David Cronenberg to Direct Jonathan Lethem's 'As She Climbed Across the Table'

If there's any director who can take on a story about a love triangle involving a black hole, it's just might be David Cronenberg, who's always had an affinity for out-there sci-fi scenarios with highbrow appeal. Media Rights Capital has just acquired the Jonathan Lethem novel 'As She Climbed Across the Table' for Cronenberg to direct. The novel is about an academic whose physicist girlfriend accidentally creates a black hole in her lab. She then gives it a name and spends all her time with it, driving her jealous professor beau into a cosmic confrontation. Definitely not your average boy-meets-girl story. Cronenberg's hardly a stranger to adapting difficult books for the screen: His adaptation of Stephen King's 'The Dead Zone' remains one of his best and most accessible films and William S. Burroughs' 'Naked Lunch' one of his most mind-bending and bizarre. He's already wrapped filming on 'Cosmopolis,' based on the Don DeLillo futuristic novel, starring Robert Pattinson and Keira Knightley. His most recent collaborations with star Viggo Mortensen, including the upcoming 'A Dangerous Method' about Sigmund Freud and Carl Jung, have been relatively mainstream compared to his early films, like the disturbingly visceral horror films 'The Brood,' 'Scanners' and 'Videodrome' and skin-crawling thrillers like 'Dead Ringers.' As for Lethem's most famous novel, 'Motherless Brooklyn,' about a detective with Tourette's, it was optioned shortly after its 1999 release by Edward Norton to star in and direct. It now has a tentative 2013 release date. [via Deadline]