Today in James Franco: James Franco says James Franco is adapting James Ellroy's American Tabloid

By Sean O'Neal | January 22, 2013 | 5:20pm

Aux Features Film

Though it has been attached previously to the likes of Bruce Willis and Tom Hanks (who most recently worked to develop it as a series for HBO), the 1995 novel American Tabloid is now in the hands of James Franco, who has added James Ellroy to the growing list of authors that he knows intimately enough to adapt and write poems about. “You’re getting the scoop,” Franco told MTV News at Sundance, for once not offering a particularly kinky and invasive sex act, but rather an acknowledgment that the project is still in its very early, just-being-talked-about-by-James-Franco stages.

That could speak to the fact that Franco is an unlikely choice to either direct or star in a film about a bunch of tough G-men and gangsters who circle Cuba in the years leading up to the JFK assassination, given that JFK was not, according to the Warren Report, assassinated by either his own celebrity or a Castro-sympathizing dildo. Perhaps once James Franco reads beyond the book’s title, and learns that American Tabloid is not an excoriating exploration of the nation’s gossip culture, he’ll find some other book to interest him.