Two actors with troubling pasts when it comes to women and co-stars, James Franco and Vincent Gallo, are the stars of a low-budget feature that was made last year about Golden State Killer Joseph DeAngelo, and it apparently found a distributor at the Cannes Film Festival this week.

Last we heard about the Golden State Killer film starring Vincent Gallo and James Franco, women who were auditioning to play victims of DeAngelo were telling Rolling Stone how they felt victimized themselves in their interactions with Gallo. That was way back in January 2024, back before we had a rapist and a racist in the White House, and it was not entirely clear if this movie was ever going to see the light of day.

Well, it seems the film is almost finished, and it was being shopped around at Cannes this week, and as Deadline reports, Lionsgate has picked up the film for distribution through its genre partner Grindstone.

In addition to the scrutiny the film received from the actors' union SAG-AFTRA, after the reports of Gallo's behavior at auditions, victims of DeAngelo and their families have expressed concern about the new film as well. Given Gallo's past, they may have reason for concern about his potentially sensationalizing DeAngelo's crimes. Gallo has a long history of being a difficult and unsettling actor, to say the least. He was criticized two decades ago for a non-simulated oral sex scene in The Brown Bunny with Chloe Sevigny that seemed gratuitous, and actress Christina Ricci, who starred as a teen with Gallo in 1998's Buffalo '66, has called him "a crazy lunatic" and verbally abusive.

Gallo's personal website includes what appears to be a serious advertisement for himself as an escort, at $50,000 per night, as well as an offer to sell his sperm for $1 million.

And Franco, who stars as a detective trying to catch DeAngelo, has his own troubing past, and hasn't starred in a Hollywood film since 2021, after settling a $2.2 million sexual misconduct lawsuit involving female acting students.

It should be noted that Gallo, now 64, has only been in one movie in the last 12 years, and that's the low-budget 2022 thriller Shut-In. (While DeAngelo was in his 70s when he was apprehended in 2018, he was in his 20s and 30s when most of his crimes were committed, so this is odd casting.) Gallo is also a staunch, outspoken Republican, and has called Donald Trump "the greatest president the USA has ever produced."

There is also a concern that Golden State Killer, as Bay Area News Group reports, will focus on the male point of a view in a story in which one man victimized and destroyed the lives of many women. This stems from the reports of the audition in which actresses say that Gallo told them they needed to feel "100 percent dominated by him," and openly talked about his own torture porn fantasies.

Per the Rolling Stone report, Gallo said to one actress, "If I say to suck my dick or I will kill you, I want you, you the person, not you the character, not you the actor, but you, to truly believe you will die if you don’t do as I say. And just like you would in real life, if this were happening to you, I want you to do all of the actions necessary to do that. You won’t actually suck my dick, but you do not have the power, I have all the power. You have no control, I am in complete control."

DeAngelo was a police officer in Sacramento and elsewhere around California during the course of his career as a serial rapist and murderer. He was apprehended using family DNA, and he pleaded guilty in 2020 to 13 murders. Before being caught, his crimes inspired various other names including the East Side Rapist, Visalia Ransacker, and The Original Night Stalker.

Jordan Gertner, who produced Buffalo '66 as well as Franco's Spring Breakers, was originally listed as writer and director of Golden State Killer, but Deadline notes that he is only listed as producer now, with Vito Brown listed as writer and director.

No release date has been set. The film is currently in post-production.

Previously: Golden State Killer Movie Auditions Face Investigation After Alleged Creepiness By Actor Vincent Gallo

Top image: Joseph DeAngelo, via Sacramento Sheriff, and Vincent Gallo in 2018, Photo by Bertrand Rindoff Petroff/Getty Images