How many times do we think James Franco has requested that someone call him Mystery when he wasn’t even getting paid for the privilege? In a dreams-come-true kind of day for the star, he’s set to play the man known as Mystery in a big-screen adaptation of Neil Strauss’s The Game. Mystery, Strauss’s stand-in for Erik Von Markovik, is the master pickup artist/mentor figure in Strauss’s notorious guidebook-memoir hybrid about learning to get the ladies calling. (Markovik later got game-play of his own as VH1’s The Pickup Artist.) No method actor, Franco has been trying to close the deal to play Mystery for at least four years; the talk has finally come to fruition as part of a partnership between Franco and Demian Gregory to produce four films, with The Game as the first. From artiste to pickup artist, James Franco is going places.