"Grey Gardens" premieres April 18 on HBO, and before you watch it, read what Executive Producer Rachael Horovitz says about stars Jessica Lange and Drew Barrymore, the Kennedy family and the enduring women behind the legacy. Horovitz, whose film-producing credits include the movies "About Schmidt," "State and Main" and "Next Stop Wonderland," opens up to Melissa Silverstein, wowOwow’s correspondent and founder of the website Women & Hollywood.

MELISSA SILVERSTEIN: You use the Maysles’s 1975 cult documentary "Grey Gardens" as the frame for this version. Can you explain why it was so important?

RACHAEL HOROVITZ: I feel like I was completely raised on that film. My mom had gotten me to see it when it came out and she had a great sense of irony. She passed away over 20 years ago and it was one of these things that we shared. It was completely her idiom, as far as the poetry of it and the humor, the zaniness. And my brothers and I really grew up knowing lines from the movie, and quoting them to one another. The documentary was just a beloved favorite film.

The backstory on this film starts with Michael Sucsy (the film’s director) who had written a script that predated my knowing him. It was a chronological, very rich, very ambitious period piece that started with the ’30s and went in order through Big Edie’s death. It included the full debutante ball, and the Inauguration of JFK in Washington. It would have definitely cost a lot of money. Also [Michael] hadn’t gotten the rights to the documentary, and so his script skirted the documentary. Coincidentally, I was trying to get the rights to the documentary. I knew Albert Maysles and we were talking very seriously about making a deal together to do a film based on the documentary, when I learned about the other project.

MS: OK.

RH: So we decided — in the aftermath of the two Capote films and the terror of having that same experience — to "get married." I brought the documentary rights and they brought their script and we redesigned his script by patching the documentary into it.

MS: Did you have any intentions of having it be a theatrical release?

RH: Many. That was the plan, but we felt that either way we would be very, very lucky. Unfortunately, the theatrical arm (of HBO), Picturehouse, was shut, as was Warner Independent, which was the in-house Time Warner company. I actually started my studio-career working at Fine Line, which was the precursor to Picturehouse. I definitely brought to this production team almost too much knowledge of how easy it is to flame out in the specialized theatrical market. And I was really, really pushing for making the film with HBO, because I thought that if we did have to give up theatrical, that the trade-off would be fantastic.

MS: That’s very smart.

RH: And probably more people — and this has now become a cliché to say this — but more people would see it on HBO than would see it in five or six art-house cinemas around the country.

MS: What is it about these women that is so endearing?

RH: Well, I don’t know that I can answer it for everyone. But if I answer it for myself maybe it’ll be universal. They really feel like family. I don’t know anyone who doesn’t have a relative whom they dearly love, who also embarrasses them and who’s painfully at odds with the outside world. And if not a relative, then a friend or an in-law. I think a lot of people relate to this story directly. And while I don’t feel that I relate to it directly, it’s not an accident that my mother adored this movie. She had a lot of the Edies in her. She never had a job. She was a true artist in her soul.