Stephen King fans have a lot to be pleased with as not only is The Stand getting a very good creative team behind the project, but his upcoming new novel 11/22/63 is getting an adaptation as well with Jonathan Demme set to handle the writing, directing and producing chores for it. Demme has a lot of big name movies to his credits over the years, such as Silence of the Lambs and Philadelphia being the most well known, and he hasn’t done much since the 2008 feature Rachel Getting Married and the 2009 documentary Neil Young Trunk Show. While Demme may not be the first name you’d associate with this time travel science fiction project, he is the ideal type to work with more character driven movies and that is far more typical of a King novel than a flashy action movie which is what the book, due on November 8th of this year, will be like. The feature is set to go into production in late 2012 once a distributor is finalized.
Plot concept: On November 22, 1963, three shots rang out in Dallas, President Kennedy died, and the world changed. What if you could change it back? Stephen King’s heart-stoppingly dramatic new novel is about a man who travels back in time to prevent the JFK assassination—a thousand page tour de force. Jake Epping is a thirty-five-year-old high school English teacher in Lisbon Falls, Maine, who makes extra money teaching adults in the GED program. He receives an essay from one of the students—a gruesome, harrowing first person story about the night 50 years ago when Harry Dunning’s father came home and killed his mother, his sister, and his brother with a hammer. Harry escaped with a smashed leg, as evidenced by his crooked walk. Not much later, Jake’s friend Al, who runs the local diner, divulges a secret: his storeroom is a portal to 1958. He enlists Jake on an insane—and insanely possible—mission to try to prevent the Kennedy assassination. So begins Jake’s new life as George Amberson and his new world of Elvis and JFK, of big American cars and sock hops, of a troubled loner named Lee Harvey Oswald and a beautiful high school librarian named Sadie Dunhill, who becomes the love of Jake’s life—a life that transgresses all the normal rules of time.
[Source: Variety]
