go forth, young pervert!

Rachel Shukert is the author of the memoirs Have You No Shame? and Everything Is Going To Be Great,and the novel Starstruck. She is the creator of the Netflix show The Baby-Sitters Club, and a writer on such series as GLOW and Supergirl. Her Twitter feed is @rachelshukert.