Jonathan Demme wants to use time travel to save Kennedy...

...or at least adapt an upcoming Stephen King book about that. Entertainment Weekly has the story:

The Oscar-winning director of The Silence of the Lambs has picked up the film rights to Stephen King’s as-yet-unpublished novel about a rip in time that leads a small-town teacher back to JFK’s assassination.

11/22/63 is due on shelves Nov. 8, but Jonathan Demme has gotten the jump on the title, a kind of odyssey story in which Jack Epping, a school teacher from Maine, ends up going back to 1958, falling in love with a librarian, and encountering assorted historical figures from Elvis Presley to Lee Harvey Oswald as he ventures closer to the political murder that changed history. (Smart money says he’ll change things around even more.)

Demme will write, direct and produce the film through his Clinica Estetico production company. Ilona Herzberg, who tackled a different kind of JFK story in the Cuban Missile Crisis drama Thirteen Days, is also producing, and King himself will executive produce.

Demme has focused his efforts mostly on documentaries in recent years, making The Man From Plains about former president Jimmy Carter, a pair of concert films about Neil Young, and a PBS report about the Hurricane Katrina-savaged Lower 9th Ward. His last drama was 2008′s Rachel Getting Married, and before that, 2004′s remake of The Manchurian Candidate.

Jonathan Demme won't go back to big-budget filmmaking?

Apparently not, according to The Film Stage:

It isn’t hard to argue that Jonathan Demme was at his commercial peak in the early 90s, when his Oscar-winners The Silence of the Lambs and Philadelphia both became widely discussed cultural events. Despite being the man behind other hits, like Stop Making Sense or Something Wild, he hasn’t been seen as much over the past ten years; much of his work in that time has been documentaries, while his biggest box office hit was The Manchurian Candidate.

Speaking at the 2nd Annual Aruba International Film Festival – where he was being honored for his documentary The Agronomist, about assassinated Haitian journalist Jean Dominick - he talked about his frustration with making movies on a big budget, and seemed to indicate that this is a territory he won’t be returning to.