James Franco pens short story with character ‘Lindsay Lohan’

The latest in James Franco’s ever-expanding multitude of projects is a short story for the fiction issue of Vice magazine, which features a central character called ‘Lindsay Lohan’.

The story, Bungalow 89, reads a lot less like fiction and a lot more like vignettes from his own life, as Franco visits Lohan in the Chateau Marmont hotel (from where Lohan was once reportedly banned thanks to an unpaid bill). He reads her Salinger stories, listens to her ramble about her memories, and zones out on a giant Gucci billboard of himself outside. But he still plays with the idea of whether the entire encounter is made up, writing: “Do you think I’ve created this? This dragon girl, lion girl, Hollywood hellion, terror of Sunset Boulevard, minor in the clubs, Chateau Demon? Do you think this is me?” The whole story is published on Vice’s website.

A list of Lohan’s celebrity lovers, on which Franco featured, was leaked online last year, but the Franco in the story at least is an absolute gentleman. “We’re not going to have sex. If you want to come in, I’ll read you a story,” he tells her. “Now we were lying in bed. I wasn’t going to f*** her. She had her head on my shoulder. She started to talk. I let her.”

He might need to be a little bit careful though: Another actor, Scarlett Johansson, sued a French novelist for including a character in one of his books that was described as looking exactly like her. Johansson’s lawyer said it was a “violation and fraudulent and illegal exploitation of her name, her reputation and her image,” and that it contained “defamatory claims about her private life”. The novelist, Grgoire Delacourt, called the action “rather sad If an author can no longer mention the things that surround us, a brand of beer, a monument, an actor — it’s going to be complicated to produce fiction.” He added that his work was a “declaration of love”.