July 11th, 2011 at 3:17 pm by
Anne
James Franco and Anne Hathaway hosted the Oscars way-back-when (and we’ve all long forgotten about it, thanks a lot James), but James Franco insists on making us relive the nightmare we can’t scrub from our retinas. If you recall, everyone thought he was stoned and that Anne Hathaway took 12 too many happy pills.
Now James is opening up about why he played it low-key and what really went on to make him the way he was (because it’s always everyone else’s fault don’tcha know). And get this, he says that Steven Spielberg allegedly told the show’s producer Bruce Cohen that it was ‘the best Oscars ever’. Bitch, please. If Steven did say that he was either being sarcastic or lying to Bruce Cohen’s face.
Despite saying talking about it is like assigning blame, and not fun, he goes on to assign blame in his Playboy interview:
“For three or four weeks we shot the promos and the little film that played in the opening. In the last week, when we really started focusing on the script for the live show and did a run-through, I said to the producer, ‘I don’t know why you hired me, because you haven’t given me anything. I just don’t think this stuff’s going to be good.’”
He particularly hated coming out dressed as Marilyn Monroe. Did he hate it more than you or I? Who knows:
“I was so pissed about that I was deliberately going to fall onstage and hopefully my dress would fall off or something — they couldn’t blame that on me; I was in high heels,” Franco says. “The plan had been that I was going to sing as Cher and then Cher was going to come out onstage; that got axed when Cher and the song from Burlesque weren’t nominated. I told them, ‘Look, this is the thing people are going to talk about, the images they will take away from the show.
“I just didn’t want to fight anymore, even when they said, ‘You’ll come out as Marilyn Monroe. It’ll be funny.’ Me in drag is not funny,” Franco continues, but he says, he “just didn’t want to argue anymore. I was going with their program; I wanted to do the material they gave me, not be one of the many cooks doing the writing. There were a lot of cooks who shouldn’t have been cooking but were allowed to. There were some cooks my manager tried to bring in, like Judd Apatow, who wrote some very funny stuff that wasn’t used.”
If Judd Apatow was involved you KNOW it would have been funny. You know, perhaps he has a point. Perhaps there were too many ‘cooks in the kitchen’ and all the wrong ones. However he’s a professional and that’s what he was paid for and he really should have at least tried. He came off not trying and it sounds like he somewhat ‘resigned’ himself to the writing, and in the sense that he lost his mojo (although I don’t know if he has a lot of mojo to begin with). He explains his demeanor:
“As far as having low energy or seeming as though I wasn’t into it or was too cool for it, I thought, ‘Okay Anne is going the enthusiastic route. I’ve been trained as an actor to respond to circumstances, to the people I’m working with, and not force anything.’ So I thought I would be the straight man and she could be the other, and that’s how I was trying to do those lines. I felt kind of trapped in that material. I felt, This is not my boat. I’m just a passenger, but I’m going down and there’s no way out.”
Good think Anne Hathaway didn’t follow his footsteps and actually rose to the challenge. Do you think he’s still passing the buck or do you think it was a bad situation that wasn’t going to get good no matter how he acted?
Danity Donnaly is is a Midwestern mama with class, sass and a love for celebrity gossip. Danity is a formerdisc jockey and is a fierce dancer who enjoys pancakes and diet coke. When she’s not delivering the dish, Danity can be found on Twitter talking smack or shaking her bon bon to any jam by Justin Timberlake.
