What Will James Franco's General Hospital Experiment, Which Begins Today, Mean for His Career?

James Franco’s stint on General Hospital begins today. The marketing fanfare has been pretty epic, but the show’s core audience is not likely to expand despite the A-list presence, a fact that has led to the inevitable barbs “Well, at least no one will see him trying to ruin his career.”

On the contrary, Franco has never turned down an opportunity to talk about the appearance, offering cryptic variations on the same theme (the phrase “performance art” has come up more than once). He has said it was almost impossible to remember all his lines, but he turned down a teleprompter because no one else in the cast used one. He resists the “What the hell are you doing?” questions. He even signed up for a sister television appearance in the meantime, though that one might be a little more along the expected lines.

The general picture that has emerged is that Franco is less concerned about industry gossip than he is in his side work with the New York artist Carter, who made the curious Erased James Franco short from last year. (Check out his un-meta meta Twitter account.) Carter revealed in interviews that the idea was his for Franco to appear on a soap and that it involves another project they’re working on together, but he was careful to add that Franco enjoys the challenge of working on a soap, yada yada yada.

That said, Franco has participated for years in idiosyncratic film projects large and small, and has written and directed shorts and features of his own. He has a short story collection on the way. He left Hollywood to go to grad school just as his career finally seemed to recover from a string of flops earlier in the decade. He hocks vodka and smashes stuff on camera when asked by marketing people. At a time of chronic overmanagment of stars, Franco seems to do whatever he wants, and it’s charming enough that we may or may not have set our DVRs for ABC at 3 p.m. today. Oh come on, he plays an assassin!

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