The other day here, I told the story of how I was hired to write a cartoon special/pilot based on the works of cartoonist B. Kliban. You may recall that I started work on it and then we found out that the folks who'd hired me had somehow neglected to acquire the rights to do that with Mr. Kliban's material. Several of you wrote that you found it hard to believe that a professional company would make a mistake like that. Well, check this out: James Franco began work on a screen adaptation of Cormac McCarthy's novel Blood Meridian. He cast it and made a distribution deal and began shooting test footage but guess what he'd neglected to do.