MVD Entertainment Group announced this past week that actor/director James Franco’s Zeroville will be making its DVD and Blu-ray debut on June 8.
There was a time when it looked as though Franco’s film adaptation of Steve Erickson’s 2007 Hollywood-themed novel would never see the light of day. As the trades have reported during the past decade, Franco optioned the book in 2011, filming didn’t begin until the fall of 2014 (Franco is a very busy guy) and once complete it was subsequently acquired by Alchemy/Millennium Entertainment the following year, but plans for its distribution went into a Chapter 7 bankruptcy vortex in 2016 … tick tock, tick tock, life moved on.
In 2019 it was picked up by an indie distributor for theatrical distribution, which was in and out of theatres so quickly that it became a footnote. They didn’t even bother posting box office numbers. And then Zeroville disappeared again … until now.
It is the same day in August of 1969 that Charles
Manson’s notorious “family” went on its infamous murder spree … and on this day,
Ike Jerome (Franco), who is known as “Vikar,” arrives in Hollywood.
It is a surreal existence that Vikar has stumbled into. He was a seminary student, but that didn’t work out … and having your head shaved with tattoos of Elizabeth Taylor and Montgomery Clift on the back of your skull soon attracts the attention of the police in the aftermath of the Tate/LaBianca carnage.
He soon finds himself working in the movie industry, a business that he is at a loss to understand. Think in terms of Peter Sellers’ character, Chauncey Gardner, in Being There. Just by being in the right place at the right time (or wrong time, as the case might be), Vikar is able to move through one “Hollywood” adventure after another and, in the process, becomes obsessed with the filmmaking process … his obsession cannot quite be understood by mere mortals.
He will become a film editor (an obsession) and meet and become infatuated with a beautiful actress named Soledad Paladin (played by Megan Fox) and cross paths with all sorts of people in his “Hollywoodland” … he is on a surreal trip (and, with Franco as the filmmaker, he is able to populate his unique world with all sorts of familiar faces that belie the film’s actual budget).
June 8, on DVD and Blu-ray, and if the truth be known, Zeroville is virtually unseen by the public … MVD Entertainment Group has made quite the score with this acquisition.
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