Soon, all art will be Franco: James Franco to direct adaptations of William Faulkner and Cormac McCarthy novels

The world spent most of 2010 as participants in James Franco’s sprawling multimedia art project “James Franco,” and it seems as though 2011 will continue that curriculum: Not only will he be hosting the Oscars, battling the ape-ocalypse, getting high and slaying dragons, and wrapping the Ivory Coast, Christo-style, in back issues of Premiere—and we only made up one of those—Franco now has his sights set on directing adaptations of works by not one but two titans of Western literature.

Showbiz411 reports that Franco is currently in talks to bring both William Faulkner’s As I Lay Dying and Cormac McCarthy’s Blood Meridian to the screen, with Franco hoping to begin filming Faulkner’s stream-of-consciousness tale of a family’s quest to bury its late matriarch—which many, including Sean Penn, have previously attempted to adapt—as early as this spring, using a screenplay that Franco has written, presumably on paper he fashioned from a eucalyptus tree he himself felled in between classes at Yale. Blood Meridian, of course, has been in the works for a couple years now, with both writer/director/actor Todd Field and Ridley Scott each attached at one time. Scott made one of his rare yields of a project after deciding that Blood Meridian is “a really tricky one, and maybe it's something that should be left as a novel,” but then, this was a couple years before James Franco truly blossomed. Frrrranco!