Stephen King

Pierce Brosnan stars in the A&E Network special four hour mini series of King’s Bag of Bones. Directed by Mick Garris, the film premieres as two separate episodes of two hours long. 3.37 million viewers tune in to watch Brosnan portray a grieving novelist who secludes himself in a lake house after the death of his wife. Durring filming, Garris made sure that he and King stayed in constant contact because Garris wanted to make sure that he portrayed the writer’s work precisely.

I sent him dailies regularly and we did talk, but he’s pretty much a guy who likes to let you do what you’ll do. He learned, a long time ago, of the frustrations of attaching yourself emotionally to a film made from your book that may not turn out well. He’s been able to successfully maintain a balance between the books staying what they are and the movies being what they are, whether he’s involved or not.

Mikael Håfström adapts the King short story, 1408, into a feature film starring John Cusack as a horror novelist who made his career by investigating potentially haunted houses. Via an annonymous tip, Cusack spends a night at New York City’s Dolphin Hotel in the infamous Room 1408, although he is strongly advised against it by the motels manager, played by Samuel L. Jackson. The film grossed $132 million after being produced on a budget of $25 million. Like many of the film adaptations of his work, King was less than thrilled about the Swedish directors work.

[To adapt my work into film] you have to concentrate on character – and throw out the notion that you need a lot of blood spurting and eyeballs flying. That’s not what fear is about.

Directed by Frank Darabont and starring Tom Hanks and David Morse, King’s mythical prison drama is adapted into a major motion picture. The film grosses $209.7 million after being made on a $60 million budget. Upon seeing the movie, King reportedly repeatedly whispered to his wife,

This is a good movie!

Mick Garris directs the made for television film adaptation of King’s The Stand, which premieres on ABC network. Starring Gary Sinise, Rob Lowe and Molly Ringwald, the 366 minute, four part film follows a group of post-apocalyptic survivors as they begin to reform a society after the world population is wiped out by a militarized version of the plague. When King heard that The Stand was being made into a film, he was less than enthusiastic about it and unsure if it would work.

I didn’t know anything about this until I read about it on the Internet. You absolutely can’t make it as a two-hour movie. If it was a trilogy of films…maybe. People who’ve seen Kubrick’s The Shining dislike the miniseries I wrote (and my amigo Mick Garris directed) even if they haven’t seen it. That’s always annoyed me. But the wheel of karma turns! This time people will probably say, “The miniseries was lots better.”

King’s Children of the Corn is adapted into a feature-length film. The tale was originally released as a short story in his compilation book, Night Shift. It’s a story of a twelve-year-old preacher who convinces all the kids in a rural neighborhood to kill everyone over eighteen for Jesus. King originally wrote the screen play for the film adaptation of Children of the Corn, but his version was thrown out due to having too much dialogue and back-story. Instead, a much more violent/gory version with more conventional narrative style was written by George Goldsmith and used for the film. Directed by Fritz Kiersch and starring Peter Horton and Linda Hamilton, the film grosses $14.5 million after being made on a minimal budget of $800 thousand.

Stanley Kubrick adapts King’s The Shining into a feature film starring Jack Nicholson and Shelly Duvall as young parents who move with their young son to a large abandoned hotel to be caretakers for the winter off season. The film grossed $44.4 million after being filmed for $19 million. The famous line proclaimed by Jack Torrence as he chops down a bathroom door, “Here’s Johnny!” was improved by Nicholson on the spot, originally being inspired by the introduction of The Tonight Show with Johnny Carson. King was disappointed with Kubrick’s decision not to film at the Stanley Hotel and did not like the adaptation, saying that his novel focused on main problems such as the disintegration of a family and the dangers of alcoholism, which, he believes, Kubrick completely ignored.

Parts of the film are chilling, charged with a relentlessly claustrophobic terror, but others fall flat. Not that religion has to be involved in horror, but a visceral 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. What’s basically wrong with Kubrick’s version of The Shining is that 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.