James Franco has directed his share of bizarre, art-damaged vanity projects: a pseudo-documentary about a reimagining of the deleted scenes from Cruising; a hicksploitation take on an early Cormac McCarthy novel; a split-screen, video-installation-like adaptation of As I Lay Dying. However, none of these is as intriguing as Franco’s ongoing project to adapt The Disaster Artist, Greg Sestero’s memoir about the making of The Room and his friendship with its writer-director-star, Tommy Wiseau.
In the 1990s, Sestero, a male model and struggling actor, met and befriended Wiseau––a vampire-like self-styled auteur and discount fashions entrepreneur of unknown, probably Polish origins––and ended up playing one of the lead roles in his magnum opus, a bizarre San Francisco-set melodrama whose aggressively vague plotting, overlong sex scenes, and out-of-nowhere Rebel Without A Cause references have spawned the modern era’s definitive bad-movie cult.
Now The Wrap is reporting that Franco has hired Scott Neustadter and Michael Weber—the screenwriting duo behind The Fault In Our Stars, The Spectacular Now, (500) Days Of Summer, and, uh, Pink Panther 2—to write the script, presumably based on their experience adapting stories about people who continue living life to the fullest after learning that they have cancer. Franco will direct and star as Wiseau, while his brother Dave will play Sestero; Seth Rogen and Evan Goldberg are co-producing the project.