Akiva Goldsman to Direct WINTER'S TALE for Warner Bros.

Screenwriter Akvia Goldsman is set to direct his first feature film Winter's Tale which will be an adaptation of the 1983 Mark Helprin novel that Goldsman adapted. Warner Bros. plans to get the production started for the film in spring of 2012. The screenwriter will get started on the project as soon as he's finished working with Ron Howard on the big screen adaptation of Stephen King's The Dark Tower series. Goldsman wrote that script and is producing The Dark Tower with Brian Grazer and King.

Goldsman is a talented screenwriter whose also directed a few episodes of the TV show Fringe. It will be interesting to see how he does with his first feature film. 

Here's the description of the book:

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 the 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 who, because of a love which at first he does not fully understand, is driven to stop time and bring back the dead.

The title Winter's Tale is a reference to the similarly named Shakespeare play. In that play, as in this book, a major character disappears for years, only to return after a long and unexplained absence, unharmed, transformed, and redeemed.