Career arcs aside, there would seem to be a chance of unintentionally traumatizing a child actor—who is, after all, performing in a film meant to scare adults. Danny Pintauro, cast at age 6 in 1983’s killer-dog thriller Cujo, went to the R-rated film premiere with his parents. “I covered my face for half the movie,” he recalls. “I couldn’t watch any of the stuff with the homeowner and the police officer getting mauled. I wasn’t there for the filming of that, so that actually seemed real to me. But any of the stuff I did? It was fine.” Best remembered today for his years as Jonathan Bower on the sitcom Who’s the Boss (1984-1992), Pintauro is now 43 and living in Austin, Texas. He shrugs off the suffering his character endures onscreen. “People always want to know: ‘How traumatized were you?’ ” he says. “I was having a good time. But most people, like the entire crew, thought I was not acting, that I was actually terrified.” A lifelong canine lover, Pintauro has empathy for viewers still affected by the movie. “There are all these people in their 40s now who need therapy because they’re still afraid of dogs,” he says. “Poor things.”
As doomed Billy Drayton in the 2007 movie version of The Mist, Nathan Gamble was cast at age 8 (in King’s novella, Billy is just 5). Now 21, Gamble, like Pintauro, seems notably unaffected and remembers smiling and laughing through a premiere screening at Manhattan’s Ziegfeld theater. Part of it was simple exposure to all the puppetry and special effects while making the film: Gamble didn’t flinch at the deaths because he’d seen all the fakery involved. And when his character perishes in the finale, Gamble says, he was far more interested in the audience’s reaction than in watching his own onscreen demise. “My dad thought it was the raddest thing. My mom couldn’t watch it.”
Play an innocent under attack and people will worry for your safety and mental health. But portray a villain—perhaps a bad-seed demon child—and there can be an altogether different reaction. Just ask John Franklin, memorably creepy as a 12-year-old genocidal preacher who orders the slaughter of the adults in the low-budget 1984 film feature Children of the Corn. (Shot by first-time director Fritz Kiersch, it has since spawned myriad sequels and a remake.) Not long after the movie opened, Franklin was spotted in a restaurant by someone who’d gone to the film. All she saw was his character Isaac. “This woman screamed and insisted the maître d’ move her party,” Franklin says, chuckling. “She couldn’t be near me. Some people couldn’t dissociate that I was not Isaac.”
Because of a growth-hormone deficiency, Franklin stands just 5 ft. tall. Cast as the 12-year-old Isaac at age 23, he arrived in Hollywood at a moment when being able to play younger was a hot commodity. In 1982 an accident on the set of Twilight Zone: The Movie led to the deaths of actor Vic Morrow and two child actors—and placed a high level of scrutiny on the child-labor laws and safety standards in Hollywood. “Producers were very cognizant of wanting to have someone over 18,” Franklin says. “They can work you harder and longer hours.” Now 60, Franklin recently retired after 14 years as a high school teacher in Southern California, where he’s coached a lot of very young aspiring actors. Today he’s still worried about the kind of pressure show business can place on children. “You can try to advise people about it,” he says. “But you still kind of have to go through it alone.”
King’s works continue to show us there are always dark forces waiting to hurt the vulnerable, the lost, the outcast, the strangely gifted and the unwary in our society—especially the young. But the dangers in this very unsupernatural world are just as dire. During the Stand by Me 25th-anniversary reunion, Wil Wheaton, his costars and director Rob Reiner all gathered, with one notable exception: star River Phoenix, who died of a drug overdose in 1993 at age 23. Wheaton recalls setting up the theater, and then: “Rob said, ‘It feels like there should be an empty chair here for River.’ ” Richard Dreyfuss, who narrated the movie as the adult Gordie Lachance, spoke to Hollywood’s horrors offscreen. “Richard says that there’s this horrible [Lovecraftian] monster that lurks just outside the peripheral vision of everyone in the entertainment industry,” Wheaton says. “And about once every generation, it bursts into our reality and takes somebody away from us to feed itself. And that in this generation, it took River.” He pauses, then adds, “That movie brought us together, and we were very good friends for a very long time. And I will always be grateful for that.”
Pintauro and Dee Wallace as Tad and Donna Trenton in Cujo.
“It’s so scary to see a child in peril with no control over what’s happening to them”
—Danny Pintauro (Cujo)
The resurrected Gage Creed (Miko Hughes) in Pet Sematary.
Nathan Gamble as The Mist’s Billy Drayton with his father, David (Thomas Jane), hovering protectively in the background.
The cast of 1990’s It.
John Franklin as Isaac in Children of the Corn.
“People always want to know what happened in my childhood. They think there has to be some reason why I’m writing all of these terrible things”
—Stephen King
Drew Barrymore ignites as pyrokinetic Charlie McGee in Firestarter.
The four young costars of Stand by Me: Corey Feldman, Jerry O’Connell, Wil Wheaton and River Phoenix. “The movie captures the truths of being 11, 12, 13 years old, in that last summer of childhood,” says Wheaton. “There’s a universality to the story, and we did our best to bring it to life on film.”
Q&A
INTERVIEW
Secrets Best Left Buried
STEPHEN KING’S TERRIFYING NOVEL PET SEMATARY WAS TURNED INTO A CULT-FAVORITE MOVIE IN 1989. IN THE SPRING OF 2019 IT CAME BACK ONCE MORE—AS A CRITIC’S DARLING. HERE, THE MASTER REVISITS ONE OF HIS DARKEST STORIES.
By Anthony Breznican
King at work, ca. 2013.
KING HAS A COMPLEX RELATIONSHIP WITH Pet Sematary. Over the decades the storyteller has done a lot of monstrous things to a lot of people in his novels, but the rumor persists that he thinks Pet Sematary crossed a line and that it’s too morbid and troubling. It turns out all of that is true—and so is a lot of what happens in the book. That’s why it bothers him.
There’s this mythology surrounding Pet Sematary, that it was too scary to publish—was there something to that?
[Laughs] No, I mean it’s true. I listened to it last year when I was down here in Florida walking on the beach with the dog. Michael C. Hall [of Dexter] did the audiobook. I was curious about it. You know, I hadn’t been near it in 20, 25 years. So I listened to it and thought, “My God, this is just awful. It’s just as dark as can be.”
Did you feel that way when you were writing it?
I just had the greatest time writing the book until I was done with it. And I read it over, and I said to myself, “This is awful. This is really f---ing terrible.” Not that it was badly written necessarily. But all that stuff about the death of kids. It was close to me, because my kids lived on that road.
Your family actually lost one of your pets on that road, right?
My daughter’s cat died. And we buried it in the pet cemetery [near our house in Orrington, Maine]. That was Smucky. She made a little cross that said “Smucky—he was obedient.” And I mean, he was a cat. He wasn’t f---ing obedient! [Laughter] But she loved that cat.
Smucky made it into the book and both movies. Your daughter would have been around 9 or 10 then. How did she take this loss?
That night, after we buried it, we heard her out in the garage. She was jumping up and down on those popper things that they wrap fragile stuff in. She was shouting, “God can’t have my cat. That cat is my cat! . . . Let him have his own cat.” I put all that in the book. . . . Everything in the book up to the point of the supernatural stuff is true.
The real parts are why you held off publishing, why it bothered you.
The kids were home a lot. . . . All you had to do is just go to the pet cemetery and see what the road did. You know, it wasn’t much of a leap.
Beyond just being scary, Pet Sematary explores w
hat it’s like to lose somebody, especially someone so young, when you’re a parent. It felt like it had heart.
It does have a meaning. I mean, that line “Sometimes dead is better,” that’s not about suicide or anything like that. It’s about anybody who’s ever had to deal with a lingering illness or a relative that won’t let go. Sometimes the desire to live is just a biological thing, and it’s better when it’s over. Everybody—everybody’s dealt with that, you know? You deal with your parents, your grandparents, and at some point you just have to let go, that’s all.
And there’s that desire to go back too. When you lose somebody, you go through that feeling of, “They were just here. They were here yesterday. They were here last week.” You feel that yearning: Couldn’t they just come back?
That’s the other thing about Pet Sematary. When I read it over, I thought, “There’s such grief in this book.” Just awful.
Given your feelings about this book, why did you write the screenplay for the 1989 movie? It feels like you kind of want to put this book at arm’s distance.
Sometimes you say to yourself, “Maybe I can take this and make it a little bit better, or maybe I just wanna face the thing that scares me the most.” So I went in and I wrote it. The more you work on a thing, the more numb you get to it. You get to the effect that it has on other people.
It started out as a follow-up to Creepshow with George A. Romero, who from Night of the Living Dead onward was the master of things rising from the grave.
It was George first. I wrote a script, and then George couldn’t [direct]. And Mary Lambert came on board. I really liked her. I thought that she was cool and had good ideas about it.
What memory sticks out at you from the set, apart from your cameo?
I still remember Mary out there—she’s a little thing—I remember [her] out there in the rain in her yellow slicker and her red boots, and she looked like a kid ready to go off to first grade. I liked the people that I was working with, and yeah, man, I wanted the screen credit too. I did. I figured if somebody’s gonna f--- this up, it’s gonna be me!
The directors of the 2019 film, Kevin Kölsch and Dennis Widmyer, changed some things. Does it bother you?
It’s something different. They did a good job. Boy, I saw all the stuff that came online when people realized that it was Ellie rather than Gage that got run over in the road, and I’m thinking like, “Man, these people . . . ” It’s so nuts. You can take Route 301 and go to Tampa, or you could take Route 17 and go to Tampa. But both times, you’re gonna come out at Tampa! [Laughs] You know what I’m saying? It didn’t change anything for me. I thought, “Okay, I understand why they did it, because it’s maybe easier to work with a zombie when she’s a little girl [rather] than a toddler.”
How does it feel, seeing all these new adaptations of your work?
It’s a little bit like being tied to the hood of a car that’s going really fast. [Laughs] Most of the time I don’t even think about it, because I’ve got other things to do. I’ve got books to write, and that’s the important thing to me. There’s so much appetite now for stories, and I do have stories to tell.
The 1983 cover of Pet Sematary, with illustration by Linda Fennimore
King’s preacher cameo
Actor Miko Hughes as Gage in the 1989 film
actors John Lithgow and Jéte Laurence from the 2019 adaptation.
The Shaw shank Redemption
DIRECTOR FRANK DARABONT CRAFTED A TWO-AND-A-HALF-HOUR KING ADAPTATION WITHOUT A TRACE OF THE SUPERNATURAL AND CAST MORGAN FREEMAN IN THE ROLE OF A CARROTY-RED-HAIRED IRISHMAN. INITIALLY IT WAS A FLOP. By Darren Franich
EARLY IN HIS CAREER, STEPHEN KING LET IT be known that he would sell the rights to his work to aspiring young filmmakers interested in noncommercial films for only $1. Then just 20 years old, Frank Darabont wrote a letter to the author about adapting the short story “The Woman in the Room.” King agreed, and Darabont launched his career with the 1983 short about a man wrestling over a difficult decision regarding his mother.
A decade later Darabont was an established screenwriter looking for his first major directorial project. He chose “Rita Hayworth and Shawshank Redemption,” a novella from King’s collection Different Seasons. Set almost entirely within the walls of Shawshank State Prison, it’s a tangent-filled tall tale following convicted killer Andy Dufresne (Tim Robbins) through the horrors of incarceration, narrated by his best friend, Red (Morgan Freeman). It was an odd film with an odd title, and in 1994 it languished at the box office.
But history has redeemed The Shawshank Redemption. Nominated for seven Oscars (but winning none), the film became a home-video hit and then a TV sensation, practically playing daily on the TNT cable network. That success owes greatly to Darabont’s talent and his unique ability to translate King’s prose for the screen. King is a storyteller, and Shawshank is a story about storytelling, with Red narrating several events in Andy’s life and turning his friend into a Paul Bunyanesque folk hero in the process. The wonder of King lies in his tangents, the funny asides, the nicknames, the way his characters linger in conversation. Unfolding over two decades at a leisurely running time, Shawshank is a showcase for King as a raconteur, funny and sad, never anything less than deeply human.
The film’s legacy looms large. Thomas Newman’s score seems omnipresent in movie trailers. The shot of star Robbins holding his hands up in the rainstorm is a classic image, much-parodied but never bettered. And Freeman’s wonderful, lived-in performance led to his becoming cinema’s king of voiceover narration. “The film seems to be something of a Rorschach for people,” Darabont told Charlie Rose in 2004. “They view the bars of Shawshank as a metaphor for their own difficulties and then consequently their own hopes and triumphs.”
The prisoners of Shawshank State Prison work beyond the gates. Outdoor scenes for the prison were shot at the Ohio State Reformatory in Mansfield, Ohio.
Clancy Brown as Captain Hadley.
Inmates expand the prison library.
Bob Gunton as Warden Norton.
The Green Mile
KING’S POWERFUL DRAMA BLENDED FICTION, FANTASY AND MEMOIR—AND GAVE MICHAEL CLARKE DUNCAN THE ROLE OF A LIFETIME. By Christian Holub
A TOWERING AFRICAN-AMERICAN MAN IS discovered attempting to heal the victims of a brutal double rape and murder. His name is John Coffey (Michael Clarke Duncan), and in the Depression-era South, his presence at the crime scene is enough to see him convicted and sent to death row to await the electric chair. But Coffey’s unusual gifts and his meek and gentle nature prompt prison guard Paul Edgecomb (Tom Hanks) to question his guilt. His encounters with the doomed inmate have profound implications for Edgecomb himself—his life is forever altered.
There’s been no attempt to remake The Green Mile—maybe because everyone involved got it right the first time. Even King, upon the film’s release in 1999, called it “great Hollywood entertainment, full of character, life and wonder.” But making that perfect film was no easy task. Frank Darabont, coming off a five-year directing hiatus after The Shawshank Redemption, had to first translate King’s sprawling six-part novel into a script that would become a three-hour movie. (His work on the screenplay eventually netted an Oscar nomination, one of four the film received.)
While Hanks was quickly cast as everyman Edgecomb, finding the perfect Coffey took time—and some help from Bruce Willis. Willis had shared scenes with Duncan in their blockbuster Armageddon and believed he was perfect for the role. “We’re on location . . . and Bruce Willis says he’s just read the Green Mile script and that nobody else could play this role but me,” Duncan told EW at the time of the movie’s release. “He said, ‘When we get back to L.A., I’m gonna call Frank Darabont and tell him I found his John Coffey.’ ” Darabont, upon meeting, agreed.
Duncan died in 2012, and Coffey remains one of the late actor’s most memorable and affecting roles. Still, Duncan recalled struggling on-set with the racial animus that runs through The Green Mile’s st
ory. In the behind-the-scenes documentary Walking the Mile, he discussed the acting getting a bit too real and highlighted the scene when Coffey is first found by the posse at the scene of the crime. “There’s like 50 of them. They’re on horses. They’ve got dogs. They’ve got pitchforks, shotguns, and they’re coming toward John Coffey,” Duncan said. “I knew that this was acting, but every take of that scene I was scared to death.”
Coffey screams in pain as flies fly from his mouth after he cures Edgecomb’s illness.
Coffey revives Del’s pet mouse Mr. Jingles.
Death-row guards Harry Terwilliger (Jeffrey DeMunn) and Brutus “Brutal” Howell (David Morse).
Director Darabont meets with Hanks on-set.
Uncle Steve’s Legacy
Long Live the King
SOME OF TODAY’S LEADING FILMMAKERS AND NOVELISTS CREDIT THE MASTERFUL AUTHOR AS A POWERFUL INFLUENCE WHOSE INSPIRATIONAL WORK HAS ELEVATED THE HORROR GENRE BEYOND ITS PENNY-DREADFUL ORIGINS. By Anthony Breznican
Stephen King (in 1975) in an early official author’s photo.
STEPHEN KING HAS WARPED PLENTY OF children in his day. He hears this a lot: I started reading your books when I was a kid, and they scared the hell out of me. As the years have passed, the author himself has felt pressure to deliver increasingly frightening tales just to keep pace with his audience. “They aren’t such easy targets!” he told EW in a 2013 interview.
EW the Ultimate Guide to Stephen King Page 5
