Jonathan Demme To Write And Direct Adaptation Of Stephen King's Upcoming '11/22/63'

The film and TV adaptation of Stephen King's long novel series The Dark Tower may have stalled, but other King projects are moving full speed ahead. We just heard that Harry Potter screenwriter and director Steve Kloves and David Yates would team up to adapt the author's giant tome The Stand, and now Jonathan Demme is getting in on the King action. He has optioned the author's next novel, 11/22/63, with an eye toward writing, producing and directing a film based on the story.

Variety has the quick report up now. The book doesn't come out until early November, so we can't make any real analysis of the possibilities here. But this is the recap of the book from King's own site, which makes the story sound like much more of a thriller and a moral play than anything else:

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.