Living new-edition foreword James Franco has announced plans for the next work of literature he’d like to reintroduce with a personal interpretation—this time William Faulkner’s classic The Sound And The Fury. In an interview with the Los Angeles Times, Franco says he hopes to follow his recent adaptation of As I Lay Dying by crafting yet another movie from of one of the author’s ostensibly unfilmable texts, the prose’s scattered focus, stream-of-consciousness expression, and tendency toward uncomfortable sexual themes speaking to Franco, for obvious reasons. (“HEY THERE, JAMES FRANCO. COME SHIELD YOURSELF FROM CRITICISM IN OUR NOBLE AMBITION,” it says.)
To help Franco realize the book’s portrait of a Southern family driven to ruin, he’s approached Mad Men’s Jon Hamm to play another pragmatic drinkin’ man given to spouting maxims as the Compson patriarch, provided Hamm’s shooting schedule allows. To help Franco realize his dreams of putting as much Franco into Faulkner as possible, younger brother Dave Franco is attached to play tortured eldest brother Quentin, provided his schedule of not being James Franco allows. Franco’s frequent co-star Danny McBride is also on board in an as-yet-unspecified role that probably isn’t Benjy, because that role is almost assuredly going to Franco himself—an illustration of the book’s paraphrased Shakespeare soliloquy, “Life is a tale told by Franco, full of Franco, signifying Franco.”