Spike Lee has acquired Time Traveler: A Scientist's Personal Mission to Make Time Travel a Reality, with plans to co-write and direct the feature. The adaptation is based on a memoir by Ronald Mallett, one of the nation's first African-Americans to earn a Ph.D in theoretical physics.

Variety reported that Lee acquired the right with his own money and has set up the project through his Forty Acres & A Mule Filmworks banner.

Mallett, who wrote the book with Bruce Henderson, recounts his rise from poverty to a distinguished academic and scientific career, and it lays out the technical specs for what Mallett envisions as a workable time machine. Developing a time machine became an obsession for Mallett from the age of 10 after his father's death. His goal was to travel back in time to save his father.

Lee called Time Traveler a "fantastic story on many levels (and) also a father and son saga of loss and love."

No production date has been set.