Spielberg, King Team up on Talisman

Wed., Dec. 6, 2006 4:09 PM PST by Josh Grossberg

Steven Spielberg has a new lucky charm—in the form of Stephen King.

The E.T. mastermind is officially joining forces with the master of horror to oversee a small-screen adaptation of the latter's The Talisman for TNT.

Cowritten in 1984 by King and Peter Straub, Talisman tells the epic adventure of Jack Sawyer, a boy who journeys from this world into a parallel world known as the Territories, in hopes of finding a mysterious relic that can help him save his dying mother.

TNT will coproduce the six-hour miniseries with Spielberg, producing partner Kathleen Kennedy and DreamWorks Television. The team's last small-screen project was the cable network's hit 2005 miniseries Into the West, which attracted a total of 81 million viewers during its six-week run and earned 16 Emmy nominations, the most for any program last season. (It won two awards in technical categories.)

Ehren Kruger, a screenwriter whose credits include Scream 3, The Ring, Arlington Road and The Skeleton Key, has been hired to adapt the novel.

"We are so happy and proud to be working with DreamWorks Television and Steven Spielberg after such a tremendous experience making Into the West," said Michael Wright, senior VP of original programming for TNT and TBS. "We've also had excellent results working with Stephen King's material on Salem's Lot and Nightmares and Dreamscapes, so the opportunity to bring these talents together on our network is just about as good as it gets."

The Talisman is slated to premiere in summer 2008.

Spielberg, meanwhile, remains busier than ever.

Aside from executive-producing the King tale, the Oscar winner has several other tube projects in the works, including the Sci Fi Channel miniseries Nine Lives, about people who have had near-death experiences, debuting in 2007; On the Lot, an upcoming Fox reality series with Survivor mastermind Mark Burnett, in which aspiring moviemakers compete for a development deal; and The Pacific War, a 10-part miniseries about American soldiers' fight with the Japanese in WWII expected to air in 2008.

On the big screen, he's producing Letters from Iwo Jima, pal Clint Eastwood's take on the Battle of Iwo Jima from the Japanese perspective (and a companion to Flags of Our Fathers), coming out later this month. Spielberg is also executive producer of The Transformers, Michael Bay's live-action event film based on the 1980s cartoon and toy line, due next summer; Disturbia, D.J. Caruso's upcoming thriller about a kid who thinks his neighbor is a serial killer; and Jurassic Park IV, slated for 2008.

The filmmaker's next directorial effort is still up in the air. It could be either of two projects in development—the much-talked-about fourth Indiana Jones movie, reuniting him with George Lucas and Harrison Ford, or the biopic Lincoln.

Given Spielberg's penchant for doing a popcorn flick and following it up with a "serious" picture, odds are on Jones shooting first (if Lucas ever approves the script). After that, Spielberg could follow up with Interstellar, a just-announced, mind-bending sci-fi movie that reportedly revolves around physicist Kip Thorne's theories of gravity fields and wormholes.

Despite the workload, Spielberg did manage to make it to Washington, D.C., last weekend, where he was feted at the Kennedy Center Honors alongside composer Andrew Lloyd Webber, singer Dolly Parton, Motown legend Smokey Robinson and conductor Zubin Mehta.

And in keeping with his mission to preserve the memory of the Holocaust, the Schindler's List helmer has also granted Berlin's Free University access to an archive of some 52,000 video testimonies collected by his nonprofit Shoah Foundation.