Jack Finney may not be a name you know offhand, but you almost certainly know his work – remember that one kindasorta seminal sci-fi film INVASION OF THE BODY SNATCHERS? Well Jack Finney wrote the book on which that film was based. But Hollywood didn’t stop, at least initially, with INVASION. Another of Finney’s books titled TIME AND AGAIN has been the subject of adaptation attempts for years and years now, and while no luck has been had thus far things may be about to change with the formal attachment of Doug Liman (THE BOURNE IDENTITY, JUMPER) to direct and produce.
Liman is in the process of commencing production on ALL YOU NEED IS KILL, so it will still be a fair while before we hear anything more about TIME AND AGAIN. But for you fans of sci-fi, time travel, and government experiments gone awry, this sounds like a project well worth following.
Here are two summaries of the plot, each covering different aspects of the tale told by TIME AND AGAIN:
“First published in 1970, the romantic time-travel tale follows Simon Morley, a Manhattan illustrator who enlists in a secret government experiment and is transported from the mid-20th century to 1882 New York, where he falls in love and finds himself forced to choose between his lives in the present and the past.”
“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?”
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