James Franco makes accidental comedy

LOS ANGELES — James Franco, famous multihyphenate, wasn’t trying to make a string of comedic sketches for AOL. But that’s how his latest project, a 10-episode series called Making A Scene With James Franco, turned out.

Franco envisioned the series as a kind of artistic challenge: How to combine two disparate films to create something new. But comedy quickly bubbled to the surface.

“We knew in the very least these would end up being weird,” he told Variety. “They ended up being really funny — unintentionally.”

The approach he and his producers took was to solicit input from fans about their favourite scenes. They then put the most popular ones on a spinning wheel, giving it a whirl to determine which two movie scenes (or scene and genre) to combine.

The resulting first four episodes are BatJuice, melding Batman and Beetlejuice; Here’s Jimmy!, recasting The Shining as a romcom; Silent Taxi Driver, a silent-movie rendition of the Martin Scorsese film; and Dirty Dancing Dogs — Dirty Dancing plus Reservoir Dogs (“Nobody cuts off baby’s ear!”).

Movies to be featured in the remaining episodes include Grease, The Godfather, Titanic, Wayne’s World, Twilight and When Harry Met Sally. While the Making A Scene bits poke fun at the films, the series also pays homage to them. “It felt like a mini-education,” Franco said.

One of the reasons AOL sought Franco was that he has 2.48 million followers on Twitter for @JamesFrancoTV. But making a digital series is an entirely different experience compared with making a movie, Franco said, with lower budgets and perhaps lower expectations in the digital realm.

“The film business is the film business,” he said. “There’s artistic pressure and financial pressure.” REUTERS