Doug Liman will direct "Time and Again." If it really happens.
It seems like forever and a day ago that someone gave me a copy of “Time and Again,” the novel by Jack Finney, saying, ‘You HAVE to read this, you’ll love it” (considering that this was in high school, I guess it was forever and a day ago). I liked it more than loved it (I may have been too young to appreciate it), but since it was published in 1970, the illustrated novel has developed a cult following, or enough of a following that Hollywood has been trying to make into a movie for years, to no avail (I know a stage musical version was workshopped for a while but never went anywhere).
Now it’s time to try again. Variety reports that Lionsgate has bought the rights to the novel and set Doug Liman to direct it. Liman is currently getting ready to direct Tom Cruise and Emily Blunt in “All You Need is Kill.”
Wondering what it’s all about? Amazon describes the book this way:
“Sleep. And when you awake everything you know of the twentieth century will be gone from your mind. Tonight is January 21, 1882. There are no such things as automobiles, no planes, computers, television. ‘Nuclear’ appears in no dictionary. You have never heard the name Richard Nixon.”
Did illustrator Si Morley really step out of his twentieth-century apartment one night — right into the winter of 1882? The U.S. Government believed it, especially when Si returned with a portfolio of brand-new sketches and tintype photos of a world that no longer existed — or did it?
And there is, of course, romance.
I don’t know if the movie will ever get made; I’m sure I’ve heard before that there were attempts to get it onscreen, with many different names attached. So this falls into the “I’ll believe it when I see it” category.
