James Franco to Direct and Star in THE ADDERALL DIARIES

James Franco recently acquired the rights to Stephen Elliott's memoir The Adderal Diaries, and he plans to star in and direct the film. Looks like Franco is looking to work out his creative muscles. Franco is a talented guy, and I think he'll end up doing a great job with this film.

I've never read this book, but Deadline descibes it as "a bit like In Cold Blood, in that a blocked writer turns to a murder trial to get himself going. Elliott, blocked for two years, reports on the trial of Hans Reiser, a computer programmer charged with killing the wife he met through a Russian dating service. Fueled by Adderall, a methamphetamine prescribed to help ADHD sufferers, Elliott's stream of consciousness prose veers into subjects that include his cruel father, Paris Hilton, and S&M."

Yeah, so this should be interesting. Franco recently starred in the upcoming Danny Boyle directed film 127 Hours, which I'm really looking forward too, and he's currently starring in FOX's reboot of Planet of the Apes. As for films he's directed he made a Documentary feature called Saturday Night, and a short film called The Clerks Tale.

Heres a full description of the book and it's story:

In the spring of 2007, a brilliant computer programmer named Hans Reiser stands accused of murdering his estranged wife, Nina. Despite a mountain of circumstantial evidence against him, he proclaims his innocence. The case takes a twist when Nina’s former lover, and Hans’s former best friend, Sean Sturgeon, confesses to eight unrelated murders that no one has ever heard of.

At the time of Sturgeon’s confession, Stephen Elliot is paralyzed by writer’s block, in the thrall of Adderall dependency, and despondent over the state of his romantic life. But he is fascinated by Sturgeon, whose path he has often crossed in San Francisco’s underground S&M scene. What kind of person, he wonders, confesses to a murder he likely did not commit? One answer is, perhaps, a man like Elliott’s own father.

So begins a riveting journey through a neon landscape of false confessions, self-medication, and torturous sex. Set against the backdrop of a nation at war, in the declining years of the Silicon Valley tech boom and the dawn of Paris Hilton’s celebrity, The Adderall Diaries is at once a gripping account of a murder trial and a scorching investigation of the self. Tough, tender, and unflinchingly honest, it is the breakout book by one of the most daring writers of his generation.