Meanwhile, James Franco is co-writing a book on our girl Lana Del Rey

By Lilian min

July 23, 2015

By Lilian min

July 23, 2015

James Franco is really gunning for that Renaissance man designation: The actor / writer / director / professor / fine artist has set his sights back in the literary world, but the target of his next writing endeavor is someone who, like him, is all too familiar with the specters of celebrity, artifice, and how those two things interact — none other than Lana Del Rey, queen of Coney Island and Hollywood and everything in between.

Franco and former writing mentor-turned-writing partner, David Shields, are releasing Flip-Side: Real and Imaginary Conversations with Lana Del Rey via Penguin Random House on March 15, 2016, wherein Franco and Shields will presumably be writing about Del Rey while also including real snippets of conversations with the singer herself.

Lest you think Franco’s fascination with the singer is coming out of nowhere, that’s far from the case — he interviewed her earlier this year for V Magazine, in which he had this to say about her:

The cover of Flip-Side takes Franco’s fanboying to the next level: Seriously, with typography that echoes Del Rey’s favored style for her album art, doesn’t this look like a zine cover?

Of course, Flip-Side makes sense when you think of it as a continued conversation between the two — or rather, as how Franco’s continuing the conversation, with Del Rey’s blessing. As he writes in the conclusion of his V profile, “I wanted to interview Lana for a book and she said, ‘Just write around me, it’s better if it’s not my own words. It’s almost better if you don’t get me exactly, but try’.”

Now that he’s doing that, perhaps he should tackle another project he mentioned in the interview next: “[Del Rey] has this idea for a film. I want to do it because it’s a little like Sunset Boulevard. A woman is alone in a big house in L.A. She doesn’t want to go out. She starts to go crazy, and becomes paranoid because she feels like people are watching her. Even in her own house. It’s like an awesome B-movie that lives in Lana’s head. It’s about her, and it’s not about her. Just like her music.”