Small-screen rejection helped make Paul Haggis' Crash an Oscar-winning film. "When I came up with the idea, I thought it would be a series," Haggis says. "But I couldn't sell it as a series, so Bobby Moresco and I wrote it as a movie."

It's selling now. On October 17, premium cable network Starz will make its official push into scripted dramas with a television adaptation of Crash.

Haggis' 2004 film wove racially tense undertones into a plot that included shootings, a carjacking, and molestation, so it would certainly seem a high-risk choice to headline a network's move into originals. ( See a slideshow of films that have been adapted for television.)

But Stephan Shelanski, Starz's executive vice president of programming, says that the same elements that make Crash a dicey bet also make it a good fit.

"Because of the provocative nature, we think we're the best home for this," Shelanski says of the R-rated series. "We don't have to shy away from the challenging subject matter. We're commercial-free, so an hour for us is an ample amount of time to tell a story. It's going to approximate the movie-going experience."

That experience has always dominated Starz's identity, but the changes in the way movies are distributed—DVDs by mail, releasing films on-demand at the same time as in theaters, even YouTube—have forced the network to evolve, Shelanski says. "There's so many ways a consumer can access movies today," he says. "We want the consumer to know something unique about us. Ratatouille, The Da Vinci Code—they're not our movies and the consumer knows it."

Most of Starz's competitors in the premium field have wised up to the importance of adding originals to their offerings—of the five majors, HBO, Showtime, Starz, Encore, and Cinemax, only Encore remains strictly movie replay. Showtime, in particular, has enjoyed critical and ratings success with Weeds, Dexter, and Californication, all of which were rolled out in the past three years.

"This is the premium channel 2.0, that you begin to give your channel some personality with original programming," says Jack MacKenzie, executive vice president at Frank N. Magid Associates, a consulting firm for entertainment companies. "You can't give your channel personality when you're dependent on what movie studios produce as your content."

Starz, which has 16 movie channels and has been a destination for last year's blockbusters since 1994, came up with a strategy that would move it into originals while capitalizing on its history: Spin series from the DNA of famous films. Turning movies into shows isn't exactly new, and past attempts, from Clueless to The Terminator, have met with varying degrees of success.