William Faulkner and the Vampires

As the exclusive representative of the William Faulkner Literary Estate, producer Lee Caplin ("Ali") has had access to the vaunted Mississippi writer's letters, sketches, notes and other literary works for years. So when Jill Faulkner Summers, the novelist's daughter, found a manuscript seven years ago in the piles of material her father left behind when he died in 1962, she passed it on to Caplin. He was stunned by what she'd found: Faulkner's only un-produced, feature-length screenplay. But here's the kicker: Faulkner, the Pulitzer and Nobel prize-winning writer of "As I Lay Dying," "Light in August," and "Absalom! Absalom!," had harvested his astonishing talent to write ... a vampire film.

Faulkner had a legendarily complicated relationship with Hollywood, which he initially attempted to exploit for easy money before becoming so annoyed that he ultimately retreated to Mississippi. His distaste was well-earned: His first produced screenplay involved being asked by Irving Thalberg to transform his all-male World War I movie "Turn About" into a Joan Crawford vehicle called "Today We Live." (For a humorous snapshot of Faulkner's Hollywood years, see John Mahoney's wickedly playful homage as W.P. Mayhew, the Southern novelist turned agonized and alcohol-benumbed screenwriter in the Coen Brothers' "Barton Fink.")

Beginning in 1932, and intermittently over the next 13 years, Faulkner was a contract writer at MGM, Fox and Warner Bros. who mainly wrote screenplays for good friend and drinking buddy Howard Hawks. Their best and most notable collaborations are Faulkner's adaptations of Hemingway's "To Have and Have Not" and Raymond Chandler's noir classic "The Big Sleep."

In the midst of all this, Faulkner apparently spun out a vampire saga set in an anonymous Eastern European location. Caplin plans to relocate the story to the Deep South and has a high-end computer-graphics firm on the hook to dress it up with modern effects.