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A mainstream flick about a porn movie and Sasha Grey isn’t in it? Imagine that.

Hollywood – from www.bleedingcool.com – The narrative of Chuck Palahniuk’s Snuff is structured around an epic, 600-man, 1 porn star victim ordeal, not too dissimilar to the infamous “World’s Biggest Gang Bang” of Annabel Chong. The biggest problem in adapting this book to a film, perhaps, is that unlike in the novel, where the story can be presented as fully explicit and vividly pornographic without actually exploiting or defiling anybody, rendering these images, visibly, on screen, would require the making of an actual pornographic movie.

The trick will be in not showing, and therefore not enacting, but implying with full force the details of degradation that the story and its meanings require.

It’s up to director Fabien Martorell to execute this tricky translation. For a long time we’d heard nothing about his progress, but he’s just now been in touch with the semi-official Chuck Palahniuk site, The Cult (link via Aint It Cool) to give an update. The big news is that he’s attaching a cast, and a very interesting one at that.

Daryl Hannah has been given the role of Cassie Wright, the woman in the eye of this raging porn storm. For reasons unknown (well, until the end of the story, anyway) she has committed to performing sex acts with 600 men, on camera, in a single day.

These 600 men are numbered, and the number 600 will be worn by Tom Sizemore. His character is one of the book’s narrators and he has a very important role to play. Sizemore may not have been born to play this role but he’s certainly been prepping for it over the last few years.

And the final bit of casting news for now tells us that Thora Birch will be playing Sheila, a man-wrangler in charge of organising the herd of naked men before delivering them to the room where Cassie is. She’s another of the narrators in the novel and her integral relationship to the story is eventually unveiled to many readers’ surprise.

In fact, it’s worth noting that Thora Birch’s mother is Carol Connors, a former pornographic actress. This detail was surely not lost on Martorell in casting this role.

All being well, it would seem these actors will take their positions and production on the film will get underway in the fairly near future. I’m most intrigued to see how well Martorell and co-producer, co-writer Karina Wilson will navigate the many problems inherent in translating Palahniuk’s book to the screen.