type: work
slug: somewhere-in-time-1980
medium: film
mode: fiction
year: 1980
creator: Jeannot Szwarc
runtime: 103 min
imdb: tt0081534
wikipedia: Somewhere_in_Time_(film)
dek: A playwright wills himself into 1912 to find the woman in an old hotel photograph. The method is self-hypnosis; the souvenir is a pocket watch with no origin.
Richard Matheson adapted his own 1975 novel, Bid Time Return, and kept its unusual mechanism: no machine, no equations — the traveler surrounds himself with period objects, dresses the part, and repeats the date until the present lets go of him. A modern penny found in a pocket is enough to end the trip. Christopher Reeve took the role between Superman films, the Grand Hotel on Mackinac Island played itself, and the picture failed in theaters before cable made it a fixture. Its afterlife is unusual for a quiet romance: a fan society, INSITE, still gathers at the hotel in period dress every October. Among time travel films it is remembered for two things — the willed method, and the watch Elise gives Richard that Richard gives Elise, which no one ever buys.
