Tara Miele has lined up her next project days ahead of the release of her latest feature, Sienna Miller-starrer “Wander Darkly.” She will follow up the romantic drama about a couple whose lives are changed by a car accident with a biopic of a comedy legend. Miele is set to write and direct an adaptation of Carol Burnett’s best-selling memoir, “Carrie and Me: A Mother-Daughter Love Story.” Variety confirmed the news.
Originally in development at Focus Features back in 2019, the movie is now in negotiations “to jump to Apple, where it will be released as an original,” per the source. Burnett and “Unbreakable Kimmy Schmidt” co-creator Tina Fey are among its producers.
The pic will “track the ups and downs of Burnett’s life as a working mom, star, and producer, as seen through the lens of her close relationship with daughter Carrie Hamilton. Grappling with a public addiction battle as a teen, Hamilton lived as a sober adult before dying of cancer at the age of 38 in 2002.”
Best known for her iconic series “The Carol Burnett Show,” Burnett’s more recent credits include the “Mad About You” reboot and “Angie Tribeca.”
Fey and fellow “SNL” alumna Amy Poehler presented Burnett with the Lifetime Achievement Award at the 2016 SAG Awards. The “30 Rock” star also paid tribute to Burnett at a ceremony honoring the 2013 Mark Twain Prize recipient. “You mean so much to me. I love you in a way that is just short of creepy,” Fey told Burnett. She revealed that her parents used Burnett’s iconic sketch series as a disciplinary tool. “If I ever got in trouble when I was a little kid, I was not allowed to take our family’s portable black and white TV up to my room and watch ‘The Carol Burnett Show’ on Saturday nights,” she explained.
Miele’s “Wander Darkly” is in available in select theaters and on demand this Friday, December 11. Her TV credits include “Arrow” and “Batwoman.” She created the viral short “Meet a Muslim” to combat Islamophobia.
Asked what advice she’d give other women directors, Miele told us, “Don’t be perfect — be brave. Try things that might fail big. And on top of that, try to enjoy it. Enjoy the risk, the question, the uncertainty of whether or not your crazy ideas will all work. That place of discovery can be so uncomfortable, but it is where all the good stuff happens.”
