Lifetime is continuing its push into broadening its movie programming beyond ripped-from-the-headlines fare and biopics with Terry McMillan’s “A Day Late and a Dollar Short,” TheWrap has learned exclusively.
Whoopi Goldberg will executive produce and star in the movie set to premiere in 2014.
She’ll play Viola Price, who learns that her next asthma attack could kill her. Emboldened by that knowledge, she sets out to repair her fractured family.
It will be a reunion for the multiple award winner and McMillan, as Goldberg appeared in the 1998 theatrical film “How Stella Got Her Groove Back,” starring Angela Bassett, which was also adapted from the author’s bestselling novel.
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It also brings Goldberg back to the Lifetime fold. She executive-produced the cable network’s medical drama series “Strong Medicine” from 2000 to 2006, as well as its 2001 original movie, “What Makes a Family.”
“Terry McMillan is one of America’s most beloved writers and ‘A Day Late and a Dollar Short’ combines her signature emotional storytelling with the complex characters viewers identify with and love” Lifetime’s executive vice president and general manager, Rob Sharenow, said in a statement. “We are thrilled to be working again with Whoopi Goldberg, who will be employing her enormous talents both in front of and behind the camera,”
Production begins this summer.
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Produced by Ostar Productions, the film will be executive-produced by Stephen Tolkin (“Perception,” “Brothers & Sisters”), Goldberg and Tom Leonardis (“Ruby’s Bucket of Blood”), Jeffrey Hayes (“Nightmares & Dreamscapes: From the Stories of Stephen King,” “The Starter Wife”) and Bill Haber (“Rizzoli & Isles,” “Beauty and the Beast”).
Tolkin will direct from a script by Shernold Edwards (“Haven”).
Goldberg is represented by WME.