HBO to Remake Joan Crawford Classic “Mildred Pierce”

Posted Aug 10, 2010 by Walt Belcher

Updated Aug 10, 2010 at 10:03 AM

HBO plans to remake the 1945 Oscar winning Joan Crawford flick “Mildred Pierce” as a miniseries for next year. It will star Kate Winslet, Guy Pearce and Evan Rachel Wood.

The network also announced new movies in the works including “The Sunset Limited,” starring Tommy Lee Jones and Samuel L. Jackson; “Cinema Verite,” starring Diane Lane, Tim Robbins, and James Gandolfini; and “Hemingway & Gellhorn,” starring Nicole Kidman and Clive Owen.

The miniseries, “Mildred Pierce,” directed by Oscar nominee Todd Haynes from a script by Haynes and Jon Raymond, is the story of a proud, single mother struggling to earn her ungrateful daughter’s love during the Great Depression in middle-class Los Angeles. “Mildred Pierce” is set for a spring 2011 premiere.

“The Sunset Limited” is based on the play of the same name written by Pulitzer Prize-winner Cormac McCarthy and is directed and executive produced by Jones from a script by McCarthy. It’s a two-character drama involving the story of a stranger who saves another man from throwing himself in front of the Sunset Limited, a Harlem subway train.

“Cinema Verite” is a film by Oscar nominees Shari Springer Berman and Robert Pulcini and it takes a behind-the-scenes look at the documentary “An American Family,” which chronicled the lives of the Louds in the early 1970s and launched the Santa Barbara family to notoriety in the creation of a new television genre, the reality series.

“Hemingway & Gellhorn,” directed by Academy Award nominee Philip Kaufman, is about the romance and marriage of novelist Ernest Hemingway and war correspondent Martha Gellhorn.

The Sunset Limited” debuts on HBO in February 2011, “Cinema Verite” will premiere in 2011, while “Hemingway & Gellhorn” will debut in 2012.