Leather jacket, Rebecca Minkoff, $695, visit rebeccaminkoff.com. Stretch cotton-blend T-shirt, Calvin Klein Underwear Body, $25. Jeans, Ralph Lauren. Vintage sunglasses, Oliver Peoples, $400. Alligator-skin watch, March LA.B, $935. Vintage boots, from Confederacy, L.A., $460. This summer, the dizzyingly prolific James Franco—movie idol, soap star, author, PhD student—is making a splash in contemporary art, debuting a mixed-media bonanza of photos, videos, and installations—at the Venice Biennale, no less. Upending the role that won him a Golden Globe and ignited his film career (as James Dean in TNT’s 2001 biopic), the project mines what Franco calls the “ripples and echoes” that Rebel Without a Cause cast through the American cinemascape, youth culture, and gay iconography.
It all starts here, with gender-bending images Franco shot of model Natalia Bonifacci and model-actress hybrids Imogen Poots and Agyness Deyn. The beauties are dreaming of Dean (and Rebel costar Sal Mineo, about whom Franco will also direct an upcoming biopic) against the backdrop of L.A., in particular Bungalow 2 of the Chateau Marmont, where Rebel director Nicholas Ray lived and held rehearsals during filming in 1955.
The photos offer a taste of Franco’s Biennale show, on which he’s collaborated with a posse of art-world rabble-rousers including shock artist Paul McCarthy, pop art vet Ed Ruscha, and director-provocateur Harmony Korine (Gummo). Each tackles a facet of Rebel, from the director’s paternal and, Franco says, abstract psycho-sexual dynamic with his stars, to the film’s imagined lost scenes. The result incorporates motorcycles, nudity, and “extreme bondage…crazy stuff,” he says.
Of his foray into yet another medium, Franco says, “It’s not about mastering all of them. It’s about using each when appropriate, so that I’m not confined to a traditional approach.”
