HBO announces plans for Angels in America broadcast

At the Television Critics Association press tour Thursday, HBO announced plans for the December broadcast of the six-hour miniseries of Tony Kushner's Pulitzer-winning play Angels in America. "The film, which has taken two years to make at a cost of over $60 million, is six hours long," said Colin Callender, president of HBO Films. "It will air in December this year in a groundbreaking scheduling pattern that will take unique advantage of our multiplex capacity by utilizing HBO, HBO II, and HBO Signature as separate platforms. This will allow the audience to watch the film in any format--two three-hour parts, six one-hour episodes, or stacked as a continuous six-hour event." Also appearing at the press conference were Kushner, director Mike Nichols, and actors Meryl Streep and Al Pacino. Kushner revealed that he had previously written a six-hour screen adaptation of Angels for Robert Altman, who had at one point been attached to direct: "[It] was also six hours long but very, very different from this, and a really much looser adaptation that I felt, finally, and Mr. Altman felt also finally didn't work as well as the play did. That was all quite a while ago. So this was really a fresh start. And Mike took a completely different approach to the material. Very different things mattered to him. This version is utterly different than any other attempt to make it into a film."