How J.J. Abrams and Hulu Brought Stephen King’s ‘11.22.63’ to TV
When Stephen King first got the idea for a story about a time-traveler trying to save JFK, he was a 24-year-old high school English teacher living in a double-wide trailer and couldn’t find anyone to publish his writings outside of cheap Playboy knockoffs like Gent and Cavalier. It would take 40 years for the author to finally publish what would ultimately become the 849-page book 11/22/63 — but it was worth the long wait. The what-if novel sold by the millions and The New York Times named it one of the five best fiction books of 2011; and on February 15th, Hulu will premiere the first episode of an eight-hour miniseries adaptation of King’s historical-fantasy opus starring James Franco.
The book — about a lonely, divorced high school teacher named Jake Epping that comes across a time portal back to 1958 in the closet of a diner, and spends five years plotting a way to stop President Kennedy’s assassination — had a rather rocky first step on its road to the screen. Director Jonathan Demme was the first license to it, though King had complete veto power over every aspect of the project. “He was pretty adamant that it be a theatrical film,” says the bestselling author. “It was like, ‘Jon, I don’t know. This is pretty long and complex.’ Making into a movie is like sitting on a suitcase. You try and cram everything in and something always gets left off. Eventually we looked at each other and said, ‘This isn’t going to work.'”
Not long after Demme moved on from the project, J.J. Abrams made a deal with King to turn it into a miniseries for the streaming service (under the title 11.22.63; the backslashes have been retired). The news that the novel was heading to TV didn’t reach James Franco, who was busy preparing for his oral exams in the Yale English department. “I had to be familiar with 150 books,” he says. “A lot of them were academic, and when I finished I was finally able to read whatever I wanted. I remember seeing 11/22/63 at an airport bookstore, and just picked it up. When I read it I got this gut feeling, a tingle, that it could be something more.” He e-mailed King and inquired about the rights, only to be told the Force Awakens director beat him to it. But an online essay Franco wrote about the book for Vice got the attention of Abrams, who offered him the lead role.” I quickly responded and said, ‘I’m totally in as long as I can direct a little,'” says Franco. “He said, ‘No problem!’ … and that was it.”
For Franco, the main appeal of the project was the chance to revisit a very familiar part of American history in a fresh way. “With the time travel element you get to sort of revitalize the whole assassination story,” he says. “The possibilities of what happened are reopened.” That means when the story actually reaches November 22nd, 1963, the fate of President Kennedy is completely unknown to the viewer. “For my generation that didn’t live through the assassination, it’s become like an American myth,” says Franco. “This is a fresh in.”
The difficult task of adapting the massive book into an eight-hour series fell to Los Angeles-based playwright and screenwriter Bridget Carpenter, best known for her work on Friday Night Lights and Parenthood. “Reading the book, you are inside the mind of Jake Epping and privy to his thoughts,” she says. “Unless you do a voiceover, which I didn’t want to do, you’re severely limited. If you don’t hear somebody’s thoughts you’re just looking at a handsome man staring at a window.” Early on, she made the crucial decision to take an extremely minor character from the book (Bill Turcotte, played by George MacKay) and make him a sidekick for Epping throughout much of the series. “That was brilliant on Bridget’s part,” says King. “They’re talking to each other and we’re listening in.”