Tracy Oliver struck box office gold with “Girls Trip,” and now the screenwriter is tackling a project for the small screen. Deadline reports that she’s signed on to pen a half-hour series based on “The First Wives Club,” the 1996 film starring Goldie Hawn, Bette Midler, and Diane Keaton.
A reboot written by Rebecca Addelman (“New Girl”) was previously developed by TV Land with “How I Met Your Mother’s” Alyson Hannigan and “Smash’s” Megan Hilty set to star. The network passed on the pilot, but the source explains that the project was “kept alive and moved to Paramount Network for redevelopment. Paramount Network, slated to debut Jan. 18 as Viacom’s leading scripted cable brand, also took in newly picked up TV Land series ‘Heathers’ and ‘American Woman,’ which will be part of the network’s inaugural slate.”
Based in NYC, the series will follow a group of women who band together when their marriages fall apart.
Karen Rosenfelt (“Twilight” franchise) is executive producing.
Oliver just made history with “Girls Trip.” She co-wrote the script for the comedy, which earned over $115 million in the U.S. and $20 million abroad. According to Deadline, Oliver now holds the “distinction of becoming the first African-American woman to write a movie that grossed over $100 million domestically.” She’s signed on to adapt Nicola Yoon’s bestselling YA novel “The Sun is Also a Star,” a story about two teens who fall in love just as one of them is facing the threat of deportation. Her other credits include “Barbershop: The Next Cut,” “Survivor’s Remorse,” and “The Misadventures of Awkward Black Girl.”
“I learned to write out of necessity. When I was in my early twenties, I was frustrated with the lack of great roles for women who looked like me. So I decided that instead of being passive about it, I’d put myself in the driver’s seat and start being a creator,” Oliver has said. “I took writing classes, bought several screenwriting books on Amazon, read tons of scripts. Anything I could do to learn the craft, I did. And I wrote shitty scripts that eventually turned into not-so-shitty scripts over time with a lot of practice. Today, I still feel like I write out of necessity. I’m not one of those people who can just crank out a script in a weekend. Writing for me is hard. It’s stressful. It’s sometimes the worst fucking thing in the world. So because of that, I try really hard to write stuff I care about. Stuff that matters to me. Which for me, most often, means I’m writing about women and people of color. I’m passionate about telling stories about people I know that don’t get a lot of shine. People that are invisible to the mainstream, but are hugely important to me,” she explained.
