When Spike Lee's not busy calling Clint Eastwood out for a bout of fisticuffs, he also makes films - and he's just added a new one to his To Do list. He's planning Time Traveler, an adaptation of the memoirs of one Ronald Mallett.
Who, you may ask, is Mallett? Well, if you have to ask, you clearly aren't a theoretical physicist. Mallett is, however, and a distinguished one at that - one of the first African-Americans to get a PhD in the subject, he rose from poverty to an intellectually distinguished career, and has taught at the University of Connecticut for over 30 years now. Along the way, he's written several highly advanced works on the question of time travel. His obsession with the subject apparently stems from the death of his father when Mallet was 10, when, inspired by a comic book version of HG Wells The Time Machine, Ronald vowed to go back and save his father's life.
So it's a rags to, well, not riches story (honestly, what they pay academics nowadays) but perhaps rags to intellectual riches. Lee's planning to co-write the film and direct, which should fit him well. After all, he's been flirting with the idea of a time-travel movie for some time, at one point having been attached to make Selling Time, wherein a guy sells a few years from his life expectancy to relive, and correct, the worst day of his life.