“I had to be familiar with 150 books,” he says. The news that the novel was heading to TV didn’t reach James Franco, who was busy preparing for his oral exams in the Yale English department. Abrams made a deal with King to turn it into a miniseries for the streaming service (under the title 11.22.63 the backslashes have been retired). Not long after Demme moved on from the project, J.J. Eventually we looked at each other and said, ‘This isn’t going to work.'”

You try and cram everything in and something always gets left off. This is pretty long and complex.’ Making into a movie is like sitting on a suitcase. “He was pretty adamant that it be a theatrical film,” says the bestselling author. Director Jonathan Demme was the first license to it, though King had complete veto power over every aspect of the project. The book - about a lonely, divorced high school teacher named Jake Epping that comes across a time portal back to 1958 in the closet of a diner, and spends five years plotting a way to stop President Kennedy’s assassination - had a rather rocky first step on its road to the screen. The what-if novel sold by the millions and The New York Times named it one of the five best fiction books of 2011 and on February 15th, Hulu will premiere the first episode of an eight-hour miniseries adaptation of King’s historical-fantasy opus starring James Franco.

It would take 40 years for the author to finally publish what would ultimately become the 849-page book 11/22/63 - but it was worth the long wait. When Stephen King first got the idea for a story about a time-traveler trying to save JFK, he was a 24-year-old high school English teacher living in a double-wide trailer and couldn’t find anyone to publish his writings outside of cheap Playboy knockoffs like Gent and Cavalier.

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