James Franco Dream

We're moving to Virginia and our house is all messy and full of boxes so you and I go to a bar to hang out and drink and talk, you know, like we do.* We have been having a James Franco Retrospective conversation, so we bring his old movies and paraphernalia (I think we own posters?) and we talk through the good times and the bad. A while later who walks into the bar, but James Franco himself. He sees his dvds at our table, assumes we're fangirls, and joins us. We have a long conversation that evolves sort of like his career--first dopy, then serious, then funny, then weird, then sort of offensive. Somewhere in the middle I'm sort of in love with him, but by the end he's talking exclusively about himself, except for an unfortunate period where he assumes we're college sophomores and boasts he can certainly guess our majors. He guesses poorly. Right about the time when we think we've had enough James Franco for life, and the novelty of actually meeting him is gone, the bar door swings open (Western style) and Jake Gyllenhall enters with a gang of (cow/frat)boys, all in cargo pants and baseball caps. They swagger up to our table and exclaim YOU'RE OUT OF CONTROL JAMES FRANCO, which is sort of true but melodramatic all the same. We take the opportunity to leave, though in retrospect this intervention would probably have been the most interesting part of the evening. We go home to this red brick house we've bought and are unpacking for a while when James Franco drives up looking for us, yelling to the house things like "Hey ladies! We were just starting to have fun!" We ignore him, in part because he's driving a really tiny volvo with a white bengal tiger in the back. James Franco just doesn't know when to stop. He's drunk and mad, and as he drives away he crashes into a fire hydrant. The crash site looks like a cartoon--water shooting up in the air, and both Franco and the volvo are humorously compressed into an accordion shape. "Crap," we think, "Now there's a tiger loose in the neighborhood." We bolt the doors and windows, and turn off the lights, because basically this new house is like our tiger fortress. I believe I used that exact phrase to describe it. It is not, however, a movie star fortress, because along comes Jake Gyllenhall and his band of goons, all of whom have mistakenly assumed we're Franco's oldest friends. They bang on our door, walk in (didn't we lock it? no, because tigers can't use doorknobs) and demand we do something about Franco's antics. "He needs his friends right now" they yell. We are definitely not his friends, and anyway they're going to let that tiger in, but they aren't listening, and the tiger gets in before they go. Now there's a tiger in the house, and it's sort of like a cricket: we can hear it, but we can't ever find where it's hiding.

I think this dream might actually be about Joaquin Phoenix's documentary, which comes out next week.


*we don't.