We aren’t even in the slow season for HBO shows where I’m constantly debating giving up the pay-for-content network and considering living a free-for-all internet TV life. Every time I think about dropping the network from my cable bill, they always swing back around with something interesting. From John Adams, to Generation Kill to (a lesser extent) True Blood and now the second season of Flight Of The Conchords is one of the best things on television.

What could HBO possibly offer me that would make me shell out subscription fees for another few years? How about Sopranos creator David Chase’s return to HBO, meshed with old 1930s era Hollywood?

Sold.

But will this be a fantastic series that makes me nostalgic for an era I never lived through or a series of cut-to-black cliffhangers…

From HitFix:

HBO announced on Monday (March 16) that the “Sopranos” creator will write and executive produce “A Ribbon of Dreams,” which focuses on the partnership between a college-educated mechanical engineer and a former cowboy who become cinematic pioneers. In addition, Chase is expected to direct initial installments of the miniseries.

The two main characters will begin as employees of D.W. Griffth and will encounter many of the pivotal figures of Hollywood, as movies went from early silent Westerns, through the development of talkies, through the studio system, through the inception of television, through the auteur years of the late ’60s and ’70s to today. The main characters’ careers cross paths with folks like John Ford, John Wayne, Bette Davis, Bill Wilder and others.

Paramount Pictures chairman and CEO Brad Gray, an executive producer on “The Sopranos,” will executive produce the HBO/Paramount/Chase Films production.

In HBO’s release, Chase says, “It gives me pleasure to think of working, together with Brad, with HBO, again. These are all people who, obviously, occupy a special place in my heart.”

I hate to say this sounds classic, because it obviously will be framed like a classic, but this sounds kind of classic.

Classic. There, I just wanted to type it again.

In all seriousness, this is a period of filmmaking history that is kind of glossed over now that we have so many more milestones that appeal to our geek sensibility. Like, I can watch 6 hours of documentary footage of Steven Spielberg deciding if he should use Go-Motion or CGI for the dinosaurs in Jurassic Park, but outside of a biography of Fatty Arbuckle, the ins-and-outs of early, early Hollywood are shrouded in lore that I’ll be watching David Chase rip open.