Spike Lee is slated to direct and co-write Time Traveler, a movie adaptation of the Ronald Mallett memoir. Lee personally purchased the rights to make the film through his company, Forty Acres & A Mule Filmworks, and passed up Fox’s Selling Time production to do it.

Mallett was one of the first African-Americans to achieve a doctorate in theoretical physics; his research into time travel continues to be funded. His memoir, co-written with (i.e., ghostwritten by) Bruce Henderson , recounts his life’s obsessive pursuit to discover a method of time travel. Inspired at age 10 by his father’s death, Mallett has ever since sought a way of going back in time to prevent his father from dying.

Lee’s last project was Miracle at St. Anna, about an all black division of US soldiers in Italy in World War II.