Actor Charles S. Dutton has revealed that he is developing a six-hour HBO miniseries about the life of Louis Armstrong

Tuesday, September 23 2008, 09:58 BST (04:58 ET)

By Simon Reynolds, Entertainment Reporter

Rex Features

Actor Charles S. Dutton has revealed that he is developing a six-hour HBO miniseries about the life of Louis Armstrong.

Dutton told Collider that he will work on the project with writer John Sayles and music mogul Quincy Jones, in addition to taking on the role of Armstrong in his later years.

The 57-year-old noted that he has been trying to produce a film about the iconic jazz trumpeter for 15 years but struggled to compress his life into a feature length running time.

"The mistake we were making was that we were trying to do it as a two-hour film," he explained. "Louis's life is just so huge you just can't... you know, because the problem was what do we leave out? What do we keep in? We could never really grasp the story on a two-hour movie. It took us 15 years to decide to do it as a big miniseries."

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