Ashleigh Hill-Buxton
Warner Bros. have obtained the rights to develop the screen adaptation of Julie Kibler’s novel “Calling Me Home” according to The Hollywood Reporter.
Described as a cross between “Driving Miss Daisy” and “The Help”, which tells the story of 89-year old woman Isabelle McAllister and her hairdresser, a black single mother named Dorrie Curtis. When McAllister enlists Curtis’ to drive her from Arlington, Texas to a funeral in Cincinnati, McAllister reveals the tragic secrets of her past in which she fell in love with the black son of her family’s housekeeper to dire consequences. The film is told both in the present and flashbacks to the 1930’s.
Roy Lee of Vertigo Entertainment is on board to produce the adaptation, which represents a new and different path to his previous films including “The Lake House” and the upcoming LEGO animated feature.
It also signals a newfound willingness by Warner Bros. to seek out a more mature audience that made “Argo” an Oscar winner and goes against the studio’s usual tack of developing big-budget spectacles.
The studio and Lee are now in the process of seeking out a writer to adapt the material for the screen.
