For almost two decades, Dr. Ronald Mallett, a physics professor at the University of Connecticut, has admired Spike Lee’s story-telling ability. He had seen Lee’s “Do The Right Thing” almost 20 years ago, calling it “brilliant.” “Malcolm X,” he says, “was such a superb film.”
But he never thought Lee’s long-admired skills would be used to exhibit his own life story, about a man who has been driven by a profound desire to make time travel a reality so he could go back and save the life of his father, who tragically died when Mallett was young. Never, that is, until Mallett received that fateful phone call from Lee earlier this year.
Says Mallett: “To me it was like a dream come true. I thought how perfect it is to have a brilliant African-American director choose to do this.”
Lee’s production company, 40 Acres & A Mule Filmworks, Inc., acquired the rights to Mallett and writer Bruce Henderson’s book, Time Traveler: A Scientist’s Personal Mission to Make Time Travel a Reality. Lee is currently in the research and script writing stages of making the memoir into a major motion picture film, says Mallett, who will serve as the film’s technical adviser, counseling filmmakers on anything that has to do with the real possibilities of time travel.
“I am elated to have acquired the rights to a fantastic story on many levels, but also a father-and-son saga of loss and love,” Lee says.
When Mallett, 63, was in his adolescence, like many young boys, his father was the center of his life. But one day he died suddenly of a massive heart attack.
