It seems there’s nothing that James Franco cannot or will not do.
Pictures like this make people kind of dislike James Franco
First he conquered television with “Freaks & Geeks” and “James Dean.” Then it was film with the “Spiderman” movies. Then Franco began writing fiction and accumulating multiple degrees. Franco followed several serious film roles with “Pineapple Express,” then destroyed a room for 32 minutes while Dave Eggers filmed the mayhem for Wholphin. And as if that were not enough, Franco projected himself into the land of meta-narratives by joining the cast of “General Hospital” as the deranged artist/killer “Franco.”
Now the real Franco has written and plans to direct the screen adaptation of William Faulkner’s “As I Lay Dying.”
Faulkner is regarded by some as an impenetrable modernist cut from the same cloth as James Joyce. Others have no problem reading his novels and swear they are amongst the 20th century’s best, and perhaps up there in the rarified atmosphere with “Moby-Dick,” “The Great Gatsby” and “Gravity’s Rainbow.”
“As I Lay Dying” is written in a stream of consciousness style with 15 narrators over 59 chapters. It remains to be seen how exactly Franco tackled the multiple voices in the screenplay, and how he’ll handle the narratives visually.
After Franco takes on Faulkner, he intends to adapt Cormac McCarthy’s fantastically violent and tarot-inspired western “Blood Meridian.”
What’s next? “Citzen Kane: Redux.”
