Abrams' adaptation of King's '11.22.63' should be very interesting

I was 10 years old when John F. Kennedy was elected president and 13 when he was murdered in Dallas.

11/22/63

It was the day the world changed, and it never changed back. The day our young, energetic president was replaced by an old, grandfatherly type.

Lyndon Johnson did some good, especially on the domestic side, but he got us so deeply entangled in Vietnam that by the time the war ended late in the Nixon administration more than 58,000 Americans were dead.

If there's one thing that has been constant over the last 52 years, it's people wondering how different things have been if President Kennedy had not died in Dallas and had served out two full terms in the White House.

George Bernau took a shot at it in "Promises to Keep," a novel in which a Kennedyesque president is shot in Dallas but survives a terrible head wound. History changes, but not as much as you might think. Bernau had another novel, "Candle in the Wind," that questioned what would have happened had Marilyn Monroe not died in August 1962.

But it was Stephen King who took the most interesting look at the situation. Instead of writing about what would have happened if Kennedy had not been killed, he wrote about the possibility of someone going back in time to prevent the assassination in the first place.

As with most of King's larger works, there's too much story here to fit into one movie. "The Stand" was a four-part miniseries and "It" was done -- and not particularly well -- as a two-part TV movie.

"Under the Dome" was overdone more than could even have been imagined, with 39 one-hour episodes over three seasons on Amazon. The story was expanded and changed, making the original story almost unrecognizable.

King's "11.22.63" is getting a similar treatment, although it might just be nine episodes and one season. James Franco has the lead as the time-traveling teacher and Chris Cooper is the diner owner who discovers the route into the past.

Franco and Cooper

King handles the idea of time travel and all the possible paradoxes like the pro he is. What's especially interesting is the idea that the bigger the change, the more difficult the universe makes it to accomplish.

One real irony is that Kennedy himself once said no assassin had ever changed history. Whether that was ever true, it's difficult to imagine that JFK in office until 1969 would have left the country in the same shape credibility-wise that Johnson did.

And even if he had been killed in 1963, it's still difficult to imagine Richard Nixon winning in 1968 if Bobby Kennedy hadn't been killed in June in Los Angeles.

Of course none of that happened, but just as it's interesting to speculate, it will be interesting to see what King and filmmaker J.J. Abrams do with it.

It's nice to have something to look forward to.