James Franco Heads to Microdrama With 'Love, Lies & Frank' on Shortical
James Franco, known for 127 Hours and The Disaster Artist, is starring in a new microdrama series called Love, Lies & Frank, streaming exclusively on Shortical, according to Variety.
Microdramas — also called Verticals or Vertical Shorts — are short, serialized episodes designed for mobile viewing, shot in a vertical format that fills a phone screen. The genre has exploded on platforms like Shortical, which draws upward of 20 million episode plays a month domestically, per Variety.
In Love, Lies & Frank, Franco plays Jimmy Frank, an eccentric advertising-agency CEO who finds himself contending with both criminal and supernatural threats. He shares the screen with Eric Guilmette, known from CEO's Kansas Sweetheart, and Neela Jolene, known from Cheerleader and the Beast — two performers who built their names in the vertical-drama space before this project brought them together with a Hollywood film actor.
The series is directed by Eric Wang Schwager and written by Melissa Lynn Moore. It is produced by Knockout Shorts, a Los Angeles-based microdrama studio, alongside Peter Gold of Gold Films. Matthew Ko is Co-Founder and CEO of Knockout Shorts. Guy Shimoni serves as CEO of Shortical, the platform carrying the exclusive stream.
What gives the production a structural significance beyond its cast is its place in a still-new labour framework. Love, Lies & Frank is counted among the first series produced under SAG-AFTRA's Verticals Agreement, a contract introduced to cover serialized micro-dramas made for mobile formats, according to Variety and SAG-AFTRA. Knockout Shorts signed that agreement with SAG-AFTRA in February, as detailed on the SAG-AFTRA website.
The Verticals Agreement exists because the microdrama format did not fit neatly into the union's existing television or film contracts. It creates a signatory path for productions that release in short vertical episodes on mobile-first platforms, rather than in traditional broadcast or streaming windows. SAG-AFTRA also maintains a separate, older Micro-Budget Project Agreement for independent producers with a project budget of $20,000, though the Verticals Agreement is the one tailored specifically to serialized mobile content.
One detail that may matter to performers and audiences watching how this format evolves: the production of Love, Lies & Frank did not use AI-generated performances or digital replicas, per Variety. That places the series firmly on the side of human actors in an industry still grappling with where artificial intelligence fits — or does not — in on-screen work.
For viewers, the appeal is straightforward. Each episode runs short enough to watch on a commute or in a queue, and the format has already found a substantial audience on Shortical. Whether Franco's involvement pulls traditional film and television viewers toward the vertical-drama space is a question the viewing figures will answer in the coming weeks.
