It’s not easy to keep track of the 1001 things James Franco is up to at any moment, so you probably forgot that in 2011, he optioned the rights to "Zeroville" by Steve Erickson. Well, Franco surely didn’t forget this was on his To Do list, as the project is up and running, and he’s using his extensive Rolodex to fill out the cast.
Screen Daily reports that Seth Rogen, Jacki Weaver, Megan Fox, Will Ferrell, Danny McBride, Dave Franco, Craig Robinson, Joey King and Horatio Sanz have joined "Zeroville," which is now shooting with Franco directing and, of course, leading the film. And it has a meta flavor to it, it’s a movie about the movies, with the story revolving around a film-obsessed architecture student who is mistaken for one of the perpetrators of the Manson murders, and has the pictures of Elizabeth Taylor and Montgomery Clift from "A Place In The Sun" tattooed on his head. Or in other words: A James Franco movie. Here’s the book synopsis from Amazon:
Zeroville is a unique love letter to film. It centers on the story of Vikar, a young architecture student so enthralled with the movies that his friends call him “cinéautistic.” With an intensely religious childhood behind him, and tattoos of Elizabeth Taylor and Montgomery Clift on his head, he arrives in Hollywood where he’s mistaken for a member of the Charles Manson “family” and eventually scores a job as a film editor. Vikar discovers the frames of a secret film within the reels of every movie ever made, and sets about splicing them together—an undertaking that takes on frightening theological dimensions.
Like all of Franco’s projects, this is potentially interesting, but execution will be the factor here. But with Fox as a femme fatale, and Rogen playing a surf hippie named Viking Man, again, this could be wild stuff. With cameras now rolling, we’ll soon see.