Oscar winner Halle Berry will star in "Shoe Addicts Anonymous," an adaptation of Beth Harbison's best-selling novel, reports Deadline.
Paul Weiland ("Made of Honor") will direct the comedy, which looks at the lives of four Chicago women from different ethnic backgrounds who are all shoe addicts who wear a size 7.5. They develop a bond that eventually goes beyond footwear.
Berry will play an agoraphobe who feeds her addiction by buying shoes online.
I'm not exactly the target audience for this one, but it sounds like "Sex and the City" without the egregious white-washing, so at least that's a step in the right direction.
Since winning an Oscar for her devastating performance in "Monster's Ball," Berry has largely signed on to action movies, thrillers and dramas, to mixed results. "Shoe Addicts Anonymous" marks Berry's first comedy since ""Bulworth," and believe me, it's a welcome return to lighter fare.
Kristen Buckley and Brian Regan ("How to Lose a Guy In 10 Days") wrote the screenplay, and Galgos Entertainment's Russell Nuce and Mark Bozek will produce with Parallel Media's Raymond Markovich and Arcadiy Golubovich.
Parallel is financing the film, which does not have a domestric distributor yet. Surely one of the major studios will take a gamble on a female-centric comedy, though they might wait to see many women rush to see Julia Roberts in Ryan Murphy's adaptation of "Eat Pray Love" next month.
Berry will shoot the film before she heads to Broadway to star in Katori Hall's "The Mountaintop," in which she plays a hotel maid (HA!) who delivers a meal to Martin Luther King Jr. on the evening before his assassination.
The "Anonymous" producers are expected to fill the other roles (and shoes) shortly.
Berry is represented by CAA.
