James "Polymath" Franco has just added yet another project to the approximately 57 he currently has in development. His adaptation of Cormac McCarthy's Blood Meridian seems to have hit a wall, but, undeterred, Franco has opted to take on McCarthy's earlier **Child of God in the meantime.
This is nothing if not brave. The immensely bleak and violent Blood Meridian was a tough enough call (it already defeated Tommy Lee Jones), but it's almost nothing compared to the extraordinary Child of God: a slim volume about backwoodsman Ballard, a recently released convict who opts to live outside of society in a cave in the East Tennessee hills and dabble in necrophilia. As you do.
Quite what happened to Blood Meridian is unclear. Scott Rudin was producing, and Franco had got as far as shooting twenty minutes of test footage with Scott Glenn and Luke Perry. "It turned out pretty well," Franco revealed at TIFF, "but for various reasons it's now on hold."
No further details on Child of God are yet forthcoming, so it's unclear whether the new project is gestating from the old to the extent of migrating its cast. Scott Glen as an insane, murderous cave-dwelling survivalist? We can see that...
If and when it comes to fruition, it'll be jostling for position alongside Franco's Broken Tower, Memories of Idaho and Sal (all recently completed); his Night Stalker film; Sweet Bird of Idaho in which he's supposed to be acting with Nicole Kidman; his Faulkner adaptation As I Lay Dying; and his documentaries about his time working on the soap General Hospital, and the fetish website kink.com.
And those are the projects we know about...