Charles Fort: the movie!

By Robbie Graham Silver Screen Saucers

The Dark Horse Comics series

An early pioneer in the research of anomalous phenomena - from ghosts to UFOs and everything in between - Charles Fort is to get his very own eponymously titled Hollywood movie.

Charles Fort is to be produced by Robert Zemeckis for Universal Pictures and adapted from the 2002 Dark Horse Comics series Fort: Prophet of the Unexplained, which portrayed Fort as an adventurous investigator pursuing aliens and murderers in turn-of-the-19th-century New York City.

According to The Hollywood Reporter:

"Fort, which is being described by some who know the material as a "period Ghostbusters," is the first project set up under Zemeckis and his Imagemovers' newly minted first-look deal with the studio [Universal].

Charles Fort was an early-twentieth-century American researcher and writer whose focus was "anomalous phenomena" and the unexplained. Books Fort wrote such as The Book of the Damned (1919) and New Lands (1923) were some of the first to explore everything from levitation and teleportation to alien abduction and other paranormal pursuits. Fort was essentially a curious skeptic who enjoyed collecting data to support explanations for things that he felt were no less possible than the scientifically accepted ones.

In addition to Zemeckis, Dark Horse's Mike Richardson is producing the film, as are Imagemovers partners Jack Rapke and Steve Starkey."

Will Charles Fort be embraced by Forteans and UFOlogists? Or will it be seen as an unforgivably sensationalised distortion of the life and achievements of a true trailblazer in the world of the weird? We'll find out for sure when the movie hits cinemas sometime in 2013.