Know what it is to be Franco by attending a Gus Van Sant/James Franco art exhibit

By Sean O'Neal | February 23, 2011 | 7:47pm

Aux Features Film

Until construction is complete on James Franco’s Funhouse—a mile-long hallway of slanted mirrors and Super 8 projectors, scored by a busted boombox playing tapes of laugh-tracks from old episodes of Taxi, according to our pamphlet—the closest you will come to knowing what it is to be Franco may well be the upcoming “Unfinished” exhibit at Beverly Hills’ Gagosian Gallery. Franco has teamed with his Milk collaborator Gus Van Sant, who will show eight works on paper that transform random Internet images into watercolor paintings, alongside Franco’s dual film projects Endless Idaho and My Own Private River.

For the fittingly titled Endless Idaho, Franco took Van Sant’s Keanu Reeves/River Phoenix Shakespearean hustler story My Own Private Idaho and added in countless outtakes, deleted scenes, interviews, location scouting shots, and rehearsal footage to create a 12-hour “unprecedented look into the workaday process of making a movie.” Once you’ve properly absorbed that, you can then move on to My Own Private River, which is Franco’s personally assembled River Phoenix montage, set to an original score by Michael Stipe. “Unfinished” opens this Saturday and runs through April 9, at which point the “Unfinished” will finally become finished, as James Franco curls up on the sidewalk outside the Viper Room and films himself sleeping for the next 20 years.