INTRODUCTION

American actor and recent Academy Award co-host, James Franco, has in the past two years been arguably one of the most productive people of celebrity on the planet. Just a brief mention of a few of his project of late: he has finished two MFA writing programs at NYU and Columbia University; conducted a video interview of Marina Abramovic for the Wall Street Journal in which he is seen with the artist wearing matching lab coats, peeling almonds, and eating gold; appeared and is set to re-appear on US soap opera General Hospital playing a character ‘Franco’, a psychotic artist wherein his last episode he escapes Jason and Dante at a giant art show by publicly faking his death; has made an installation piece for New York's Deitch Projects based on his General Hospital stint; he is currently pursuing a PhD in Yale's English department at the behest of Harold Bloom and is about to work on a degree at the Rhode Island School of Design.

A Divided Mission?

As Franco's acts of interdisciplinary feats and his freelance approach to the stage, arts and scholarship has divided Hollywood pundits and pushed Cultural and Media Studies critics to the limits of scepticism mirroring the reactions which arose when ‘Madonna Studies’ was announced in the early 1990s as a subdivision of Media Studies, I am struck by two truisms. Firstly, that people – to include if not especially scholars – do not like change.