Willamette Week‘s Aaron Mesh reported yesterday that director Todd Haynes (I’m Not There) is “in talks to produce a television adaptation of Mildred Pierce, the 1945 Joan Crawford tearjerker. The wrinkle is that Haynes intends to base his film on the original James M. Cain novel instead of the Michael Curtiz film.
“I read the book recently, and it’s so different from the Crawford film,” Haynes said. No casting ideas, he said. He said he’s writing the script with Old Joy screenwriter Jonathan Raymond, and plans to move the setting back a decade to the 1930s, when the book was set. “It seems so fitting,” Haynes said, “because it’s really about the Depression-era economy. It feels particularly prescient right now.”
