After jumping back into the fantastical world of the **Men In Black **series and pondering making Kevin Spacey swap bodies with a family cat in the still-developing Nine Lives, Barry Sonnenfeld is looking for a little dose of reality. Well, we say reality, because a potential future film is based on a hoax{
Sonnenfeld is aboard to direct a film based on magician James “The Amazing” Randi’s Project Alpha idea, which ran in the late 1970s and early ‘80s and saw him and two fake psychics pull a fast one on paranormal researchers. The hoaxers, including Steve Shaw and Michael Edwards, made the scientific team believe they had legitimate psychic powers not for an hour or an afternoon, but for two bloomin’ years. The fraud was eventually revealed publicly in Discover magazine.
The hoax is also covered in Justin Weinstein and Tyler Measom’s documentary of Randi, An Honest Liar, which has Sonnenfeld as an executive producer: “Not only did I love An Honest Liar, but I knew there was an excellent narrative film to be made out of this story, with James Randi playing the ‘behind the curtain’ puppeteer.” There’s no word on when the film might be made.
For more on An Honest Liar, check out this podcast interview with Randi and Weinstein.