James Franco has been on a run of adapting novels recently, and for his latest directorial job, he’s turning Steve Erickson’s 2007 book Zeroville into a film. The new project will find him turning the tables (and cameras) on his **This Is The End.
Zeroville, which Paul Felton and Ian Olds have scripted, finds Franco as a young, movie-obsessed architecture student arriving in Hollywood in 1969 and almost immediately mistaken for one of the perpetrators in the Charles Manson murders.
He’s plunged into a world of sex, fame and drugs as the old guard movie studios decline and the renegade directors rise, and he’s present for the big changes in the 1980s.
Rogen will be Viking Man, an eccentric, cigar-loving, surf-happy hippy who acts as Franco’s guide through this weird world, which includes Fox as a femme fatale named Soledad, Weaver as a film editor who also mentors Franco, and McBride as a sinister moneyman.
Franco has already kicked off grabbing shots for the film, working at the Venice film Festival last month. Zeroville should arrive next year.