by Rocky Wood
Stephen J. Spignesi describes Desperation as, “…a sprawling tale of a band of … pilgrims? … who come face to face with a minion of a possibly eternal evil and who must depend on the wisdom and God-centeredness of a young boy who just may have a direct line to the Big Guy himself.”56
The screenplay version of this story57 concerns an ancient creature, which is released from its tomb. Desperation was a small mining town in the Nevada Desert and most of the inhabitants had been brutally murdered by the town policeman, whose body had been taken over by the evil entity. In the aftermath the cop, Collie Entragian, arrested and brought passing travelers into town. The victims soon realized that they were nothing more than future hosts for the entity, known as Tak, which had escaped from an old mine shaft accidentally re-opened at the China Pit, a nearby mining site. Tak had to keep new hosts available because it quickly wore out its victims’ bodies.
In a flashback we learn that Chinese miners had uncovered Tak at the Rattlesnake #2 mine in Desperation in the 1850s. Exposed to Tak, the Chinese turned on and killed their white overseers and each other. A cave-in shortly thereafter trapped Tak once more.
David Carver, a devoutly religious schoolboy and one of Tak’s modern-day captives escaped from his cell. Carver felt he had direct contact with God following a series of promises he had made after one of his friends was seriously injured in a car accident. David released the other prisoners and the group retrieved weapons, heading to the Chinese Theater to plan their next move. A local, Tom Billingsley, related the history of the mine to the others but was then savaged and mortally wounded by a cougar. Tak, it turned out, had the ability to control all manner of creatures.
David then led the survivors out to the mine. Meanwhile Tak, having exhausted the body of Entragian, entered the body of David’s mother Ellen but found it quickly failed and next chased Mary Jackson. He failed to secure her body and was forced to enter a buzzard.
The group reached the China Pit and set explosives. The buzzard attacked and killed David’s father. John Marinville, an author with a checkered past, went into the shaft on a suicide mission and set off the explosion, once again sealing Tak in its rocky tomb. King specifically notes that David Carver’s faith was not destroyed by the deaths of his entire family and the events in Desperation.
No timelines are given for the modern day action in the screenplay but the “flashback” section is set in the 1850s. In the novel the modern timeline is July of 1995 and the events with the Chinese miners occurred on 21 September 1859.
We are treated with a number of links to King’s other fictional works. For instance, Collie Entragian had writer John Marinville sign an autograph for him as “Your Number One Fan.” This is, of course, how Annie Wilkes described herself to her captive Paul Sheldon in Misery. And, when Steve Ames saw the dead bodies in the mining company lab he stopped, “…rubbing his mouth like Jack Torrance.” Of course this reference is to the lead character of The Shining. Torrance is also a character in Before the Play, the prequel to the classic haunted hotel novel.
Cynthia Smith, one of those terrorized by Tak in Desperation, also appears in Rose Madder, in which Norman Daniels attacked her at the Daughters and Sisters picnic. The screenplay also notes that Cynthia reads Dean Koontz. Koontz is a best-selling horror writer and is sometimes described as “the poor man’s Stephen King.”
Of course, both the novel and screenplay versions of Desperation link with the altered reality novel The Regulators, in which 40-50 Chinese miners were killed when the Rattlesnake Number One mine in Desperation, Nevada collapsed. The term, “can tah,” important in this story is repeated by the Manni in The Dark Tower VI: Song of Susannah.
One point of interest in both the novel and screenplay is that the writer, John Marinville (played by The Dead Zone star Tom Skerritt), was a great Harley fan and was traveling cross-country on one when Entragian captured him. King is known to be a Harley fan and owner. In 1997, shortly after Desperation was published, King traveled across Australia on a Harley. A picture of him with the Harley was once proudly displayed in the foyer of his office in Bangor. He followed up with a similar trip in 2006.
Overall the screenplay is faithful to the novel. There are few changes and most of those are minor. For instance, in the novel Peter Jackson was shot dead by Entragian but in the screenplay Entragian broke his neck.
It is unlikely that the screenplay will be published in book format, as was Storm of the Century, as the story itself exists in the form of the novel. In the meantime readers can enjoy that novel and also the audiobook version, read by Misery and Dolores Claiborne actress Kathy Bates.58
Tak: An Eternal Evil
An ancient Evil that lived in an ini* in the old China Pit near Desperation, Nevada. It could inhabit the bodies of people and animals and cause them to do its bidding. Its influence also caused people to grow and degenerate rapidly, causing death in a matter of hours or days. John Marinville may have killed it when he blew up the ini in July 1995.
Source: Desperation (Novel)
A creature that took over the bodies of an assay crew member, Entragian (using him to kill most of the inhabitants of Desperation), and Ellen Carver; intended to take over Mary Jackson but was foiled; and lastly took over a buzzard. It spoke the Language of the Unformed and controlled animals by using can tahs. Tom Billingsley speculated it was a “waisin” or earth spirit that had nearly escaped 150 years earlier, during mining of the China Pit near Desperation, Nevada. At that time, when it sensed the outside world within its reach, it projected reddish smoke that drove those who came in contact crazy. John Marinville trapped it forever by blowing up the ini.
Source: Desperation (Unproduced Screenplay)
An evil entity, it took over an autistic boy, Seth Garin in the small town of Wentworth, Ohio. It fed on death and hurt the people around it. Seth eventually outsmarted it and it died on 15 July 1996 because it had no host.
Source: The Regulators
*ini: A cupped hole in the floor of an isolated part of the China Pit in front of the pirin moh (“a weird Lovecraftian building”), it is lined with hooks of protruding stone and can tahs (stone statues of animals) are littered around it. Tak lived there and David Carver thought it went through into another dimension. The hole at the bottom of the ini is no more than an inch across.
53 Weber has made quite a career in King adaptations, also appearing as Clark Rivingham (in the You Know They Got a Hell of a Band episode of Nightmares & Dreamscapes: From the Stories of Stephen King); 8x10 Man (in the Revelations of Becka Paulson episode of The Outer Limits); and Jack Torrance (in the mini-series of The Shining)
54 On Writing, Stephen King, in part 10 of the ‘On Writing’ section
55 Horror Plum’d, Michael Collings, p.378
56 The Essential Stephen King: The Complete and Uncut Edition. Stephen J. Spignesi, p.92
57 All detail in this section is from the screenplay held at the Fogler Library
58 Desperation, Penguin Audiobooks, 1996
Dolan’s Cadillac – Unproduced Screenplay (Undated)
Box 1012 at the Special Collections Unit of the Raymond H. Fogler Library at the University of Maine, Orono contains five pages of a screenplay by Stephen King, adapting his short story Dolan’s Cadillac. It is unclear when this screenplay was written and there are only five pages, representing the initial action in the story, a montage marking the passage of seven years and the very beginning of the aftermath to that initial action. As Box 1012 is a public box those interested may read these few pages at the Library.
Dolan’s Cadillac was originally serialized in the Castle Rock newsletter (edited initially by Stephanie Leonard and later by Christopher Spruce) over five issues, from February to June 1985. King revised it for publication in a Limited Edition by Lord John Press in 1989 and that revision appeared in the 1993 collection, Nightmares and Dreamscapes.
The following is a short summary of the partial screenplay. In this America Under Siege tale a woman s
tarts her vehicle and is instantly killed by a car bomb. It is 1968 and Elizabeth Robinson, who had previously seen something (just what is not revealed), had been interviewed by the police. Shortly afterward a mobster, Jim Dolan, had her killed.
By 1975 Elizabeth’s widower Dave had spent seven years focussed on the man he rightly thought responsible for his wife’s death. Although he lived in Las Vegas he had taken another apartment in Los Angeles for his frequent visits there researching Dolan and had also purchased a truck, which he left in that city. The script ends with Dave attending the 1975 Nevada Teachers’ Convention with Dana, Dean and Steve.
Not surprisingly, as most of the five pages cover a rolling montage conveying the passage of the seven years, there is only limited information to present. The original story did not specify years for the events; but the gap between Elizabeth’s death and Dolan’s demise was nine years. For whatever reason King deliberately chose in the screenplay to set the killing in 1968 and there may well have been two more years of movie action before Dolan and his Cadillac reached their demise!
In the montage Dolan is shown with different women in 1968, 1970, 1972 and 1974, with the clear intent of comparing Dolan’s continued life, and “love” life, to Dave Robinson’s life without Elizabeth. In 1968 Dolan had black hair but it had turned silvery-white by 1974. Dolan’s cars in the montage also change with the years, from a 1968 Cadillac DeVille sedan to a 1970 Fleetwood Brougham, a 1972 Fleetwood Limousine and finally to a 1974 silver-white short stretch limo.
Noted King expert Stephen J. Spignesi states Dolan’s Cadillac is “…King’s modern update of Poe’s 1846 short story ‘The Cask of Amontillado’.”59 The leading King academic, Michael Collings also acknowledges King’s debt to Edgar Allen Poe saying, “King updates his story, amplifying his protagonist’s motivation and suffering.”60 Tyson Blue, another leading King critic, wrote a particularly incisive review of the story in his The Unseen King61. While readers will find this out-of-print book difficult to find that particular criticism alone would make the effort worthwhile.
For those whose memory of the original short story has dimmed the following is a summary of the Nightmares and Dreamscapes version.
In which a man takes revenge for the death of his wife. Elizabeth Robinson, a first grade teacher was in the wrong place at the wrong time and witnessed a crime committed by James Dolan. She agreed to testify against him but before she could was killed when her car was blown up. Her husband then began watching Dolan’s movements in Las Vegas and California and planning his revenge. Nine years after Elizabeth’s death, he got the opportunity to deliver on a plan. He secured a summer job working with a highway repair gang. On a long weekend when the roadworks were halted for the holiday, Robinson dug a large hole and created a false detour. Dolan, on one of his regular trips to the West Coast in his Cadillac, crashed into the hole. Robinson then filled the hole, complete with Dolan and Cadillac, but not before taunting Dolan with the possibility that he might just let him out. Robinson returns to his normal life.
The key change from King’s original story is the acquisition of a first name by Robinson (“Dave”). In both versions of the short story King does not provide it, although Harvey Blocker, his foreman at the Las Vegas Streets and Highway Department gave him the nickname “Bubba.”
Elizabeth’s car in the script was a 1965 Chevrolet, whereas in the stories it was a 1968 Chevrolet. This change is presumably because it was unlikely a teacher would have a brand new model car in the 1968 setting of the movie.
There are no links from this screenplay, or indeed the other versions of Dolan’s Cadillac to any other King work of fiction. In many ways this is a relatively unusual piece of King fiction, a tale of cold revenge in the crime genre into which King delves but rarely (for instance, The Fifth Quarter, The Wedding Gig and Man with a Belly.) However, Full Dark, No Stars (2010) is a collection of stories about retribution.
Dolan’s Cadillac was finally adapted as a direct-to-video release in 2009 (2010 in the United States), starring Christian Slater and produced from Richard Dooling’s screenplay. Dooling also wrote Kingdom Hospital. It received poor reviews and a rating of 5.7 out of a possible 10 from members of www.imdb.com.
59 The Essential Stephen King: The Complete and Uncut Edition, Stephen J. Spignesi, p.189-191
60 Horror Plum’d, Michael Collings, p.211
61 The Unseen King, Tyson Blue, p.120-123
The Drum Stories (1965, 1966)
In researching The Complete Guide to the Works of Stephen King in Bangor, Maine in December 2002 I met Stu Tinker, the superb proprietor of the specialist King bookshop, Betts Bookstore62. Tinker mentioned he had heard from a collector that an unknown story from King’s high school days had come onto the market. After some months of research I made contact with Kerry Johnson, who provided me with a copy and the provenance of Code Name: Mousetrap.
One of King’s earliest published writings, Code Name: Mousetrap was printed in the Lisbon High school newspaper, The Drum, for 27 October 1965. King was a senior that year and had been on the newspaper staff for three years (see feature panel). That academic year Ms. Prudence Grant was in her first year of teaching and her extra-curricular assignment was to be advisor to The Drum. Ms. Grant retired in June 2002 and while cleaning her files ran across some original copies of the newspaper, including the one containing Code Name: Mousetrap. Kerry Johnson purchased it from her through eBay. Ms. Grant provided Johnson with excellent background information and he also corroborated the background with another teacher from the school.
In a letter to Johnson, dated 15 October 2002, Ms. Grant wrote, “I have the copies after all these years because I’m something of a packrat and had not cleaned those things out of my file cabinet. I found them again when I cleaned out my papers because I retired in June 2002.”
In an interview with Ray Routhier of the Portland, Maine Press-Herald, Ms. Grant said that while she never had King in class she remembered him working for the paper. She recalled him as “a goofy guy who went on to do far, far, far better than any of us.”
When the story’s existence was initially revealed I thought this, “…was King’s only piece of fiction in the paper.” I was surprised but delighted when shortly thereafter another collector, Bob Jackson, advised he had bought a different copy of The Drum from Ms. Grant, also over eBay. Jackson also provided a copy and the provenance of this story, The 43rd Dream. That edition of The Drum was dated 29 January 1966.
In total Grant sold four copies of the 27 October 1965 issue, containing Code Name: Mousetrap for between $400 and $500. The single copy of The 43rd Dream went for $800! In 2009 I had the joy of meeting Ms. Grant, when lecturing to the Lisbon (Maine) Historical Society, on the impacts of Lisbon and Durham on King’s fiction. Along with Ms. Grant and one of King’s teachers, Merton Ricker, I also got to meet and learn from many of those who attended school with the boy who would become one of the world’s best-selling, and best loved authors. They, and the officials of the Society, were gracious in their hospitality.
Each story was published as written by “Steve King.” The first full details of these stories were then released to the public in May 2003, in The Complete Guide in May 2003. I provided copies of the stories to King’s office, as it was my understanding Steve no longer had a copy. Marsha DeFilippo, King’s personal assistant, later reported King said, “...he had great fun writing them.” The author was “news editor” of The Drum in 1963-64 (the first issue – Vol 1, No 1 is dated November 27, 1963); “Editor-In-Chief” in 1964-65; and, as a senior, was credited for “Copy” in 1965-66.
In 2009 King allowed reproduction of The 43rd Dream, from collector Bob Jackson’s copy, in The Stephen King Illustrated Companion by Bev Vincent. Code Name: Mousetrap has not been published outside the original The Drum. Copies do not circulate. It is very unlikely that readers or researchers will be able to obtain a copy unless the original eBay purchaser resells their copy or further copies turn up in file cabinets
or attics somewhere in Maine.
Code Name: Mousetrap
In this America Under Siege story a man breaks into a supermarket with a recently installed burglar alarm. The burglar, Kelly, becomes somewhat wary after reading “B.J. Burgular Alarms” (sic) had installed a new burglar (also misspelled “burgular”) alarm. The bottom of the note read, “Code Name: MOUSETRAP.” It was a very large store, “Twenty cash-registers, full of Friday night receipts, faced him blankly.” Suddenly, a buzzer sounded and the lights came up, causing Kelly to run for it.
With that, “…the soup display began to move. It clattered toward him, spilling individual cans, and revealing the glitter of stainless steel beneath.” One can clearly see King in those last words! “Now, he could clearly see the shape of the Mousetrap. Three limber-jointed steel tentacles snaked out at him. An insectivorous row of TV eyes stared at him. In the silence of the store, he could actually hear the clitter of the relays in its electronic brain.”
As he ran from this creature, he “…could not believe what he saw – and when he did, he let out a soft moan” – dozens of beefsteaks were rolling over the meat counter and coming after him along with a “…rump roast with two glittering antenna…” that “…crashed into his leg and clutched him with bright steel claws. 98 cents a pound, he thought widly (sic), my rump roast certainly isn’t as cheap as it use (sic) to be.” Dodging a “V-formation of sirloins” and a shopping cart, “waving tentacles like a wild Medusa on wheels,” Kelly crashed through a plate-glass window and onto the pavement.
