HBO Films is turning to the British stage for a new project, signing scribe David Hare to adapt his British play "My Zinc Bed" for the shingle.Uma Thurman, Paddy Considine and stage thesp Jonathan Pryce will star in the pic, which centers on a young idealist alcoholic, his wealthy boss and the boss' wife, with whom the idealist has an affair.
Longtime stage and television helmer Anthony Page ("I Never Promised You a Rose Garden") will direct.
Movie, which HBO Films will co-produce with the BBC, will be broadcast on the net in 2008, HBO execs said.
Hare's play originally played the Royal Court Theater in 2000, when Variety called it "a play that seems both wrenched out of empathy and experience and somewhat abstracted from it." It was never staged in the U.S.
Hare, who penned the screenplay for "The Hours," has adapted his own work for the bigscreen before, most notably with '80's Fred Schepisi pic "Plenty." He's also attached to write Par's adaptation of Jonathan Franzen's "The Corrections," which Scott Rudin is producing.
Thurman last appeared on HBO in Mira Nair's "Hysterical Blindness," which earned the thesp a Golden Globe in 2003.
"Zinc" is one of the first projects under the purview of HBO Films' new Gotham topper Julie Goldstein, the Miramax vet who was hired earlier this year, and recently promoted veep Maria Zuckerman, who will oversee "Zinc" for the company.
