NYU professor fired for failing to appreciate James Franco's inversion of the class attendance model

By Sean O'Neal  |  December 19, 2011 | 8:08pm
Aux Features Film

Forever doomed to suffer the idiot criticism of philistines, James Franco has become the subject of a lawsuit aimed at New York University, where a former professor claims he lost his job after giving Franco a “D” last year, and failing to recognize the artistic significance of Franco skipping his class. José Angel Santana, using the outdated paradigm of pre-millennial education, says he gave Franco the grade for missing 12 of his 14 “Directing The Actor II” classes, ignoring Franco’s subversive commentary on the course—in which Franco demonstrated that the director-actor axis is fluid, and that the actor could become the director and vice versa by forcing his so-called “director” to play a part simply by removing himself from the equation, thus creating a negative space to which he must react.

Unfortunately, Santana is restricted by his limited artistic sensibilities, so he sees only a Hollywood star who exploited his school’s sycophantic attitude toward celebrities: “The school has bent over backwards to create a Franco-friendly environment, that’s for sure,” Santana tells the New York Post, no doubt referring to the university’s new policy requiring all students to walk at 1/8 speed and speak solely in out-of-context dialogue from Douglas Sirk’s Imitation Of Life, and in the cafeteria, replacing fish sticks with a single Ritz cracker suspended in petroleum jelly.

He also expressly called out his fellow professor Jay Anania and department chair John Tintori, saying that he believes they rewarded James Franco with good grades in exchange for his hiring them to be in his movies—Santana, like so many, unaware that we are all in James Franco’s movie and everything, including these “grades,” are merely surface events meant to give the illusion of plot. Santana concludes by saying, “They’ve turned the NYU graduate film degree into swag for James Franco’s purposes, a possession, something you can buy,” unwittingly spelling out Franco’s doctoral thesis.

 
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