The Stephen King Companion

by George Beahm

  “DOLLAR BABIES”

  King’s official Web site lists short stories available for “film students who want to try their hands at a Stephen King story.” Because the list constantly changes, I won’t list them here but instead refer you to the source. (Stories not listed are not available for a student film.)

  King asks for your name, e-mail address, and the story selected (via drop-down menu), plus a message with additional details. The deal, laid out in the FAQ section of his Web site, lists four requirements:

  1. Dollar Babies can only be adapted from pre-approved short stories; novels are not available.

  2. They cannot be “for profit.”

  3. They can only be exhibited at film festivals, as student projects, or for demo reels.

  4. A contract must be completed before a film can be produced.

  It’s an unprecedented deal, one that’s at odds with other writers, notably Harlan Ellison, who responded to a fan online who asked for permission to adapt one of his short stories, “Anywhere but Here, with Anybody but You.” Harlan’s polite but firm reply was posted on his Web site on October 3, 2014:

  Sorry, Matt, permission denied.

  It ain’t quite that easy.

  First, you have to get some money. Not a lot, but at least SOME.

  Then we schmooze a little, I vet your previous attempts at screenwriting, and if you got even minimal chops, we arrive at a term of option for the story, in exchange for a palmful of that money. We sign a contract of a page or two, which is called an “option,” and we go our separate ways for a period of time—as indicated—during which you do a first adaptation. Thereafter, if the work you’ve done has some worth, and you get MoneyPeople in the Movie Business in love with your treatment, you renew the option or we move on to an actual contract for pre-production.

  Other than that route, kiddo, the story (and all my others) is sacrosanct, and you cannot even idly scrawl a Schaffer-version on chalkboard for your bling-gang to savor.

  I cannot be bought … but I can be rented.

  Hope this lays everything out professionally for you.

  KING’S INVOLVEMENT

  One of my editors, Bill Thompson, once said that “Stephen King has a movie projector in his head.” He could be right. Whenever I write a scene, I always know left from right, what the depth of perception is. I very rarely give much description of my major characters because I am looking out from inside their eyes.… I am interested in the kinetics of the world, which is why so many of my books … have been adapted to the screen.

  —Stephen King, quoted by Bob Thomas, Gainesville Sun, July 23, 1986

  King’s involvement with movies depends on the contract he signed for the book or short story. Since all his novels are reserved for movie/TV options, they are not available for “dollar baby” usage.

  King’s principal interest are his books. But on behalf of movie projects, he has variously worn several hats: as screenwriter, cameo actor, director (once, for Maximum Overdrive), assistant director (The Shining TV miniseries), and executive producer (for The Stand TV miniseries). Of course, he’s most often credited as a screenwriter, for which he’s best suited.

  By far the most contentious film-related project was King’s battle with New Line Cinema, whose 1992 film, The Lawnmower Man, struck me as being so tenuously connected to the original story that its major appeal as a film project lay in the box office value of King’s name.

  In a story reprinted in the Daily Press (March 1992), King complained, “I hate it that New Line’s got my name plastered all over the place. It’s the biggest rip-off that you could imagine because there’s nothing of me in there. It just makes me furious.… There’s also nothing about computers and virtual reality in my story, which seems to be all that the movie is about.”

  As Entertainment Weekly (April 1994) pointed out, “[T]he author charged that the virtual-reality pic bore little resemblance to his tale and demanded that his name be removed from the film and its advertising.”

  But New Line didn’t comply, and the matter went to court, which was eventually decided in King’s favor: When the video was released with his name clearly on the product box, it cost New Line big bucks: $10,000 in daily fines, until King’s name was removed, and all the profits from the home video, which went directly to King. (His lawyer, Peter Herbert, said, “Stephen is thrilled and feels he’s been vindicated.”)

  On the other hand, when things go well, they go very well indeed. A sleeper that made only $18 million at the box office, Shawshank Redemption found its audience on its second run, on home video, and television reruns. As Russell Adams (Wall Street Journal, May 2014) pointed out, Shawshank actors are getting hefty residuals with no end in sight; licensing fees, home video, and electronic delivery have raked in millions for Warner Bros. long after the film’s initial release in 1994.

  The rights were bought from King for $5,000, back when Frank Darabont was a relative unknown. Darabont even got the original check back, uncashed, framed, and inscribed with a note from King: “In case you ever need bail money. Love, Steve.”

  King’s principal involvement in two films—Maximum Overdrive, as director and The Shining, as assistant director—proved instrumental. King bore 100 percent responsibility for Maximum Overdrive, a critically panned 1986 release based on “Trucks,” a short story collected in Night Shift. Budgeted at $9 million, it brought in $7.4 million at the box office. Rotten Tomatoes, a film Web site, gave it an approval rating of only 17 percent. And even King was frank in admitting it was his worst film adaptation.

  At a July 1986 press conference in Beverly Hills to promote Maximum Overdrive, King defended it by saying, “This is a moron movie, like Splash! You can check your brains at the box office and you come out 96 minutes later and pick them up again.”

  To New Times, King explained, “Listen, this movie is all about having a good time at the movies, and that’s all it’s about. Believe me, it’s not My Dinner with Andre. And little Stevie is not rehearsing his Academy Award speech for this baby.… When you write a novel, you are the cinematographer, the star, the special-effects crew, everything. You are in total control. Making a film, you have eighty people standing around, waiting for the sun to come out.… Now that is a primitive way to create. For the record, I don’t think the picture is going to review badly.”

  He finally concluded: “I think most of you know the movie was a critical and financial flop,” he wrote in Castle Rock. “The curse of expectation wasn’t the only reason … but it was certainly one of them.”

  Since the release of Carrie in 1976 as a major motion picture, fans have chimed in on what they consider their favorite King films. I’ve picked what I feel is representative. Your mileage will vary.

  King’s own list over the years has been pretty consistent. In a Rolling Stone interview (November 2014), he cited several. The best, he said, was Stand by Me. He added, “But Stand by Me, Shawshank Redemption, Green Mile are all really great ones. Misery is a great film. Dolores Claiborne is a really, really good film. Cujo is terrific.”

  Building on King’s list, I’m adding the other films that I think are well worth your attention, in chronological order of their release dates. These are the ones I’ve most often seen cited as favorites and bests. Also, to give a sense of scale, I’ve cited each film’s “Tomatometer” rating from the Web site Rotten Tomatoes.

  117

  TEN NOTABLE FILMS IN CHRONOLOGICAL ORDER

  1.

  Carrie: High School Hell

  Release date1: November 3, 1976; Tomatometer: 92%; audience score; 76%. (Rotten Tomatoes rates it as number 45 out of the top 75 horror films of all time.) Screenplay by Lawrence D. Cohen, directed by Brian De Palma. Budget: $1.8 million; U.S. box office receipts: $33.8 million.

  In any list of noteworthy King films, Carrie cannot be overlooked, not because it’s the first but because of its staying power. In addition to its original 1976 appearance, it was remade for TV in 2002, and in 2013 it wa
s remade as a major motion picture with Chloë Grace Moretz as Carrie and Julianne Moore as her mother. Also, it became a musical on Broadway, where the critics dumped buckets of pig’s blood on it.

  The novel and the film draw their power from the depiction of high school as a caste system, the perfect setting for a movie aimed for teenagers, which is an important demographic for the film industry. Drawing on his own experiences in grade and high school, and observing high schoolers from the vantage point of a teacher, King saw it all: the good, the bad, and the ugly.

  As Tabitha King wrote in an introduction to the New American Library Collectors Edition, “Carrie’s readers also respond to the portrait of high school as a zoo, a horror show, as blackly funny, awkward, and cruel as a Punch and Judy show.”

  King transmuted his own experiences to make Carrie come alive on the page, and we empathize and identify with her: Haven’t we all felt like an outsider at one point in our lives?

  One of his teachers told NPR (May 10, 2003) that

  [h]e was taunted by older boys on his way home from school when he was in grade school. The older boys would hide in a hollow, and they would jump out at him or scare him. So I think he was the butt of a lot of pranks. His first book [Carrie] was heavily based on Lisbon High, down to several faculty members. We had a bumbling assistant principal who’s portrayed in Carrie as the guy who closed the file drawer door and slams his thumb.

  Keep in mind the time frame: The novel Carrie was published in hardback in 1974, and ’Salem’s Lot was published in hardback in 1975. King wasn’t a brand-name horror writer at the time; he was unknown to moviegoers, and in the book industry his reputation was growing: He was pegged as an upcoming writer to watch.

  A low-budget movie ($1.8 million) directed by Brian de Palma, a relative unknown at the time, Carrie was released on November 3, 1976, and the box office receipts exceeded all expectations.

  The movie itself is riveting. A timely tale—school bullying still makes the news on a regular basis, almost four decades later—and also a timeless tale (high school is still hell for outsiders), the movie was not only hugely profitable but also served as a vehicle for its two principal actors: Sissy Spacek, who had previously appeared in Badlands (1973), and was suddenly thrust into stardom, and Piper Laurie, who had not been in a major film in fifteen years, since The Hustler, and who commanded critical attention in her role as a fundamentalist Christian. Both Spacek and Laurie received Oscar nominations in 1977 for their respective roles as actress and supporting actress in what was a low-budget horror film for which no one held high expectations. (The movie also starred Amy Irving, William Katt, John Travolta, and Nancy Allen.)

  Spacek, who had been a high school prom queen in real life, didn’t win the Oscar for her role, and neither did Laurie, who also received a Golden Globe nomination. In my opinion, they were robbed, but their riveting performances underscored what readers already knew: that Stephen King is one hell of a storyteller, and Carrie is one hell of a movie.

  As King observed, speaking about the book and the subsequent film adaptation, “I made Carrie, and Carrie made me.”

  Multiple Takes

  Stephen King: “Brian De Palma’s Carrie was terrific. He handled the material deftly and artistically, and got a fine performance out of Sissy Spacek. In many ways the film is far more stylish than my book, which I still think is a gripping read but is impeded by a certain heaviness … a quality that’s absent from the film” (Playboy, interviewed by Eric Norden, June 1983).

  Brian de Palma: “I read the book. It was suggested to me by a writer friend of mine. A writer friend of his, Stephen King, had written it. I guess this was [circa 1975]. I liked it a lot and proceeded to call my agent to find out who owned it. I found out that nobody had bought it yet. A lot of studios were considering it, so I called around to some of the people I knew and said it was a terrific book and I’m very interested in doing it” (Mike Childs and Alan Jones, in Cinefantastique).

  Sissy Spacek, on the pivotal scene: “It wasn’t hard for me to get into this scene, because I’d been to a few proms in my time. I’d even been homecoming queen my senior year at Quitman High School. The lights and music were so familiar to me, and I could easily imagine how Carrie would have been dazzled by the attention. Of course, anyone who has seen the movie knows that Carrie’s moment of glory is destroyed when her enemies drop a bucket of pig’s blood on her head and all hell breaks loose—literally.

  “They filled the bucket with Karo syrup and red food dye. Of course we had to film that scene twice, from every angle. At first the ‘blood’ felt like a warm blanket, but it quickly got sticky and disgusting. I had to wear that stuff for days. And when they lit the fires behind me to burn down the gym, I started to feel like a candy apple” (Spacek, with Maryanne Vollers, My Extraordinary Ordinary Life).

  The Critics’ Take

  Richard Schickel (Time): “An exercise in high style that even the most unredeemably rational among moviegoers should find enormously enjoyable.”

  Tom Huddleston (timeout.com): “This is a truly throat-grabbing horror movie, sporting a handful of pitch-perfect set pieces.… Sissy Spacek’s performance in the title role is close to flawless: she was 27 when the film was shot, but looks barely half that, and this otherworldly combination of maturity and innocence adds to the film’s unsettling tone.”

  Roger Ebert (rogerebert.com): It’s “an absolutely spellbinding horror movie, with a shock at the end that’s the best thing along those lines since the shark leaped aboard in Jaws. It’s also (and this is what makes it so good) an observant human portrait. This girl Carrie isn’t another stereotyped product of the horror production line; she’s a shy, pretty, and complicated high school senior who’s a lot like the kids we once knew.”

  Note: In 2013 the movie was remade on a $35.3 million budget and released by Sony. It starred Chloë Grace Moretz in the title role. It did not, however, please the critics or fans, who respectively gave it ratings of 49% and 46% on the Tomatometer.

  2.

  The Shining: Redrum, Redrum

  I admire Kubrick for the sheer variety in his films. I’m sure The Shining will be the best haunted-house movie ever put on film.

  —Steven Spielberg, interview with Chris Hodenfeld, Rolling Stone, 1980

  Release date: May 23, 1980); Tomatometer: 92%; audience score: 93%. Screenplay by Stanley Kubrick and Diane Johnson; directed by Kubrick. Budget: $19 million; U.S. domestic gross receipts: $44 million. Key cast: Jack Nicholson, as Jack Torrance; Shelley Duvall, as Wendy Torrance; Danny Lloyd, as Danny Torrance; and Scatman Crothers, as Dick Hallorann.

  As King told Playboy (June 1983):

  I’d admired Kubrick for a long time and had great expectations for the project, but I was deeply disappointed in the end result. Parts of the film are chilling, charged with a relentlessly claustrophobic terror, but others fall flat. I think there are two basic problems with the movie. First, Kubrick is a very cold man—pragmatic and rational—and he had great difficulty conceiving, even academically, of a supernatural world … a visual skeptic such as Kubrick just couldn’t grasp the sheer inhuman evil of the Overlook Hotel. So he looked, instead, for evil in the characters, and made the film into a domestic tragedy with only vaguely supernatural overtones. That was the basic flaw: Because he couldn’t believe, he couldn’t make the film believable to others.

  The second problem was in characterization and casting. Jack Nicholson, though a fine actor, was all wrong for the part. His last big role had been in One Flew Over the Cuckoo’s Nest, and between that and his manic grin, the audience automatically identified him as a loony from the first scene … if the guy is nuts to begin with, then the entire tragedy of his downfall is wasted. For that reason, the film has no center and no heart … it’s a film by a man who thinks too much and feels too little, and that’s why, for all its virtuoso effects, it never gets you by the throat and hangs on the way real horror should.

  Because King counts The Shining a
s one of his favorite books, it was King’s misfortune (as he sees it) to have had Kubrick at the helm, because the end result was a movie that pleased Kubrick and his fans, but not King and all of his fans, who are right in saying that it’s a cold film. (So, too, is Kubrick’s 2001: A Space Odyssey, in which dialogue is minimized, and the most compelling character is Hal, a sentient computer on board a spaceship.)

  But because of Kubrick’s reputation as a great film director, his version of The Shining has gotten an extraordinary amount of coverage in the media, and from critics as well. Had it been directed by a lesser-known director, or a first-time director, it’s not likely the coverage would have been so extensive.

  King’s perceived faults with Kubrick’s The Shining are encapsulated in the Playboy quote above; I see no need to belabor King’s point. Kubrick, on the other hand, has said very little about the film, but in an interview with Michael Ciment (visual-memory.co.uk), it’s clear that there’s a serious disconnect between what King wrote in his novel, and how Kubrick interpreted it, as Kubrick made clear in his wrong assessment of Jack and his family: “Jack comes to the hotel psychologically prepared to do its murderous bidding. He doesn’t have very much further to go for his anger and frustration to become completely uncontrollable. He is bitter about his failure as a writer. He is married to a woman for whom he has only contempt. He hates his son.”