David Chase's next project for HBO after his triumph with The Sopranos will be something even cooler for classic movie nuts like me -- Ribbon of Dreams, "a miniseries about the invention of cinema and subsequent growth of the Hollywood film industry," according to HBO's just-dropped press release.

Starting in 1913, it'll follow a college-grad engineer and a two-fisted cowboy, who join forces to help pioneer Hollywood. They will, of course, cross paths over subsequent years with the legendary likes of John Ford, Bette Davis, John Wayne and other names, spanning from silent films to sound, into the studio "golden age" and beyond, to television.

As a film history grad and Turner Classic Movies devotee, I'm only sorry that Ribbon of Dreams is just a miniseries. Hollywood's early history, especially, is rich enough to run for years -- a crazy cauldron of westward-ho individualism, city building, image making, culture exporting, overnight rises (and falls), energy and excess, wealth and waste, and combustible collisions between corporate moneymen and creative artists.

That much is made non-fiction vivid in all those TCM profiles of early stars/titans, along with such broader portraits as historian Kevin Brownlow's classic 13-hour Hollywood series delving inside the silent era. Brownlow's cameras in the 1970s documented the first-person accounts of early Hollywood movers and shakers who were then dying off, as their silent art had 50 years earlier. Now's the time for PBS, VOD and some enterprising DVD distributor to resurrect Hollywood's moving pastiche of personal memories, rare clips, and astute analysis of it all. That early era set up all the innovation and agony Hollywood continues to represent today.

Here's HBO's press release.

UPDATE (March 17) --

Turner Classic Movies is stepping in to provide another dose of Hollywood history, in a 10-part documentary called Moguls and Movie Stars: A History of Hollywood (working title).

While it's not completely an early-era focus, the upcoming series -- from Bill Haber's Ostar Productions, who did TNT's Stephen King mini Nightmares & Dreamscapes -- does cover that era as "an epic project that promises to be a landmark event for TCM," said Michael Wright, head programmer for TCM, TNT and TBS.

Moguls and Movie Stars will be "a rare, personalized look at the American film industry, featuring the remarkable men and women whose drive and ambition founded the 'Dream Factory' that became Hollywood," Haber said in the same press release. "At the heart of our story is a remarkable generation who, in a few short years, created an entertainment empire -- among them such names as Mayer, Goldwyn, Warner, Fox, Zanuck and Selznick. Many began as impoverished immigrants and became among the wealthiest and most influential figures in American culture."

Expected premiere is 2010.