QUILTING BEE : An American Tale, Human Division, From Spielberg

Trade mah-jongg for quilting. Switch mother-daughter relationships to aunties’ marriages over the ages. And forget the cross-cultural barriers.

And, bingo, you have “The Joy Luck Club” a la 1994. It’s called “The Making of an American Quilt,” a book written by Whitney Otto that is being produced on the big screen by Steven Spielberg’s Amblin Entertainment and directed by Jocelyn Morehouse.

Writer Jane Anderson is currently adapting Otto’s work for the screen. It will be an ensemble piece with six or seven major roles for actresses 50 and older.

Morehouse, who lives in Australia, jokes that she has this “deeply wonderful fax relationship” with the Los Angeles-based Anderson, as they stitch their way through the rewrite. If all goes well, Morehouse hopes to be in production this summer.

“This is an unbelievably, beautiful story about wisdom, true love and hope. Yes, it’s a bit like ‘Joy Luck Club,’ but instead of stories about mothers and daughters it is a story about the loves of their lives,” she says.

Tailored around the pending marriage of a young woman named Finn, the story opens with the bride-to-be hoping to sort out her premarital doubts with a visit to her grandmother.

When she arrives, she finds that her grandmother, her elderly friends and grand-aunts are basting together her wedding gift--a friendship quilt, to which each contributes a square.

Amblin expects to begin casting in the coming weeks. “You know, there is a lot of comedy in the script. These women are a bunch of crusty old broads with wonderful stories to tell,” says Morehouse. “They are roles any actress would want. And you know, the phone has already started to ring.”