"Big Valley" en route to big screen

By Jay A. Fernandez

LOS ANGELES (Hollywood Reporter) - The 1960s TV Western "The Big Valley" will be revisited as a feature film.

Producer Kate Edelman Johnson is spinning a big-screen project out of the show co-created by her father, producer Louis F. Edelman, and writer A.I. Bezzerides. The series, which ran on ABC from 1965-69, starred Barbara Stanwyck as the matriarch of a ranching clan in California's San Joaquin Valley in the 1870s. Lee Majors, Richard Long and Linda Evans were among the regulars.

Daniel Adams ("The Golden Boys") has written the screenplay and will direct.

Edelman produced such films as "White Heat" (1949) and "You Were Never Lovelier" (1942) as well as such TV series as "The Life and Legend of Wyatt Earp" and "The Danny Thomas Show."

Bezzerides wrote the 1955 film "Kiss Me Deadly" and the novel that inspired "They Drive By Night" (1940).

(Editing by Sheri Linden at Reuters)