Things that are said on podcasts aren’t fact checked. They are just blah blah blowing smoke in the air.
To wit: many outlets has picked up a story told by a comedian named Paul Rust on a podcast he has with Matt Gourmley. Rust recalls that “literally two days after [Franco] had hosted the Oscars” Franco purposely screwed up a promotion he was filming for the comedy, “Your Highness,” with Danny McBride.
Rust says: “So he was upset because the reviews were not good. He was in a bad mood.” Rust says Franco mumbled during the taping, and then abruptly left but not before he kicked a chair.
Unfortunately, Rust’s memory may be fuzzy.
I have no interest in defending Franco, but I knew him pretty well back then. At the time, the Oscar nominated star of “12 Hours” was on a bewildering tear through graduate schools –including NYU — after quickly finishing up – as an adult — his credits at NYU. As I remember it, he returned to Yale when the Oscars were over.
The New York Times confirmed it in an article on March 3rd, 2011. Franco was back in New Haven for classes. His fellow students were talking about his quick return. Franco himself posted a Tweet against his naysayers that afternoon.
That whole story about the 2011 Oscars is vivid in my mind. On the Monday of Oscar week, I called Franco thinking he was in Hollywood and assembling the show he would host with Anne Hathaway. When I reached him, I was shocked to discover he was still in New Haven. He thought he’d come in on Thursday, rehearse, and return to Yale.
“I can’t leave class,” he told me.
He wasn’t stoned, as his critics said. He was lost. That’s because in his absence, Hathaway and her team diligently worked on the show with the writers. They didn’t wait around. Nature abhors a vacuum, you know. The result was a famous disaster of an Oscars.
But this item is not about saving James Franco’s reputation (in tatters because of his sex scandals). It’s more about how almost nothing I’m reading from podcasts, blogs, aggregated posts, etc is checked for any veracity. The worst culprits are outfits like Newsbreak App and Smartnews, which just regurgitate anything from any published site without caring about its truth. Everything is clickbait. Most of the internet, particularly in the field of entertainment, is a dumping ground.
As for Franco, I don’t care where he was personally. But he wasn’t doing promos and throwing chairs. At least, not that time.
