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Actor/director/PhD candidate/Instagram ingenue/author James Franco wrote a short story about a character named “Lindsay Lohan” for Vice’s new fiction issue.
While the piece, titled Bungalow 89, might purport to be fiction, career details, character names, and a photographs of Franco sprinkled throughout the piece indicate otherwise. The story actually reads like a tell-all explaining that Franco has refused time and time again to sleep with “Lohan”—even though she totally wanted to.
With narcissism at an all-time high, the story consists of Franco pitying, condescending, and benevolently educating the wayward starlet in the writings of Salinger and lessons of self-control:
Once upon a time a guy, a Hollywood guy, read some Salinger to a young woman who hadn’t read him before. Let’s call this girl Lindsay. She was a Hollywood girl, but a damaged one. I knew that she would like Salinger, because most young women do.
Here are key passages in which Franco makes sure everyone who is reading knows that he really and truly never now, then, or ever has had or wanted to have sex with Lohan. Not when she tried to break into his room:
There was a Hollywood girl staying at Chateau Marmont. She had gotten a key to my room from the manager. I heard her put the key into my front door and turn it, but I had slid the dead bolt and that thing—I don’t know what you call it; it’s like a chain but made of two bars—that kept the door from opening.
She said, “James, open the door.”
She said, “Open the door, you bookworm punk blogger f*****.”
Not when she tried to booty call him:
My phone rang. She let it ring until I answered.
“You’re not going to let me sleep, are you?”
“Do you think this is me? Lindsay Lohan. Say it. Say it, like you have ownership. It’s not my name anymore.”
“Lindsay Lo-han.”
“I just want to sleep on your couch. I’m lonely.”
“We’re not going to have sex. If you want to come in, I’ll read you a story.”
“A bedtime story?”
“It’s called ‘A Perfect Day for Bananafish.’”
Not when she was cuddling up next to him in bed:
Now we were lying in bed. I wasn’t going to f–k her. She had her head on my shoulder. She started to talk. I let her.
Not even that time a few years ago when she was high at New York club Bungalow 8 and dragged him into the mirrored bathroom to have sex:
“He didn’t f–k me, that s–t. And what was he doing there anyway? On my night. My night with Meryl, my night when everything was right, when I got everything I wanted. Almost.”
But he does wish her well in her time of need!
I ran my fingers through her hair and thought about this girl sleeping on my chest, our fictional Hollywood girl, Lindsay. What will she do? I hope she gets better. You see, she is famous. She was famous because she was a talented child actress, and now she’s famous because she gets into trouble. She is damaged.
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