Why Is He Getting Sued?

It's been a rough month to be James Franco. And when I say that, I, of course, mean it's been a rough month or so to be a James Franco fan: Dude keeps landing himself in situations that show his sketchy side. You know, allegedly trying to woo seventeen-year-old girls, and then blaming the seventeen-year old for taking advantage of him through social media and texting. Now, a new incident's popped up, though it's more on the administrative and creative plane than the creepy old man one: James Franco's being sued for his Bukowski film.

Franco's Bukowski claims to focus on the writer's childhood and not on Bukowski's semi-autobiographical novel Ham On Rye — the rights of which, as of now, supposedly lie with Cyril Humphris — despite the fact that he had been working with Humphris in 2009 to develop a film based on the book before his rights to it were terminated. Now Humphris's lawsuit is claiming that Franco's film is still based off the book, "borrow[ing] the novel’s themes of childhood loneliness; adolescent self-consciousness; the failures, hypocrisy, and cruelty of adults; and, in an unflinching depiction, the crude interest teenage boys take in sex.”

This is but the latest in a string of similar accusations becoming public in Hollywood, from New Girl' s plagiarism case, to Drake landing in hot water for "borrowing" music, and of course to the infamous Shia LaBeouf case. Now we just get to sit back and wait for Franco's instagrammed response.