Leading Man: James Franco Courts Controversy in ‘Mapplethorpe’

James Franco channels Maplethorpe for GQ - GQ.com

Matinee idol James Franco is adding another outsider and provocateur to his list of upcoming movie projects. The decision to star as Robert Mapplethorpe in a biopic of the controversial photographer is in line with recent career moves by the creatively restless Franco, who has moved from costarring in a mega-budget “Spider-Man” blockbuster and hosting the Oscars, to appearing on a soap opera, and producing and starring in micro-indie art projects seen by a literal handful of people.

Mapplethorpe” was one of 11 films to receive a $15,000 grant from the Tribeca Film Institute’s All Access program in January. Two of the films, a mix of fictional and documentary features, will be awarded another $10,000 during the Tribeca Film Festivalnext month in New York City.

Robert Mapplethorpe

Franco’s film will track his life from his rise to fame in the ‘70s to his death from HIV in 1989 when he was just 42 years old. “Mapplethorpe was as famous for his calmly explicit homoerotic male nudes and provocative depictions of sadomasochistic sex as for his star black-and-white portraits of celebrities,” writes ArtForum.com.

Actress and producer Eliza Dushku—perhaps best known to mainstream audiences for “Bring It On” and for playing the badass Faith in “Buffy the Vampire Slayer”—secured the life rights and participation of Mapplethorpe’s estate in 2009.

She is currently aboard only as a producer. Her co-producer and director is Ondi Timoner, an acclaimed filmmaker who is the only person to twice be awarded the Sundance Grand Jury Prize for Documentary Film: in 2004 (“Dig!”) and ’09 (“We Live in Public”).

James Franco as seen in GQ Magazine

Franco has already portrayed several real-life gay men onscreen. In 2008, he took on the role of activist Scott Smith, boyfriend to civil rights pioneer Harvey Milk, in director Gus Van Sant’s biopic “Milk,” and in 2010 Franco played poet Allen Ginsberg in “Howl.”

Making the festival rounds is “The Broken Tower,” a portrait of troubled gay poet Hart Crane that he also wrote, produced and directed as his master’s thesis for the Tisch School of the Arts at New York University.

Franco’s decision to take on these particular roles “probably has less to do with any interest he has in playing gay men than in portraying figures whose rights and freedoms were threatened by self-appointed moral guardians,” ArtForum speculates.

“They’re also too juicy and iconic roles for any ambitious actor in his early 30s to turn down.”

He recently posed as Mapplethorpe for “GQ Germany.”

TRIVIA: A competing Mapplethorpe film is on the boards. Singer-songwriter Patti Smith is adapting her award-winning memoir “Just Kids,” which traces a period in the 1960s when she and Mapplethorpe were unknown, struggling artists and constant companions.

CLICK HERE for the complete ArtForum article.

CLICK HERE for GQ Germany’s layout with James Franco.

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