Los Angeles — Steven Spielberg has signed to executive produce a three-hour ABC telefilm based on the life of Anne Frank, the teenage icon of the Holocaust whose poignant diary has put a human face on the horrors of the Nazi era for millions of readers during the last 50 years.
The DreamWorks project is based on the 1998 biography Anne Frank: The Whole Story by Melissa Muller. Kirk Ellis (The Art of War) is set to pen the screenplay adaptation.
The telefilm is expected to air next season, but there's no word on casting or a target date for the start of production.
While Frank's story of two years of hiding in Amsterdam, the Netherlands, is well-known, the telefilm will explore her early childhood in Frankfurt, Germany, through her last days at the age of 15 in the Bergen-Belsen concentration camp.
ABC Executive VP Movies and Miniseries Susan Lyne noted that Spielberg was the ideal person to shepherd the telefilm, given his well-known commitment to documenting Holocaust stories. "For all the reasons that her story has moved people for generations now, we think that being able to give people a full picture of (Frank's) life is a TV event," Lyne said. "We hope that this will be a film that families will sit down and watch together."
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(Elisabeth Shue) War of the Worlds
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