James Franco Wrote A Short Story About Lindsay Lohan for Vice
Overeducated actor James Franco has a short story, titled "Bungalow 89," in Vice's new fiction issue. Although this tale would portend to be fictional, it contains a number of seemingly biographical details about a "character" he went ahead and called "Lindsay Lohan."
"Bungalow 89" reads like a weird attempt at Faulkner-esque stream-of-consciousness, but also reads like an overlong explanation from Franco that he did not sleep with Lindsay Lohan, despite what her fuck lists may say. Apparently, while the two were guests at the Chateau Marmont, Lindsay would not stop trying to sleep with him. He did not entertain this idea. Instead, he read her Salinger:
Once upon a time a guy, a Hollywood guy, read some Salinger to a young woman who hadn't read him before. Let's call this girl Lindsay. She was a Hollywood girl, but a damaged one. I knew that she would like Salinger, because most young women do. I read her two of the Nine Stories, "A Perfect Day for Bananafish" and "For Esmé—with Love and Squalor." "Bananafish" was great because it has a nagging mother on the other end of the phone line, nothing like Lindsay's real mother, but still, the mother-daughter thing was good for her to hear. And there's the little girl in the story, Sibyl, and the pale suicide, Seymour, who kisses her foot and talks about bananafish with her, those fantastic phallic fish who stick their heads in holes and gorge themselves—it should be called "A Perfect Day for Dickfish"—and then, bam, he shoots himself.
But Franco really, really wants to be clear: he did not sleep with Lindsay. Nope. They were in bed together, but nothing happened:
Now we were lying in bed. I wasn't going to fuck her. She had her head on my shoulder. She started to talk. I let her.
Again, even though this is part of a "fiction issue," Franco details the life of someone who sounds exactly like Lindsay Lohan:
I ran my fingers through her hair and thought about this girl sleeping on my chest, our fictional Hollywood girl, Lindsay. What will she do? I hope she gets better. You see, she is famous. She was famous because she was a talented child actress, and now she's famous because she gets into trouble. She is damaged. For a while, after her high hellion days, she couldn't get work because she couldn't get insured. They thought she would run off the sets to party. Her career suffered, and she started getting arrested (stealing, DUIs, car accidents, other things). But the arrests, even as they added up, were never going to be an emotional bottom for her, because she got just as much attention for them as she used to get for her film performances. She would get money offers for her jailhouse memoirs, crazy offers. So how would she ever stop the craziness when the response to her work and the response to her life had converged into one? Two kinds of performance, in film and in life, had melted into one.
James Franco would like you to know: he did not sleep with the woman described in this story and if you think that woman is Linday Lohan, then OK.
[Image via Getty]