James Franco Set to Star in Stephen King’s DRUNKEN FIREWORKS
James Franco is set to star in another Stephen King project! It will be a feature film adaptation of a short story called "Drunken Fireworks." There’s also a chance that Franco could direct it, but he hasn’t decided if he wants to do that or not yet.
Franco most recently worked on Hulu’s Stephen King and J.J. Abrams series 11.22.63, which was incredible! That series was just a perfect storm of awesomeness, and it’s great to see that Franco is taking on another of King’s creations. This sounds like it will be a great project for him.
Drunken Fireworks is a darkly comic tale of a blue-collar mechanic and a retired mob boss who go head to head in an increasingly antagonistic annual Fourth of July fireworks competition. The tale is set in small-town rural Maine, where local good ol’ boy Alden McCausland (Franco) strikes up a rivalry with retired mob boss Nicky Serrano when Nicky moves in across the lake from Alden and his mother. When Nicky bests Alden’s Fourth of July fireworks show, Alden goes to great lengths to ensure that he beats Nicky the next year in a competition known henceforth as the “Fourth of July Arms Race.”
The script for the feature is being written by Matt Rager, who has collaborated with Franco on a few projects such as As I Lay Dying, The Sound And The Fury, and the upcoming John Steinbeck novel adaptation In Dubious Battle. Here's the official story description with additional details:
Alden McCausland and his mother are what they call “accident rich”; thanks to an unexpected life-insurance policy payout and a winning Big Maine Millions scratcher, Alden and his Ma are able to spend their summers down by Lake Abenaki, idly drinking their days away in a three-room cabin with an old dock and a lick of a beach.
Across the lake, they can see what “real rich” looks like: the Massimo family’s Twelve Pines Camp, the big white mansion with guest house and tennis court that Alden’s Ma says is paid for by “ill-gotten gains” courtesy of Massimo Construction. When Alden’s holiday-weekend sparklers and firecrackers set off what over the next few years comes to be known as the Fourth of July Arms Race, he learns how far he and the Massimos will go to win an annual neighborly rivalry—one that lands Alden in the Castle County jail.
This sounds like a fun story and will make for a great film.
Source: Deadline