It's been over a year since we last heard about the feature adaptation of the Pulitzer/Tony-winning play August: Osage County.  But with two stars like Meryl Streep and Julia Roberts attached, you knew The Weinstein Co. would circle back to the project eventually once schedules could be aligned.  The studio and director John Wells (Company Men) are moving forward on August with a fall start date in mind.  Tracy Letts' play follows "the women of a family whose lives have splintered in many directions until a crisis bring them back to their childhood home and to the dysfunctional woman who raised them."  Streep will play the pill-popping matriarch; Roberts will play her daughter.  More after the jump:To mark the occasion, Roberts released the following statement [via THR]:

“After seeing Meryl Streep's mesmerizing portrayal as Margaret Thatcher in The Iron Lady, it has me even more excited and proud to co-star with her."

I love seeing two big stars team up, and this is as big as you can go with female leads.  In service of what sounds like a terrific story, too.  The play synopsis sells August: Osage County as one of those broad Southern melodrama that works so well on stage:

When the patriarch of the Weston clan disappears one hot summer night, the family reunites at the Oklahoma homestead, where long-held secrets are unflinchingly and uproariously revealed. The three-act, three-and-a-half-hour mammoth of a play combines epic tragedy with black comedy, dramatizing three generations of unfulfilled dreams and leaving not one of its thirteen characters unscathed. [Amazon]