"12:01 P.M." is a short story by American writer Richard A. Lupoff, which was published in the December 1973 edition of The Magazine of Fantasy and Science Fiction.

Lupoff and Jonathan Heap, director of the 1990 film, were "outraged" by the apparent theft of the idea, but after six months of lawyers' conferences, they decided to drop the case against Columbia Pictures.

The physicist, Nathan Rosenbluth, theorized a "disfiguration of time" that could cause the universe to snap backward and repeat the period of one hour.

"12:01 PM" was first adapted into an Academy Award–nominated[citation needed] 1990 short film starring Kurtwood Smith.

Directed by Jonathan Heap, it originally aired on the cable television network Showtime in 1990 as part of their 30-Minute Movie anthology series.

It stars Helen Slater, Jonathan Silverman, Jeremy Piven, and Martin Landau, and it originally aired on the Fox Network in the United States.