Actor James Franco made big news in the Hollywood trades when he began pre-production on a movie adaptation of Cormac McCarthy’s BLOOD MERIDIAN that he was slated to write & direct. He got Scott Rudin on board to produce, lined up IMGlobal to distribute the film, and managed to cast Russell Crowe and Vincent D’Onofrio, among others. Sounds exciting, doesn’t it? Except that Franco, the distributors and the producers forgot one niggly detail: they didn’t acquire the rights to Cormac McCarthy’s book. The Hollywood Reporter revealed the embarrassing story earlier this month.
I was astonished. You’d expect something like this from amateurs…but from experienced professionals and a major international distributor? I can’t imagine how the movie got this far along without anybody in business affairs double-checking that someone had actually secured the rights to the book. What makes this even more unbelievable is that Scott Rudin produced the adaptation of McCarthy’s NO COUNTRY FOR OLD MEN…and yet he was apparently unaware that no deal had been made with the author.
But that’s not all. It turns out that Franco shot 30 minutes of test footage several years ago, you might call it his own fanfic adaptation, with Luke Perry and Scott Glenn among the cast in an effort to snag the rights…but McCarthy didn’t bite. So did Franco just decide to make the movie anyway and hope that McCarthy would end up being okay with it? It’s mind-boggling.