James Franco To Direct Movie About Zola’s Epic Twitter Stripper Story

The only way you missed ex-exotic dancer Zola’s tale of strippers, drugs, guns, and being lost in the sauce was if you were hiding under the online equivalent of a rock. When Aziah Wells took to Twitter to expound on a possibly apocryphal tale of a trip to Florida gone amazingly, wonderfully sideways, the entire internet took notice. Now that story is coming to a big screen, just as Wells herself predicted. Better still, it’s being directed by multihyphenate and Scion commercial star James Franco, Variety reports. The movie is based not on the tweets themselves but on David Kushner’s Rolling Stone article telling the true story behind Wells’ wild tale. “It reads like Spring Breakers meets Pulp Fiction, as told by Nicki Minaj,” Kushner told Variety. Spring Breakers is probably Franco’s best role outside of Freaks and Geeks, so any project that features that as a direct comp seems crazy exciting. The script will be written by Andrew Neel and Mike Roberts. The pair collaborated with Franco most recently on the frat hazing drama Goat, which just premiered at Sundance. We’ll embed the tweets, which canonized “Okay listen up. This story long. So I met this white bitch at Hooters…” as an opener on the level of “Call me Ishmael,” below.