How’s this for spooky? So there was Empire just a few hours ago, watching Time After Time (the movie in which H.G. Wells and Jack The Ripper are transported to 1979 via a time machine) and wondering, after it had finished, what its director, Nicholas Meyer, was up to these days.
And then – would you Adam and Eve it – we flicked on our magical internet movie news updatery widget thing, and after much whirring and churning and spitting and smoking and belching flames, we found the following:
Meyer has signed on to write a biopic of George Washington, the second President of the United States. OK, then, unlike George, we can tell a lie – he was the very first President.
The currently-untitled Washington biopic, which we gather is particularly timely because of some election thing going on in the States at the moment, will be produced by Paul Allen’s Vulcan Prods.
Now, that name has special significance to Meyer, because he directed two of the finest Star Trek movies, The Wrath Of Khan (no. 2) and The Undiscovered Country (no. 6). So perhaps it’s fate that he ended up writing a movie for a company that reminds him of Mr. Spock.
In fact, Meyer is undergoing something of a renaissance, career-wise – he wrote the screenplay for the acclaimed movie, Elegy, which came out in the States recently. And now this – not bad for a 62 year-old. Who says Hollywood is no country for old men?