Word on the street is, James Franco missed a ton of classes, received a low grade, then contributed to the untimely firing of an NYU professor.
But Professor R. John Williams, Franco’s adviser at Yale, recalls a different student. In Williams’ obsequious Slate column, he describes James Franco as a model student with, uh, plenty of time on his hands:
So what is James like as a reader of scholarly work? I’ve often heard it expressed that he must be a mountebank, since no single person could be doing as many things as he does. How could he possibly be simultaneously reading for a Yale Ph.D and filming a multimillion-dollar motion picture? How could he possibly have time to write anything when he’s also teaching a class at NYU and starring so many films? I’ve wondered the same thing myself. But on that trip to Detroit, I learned a secret. People think that when you’re the star of a film, your time must be chock-full with endless minutia—appearances, conversations, getting “into character,” and so on. But when you’re the star, you end up just sitting around a lot.
And:
So when you see James’s character with his arm trapped under a rock in 127 Hours, what you don’t see is that there was an assigned reading under the rock with it. When he’s playfully wrestling with a genetically-enhanced chimpanzee in Rise of the Planet of the Apes, just off to the right of the shot was a stack of books.
AND:
The truth is, if you’re an A-list Hollywood star like James Franco, and are willing to put the time into earning a Ph.D, you may actually have more time to read than many of your colleagues. Heck, you don’t even have to worry about the grocery shopping, laundry, and other sundry tasks that every other poor graduate student in the country has to worry about. After visiting Detroit, the thing I found myself wondering was not “How does James do it?” but rather “Why aren’t more Hollywood actors earning Ph.Ds?”
So there you have it: it’s always gratifying to teach an earnest student, but teaching James Franco is the most gratifying of all.
In the meantime, John Tintori—he’s the film chair at Tisch School of the Arts—stresses that Professor José Angel Santana’s contract simply expired. No more, no less.
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