HBO Lines Up Star Talent for Upcoming Specials, Mini-Series

LOS ANGELES: HBO has lined up a slate of TV movies and mini-series for 2011, including TheSunsetLimited, based on the Cormac McCarthy play and starring Tommy Lee Jones and Samuel Jackson.

Directed and executive produced by Jones from a script by McCarthy, TheSunsetLimited tells the story of a stranger who saves another man from throwing himself in front of a Harlem subway train. It will debut on HBO in February.

The HBO Miniseries Mildred Pierce stars Kate Winslet, Guy Pearce and Evan Rachel Wood, among others, to be directed by Far From Heaven‘s Todd Haynes, who also wrote the script together with Jon Raymond. It is the story of a proud single mother struggling to earn her daughter’s love during the Great Depression in middle-class Los Angeles. The five-parter, produced in association with MGM, is set for a March premiere.

For later in the year, the premium network is working on Cinema Verite, a TV movie with Diane Lane, Tim Robbins and James Gandolfini. The HBO Films presentation takes a behind-the-scenes look at the groundbreaking documentary An American Family, which chronicled the lives of the Louds in the early 1970s and catapulted the Santa Barbara family to notoriety. Another HBO Films presentation is Hemingway & Gellhorn, starring Nicole Kidman, Clive Owen and Philip Kaufman. It is about the tumultuous romance and subsequent marriage between literary master Ernest Hemingway and up-and-coming war correspondent Martha Gellhorn, Filming will begin in and around San Francisco in February 2011 for a 2012 premiere.