James Franco Planning to Direct Two Feature Films
Mon, January 3, 2011 
Is there anything this guy can't do? Not only is James Franco currently busy preparing to win an Oscar for 127 Hours (Sorry Colin Firth, but I refuse to give any kudos to another critically acclaimed, yet boring British film i.e. The Queen, Elizabeth: The Golden Age, and the list goes on) while readying to host the awards show on February 27th, but he's also lining up two feature directorial efforts.
Showbiz 411 is reporting that Franco is in negotiations to direct an adaptation of the William Faulkner 's literary classic, As I Lay Dying, a film which Franco wrote the screenplay for. Along with this, Franco is also working to adapt the Cormac McCarthy novel, Blood Meridian, a project he would both write and direct as well. The article also makes note that Franco is doing all this while taking classes at Yale University and Rhode Island School of Design.
James, it's a shame more people in Hollywood aren't as ambitious as you *cough* Will Smith *cough*.
Below is a synopsis for both novels [via Amazon]:
One of William Faulkner’s finest novels, As I Lay Dying was originally published in 1930, and remains a captivating and stylistically innovative work. The story revolves around a grim yet darkly humorous pilgrimage, as Addie Bundren’s family sets out to fulfill her last wish: to be buried in her native Jefferson, Mississippi, far from the miserable backwater surroundings of her married life. Told through multiple voices, it vividly brings to life Faulkner’s imaginary South, one of the great invented landscapes in all of literature, and is replete with the poignant, impoverished, violent, and hypnotically fascinating characters that were his trademark.
An epic novel of the violence and depravity that attended America’s westward expansion, Blood Meridian brilliantly subverts the conventions of the Western novel and the mythology of the “wild west.” Based on historical events that took place on the Texas-Mexico border in the 1850s, it traces the fortunes of the Kid, a fourteen-year-old Tennessean who stumbles into the nightmarish world where Indians are being murdered and the market for their scalps is thriving.
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