Katrina: American Crime Story is moving full steam ahead but there will be changes & a new part of the story is being adapted.
The new story will adapt Five Days At Memorial by Pulitzer Prize winner Sheri Fink as source material. Scott Rudin, who had bought the rights to the book shortly after it came out in 2013, has come on board as an executive producer alongside the Emmy-winning ACS trio of Ryan Murphy, Nina Jacobson and Brad Simpson.
The book details the aftermath of Hurricane Katrina at Memorial Medical Center in New Orleans, and the decision by medical staff, led by Dr. Anna Pou, to euthanize critically ill patients after being trapped in the hospital for days without power.
In a followup to her Emmy-winning turn as Marcia Clark on People v. O.J. Simpson: ACS, Sarah Paulson will play Dr. Pou in Katrina, which is currently looking for a writer/showrunner to pen the adaptation. Katrina is expected to start production in the spring and premiere in 2019 as the third installment in the ACS franchise following People v. O.J. Simpson and the upcoming The Assassination of Gianni Versace.
Katrina was originally supposed to air second but the idea took longer to gel as the producers had been trying to figure out what part of the sprawling story of the Hurricane Katrina aftermath to tell, and Five Days at Memorial is giving them a story engine to do that.
Despite previous cast announcements for this installment, no other cast members besides Paulson are currently attached to Katrina but the producers would try to find new characters for some of the actors that had been previously earmarked for the project, including Annette Bening, Dennis Quaid and Matthew Broderick, to play.
