James Franco Nearly Thwarted By Soap's One-Take Policy

After missing General Hospital's Thanksgiving celebration, Franco swung back into Port Charles this afternoon for three brief scenes. Each poignantly captured Franco's impatient sensibility, his mysterious fascination with Jason, and his love for multimedia artwork, but one of the scenes revealed a fourth component that writers had definitely not included in the A-lister's script.

Faced with a breakneck production schedule to pack in as many scenes as James Franco's schedule would allow, General Hospital cut down its standard "two takes per scene" to one. In the video below (taken from a handheld phone while Movieline's state-of-the-art East Coast video department is under repair), watch as Franco's straight face is tested when several things go wrong, culminating with the actor adding a Jackson Pollock-like flourish to his art.