• by Steve McClellan  @mp_mcclellan, October 10, 2011

As part of its Breast Cancer Awareness Month programming efforts, Lifetime on Monday is debuting the movie “Five,” which explores the disease and its impact on patients and those close to them. The film’s development has an unusual backstory -- it is based on a campaign that ad agency JWT, a unit of WPP, created for a chapter of the Susan G. Komen Foundation three years ago.

It was the agency’s Puerto Rico office that developed the original concept -- a local half-hour TV special -- for the Komen Foundation’s Puerto Rico chapter back in 2008. The idea was to explore the five emotional phases that women with breast cancer (and their families) experience, including diagnosis, acceptance, treatment, family support, and remission. The special featured testimonials from women recounting their ordeals set to an original classical music score.

After seeing the work from the shop’s Puerto Rico office, Mike Mike Wiese, director of branded entertainment at JWT New York and a co-executive producer of the film, sensed there was an opportunity to take that original premise and transform it into a longer-form piece suitable for the national TV.

Wiese also said he was inspired by content formats like the iconic BMW film series, “short films that can tell a bigger story,” he said. “We had the Five format structure, and we knew it was something that could work so we just kind of shot big,” he added.

He started by crafting the broad strokes of a movie concept that he brought to Creative Artists Agency, the Hollywood talent firm, in late 2009. A few months later, he and CAA brought it to Lifetime, which gave it the thumbs up almost immediately. Sony Entertainment, which has a production and distribution partnership with Lifetime also got involved.

The movie has a full compliment of ads and two primary branded integration partners, including JWT client Ford Warriors In Pink, the Ford-sponsored group that sells T-shirts and other merchandise to raise money for breast cancer-related research. (There’s also a Ford sweepstakes tied to the program for its Focus model.) Walgreens drug chain is the other integration partner.

According to Wiese, the film, like the original TV special, explores the five emotional phases of the disease, but does so by telling the separate stories of five different women who are diagnosed with breast cancer. The thread holding those stories together is the oncologist who treats them, portrayed by Jean Tripplehorn.

The cast also includes in Patricia Clarkson, Rosaria Dawson and Annie Potts. Segment directors include Jennifer Aniston, Demi Moore and Alicia Keys.