Photo: Glazer, Eliot
James Franco says, “A very strange thing happened: I had been listening to Motown everyday … So I watched [a Motown documentary] in the car on the way to the airport one night, most of the doc was about Smokey. [Then] on the plane to L.A. I slept the whole way and when we landed I woke up with a smiling face standing over me. He said, ‘Hey, I’m a big fan.’ I just stared. ‘It’s Smokey,’ he said. Six months later … I asked him to sing on one of the songs and he said sure.†Because that’s just how his life works.