Actors Anonymous
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5.0 • 2 Ratings
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- £6.49
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- £6.49
Publisher Description
Inspired by Alcoholics Anonymous's 12 Steps and 12 Traditions, Actors Anonymous is a dark, genre-bending work that mixes memoir and pure invention in an audacious examination of celebrity, acting and the making of fiction.
Actors Anonymous is unsettling, funny and personal - a series of stories told in many forms: a McDonald's drive-thru operator who spends his shift trying on accents; an ex-child star recalling a massive beachside bacchanal; hospital volunteers putting a camera in the hands of a patient obsessed with horror films; a vampire-flick starlet who discovers a cryptic book written by a famous actor, who may have killed his father and gone on the run.
The book contains profound insights into the nature and purpose of acting. Franco mercilessly turns his 'James Franco' persona inside out while, at the same time, providing a fascinating meditation on his art, along with nightmarish tales of excess. 'Hollywood has always been a private club,' he writes. 'I open the gates. I say welcome. I say, Look inside.'
Franco's writing is vivid and disturbing, but what distinguishes his work is the great compassion he extends towards his characters, who he presents in all their raw humanity, while at the same time providing insight into their deeper selves.
PUBLISHERS WEEKLY
Franco's debut novel, following his short story collection Palo Alto, is an assemblage of chapters whose organizing factor is a parody of the Alcoholics Anonymous manual Twelve Steps and Twelve Traditions. Each chapter is headed by a step or a tradition, such as step three: "Turned our will and our performances' over to the Great Director." Some chapters are first-person narratives, ostensibly by different narrators, though it's hard not to think of the author as the sole narrator, since the tone and voice of each is identical to the others flat, Bukowskian recitations of acting classes taken, sex had, and drugs done. Elsewhere, readers encounter uninspired maunderings about the nature of acting: "Kazan said actors acquire the look of waxed fruit." The chapter headed "Step 4: Made a fearless and searching moral inventory of our character' " is composed of sophomoric poems about River Phoenix. At one point, a narrator named James receives a note from a professor that says, "Stop writing." Another chapter includes the pronouncement, "Writing sells mass produced objects." This mass-produced object will likely appeal only to Franco's most devoted fans, but you can't fault a guy for trying.
