‘One More Day’ offers new twist

Mitch Albom’s tales sometimes hover above reality, with ghosts and angels and such.

“Oprah Winfrey Presents: For One More Day” – the new ABC movie Albom adapted from his novel – is like that. There’s a car crash and a life-beyond-death twist.

Still, there’s a very real person at the story’s core.

“He wrote this to honor his mother,” says Ellen Burstyn, who co-stars. “He said his father crept into his other stories but his mother never had.”

Now she’s there. Posey Benetto – played by Burstyn and (in flashbacks) Samantha Mathis – ripples with Rhoda Albom’s traits.

“She doesn’t pull any punches,” Burstyn says.

One example is her library confrontation. It was taken directly from life, Albom says.

In small-town New Jersey, they had a routine. Each Saturday, his mother took him to the library; he’d get a ride home, book in hand, two hours later.

The key time came when he was 9 or 10.

“I had this Curious George book,” Albom recalls. “I had read it several times so she asked why I had it again.”

He had wanted “20,000 Leagues Under the Sea,” he told her, but the librarian said it was too difficult.

His mom fumed, marched in and confronted the librarian.

“Never tell a child something is too hard,” she said. “And especially, never this child.”

She grabbed “20,000 Leagues” and stormed out.

“I think we stole it, basically,” Albom says. “I don’t remember the librarian checking it out.”

On one hand, the librarian was right. The book was too hard, but he struggled through. And it made an impression.

Albom became and remains a columnist for the Detroit Free Press and has written books: four collections of columns, two other sports books, a best-selling memoir (“Tuesdays With Morrie,” also made into an Oprah-produced TV movie), a short novel (“The Five People You Meet in Heaven,” which resulted in another small-screen film) and even some plays (including “Duck Hunter Shoots Angel”).

“I was working on another book, when I called my mother, just to say hello,” Albom says. “(Afterward,) I was filled with this whole sense of, ‘What’s it going to be like to not be able to do that any more?’ ….

“I know when she dies, I’m going to say, ‘If I could just have one more day with her.’ “

He postponed his other project and wrote about an alcoholic former baseball player (played by Michael Imperioli), torn between opposite parents.

The dad is a sports zealot. “I sort of made him the opposite of my dad,” Albom says.

And the fictional mom is similar to his real one – with a key addition.

“Across the street was the only divorced woman I knew,” Albom says. “The ostracism she faced was amazing.”

So the fictional Posey divorces and becomes an outsider.

It’s a rich character to play, says Burstyn. “Mitch Albom is a wonderful writer.”

“We’re both from Detroit,” she adds. “I think there’s an openness and a plainness of speaking that you’ll find in the Midwest.”

He got there long after she left. Albom, 49, reached Detroit for his newspaper job; Burstyn, who turned 75 on Friday, left shortly after high school.

She modeled and danced in Texas and then New York.

“I decided I was going to be an actor in a Broadway play,” she recalls. “I asked people how to get an audition.”

She ended up landing a Broadway role and some TV ones, but, she says, “It was a couple years before it dawned on me that I should learn how to do it.”

She studied intense method acting under Lee Strasberg and it stuck. Burstyn has won an Oscar (for “Alice Doesn’t Live Here Any More”) and been nominated for five more.