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The Oscar-winning director of The Silence of the Lambs has picked up the film rights to Stephen King’s as-yet-unpublished novel about a rip in time that leads a small-town teacher back to JFK’s assassination.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

Universal passes on ambitious adaptation of The Dark Tower...

From Variety:

Universal has officially placed the ambitious multiplatform franchise The Dark Tower in turnaround. Variety first reported that the studio had second thoughts about the film and TV project from Akiva Goldsman and helmer Ron Howard on May 5, when the studio began mulling a turnaround.

Tower involved a television show that would have continued the narrative in between three movies, all based on Steven King's seven-novel series (King has completed an eighth, The Wind Through the Keyhole, set for publication in 2012).

Howard unveiled plans for The Dark Tower adaptation last September. Universal soon came on as a distributor, thanks to Imagine's production deal with the studio; NBC (or an affiliated cable net) was expected carry the TV component.

By April, scribe Mark Verheiden was brought on board to write the TV show along with Goldsman.

No financier has officially signed on to the project, but Warner Bros. could be a likely option since the studio is home to Goldsman's Weed Road Pictures shingle.

Imagine Entertainment's Brian Grazer and Goldsman were set to produce while Javier Bardem was attached to star.

Howard is expected to still helm the project if the studio shops it elsewhere and it finds a new home.