Oscar-winning Spanish filmmaker Pedro Almodovar is venturing into television with a series adaptation of his first international hit, the Oscar-nominated 1988 feature "Women on the Verge of a Nervous Breakdown."Fox TV Studios is developing the English-language hourlong project and has tapped Mimi Schmir to write the pilot script. Almodovar and Schmir are executive producing.
The movie, starring Carmen Maura and featuring Antonio Banderas, was inspired by 1950s Hollywood comedies. Featuring Almodovar's trademark rapid-fire dialogue and fast-paced action, it chronicles a two-day period in the life of a voice actress who has been abandoned by her lover and gets in a series of comic situations while frantically trying to track him down.
Almodovar will be very involved in "Women," which will be developed with an eye for the international market.
Schmir, whose series credits include "Grey's Anatomy" and "Shark," already has mined the arena of women in midlife crisis in a novel she is writing based on her "Hot Flashes" blog.
The "Women" series "will be a suburban drama about a group of women who have known each other for a long time, perhaps from college, who are in the middle of their lives and looking at the second half of their lives," Schmir said.
Like the movie, the series will feature a fair amount of humor. Schmir also plans to pay homage to the movie by keeping some elements, like the film's ongoing gag of unsuspecting visitors to the actress's apartment being knocked out by sleeping-pill-laden gazpacho she had intended for her philandering lover.
Almodovar, who won a screenwriting Oscar for "Talk to Her," will premiere his next movie, "Broken Embraces," next month at the Cannes festival.
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