C (2:50)

It's the most unkillable IP short of Greek myths at this point. The longevity is extraordinary. I think there's probably a few reasons for it. It's interesting that we're talking about more or less non horror section because it's the horror, really, that kind of gets regurgitated, reimagined, rebooted, redistributed all the time. Because horror has been so powerful at the movies, especially in the last 30 years. But I think it's because there is a sense of emotional comfort in what you're getting from a Stephen King story. And whether that's a drama or a family story or your garden variety. This scared the hell out of me kind of thing.

B (3:30)

Yeah.

C (3:30)

And also, I think it's probably somewhat related to the ease of use of his prose translating to the screen. He writes in a very cinematic style. He writes in a way that makes you feel like you are intimately connected to the characters and the story. And it's just so darn adaptable. And also, the man's written 10,000 books.

B (3:53)

He has written more than 75 books. He has had more than 200 short stories published. We're possibly not even close to fully tapping the work of Stephen King.

C (4:02)

Still very much going.

B (4:03)

Yeah, I believe it was one of his early editors or agents or professor, I don't know who, who said, steve, you have movie projectors behind your eyes. Like, even early on, there was the idea that he was writing as someone who grew up watching movies himself. He grew up in the 1950s watching scary movies and small theaters in New England and Maine, where he grew up. And that sort of storytelling, the situations that he comes up with. A lot of it feels like he is taking the movies that he watched and some of the books that he read, Ray Bradbury, Richard Matheson, and just translating it into sort of a more modern vernacular.

C (4:40)

I just saw a recent documentary called Chain Reactions, which is by this filmmaker, Alexander Aux Philippe. And he makes a series of films about films, especially iconic films. He made a film about Alien. He made a film about the Exorcist. And his new film is about the Texas Chainsaw Massacre. And usually the style that he has landed on in these films is he finds three or four or five hallowed figures in the world of culture and he allows them to talk through their memories and emotional experiences and philosophies of emotions of a movie in particular. And King is featured in Chain Reactions and he talks about seeing Texas Chainsaw Massacre for the first time. And I think that collision of Matheson and Bradbury that you're talking about, this sort of pop, sci fi, spooky world, the post Twilight Zone world that all those authors were working in, combined with the intensity and the viscera of the new horror that came in the late 60s, essentially informs what his work becomes. And if you think about those two things smashed together, of course that guy's gonna make stuff that feels like a movie because Matheson and Bradbury also wrote stories that you were like, desperate to adapt, but they were much more difficult to adapt. There are not as many great adaptations of those authors. But for King, you can see that that cinematic mind that you're talking about is literally born from having a huge relationship to movies.

B (6:05)

And also his success arrived at a time that was informed by big horror in both publishing and cinema. Carrie was published in 1974. This is on the heels of the movie success of the Exorcist. Rosemary's Baby. Carrie, directed by Brian De Palma, comes out in 1976. And he has said something to the effect is, I made Carrie and the movie of Carrie made me. That's a paraphrase, right? But it is arguable that if that movie did not succeed in the way that it did, that the rest of his career, certainly his early career, would not have played out the way that it did. Because shortly after that, he was able to start moving from paperback publishing to hardcover publishing. He went from Carrie and Salem's Lot to the Shining. And it was the confluence of King in the movies and King on the paperback spinner racks that led to his dominance certainly of 80s culture.

C (7:03)

We don't have as many literary adaptations in Hollywood now as we did when we were growing up, but. But we do still have them in the form of a King style author, where an author, you can watch them rising as they're building their world. And there's a rush, a gold rush to land on their IP and try to find a way to build out an extended world of their storytelling. And I'm not sure that he necessarily fully paved the way for that singularly, but he has this unique situation where there are so many thematic and visual recurrences in his work, but it's not an extended universe. They're individuated stories for the most part, give or take your Dark Towers. And so because of that you can also iterate on all of these different properties all at the same time. So even if Carrie hadn't hit, I'm not so sure he wouldn't have made it as a bigger author. And there might have been another adaptation. Maybe Salem's Lot would have come. Maybe the Shining would have come. Maybe something would have happened in the aftermath of that that also would have worked.

B (8:04)

It's amazing because early on adaptations of his work were directed by good to great directors. You have Brian Palmer kicks it off. Can you rattle the rest?

C (8:14)

Stanley Kubrick, Tobe Hooper on Down the.

B (8:17)

Line, Cronenberg, Carpenter, essentially all of the.

C (8:20)

Giants of new horror post1970, especially American and Canadian filmmakers all got a chance to put their arms around King because King was seen as both transgressive and commercial. And that's usually what those filmmakers were interested in in that convergence of those two ideas.

B (8:37)

After that early boom, we hit both with his books and movies in the 80s, an era in which Stephen King was just pumping out books. Some of them were good, some of them were quite terrible. And movies were being pumped out that were not particularly great. Children of the Cord, Firestarter.

C (8:56)

Sometimes they come back.

B (8:57)

Sometimes they come back.

C (8:58)

The Dark half. Yeah, I like that one.

B (9:01)

I'm up there with the Dark Half. Well, we can talk about that book because that is a Richard Bachmann book. You can see here. I wrote my paperback of the Bachmann books from when I was 13 years old. It is incredibly creased. But he got to this moment where he was known for being successful. He was known for overwhelming the market and a lot of the stuff was bad. And then Something happened in 1986, which is a movie came out. That movie was called Stand By Me. I have heard you talk in the past about how you are not the biggest fan of this movie. But I would love for you to talk about how you think it started to change how people thought about Stephen King.

C (9:39)

Well, it's obvious that it meant that he wasn't strictly defined by the box of horror convention. Stand By Me relative to some other non horror work that he would do in the future. Still a hard edged story, but still does include a dead body and this kind of primal childhood fear that is at the heart of so many of his stories. But it is a story of memory and friendship and. And trying to go back to a time when things felt more innocent. It's a modest Movie. It's not a big action movie or anything like that. It's a movie about four friends, four teenage boys. It does feel momentous and it is beloved. It's not beloved by me, but that's maybe more of a style issue over content issue. I think it's perfectly fine. But wouldn't you rattle off the Cronenberg, Carpenter, Kubrick, you know, that that litany of great filmmakers who had just been taking their bite out of him. Rob Reiner is a. Is a perfectly good craftsman and the script is perfectly nice.

B (10:38)

So stand by me, 1986. It came out in theaters one month after Maximum Overdrive and several months before he released his novel it.

C (10:50)

Who directed Maximum Overdrive?

B (10:51)

Maximum Overdrive is a movie directed by Stephen King. Some would argue an atrocious movie. Some would say a sort of schlocky cult classic. However you want to slice it, it is terribly directed because Stephen King is not a director. He hasn't directed since he was high in his own supply, as was the producer, Dino De Laurentiis. He had made throughout the mid-80s a bunch of Stephen King adaptations. And finally, the apotheosis. Steve, I'm just gonna give you the keys. I'm gonna let you come down to North Carolina where I, Dino De Laurentiis, have built my own studio and my own backlot and my own warehouses where movies like Dune and Blue Velvet were also filmed. And I'm just gonna let you go nuts. And Stephen King, who admits that he had no idea what he was doing was drinking a case or two of beer a night, just really crapped the bed. It is a poor. A poor, poor movie.

C (11:47)

I do wonder if it was a more beloved or classic work, how it would have turned out, despite being under the influence of whatever he was under the influence of. Because Maximum Overdrive is not. Not. It's a. It's his monster truck horror movie. You know, it isn't that kind of intimate, phantasmagoric thing that he does so well. It's something a little bit different, too. It does feel. It fits neatly into the mid-80s. It's of its time. It does register now as a kind of cult classic. More of a curio, I think, than quote, unquote, beloved. But it being the only thing that he ever directed is notable. And I'm glad he didn't direct any more movies.

B (12:20)

It's a great movie for anyone who likes AC dc.

C (12:22)

That's right.

B (12:23)

Pretty good soundtrack. Pretty good soundtrack that is released, received pretty poorly. And then Stand By Me comes out as you say? Directed by Rob Reiner. Starring Wil Wheaton River Phoenix Corey Haim, Gerry o', Connell, Kiefer Sutherland Richard Dreyfuss does the narration. And it is this nostalgia tinged look at Four Boys in 1959 Oregon. The movie transfers it from Maine to Oregon who live in a town called Castle Rock, who go take an overnight trip to try to go find a dead body. And I am not as nego on it as you are.

C (12:59)

Most people aren't.

B (13:00)

I love it for a couple reasons. One reason I love it is cause I don't know what it is. I just love to hear kids curse in movies. And there's so much profanity that's true. I cannot wait to show my child this movie.

C (13:14)

It is a very good portrait of the exploration of language that you are in at 11 or 12 years old where you're like, can I actually say this now? The cheap thrill of saying something awful to your friend.

B (13:24)

I've never lost it. I saw it at an early age and I still like, yes, look at these kids.

C (13:29)

I'm sure I've said this before, but I didn't. I actually didn't see it when I was 9 or 10. I saw it a little bit later in life too. And so I think it is a movie that imprints on young people and the characters are very relatable in the story that they're going through. I don't know. It's not one of my movies. But you're right that it changed the game for King and what we expect from his films.

B (13:47)

It was nominated for Best Adapted Screenplay. And Castle Rock Entertainment, which Rob Reiner's production company produced so many movies throughout the 90s and 2000s, was the production company behind Seinfeld, A Few Good Men. So many things came from this. Castle Rock Entertainment is named after the town in this book, which is named after a location in Lord of the Flies, which is Stephen King's favorite book. I grew up with the title card with the Lighthouse. Just in my mind, I could hear the Castle Rock music and that came out of this, which is something that I don't know that you could have predicted at this point in the late 1980s.

C (14:31)

It's interesting too, because they obviously did go on to adapt other Stephen King works, but I wouldn't describe King films as their bread and butter. I think there was a kind of starchy, entertaining Hollywood product that they were best known for.

B (14:45)

American President.

C (14:46)

Yes, the American President, exactly. They really did help put Aaron Sorkin on the map. In many ways, Hollywood not On stage. And so it's funny when you think about the fact that they also, I believe they produced Misery. They produced a handful of King films.

B (14:58)

I feel like they had first dibs on King stuff, but that was not the thing that defined that company.

C (15:04)

And I wouldn't say Rob Reiner is a particularly horror forward storyteller.

B (15:09)

Absolutely.

C (15:09)

He makes a very different kind of movie too. Although he has made a couple of.

B (15:13)

King movies the year after this one. I feel like you might have seen this one when you were a kid. 1987, the Running Man. So one of the interesting things about King, there's so many interesting things, I can just go on forever. They should give me my own.

C (15:25)

Steven, I would love to just be the audience, to be honest with you, because you are the master here today.

B (15:30)

He is a cross genre filmmaker. As I said, we think of him as horror, but he does non horror stuff. However, he also does thrillers, he does detective stories, he does westerns, he does fantasies, and he does sci fi. He has done a lot of sci fi that people actually consider to be horror. I would argue that Firestarter, the Dead Zone, in many ways are as much sci fi as they are horror. 1987, a sort of dystopic sci fi movie comes out called the Running Man. This is based on the 1982 book that King wrote under a pseudonym. He wrote five books under the pseudonym Richard Bachman, several of which have been made into movies. And this, he claims, was written over 72 hours and it was barely changed. The book. The book is very different from the movie we're about to talk about, which is an Arnold Schwarzenegger vehicle. How old were you when you saw this?

C (16:23)

I must have been eight or nine. You know, we were just having a conversation off mic about when is the right time to show your children certain kinds of films. And I think I just caught this on cable. Some good fortune. I'm glad that I did. I wouldn't say this is a great film, but it is a kind of important film because it's unusual for a star emerging at the exact right moment to land on such a adaptable and prescient piece of work and attempt to say something culturally, tell us the story.

B (16:54)

For those who can't remember, it's effectively.

C (16:56)

A game show movie about survival. It feels very much like his Paddy Chayefsky movie about people who are plunged into this active 24 hour livestream game show in which they are being hunted and attempting to survive. And the game show in the film is hosted by Richard Dawson, a real life game show host in our consciousness. And it's a paranoid thriller that features absurdist elements about technology that when you look at the framework of it, now feels eerily close to a lot of what we've been seeing in the world. Schwarzenegger's an unlikely fit, I would say, for the lead, he being the hulking colossus that he is. I believe the book is about a much more regular kind of guy.

B (17:40)

Absolutely.

C (17:41)

And so it does tilt, I think, a lot of what makes that story more relatable, more sort of like sitting in the driver's seat of the story. Because Arnold is one of the least relatable heroes we've ever had on screen in so many ways, especially to American audiences. But fun movie. A bit silly at times. A bit like you can feel the fiberglass in the production design.

B (18:05)

Yeah.

C (18:06)

But very influential, I think. Pretty important actually, to. To Arnold's rise to power because he uses the mid-1980s post terminator to sort of grab a unique lane that maybe only Charlton Heston owned in the history of films, where he is simultaneously a very powerful, thunderous hero, but is consistently making work and making very entertaining movies that audiences like. But a lot of them have social commentary underneath them and not so subtle social commentary. And audiences are excited about that and they like that. So I view it as a pivotal movie in his career for King. I'm glad it's being remade is what I'll say.

B (18:46)

Yeah. I think a lot of people don't realize that this is based on a Stephen King work, partially because, again, it was based on a book he wrote under a pseudonym and partially because it's out of his own. You could argue that this is a Hunger Games precursor. Maybe there are other books in the history of dystopian sci fi that were written before this that have similar conceits, but I feel like this is one that many people are familiar with and it is the reason that it is being remade and directed by Edgar Wright, who's one of the more interesting sort of cross genre filmmakers that we have right now. You haven't seen this yet, have you?

C (19:22)

I am seeing it next week.

B (19:24)

Okay.

C (19:24)

Yes, Edgar. One of the high stylists, I would say, of recent movie history.

B (19:28)

And from what I can tell, it does reflect the book a little more in that it is. Glen Powell is not an everyman. He's an incredibly handsome man. We all want to be him, but he is not Arnold Schwarzenegger.

C (19:40)

He's slightly more regularly sized.

B (19:41)

Absolutely. And it's about an Everyman who joins this game show in order to get money for his family, for his child who has a sickness, a disease. Have you read the Running Man?

C (19:55)

It's definitely a book I opened and probably didn't finish. I think I had a confused relationship to Bachmann as a kid. I've told this story before. I discovered King's books because in my sister's room, there was a. A sort of cupboard area above her bed in which things were stored. And it was too high when I was a young kid to be able to reach it, to slide it open. And as I got older, probably eight or nine, I was able to stand on a short step ladder and slide it open. And when I slid it open, five King books tumbled out. Well worn, just like the one on your desk right now. And Carrie was there, the Shining was there, the Stand was there. A handful of the classics.

B (20:33)

Yeah.

C (20:33)

And my parents were not big readers when I was a kid, but they clearly were in the 70s and early 80s. And those books felt like talismans or like portals back to their youth or something. And I got very interested in those books. So I would start doing the thing that I'm sure you were doing, which is buying every new King book when it came out at the bookstore as a teenager. And I cannot remember the title of the Bachmann film that came out when I was a teenager. And I went to Barnes and Noble and I picked it up and I was like, why is this being so prominently displayed? Who is this? And trying to make the connection and better understand. We didn't have Wikipedia back then. You know, it was not so easy unless you had a friend who could explain this to you how this worked. And then I went back looking for Bachmann books and feeling like maybe they were not in concert with what I liked so much about King. And so I ultimately never read any of those Backman books.

B (21:20)

Yeah, Thinner was a Bachmann book, okay. It's Rage, which was never made into a movie, in which Stephen King has actually. This is the school shooting book. It's possible that is not easily able to get these days because I actually don't want that book in the world. The Long Walk, the Running man and Road Work, which has never been made into a movie. And then Thinner, interestingly, Misery was written to be a Bachman book, and that would have been released as a Bachman book had he not had his pseudonym blown up by a bookseller in Washington, D.C. i think. Went to the Library of Congress, looked at some copyright pages, figured out that Stephen King was Actually the person behind Richard Bachmann and revealed this to them.

C (22:02)

What does he say about why he used the Bachmann alias in the first place?

B (22:06)

It was for a couple reasons. The main reason was he was producing so much work at the time already and his publisher was like, you can't keep putting more books out under the name Stephen King. Several of these were written when he was young. The Long Walk, which we're going to talk about in a bit, he says was the first novel he ever wrote. He wrote it as a freshman in college. So he had all these books in the trunk or whatever and he wanted to release them, but he couldn't release them under the name Stephen King because his publishers wouldn't have done so because he would have overly glutted the market more than it already was. And so he put them out under this name. And he claims he wanted to see if he could be as successful under another name as he was under the name Stephen King. It's hard to take that claim seriously given that some of these books are genuine juvenile. Like the first book that you ever wrote maybe is not a book that you should be releasing into the world. And yet he did.

C (23:02)

He was not considering publishing the stand under the Bachmann.

B (23:05)

Absolutely not. Absolutely not. I rewatched the Running man this weekend. It was fascinating to because I hadn't seen it since I was a kid. And get me the president's agent, I think Richard Dawson says at one point. Or get me Justice Department entertainment Division.

C (23:18)

Did you like it as a kid?

B (23:19)

I thought it was fun. Fun and dumb. I was like, look at these, look at these wrestlers. And if you're rewatching it, it's mostly unserious, but there are a couple things in there like, oh, he saw what we were doing with TV and maybe where we were going. We'll be right back.

A (23:49)

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B (24:59)

Montblanc invites you to use life's quiet moments to pause, reflect, and put pen to paper. Chapter one. Oh, no, no, no, no.

A (25:08)

Part one. Perfect.

C (25:11)

The mountains are impressive. Oh, I wish you were here to see them.

A (25:16)

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B (25:20)

Stuck for every journey, the perfect companion awaits Montblanc. Let's write. Visit montblanc.com for exquisitely crafted writing instruments, leather goods, and more. Welcome back. This is the Book Review podcast and I'm Gilbert Cruze. I'm joined this week by Sean Fennesee, and we're talking about the less scary side of Stephen King. All right, we have to talk about one of the biggest Stephen King movies. It's one that he claims again, he has so many stories. He claims that he was in a supermarket, I think, in Florida, where he has a second home, and an old lady walked up to him and said, this sounds like it totally happened. Why can't you write nice stories like that? Shawshank Redemption. And he said, ma', am, I did write that. And she did not believe him. The Shawshank Redemption, a 1994 film based on the novella Rita Hayworth and Shawshank Redemption. There's no the. It's Rita Hayworth and Shawshank Redemption. It was published in 1982's Different Seasons, which is a collection of novellas that also produced the Body, which was adapted to Stand By Me, and Apt Pupil, which I don't want to talk about.

C (26:34)

That is also a non horror adaptation.

B (26:38)

It's an incredibly fraught movie.

C (26:40)

Sure is.

B (26:40)

It's not on the rundown here. We're not going to talk about it.

C (26:43)

I'll be perfectly honest with you. I was having a conversation about that film but three days ago, so it is. Why? How? I happen to be speaking with someone who knew someone who worked on the movie.

B (26:51)

Okay. And are they proud of their work?

C (26:54)

I wouldn't say that it's a little mysterious. It's Directed by a person that we don't, you know, who's no longer participating in Hollywood.

B (27:00)

Bryan Singer, a disavowed person. This movie has the longest legacy of almost anything that Stephen King has done. It was a film that came out in 94 at a time when Forrest Gump and the Lion King were sort of ruling the box office. It had a weird title, Shawshank Redemption. Didn't really pop with people when it was in movie theaters. And then over time, over decades, it became both a VHS hit and, and a basic cable hit. It was a movie that on TNT or tbs, I can't recall which was on all the time. Very interesting. Didn't do well at the box office. Nominated for a ton of Oscars. Best Actor, best Picture, best Adapted Screenplay. Didn't win any. And now some people say this is their favorite movie of all time.

C (27:47)

I believe on IMDb for the longest time it was the number one rated movie ever made. It might still be, at least according to users. And that's interesting. It does make sense. It's a wonderful movie. I love this movie. I think you have to be a dead eyed alien to not have a reaction to this movie. At least it's beautifully made.

B (28:08)

This is a story about a man who goes into prison, Shawshank Prison in Maine. Played by Tim Robbins. He's accused of murdering his wife. We eventually find out he is innocent. There he has to figure out how to live within this new society. He makes friends with a man named Red, played by Morgan Freeman. And the movie essentially becomes about their friendship over several decades.

C (28:30)

Yeah, it does have an overarching question of wrongful imprisonment that drives the action for Robbins character. But it's really an episodic prison film. It's a series of incidents about what happens inside of this prison and the world that is built around the Robbins character and the people that he encounters over many, many years. Very odd film. Structurally. There's not a ton to compare it to and it has a kind of winsomeness that is unusual not just for King stories, but for prison films.

B (29:01)

Yeah.

C (29:02)

And yet it really, it persists. I am curious if it is. If you think it is the quintessential King movie even though it isn't the quintessential King story.

B (29:15)

It's hard for me to say that something like the Shining is not the quintessential King movie. A movie that hopefully, as some listeners know he was not a fan of, talks about it all the time. Even after decades, even after it is considered to be one of the great Cinematic American horror masterpieces. This, however, might be something that unbeknownst to most, defines Stephen King in their minds. Because I think more people possibly have seen Shawshank than will watch the Shining and will love it and will appreciate it. The Shining is a great movie that appeals to horror fans and Kubrick fans and we'll have a long legacy. But this is a broad, moving, crowd pleaser.

C (30:00)

In the end, it is what we call four quadrant. It appeals to young people, it appeals to old people, it appeals to men, it appeals to women. And it does have some magic in it. It is a little bit saccharine, it is a little bit sentimental. And I think a lot of the more purely dramatic King storytelling does have a sentimentality at its core.

B (30:22)

And so he would call himself a sentimentalist. I think he has actually said that.

C (30:26)

And I think I'm maybe a little bit resistant to that as the defining aspect of King, I find to be, in a way, I enjoy a kind of mean spirited author. And he doesn't always let his characters off the hook and there's not always happy resolution. And I think that that is a reflection of how he sees the world and some of the experiences that he's had despite all of his success. And I admire that. And I, I think that's kind of a core tenet of good horror storytelling, is to not resolve comfortably. But this is a movie with absolute exaltation at its conclusion. It is literally we won. And I think that's part of the reason why it is so powerful for people.

B (31:06)

I again hadn't seen this one in quite a while. Rewatched this weekend, rewatched a lot of movies this weekend and I wasn't prepared for how great I was going to feel at the end of this movie. I know what happens. Surely it's not going to work its magic on me again. And buddy, when you see them on the sands of Mexico, it's incredible.

C (31:29)

You would be insane to not be moved by it. I think it's so fascinating though, the role that Frank Darabont, who is the writer director of this movie, plays in the King story and the work that he made and what he is ultimately known for. I would. He's known for four films, right? Those films are this film, a film. I'm sure you want to. I'm sure you want to talk about the Green Mile, the Majestic, the Jim Carrey film that followed those two films, the Mist, another King adaptation and then the Walking Dead, which he was a co creator, showrunner of the first season of that show and went on to be one of the defining horror stories of the 21st century. And his stuff is just getting meaner and meaner over time too. He is clearly abandoning what is at the heart of Shawshank in fascinating ways to me. And I feel like a lot of. I wonder how much of an entry point Shawshank is for younger King fans. For folks who didn't grow up discovering their parents dog eared novels or didn't stumble upon them in the bookstore at 9 years old. This is something that you see his name and then maybe if you shifted to the dead zone, you might think, how is this the same author?

B (32:35)

We will talk about the Green Mile in a few minutes. I want to briefly touch on a movie that comes in between Shawshank and the Green mile. This is 1995's Dolores Claiborne. This is a film that stars Kathy Bates post Misery film that is also directed by Rob Reiner, based on a Stephen King book. She won a best Actress Oscar for that. The book, if you've never read it, is written as one giant monologue. There are no chapters in Dolores Claiborne. It is just the character of Dolores Claiborne talking for several hundred pages. The movie is fascinating because William Goldman worked on it. He was a consultant. The famed screenwriter of movies such as all the President's Men, Butch Cassidy and the Sundance Kid actually did several King adaptations.

C (33:24)

He did Misery.

B (33:24)

He did Misery. He did Dreamcatcher, which we're not gonna talk about.

C (33:27)

I would love to. I would love to, but we don't.

B (33:30)

Have to deleted scenes. Hart and Atlantis. He wrote the stage production of Misery, which starred Bruce Willis in the James Caan role and which I don't think was well received.

C (33:41)

I wish I could have seen it though.

B (33:43)

Me too. Me too.

C (33:44)

It is chronicled in New York Magazine. Over time he wrote about his experience.

B (33:47)

Oh really?

C (33:48)

Yeah.

B (33:48)

I didn't know that actually. So Dolores Claiborne is a story about a maid in Maine, Dolores Claiborne, played by Kathy Bates, who works for a rich lady. That rich lady is found dead at the bottom of the staircase and everyone suspects Dolores because they've believed for decades that Dolores also killed her husband many, many years ago. It stars Kathy Bates, Jennifer Jason Leigh as her daughter, Christopher Plummer as the detective looking into all this. And it is a. It's like a psychological thriller detective story. There's really no horror elements in it.

C (34:20)

It's a pop boiler.

B (34:20)

Yeah, yeah. But it's also not something that you would categorize as a feel good Tale.

C (34:25)

There is something in it though that is deeply king and that I feel is maybe an unfortunate. Has unfortunate aftermath in present day horror storytelling. Which is. It is a trauma story.

B (34:38)

It sure is. There's so many flashbacks.

C (34:39)

There's a lot of flashbacks and there is a lot of originating incident that informs the psychology of the characters. And this is a major tool of conventional present day horror storytelling. And so even though there's nothing supernatural in this story, it does feel very tightly rooted in a lot of his other work, like that structure and the idea of something from the past haunting the present and informing the present is a huge part of the way that he builds story.

B (35:04)

Absolutely.

C (35:05)

And this is just a darn good adaptation because it does change a lot of what is in the original text. I believe it's Tony Gilroy.

B (35:11)

Tony Gilroy wrote the screenplay.

C (35:12)

Yeah. The screenwriter who is now probably best known for Andor and Michael Clayton, but at the time was just a working screenwriter. And this is a very good film, especially because it's a Taylor Hackford film. Maybe not like the most hallowed filmmaker either, but another Hollywood craftsman who brings like some sturdiness to the production. And Kathy Bates is amazing in this movie.

B (35:31)

Yeah. This is one of three books that he wrote around the same time that either he said or retroactively were considered to be a trio of books that he was writing about how women are treated terribly by men. There's a book called Rose Matter and then two books, Dolores Claiborne and Gerald's Game, who are linked. There's a story thing that happens in both of those books, an eclipse that happens in New England that occurs in both books. And I believe at some point Dolores Claiborne is vaguely aware of Jesse Burling Game, the protagonist of Gerald's Game, and.

C (36:07)

Vice versa in the books, in a cosmic fashion.

B (36:10)

In a cosmic fashion, like the eclipse happens and then Dolores sees a vision of this character in this other book. And then this character in this other book sees a vision of Dolores Clayborne standing over a well where she has dethrone her husband. But he wrote these three novels in the early 90s about something that's actually threaded throughout many of his novels where they're like, men are terrible to women and they have been since time immemorial. Dolores Claiborne in Adaptation. I don't think people really think about that much, but actually turned out pretty well.

C (36:40)

It's a good film. Yeah, I would recommend it. If people haven't seen it. It's not as flashy as some of this other work that we're talking about. And it does not have the same cult status either. It has just been the middle. And I like it a lot.

B (36:52)

I watched it for the first time years ago when I had Covid and I was staying in our basement. So I actually don't know if I saw most of it or dreamt most of it. That was a bedtime. The Green Mile, 1999. The second prison movie based on a Stephen King story directed by Frank Darabont. Fascinating publishing story here. This is based on a novel that was released in six installments in 1996. He wrote a serial novel because his foreign rights agent at the time was talking to someone else who said that Dickens used to do this. Dickens used to release the Old Curiosity Shop or whatever.

C (37:30)

The Quick papers.

B (37:31)

Exactly. And so he said, let me give that a shot. He had not finished the story by the time he started writing it and he released it. They were all hits. Eventually, all six entries of the Green Mile sat on the New York Times bestseller list at the same time, which pissed off so many publishers because they're like, you are blocking our books from getting on the bestseller list with your five or six entries on the list here.

C (37:56)

He's sort of the Taylor Swift of his day.

B (37:58)

He was, I think he would say the same retroactively. This was in 96. He had a frankly ridiculous 1996 when he published this book. He published the final installment of the Green Mile. And then one month later, he published two more novels, Desperation and the Regulators. And the Regulators actually was written under the Richard Bachman.

C (38:21)

That's what I was thinking of. The Regulators. I told you there's one more book. Yes, that is the book I was thinking of when we were talking about. I forgot about that because you said there's four books collected in there. And there was a fifth book, and I was very.

B (38:32)

It came back to it.

C (38:33)

I was 14 and I was so confused.

B (38:35)

I can admit on this podcast when I am wrong and you are right.

C (38:38)

I could have sworn. Because it's a vivid memory of buying the Regulators and thinking, that's a bad. What's going on here?

B (38:43)

That is a bad book. So essentially, he wrote these two books desperately of the Regulators, same character names. He puts in two different. In two different scenarios.

C (38:51)

I read both of these books.

B (38:53)

One of them is okay. Desperation actually is not bad. It was made into a terrible TV movie. That book is not bad.

C (38:58)

The Regulators put me off of Bachmann because I read that book and I just could not get into it.

B (39:02)

But then the Green Mile is made again lauded by the Academy 1999, one of the great movie American movie years in recent memory. This movie is nominated for best Picture, Best Adapted Screenplay, Best Supporting Actor, Michael Clarke Duncan. It was the most successful Stephen King film adaptation until chapter one, which came out in 2017. But before that, this movie, which made almost $300 million, was the most successful Stephen King adaptation. It was a huge hit. Did you like it?

C (39:36)

No, I didn't like it.

B (39:38)

It stars Tom Hanks as the head of the death row block at a prison in the south during the Depression. And one day a large man comes in, accused of murdering two small girls. And they discover over time that he has a bit of magic to him. He is able to take badness out of people and spit it back into the world. That's like the core of the story, but it's also in the same way that the Shawshank is. And because it was written as a serial novel, it is a tale that is told in little snippets. There are all these side characters and they have their own stories. And there's a mouse named Mr. Jingles plays a really big role in both the book and the movie. Incredibly sentimental, some would say sappy, quite long, I think close to or over three hours. But it stars Tom Hanks and it's directed by the man who directed Shawshank Redemption. And people, a lot of people really love this movie.

C (40:32)

Do they still?

B (40:33)

That's a good question.

C (40:34)

I feel that it is a movie that.

B (40:36)

Should we go downstairs and ask?

C (40:37)

Well, I feel it has edged into obscurity despite its major success in the. I appear frequently on a show called the Rewatchables. And on the Rewatchables we talk about old movies. And one thing that comes up in talking about old movies all the time is what were the top ten movies at the box office in 1979? And invariably there will be seven all time favorites, one beloved cult classic, and then two movies that you do not recognize and very few people have seen in the last 20 years. And that's just culture, right? Some things hit and stay and some things hit and fall. I don't really feel like this movie has a huge legacy. I could be wrong. There could be someone on the other side of this podcast listening and screaming, no, the Green Mile is my favorite film of all time. How dare you? Yeah, that's true of every work of art. But I don't think this movie has a terribly deep legacy at this point.

B (41:28)

I think you might be right. And I also think if Given the chance to watch one of two prison movies, this is not the one that they are going to go to.

C (41:35)

So interesting that obviously you could see why any studio would green light this, but it almost feels like a parody of what a studio executive wants. Are there any other prison movies from Stephen King works? Let's get those into greenlight right now. Yeah, and they did. And let's put Tom Hanks in it. Forget about Tim Robbins. There's something almost absurd about how similar it is.

B (41:56)

The director, Frank Darabont, knew what he was getting into. He got ahead of the argument at the time and said, I don't want to be the guy who's only known for directing Stephen King prison movies set in the mid 20th century. But I rewatched it this weekend and it is a perfectly watchable movie. It's a smooth movie. I got a little teary eyed a couple points, but it is quite long and it is quite episodic.

C (42:19)

Would you recommend returning to it?

B (42:23)

Life is short.

C (42:23)

I agree.

B (42:24)

Life is short. I would not say if you have seen this, that you should return to it. If for some reason you want to watch the Green Mile, I give you permission. Sean is not going to give you permission. We should jump ahead a little bit to this year, which as we said at the top of this conversation, somehow is a big year for Stephen King adaptations. We are living in a post it chapter one world movie that came out in 2017, which I adored 20% because the kids just do so much cursing. And it is the biggest horror movie of all time at the box office.

C (42:57)

It's a darn good studio horror movie.

B (42:59)

It's quite good sequel. Not good at all. The first one is great. I can't wait once again to watch this one with my child when he's a little bit older. So we're in this world in which King still is something that studios, the movies, tv, they want to rely on. What we have this year is a movie called the Life of Chuck, which is directed by Mike Flanagan, who's a very interesting filmmaker who's directed two previous King adaptations, one based on the book Gerald's Game, which I talked about a few minutes ago and which was for a long time considered unadaptable. And then a movie version of Doctor Sleep, which is Stephen King's sequel to the Shining and which I know you have great affection for, as do I. I've seen it several times. This is a bizarre choice. The Life of Chuck is based on a short story from the 2020 collection if it Bleeds it's hard to describe, but it's essentially the story of a man who's dying at a brain tumor at the age of 39. And the structure is interesting. You don't know what's happening at first. Eventually you do. It doesn't feel like any movie I've ever seen, partially because it hews so closely to the text. Mike Flanagan loves Stephen King more than I do, probably. And he, I felt like, did not adapt as much as he just brought it straight to the screen. And as a result, whether it's the structure, whether it's the Nick Offerman narration, which takes huge gobs of the story and just says it straight on screen, it's very bizarre. I read this book during COVID It was released during 2020, and it hit me hard. But I don't know if that was because the story is great or because Covid was tough. I remember crying at the end of this story.

C (44:49)

I have not read this story. And when I sat down to see this movie, all I knew about the movie was that it won the audience prize at the Toronto International Film Festival. That was all that I had read about it. I'm extremely fond of both Gerald's Game and Doctor Sleep, and I think Flanagan has a real touch when it comes to adapting some of the complexities of King's storytelling style. I think that my job as a professional movie watcher gave me a tremendous amount of affection for this film because I couldn't really figure out what it was the entire way through. Typically, with most films that I go see, especially genre storytelling, through the first act, I've got a pretty good idea where we're going. I know the beats, I know the conventions, I know the way we're meant to feel and the way that I actually feel while watching a movie. And I try to navigate those feelings by not jumping ahead too often, but it's difficult to jump ahead. I had no idea what was happening in this movie. And maybe some of that what's it quality is a negative, but I found myself turning myself over to it because that. That shield of knowledge, that invulnerability that I sometimes feel when watching a movie that makes it harder for me to connect, was down, was fully down, trying to understand what this was. And I'm sure if I had read the book, I would have felt quite differently. But I did find myself moved by it. I do think there's a lot of things about it that don't work, but that doesn't mean it's unsuccessful for me. And that said I don't know why Mike Flanagan specifically wanted to make this. Maybe he felt like he made his intimate King story and then his horror epic and then he was looking for some other strain to represent his interest in and the writer.

B (46:36)

It also, as we talked about, certainly with the Green Mile, but even with Shawshank a little bit, it has that King sentimentality.

C (46:45)

And I usually don't like that. But for whatever reason, I did like this. I liked it this, and maybe as you get older too, that these stories start to work in different ways on you.

B (46:52)

Yeah, yeah. You're getting soft.

C (46:54)

I am getting soft.

B (46:57)

The Long Walk, which recently came out, an adaptation that has been talked about for decades. Frank Darabont had the rights for a long time. George Romero wanted to make a version of this. It was released as a book written under the Richard Bachman name. As I said, King says this was the first novel he wrote when he was a freshman in college. It was essentially another, like the Running man, post apocalyptic, or maybe not post apocalyptic, just like futuristic dark sci fi story of a world in which there's another TV show or another TV experience called the Long Walk, in which 100 young men are set to walk on a road and the last one to survive wins. And that is the story. King wrote this as someone who's dealing with Vietnam. And at the time it was seen as an allegory for the experience of young men going off to war. Just put through the meat grinder and people having to see this stuff on tv. It comes out now directed by Francis Lawrence, who directed several Hunger Games films. The analog between those two stories are interesting. What'd you think of this one?

C (48:06)

Liked it quite a bit until I didn't and have not read the book. So I cannot speak to its fealty. But I think it is grounded into exceptional lead performances. David Johnson, who some people may have seen in the Alien Romulus film last summer, he was one of the stars of the TV show industry. And Cooper Hoffman, probably best known for Licorice Pizza and Saturday Night, who is the son of Philip Seymour Hoffman. They play two of the young men participating in the Long Walk. And the film is unusual. It was shot in sequence. And so you can feel the wear of the experience because it is a film that is primarily shot perspectivally at the characters. And there is a military figure played by Mark Hamill, who also appears in the Life of Chuck as the sort of the major who is running the Long Walk. And he is sitting in the back of a truck that is slowly leading the charge. And so we were seeing most of the movie from his perspective, looking out at these boys. And it's a movie of faces. And I love movies of faces. And I think that some of the script is touching and thoughtful and some of it is a bit overwrought. And I do think that this is a movie that missed the mark in the ending. But all the way up until the very final moments of the movie, I was very emotionally attached to the characters. I do think it's interesting for us to figure out what the particular allegorical power is of this story now versus when it was originally written. And it's clearly written by like pained and frustrated young guy, young kid, basically. And to think about what this movie represents to the culture is like potentially very wide. You could apply what we think is transpiring on screen to conflicts around the world, to the idea of just the daily grind of life in America in 2025. It's very flexible in that way. But I think it is an unusually dark, bleak movie for the movies in 25.

B (50:15)

Yeah, I guess a movie doesn't need to be a horror movie to be bleak or scary. And this is one that falls into that category.

C (50:22)

Did you like it?

B (50:22)

I half liked it. And it was again, I think we talked recently. You'd asked me years ago, what are the stories that I think remain to be unadapted. And this was definitely one of them. So I'm happy they finally got around to it. But of course, whenever you see something, or half the time when you see something on screen that you've been waiting for decades, it just, it cannot live up. I want to end by asking you, after we've talked about all these ostensibly non horror adaptations, what you think it is that continues to make a good Stephen King story to movie work. I would say one of the reasons that he's been such a success, There are many reasons, but one of the reasons that he's been such a successful author over all these decades, 50 plus years, is because he has great situations surrounded by great characters. If you look at Shawshank, if you look at Stand By Me, even if you look at the Green Mile and some others, those are all stories that are defined by character misery defined by character. So many of his great works, you remember the characters, you know who Jack Torrance is, you know who Paul Sheldon is, you know all these names. And he also has great situations. Let's put 100 kids walking until 99 of them die. Let's have an author holed up in a Cabin in the middle of the woods with his insane number one fan. Let's have an innocent man who goes to prison who has to figure out a way to get out. Those two things work well when they work well in his books and they certainly work well in movies.

C (51:53)

We haven't talked about his prose much. I do think that he maybe is not the most elegant stylist at times, but he is a propulsive writer. He is an all time page turning writer. And that actually works tremendously well for Hollywood because people who are deciding to make movies or not read a lot of scripts and they have to read a lot of books and a lot of material. And what you want is something that you can power through. I just watched for another podcast, the Unbearable Lightness of Being, which is a fascinating book, but it's not a. Not a raw page turner.

B (52:29)

Yeah.

C (52:30)

And the idea of adapting a book like that is much more complicated than if it lands on your desk. And it is just a book that you can just fly through because it is. You really want to know what happens next.

B (52:41)

Despite the fact that it is a brick.

C (52:43)

It's huge.

B (52:44)

1100.

C (52:45)

It's huge. I had that experience with the Stand as a kid. That's a doorstop and I loved flying through it. So I do think that that is a huge reason why his films get made frequently. Is that executives, filmmakers, the people who work in motion picture literary. That's like something you hear once you learn about the world of agents and actors. They like reading his stuff.

B (53:07)

Yeah.

C (53:08)

And so it makes it that much easier. In addition to the fact that I think the way I would describe what you were saying is he just has good ideas, which seems simple. But the truth is that most genre fiction lives and dies by the quality of its idea, by the quality of its hook, by the quality of its execution. And he just consistently conceives of cool concepts. And that's not. It's just not easy. He just has one of those minds that it feels like it's a conveyor belt and it never turns off. And I haven't read nearly as many of his books in the last 20 years as I know you have. But I would not be surprised to learn that, like, yeah, he's definitely pumped out a few classics because he is very adaptable to modern convention, but also knows the long history of the storytelling that he likes to do.

B (54:00)

A major part of your job is just watching all the movies. All the movies are coming out and all the movies have ever existed, seemingly. Do you ever get to read?

C (54:09)

Not as much anymore. I mean, I brought a book with me today. I was reading a book on the train. I'm reading, but it's invariably the sort of thing that I do now, which is I'm reading Abel Ferrara, the New York City Filmmaker's Memoir Guide to His Work. And I still read a fair amount of nonfiction, mostly film scholarship and film history.

B (54:29)

Got it.

C (54:29)

I wish I was a novel consumer like I was in my teens and 20s, but it's hard to be. I also have a child. These things, something's gotta take a backseat. But I will go back. I will go back. I need to put a kid through college and then maybe it'll be time for me to start reading novels again.

B (54:45)

Well, I'll have a pile of books ready for you.

C (54:49)

I don't know how you do what you do. What you do is absurd to me.

B (54:52)

Read lots of books.

C (54:53)

Yeah. That is much more challenging than sitting down to watch a film.

B (54:56)

It certainly takes more time, I'll tell you that.

C (54:58)

Sure does.

B (54:59)

Sean Fennessy, co host of the Big Picture podcast. It's been a delight to have you on the Book Review podcast.

C (55:05)

Thank you, Gilbert.

B (55:07)

That was my conversation with Sean Fennessy about non scary Stephen King film adaptations. I'm Gilbert Cruz, editor of the New York Times Book Review. Thanks for listening.

A (55:27)

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