Lin. (Jonathan Daniel/Getty Images)

We know who we would give the money to: Jeremy Lin, the poor guy. Linsanity lasted approximately a month, in which the Knicks point-guard was the hottest thing since the Rolling Stones showed up in America and pissed off Don Draper. But after a recent knee injury, his career is being put down faster than one of the horses in Luck. Refusing to give up, the basketball sensation is still tweeting about his recovery from the hospital. He’s not out yet!

Maybe he could team up with Kris Humphries of the New Jersey Nets, who is refusing to give up and annul his marriage to reality TV robot, Kim Kardashian. He says he’s not in it for the money, but rather wants an apology from his wife of 72 days, and an admission that she and her family made money off their publicity stunt of a wedding. We’re sure Ms. Kardashian would admit it if she actually believed it to be true; unfortunately she’s spent so much time turning herself into a human brand that she probably doesn’t understand the issue. Doesn’t everyone get married for money (and an E! Special) these days?

Well, at least we know there’s some class left in New York: the celebrities are beginning to arrive for the Tribeca Film Festival, co-founded by Robert DeNiro and made famous by that Jay-Z song. French beauty Catherine Deneuve did not inspire any Repulsion while being honored Monday night at the 39th Annual Chaplin Award Gala. The Film Society of Lincoln Center’s gala brought out the heavy-hitters to honor Ms. Deneuve: Glenn Close, Susan Sarandon and Paul Feig were just several of the attendees to show their Franco-appreciation. It makes sense; we need someone to deify now that Jeremy Lin’s off the court.

A scruffy Franco, post open bar, pre Q&A (Julie Cunnah Photography)

In our post-fashion week hammock of a lull, with the Presidents Day exodus to boot, we were surprised when our inbox lit up yesterday afternoon with a short note from our friends at the Film Society of Lincoln Center: “Hey, do you want to meet James Franco?” What a silly question.

Doing a quick bit of research, we learned he was hosting a remixed screening of Gus Van Sant’s My Own Private Idaho. Mr. Franco aptly redubbed his take on the cult classic "My Own Private River" an homage to the late River Phoenix, a young actor that had made a lasting impression on an even younger James.

As we approached the Walter Reade Theater for this Franco flavored chapter of the Film Comments Select Series, we spotted our PR contact and he yanked us inside. “Come on you have to see this, they’ve decorated the reception exactly like an Alcoholics Anonymous meeting … except there’s an open bar.”

Having seen our fair share of flicks depicting AA meetings, this fit the bill: chintzy channel fabric hung the walls in medieval monotones, utilitarian foldout tables piled high with pamphlets, a respectable snack area in the corner. Atypical from the scene, however, was the wide grin smacked across the face of a bartender, holding court over an impressively stocked open bar.

Drink in hand we eyeballed the projector displaying what had been discarded footage from Van Sant’s original cut of My Own Private Idaho, turning back around to attack the cheese booth, in walks Franco.

Typically swaggered, slightly squinted (a la Oscars), and donning a quilted Gucci leather jacket, Mr. Franco beamed around the room, shaking hands, kissing babies and then, finally, speaking with The Observer.

JF: Hey man, have we met before? You look familiar.

NYO: I don’t believe so, but that’s not terribly important. Mind if I ask you what it was like to obliterate an apartment with a sledgehammer on film for Wholphin films?

JF: You saw that! Haha! I love those guys, we had a ton of fun. I really fucked that room up didn’t I? Funny you mention Wholphin actually, it’s a bit under wraps but I’m doing a whole new project with them, basically focusing on all of my short films from film school. It’s gonna be fun.

NYO: Speaking of film school, we seem to remember a scurrilous headline from the Huffington Post trumpeting the fact that you received a “D” in one of your film courses at NYU–it’s good to see that that blow didn’t make you rethink your career.

JF: Ahh man, not you, too! Look, everyone who’s anyone who’s ever been to film school can tell you this–it’s not about the grades, it’s about the body of work you produce. I knew I had that grade coming, had discussed it with the teacher, I think there’s actually some sort of lawsuit or something around that whole thing. Either way it’s stupid.

NYO: So what was the initial attraction to My Own Private Idaho? Was it the Shakespearean connection? I mean, you were, what, 15 when River died?

JF: Yeah, I was young, but River had influenced me from an even younger age, along with Van Sant’s work. These guys were idols of mine, so when we found what had been lost footage, the dailes, the cuts, etc, it was a total honor to re-cut the movie in tribute.

“Would everyone please take their seats in the theater!”

NYO: Looks like it’s that time, James.

JF: Take Care, man.

Wholphin is the film imprint of McSweeney's. See James Franco destroy a bedroom on Wholphin No. 8 (https://store.mcsweeneys.net/products/wholphin-no-8)

Raquel Welch

In 1970, just after the opening of Myra Breckinridge, in which she plays a post-op transsexual, Raquel Welch met Janis Joplin on The Dick Cavett Show. “Who but Dick Cavett would think up that combination?” Ms. Welch laughed, in a recent interview with The Observer. “I happened to be a big, huge fan of Janis Joplin—she probably wouldn’t have known that. … I was gaga ... and she was looking at me like I was from the moon.”

Like Janis Joplin, Ms. Welch is an immediate signifier of a certain moment in America’s cultural history—consider, for instance, the appearance of her toned, bikini-clad figure on the cover of Time magazine in 1969. A 1979 Playboy cover dubbed her “The Decade’s Most Desired Woman.” Presenting an Oscar in 1970, Ms. Welch notoriously quipped, “I’m here for Visual Effects, and I have two of them.” If Ms. Joplin exemplified the postwar American masculine woman, chugging Southern Comfort and gnarling her hair, Ms. Welch was the picture of robust, confident femininity. (See her most notable moments here.)

That cultural impact is inherent in the title of the Film Society of Lincoln Center’s five-day retrospective of her work, entitled “Cinematic Goddess: American Sex Symbol, The Films of Raquel Welch.” She’ll be interviewed by Mr. Cavett once again, and in attendance at screenings of films like Kansas City Bomber (in which she plays a roller-derby athlete known as “The Hottest Thing on Wheels”) and One Million Years B.C. (in which her leather bikini upstaged Ray Harryhausen’s special effects).

Last seen onscreen in the short-lived 2008 sitcom Welcome to the Captain, Ms. Welch maintains a healthy fanbase: “People do stop me and talk to me about something they saw that they loved,” she said. “It is very satisfying, but I have my own opinions.” In her 2010 memoir, Beyond the Cleavage, she wrote about single parenting and called herself the “Rodney Dangerfield of sex symbols”—she’d gotten insufficient respect.

In her many roles, she was always more man-eater than wilting flower; as such, Ms. Welch sees herself as a figure of liberation, albeit of an unusual sort. “Whatever my film work was, it was a departure from the sex symbol previously, who was blonde and more docile than the characters I portrayed as a sex symbol,” she said. “I think it was a different role for women. Women watch other women, and they are affected by that.” She seemed proud to have been cited by the feminist cultural critic Camille Paglia, who said in a 1995 interview with Playboy: “I love an actress as sensual as Raquel Welch. She and Liz Taylor and that type of woman are the great queens of Hollywood. They have the lush sexuality that I admire, as opposed to the WASPy, desexualized Meryl.”

Meryl Streep came up frequently in The Observer’s conversation with Ms. Welch, who cited the actress’s role in The Iron Lady as one of her favorite recent performances. She also drew a comparison between her own work and Ms. Streep’s: “I felt like, you know, my presence in the world of cinema had a different meaning than Meryl Streep ... There was an impact that was made, but it wasn’t the usual.”

Ms. Welch sees that impact most clearly in the work of Sigourney Weaver (in the Alien franchise), Sharon Stone (in Basic Instinct) and, more recently, in the young Rooney Mara (in The Girl With the Dragon Tattoo). “A lot of times I would play a lot of roles a man would play,” she recalled. “In One Million Years B.C.—yes, the costume was revealing. But I was outdoors all the time, I was fighting to survive, there was a girlfight. I was participating, it was physical, and I was independent. I wasn’t that pushover kind of a girl. And I think that left an impression.”

That impression was, of course, filtered through Ms. Welch’s sex-symbol identity. She was allowed to hang with the men, but she still had a prurient appeal. “Those are earmarks for what people want to see,” she said of her costuming in B.C. She reminisced about a photographer from Life who posed her in action scenes as well as more stereotypical sex-bomb settings: “One time I was fighting a bull—and at one point I was just dancing with this towel,” she recalled. “He was convinced that girls in motion were more interesting.” The mere fact that Ms. Welch was dynamic in her films—rather than being a Lana Turner studio still-life—made her interesting, no matter the content and, in her way, revolutionary.

Her most conscious attempt to toy with her image may have been starring in Myra Breckinridge, the film based on Gore Vidal’s gender-bending novel. (The film screens at Lincoln Center on Feb. 10.) In it, she portrays the end result of a sex-change operation, with Observer film critic Rex Reed playing the “before.”

“I thought it was the funniest book,” she said of Mr. Vidal’s novel. “They were talking about Anne Bancroft playing the role. By that point there wasn’t even a script around … I started to become interested. I told the producer, ‘I don’t know what direction you’re thinking—but if a guy would like to become a girl, maybe he would like to be me!’”

Deviation from Mr. Vidal’s text, Ms. Welch told The Observer, led to the messiness of the final product. At a 2004 screening at LACMA, “we all sat and had a laugh. It’s great fun—it was such a light subject. And, yes, it’s a curiosity. That book is going to be something that people will refer back to, and then they’ll go to the movie and say, ‘What happened here?’”

For all its flaws, the film accurately documents a culture-wide fixation on the body of Raquel Welch. The actress herself, though, remains more interested in her later work, and says she drew the film series’ organizers’ attention to her role as Queenie in the 1975 Merchant Ivory production The Wild Party, which was not a commercial success. “It was very satisfying for me to do. The sex symbol thing can grow tired—for the person who’s doing it, especially.”

Ms. Welch pushed past early categorization, too, in 1981, to star in Woman of the Year on Broadway, then playing a nightclub act, “because I was in singing-dancing mode. But eventually I came back to H-wood. My personal life brought me back.”

Ms. Welch doesn’t see all her films as of a piece. “If you think about it, there was a lot of variety in there,” she said, pausing to glance over the Lincoln Center list. “You can start out with Fantastic Voyage, and that wasn’t enormously sexy—I was playing a lab scientist! … I think there’s a lot of range. One Million Years B.C., yeah, O.K. …” She trailed off.

“But Myra was a chancy project, and it was a Gore Vidal book—and all that went on in the book didn’t get to the screen in the manner I know Gore would have liked. Is The Three Musketeers the same as The Wild Party the same as The Last of Sheba? I think there’s a lot of range.

“Maybe my photo images in magazines—there were things that were more visually oriented. But you can never break [out of] that, no matter how you try.”

At 26, Mr. Ulliel appears even younger, and his face has been his fortune--he appeared in a major ad campaign for Chanel's men fragrance, directed by Martin Scorsese. "At some point, it's a bit phony and weird, and I was a bit fed up at some point seeing my face everywhere in the streets, and after a while you pass in front of the poster and don't even notice it." In the perfume advertisement, Mr. Ulliel, playing an actor at a press conference, announces, "I'm not going to be the person I'm expected to be anymore." Said Mr. Ulliel, "I like the idea of presenting a fragrance rather than clothes or a bag. For me, a smell is something totally abstract. In the collective mind, you're not closely linked to one concrete product. It's an ambience."

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=oG-nnDlnWrA

As for not being who he's expected to be, the actor enjoys the relative anonymity of New York, where he's hardly boxed in by major French stardom. "You just meet people all the time. What I like is the mixture of people, here at a party, you go and you see people from banks; people from fashion industry, models; people from the cinema industry; and at the same time, people who make hot dogs on the street, and they just mix!"

That ability to mix and mingle freely may someday be constrained, as Mr. Ulliel is a rising star: He went unnoticed in the bar as he sipped his scotch, but photographs of the actor at his film's premiere ended up on the gossip blog Just Jared, a rare coup, if one would call it that, for a foreign actor promoting a 139-minute costume drama. (His largest role stateside, after Chanel, has been as the young Hannibal Lecter in 2007's Hannibal Rising.) In The Princess of Montpensier, which attracted positive reviews in U.S. publications during its run at Cannes last spring and just played at Lincoln Center's Rendez-Vous With French Cinema series, Mr. Ulliel plays the Duke Henri de Guise, in love with a princess who has been bartered away to another man. Mr. Ulliel views the high drama of its royals-in-love plotline as a selling point: "The idea was to film as if the camera was invented at that time, and do a documentary of that time, with all those young people experiencing those things. You can see how young all the people were going through those things. At that time, you were experiencing all those things--I think 17 at that time was 28."

Mr. Ulliel's weekend of promotions had been spent largely at screenings during the Rendez-Vous series. They had gone "good, I think. You can't really tell, because people that come to you afterwards, who like the film, they come to tell you good things. People who doesn't like, they come to you anyway." But the actor was making the most of his time in New York: "When I'm in Paris, in my hometown, I never walk. Even if I have to go two blocks away, I take my scooter. Even if it's freezing cold here, I would walk. Here, there's a lovely feeling of freedom. The way it's built, with those blocks, it's quite comforting." He gestured at a point in the distance. "It's just three blocks away! But sometimes it's tricky because the blocks are so long!"

ddaddario@observer.com :: @DPD_