Rolin Jones, whose credits include Interview With The Vampire, Boardwalk Empire, and Friday Night Lights, will adapt Grapes Of Wrath and then “manage the franchise” going forward, “working with acclaimed creative talent connected to individual seasons,” the network announced on Monday. Each season will be “devoted to a different celebrated work, historical moment, or individual narrative celebrating and highlighting the American spirit.”
“For more than a year we have been searching for the perfect story to launch our next big television franchise, and we found it in The Grapes Of Wrath, which is as timely and relevant today as it was when first published in 1939,” said Dan McDermott, president of entertainment and AMC Studios for AMC Networks. “Our country is built upon so many unforgettable historic and dramatic moments, tales of bravery and courage, classic novels, short stories, and chronicles well known and never-before-told. As a network that began its life as American Movie Classics, this is the franchise we’re destined to bring to the screen.”
This anthology does feel appropriate for the American Movie Classics network, and focusing on “American Stories” also runs parallel to the, shall we say, increasingly nationalist sensibility of the U.S. at the moment. Of course, Grapes Of Wrath is set during the Great Depression and explores the dehumanizing effects of capitalism and the spoiled promise of the American dream, so that may also be entirely too appropriate. Grapes Of Wrath was most famously adapted by John Ford in his award-winning 1940 film of the same name, which starred Henry Fonda in the lead role.
“We’re thinking about Great American Stories like one of those resolute car factories in Michigan—bring in visionary creators, give them an assembly line of singular talent to build the thing, hand them the keys and get the hell out of the way,” Jones said in his own statement. “This is Dan McDermott’s big, bold, torpedo bat swing at AMC. He’s hired me to roll a beauty off the factory floor every year. I hope to never have another job for the rest of my career.”
