Wednesday night’s live Times Talk with “Disaster Artist” star and director James Franco and his brother, actor Dave Franco, has been cancelled.
Franco just won a Golden Globe Award for playing off beat real life loser filmmaker Tommy Wiseau. On the Globes broadcast he brought Wiseau up on stage but then cut him off from speaking. That didn’t win him any new fans. I thought it was unsuual for Franco, who is usually very generous to other actors. But maybe he knew best in that situation.
Still, there have been rumors for weeks that Franco was going to be caught up in the recent tsunami of accusations against actors regarding sexual conduct. And sure enough, on Twitter during the Globes, actress Ally Sheedy Tweeted her surprise that Franco was being rewarded with a statue given his history. She deleted it, but enough people captured the comment to make noise.
And then within minutes another actress, Violet Paley, Tweeted “Cute #TIMESUP pin James Franco. Remember the time you pushed my head down in a car towards your exposed penis & that other time you told my friend to come to your hotel when she was 17? After you had already been caught doing that to a different 17 year old?”
True or not, Paley’s Tweet instigated an avalanche of accusations. Now the Times Talk has been cancelled– a mistake, I fear, because it sends a signal of guilt. Of course, Franco does have one– just one– episode in his recent past in which he wound up texting an underage girl. He explained it by saying he obviously didn’t understand how old she was.
Unlike a lot of the alleged sexual predators of recent note, James Franco comes from a close knit, solid nuclear family. I actually knew his grandmother. His late father was a lovely guy who died much too young and suddenly from a widowmaker heart attack. His mother is a writer and very cool. So all of this seems hard to believe, and I guess we’ll have to see how it all plays out. It would be a real shame if a very good career was tarnished here for no reason.
