For the first of three short segments of the TV movie Dead of Night, Richard Matheson wrote this adaptation of Jack Finney’s 1956 story “Second Chance” where a college student lovingly restores a 1920s-era Jordan Playboy roadster and takes it back in time.
—Michael Main
I remember what someone once said; I think it was Einstein or somebody like that. He compared time to a winding river, with all of us in a boat drifting along between two high banks. And we can’t see the future beyond the next curve or the past beyond the curves in back of us, but it’s all still there, as real as the moment around us. To which I now add my own theory . . . that you can’t drive into the past in a modern car because there were no modern cars back then, and you can’t drive into 1926 along a four-lane superhighway, but my car and I—the way I felt about it anyway—were literally rejected that night by our own time.

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Variants

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  1. Second Chance by Richard Matheson, directed by Dan Curtis (NBC-TV, USA, 29 March 1977).
    2. . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . written by Richard Matheson
    Jack Finney (based on a work by)
    . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . directed by Dan Curtis

Previous Works
based on “Second Chance” by Jack Finney (1956)