Akiva Goldsman Adapting Unfilmable Fairy Tale “Winter's Tale”

This is the moment fans of author Mark Helprin's "Winter's Tale" have been awaiting/dreading for years.

Akiva Goldsman, the producer behind movies like "Jonah Hex," "Fair Game" and "The Losers," is making his feature-film directorial debut with his own adaptation of "Winter's Tale," reported Deadline.

The novel is a sweeping epic, an adult fairy tale set in New York City around the turn of the 20th Century. Here's the description from publisher Houghton Mifflin Harcourt:

New York City is subsumed in arctic winds, dark nights, and white lights, its life unfolds, for it is an extraordinary hive of the imagination, the greatest house ever built, and nothing exists that can check its vitality. One night in winter, Peter Lake--orphan and master-mechanic, attempts to rob a fortress-like mansion on the Upper West Side.

Though he thinks hte house is empty, the daughter of the house is home. Thus begins the love between Peter Lake, a middle-aged Irish burglar, and Beverly Penn, a young girl, who is dying.

Peter Lake, a simple, uneducated man, because of a love that, at first he does not fully understand, is driven to stop time and bring back the dead. His great struggle, in a city ever alight with its own energy and beseiged by unprecedented winters, is one of the most beautiful and extraordinary stories of American literature.

This synopsis is notable for a couple of reasons, like the misspellings of "the" in the second paragraph and "besieged" in the third, and for the lack of any mention of the flying horse that appears throughout the story.

This seems like an awfully ambitious project for a man who's previously only directed a handful of TV episodes, mostly "Fringe." We dearly loved this novel, but shudder to think what Hollywood would do to it with a $75 million budget.

Do yourself a favor and read the book before this thing hits theaters--figure you've got at least two years.

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