Stephen King Adaptations

[Luckylyn]

I loved Storm of the Century.  It was so compelling, scary, and the conclusion was really heart wrenching. 

 

I finally read Cell and am hoping the movie version improves it.  The book could be clunky at times especially the exposition about the tech, but I did appreciate the ending which left it to the reader to figure out what might happen next.

 

I'm still waiting for adaptations of Eyes of the Dragon and The Girl Who Loved Tom Gordon.

 

Is there any word of a possible Dr. Sleep movie?  I wonder if the iconic status of Kubrick's Shinning makes doing a film of the sequel too tricky since Kubrick changed key things.  Stephen King makes a point at the beginning of Dr. Sleep that it's the sequel to his book and not Kubrick's Shinning. 

[Cobalt Stargazer]

I finally read Cell and am hoping the movie version improves it.  The book could be clunky at times especially the exposition about the tech, but I did appreciate the ending which left it to the reader to figure out what might happen next.

 

I really enjoyed Cell, and the stuff about the tech didn't bother me. It's no more implausible than a book about Y2K where everything really does go boom, although probably with less zombiefication.

 

Do TV movies count? Because I'm looking forward to tonight's Big Driver, even though it's on Lifetime and I'm wondering how much of the source material will be cut. Maria Bello is a little underrated as an actress IMO, and I think she'll do a fine job in the lead role.

Edited October 18, 2014 by Cobalt Stargazer

[Luckylyn]

Any Stephen King adaptation tv or film is welcome for discussion here as far as I know.  I didn't know Big Driver was a Stephen King story.  I will check it out.

 

I think Cell starts out strong but gets clunky in spots along the way.  The ideas for the tech I can swallow.   It's the way the conversations about it were written and inserted into the story that I think didn't quite work as well as it could have.

[Cobalt Stargazer]

Any Stephen King adaptation tv or film is welcome for discussion here as far as I know.  I didn't know Big Driver was a Stephen King story.  I will check it out.

 

Big Driver was a novella from Full Dark, No Stars, and if you haven't read that you should.

[Ceindreadh]

 

The Salem's Lot tv movie with David Soul was veddy veddy scary to me......

 

When Salem's Lot aired first I saw part of the first half and was freaked out by the floating kid.

Watched it all the way through a few years later as a teenager and ended up leaving a bible on my bedside table for a few nights.  (my sister - supposedly the 'sensible' one, slept with a few cloves of garlic!)

[FozzyBear]

I watched Carrie (the OG 1970s one) again last night as part of my Halloween viewing schedule. I'm always struck by what a warm open hearted movie that is. No! I'm seriouse! Stay with me! Sue and Tommy are actual nice kids! Sure they act like asshole teenagers in the beginning, but once they are clued into how isolated and lonely Carrie is they act like nice kids. Sue never has a moment of jealousy over Tommy and Carrie even though she sees them kiss on stage and Tommy, once he gets to know Carrie, seams actually smitten with her. In fact most of the kids are pretty decent to Carrie at prom and really try to make amends for being such assholes to her. If I forget where all this is going Carrie and Tommy at prom actually fulfills all my nerdy high school dreams about THAT BOY finally realizing what a catch I am. It makes it all the more horrifying and tragic when it goes so very bad. You're so close to a happy ending and then the bucket of pig's blood and all the death. That's one of the things I love about King's writing, his sympathy for the characters he creates and his understanding of how 1 or 2 bad apples(fuck you Chris!) can really bring about tragedy. King really was the OG anti-bulling message and how even one bully can cause a telekinetic girl to burn down an entire town so be decent to everybody. Or at least that's what I get from it.

[Sharpie66]

I read Carrie when I was 12, and really loved it. It was the first time I had ever read something that mixed up its POV by being a mashup of "source material," including ones that aren't reliable. I also loved it when King did the same thing in The Dead Zone. I wished that the movies would have had a similar mixed up perspective.

Edited November 2, 2014 by Sharpie66

[stonehaven]

Just saw A Good Marriage..and it felt like a Lifetime Movie but with better acting..

I find it ironic that Anthony Lapalgia was the serial killer when one of my favorite episodes of Without a Trace dealt with a woman who finds out her husband is a serial killer...

Yet, this took a different tack..yes, it was slow but it was a study of people....and it made me wonder what I would really do...and then sigh with relief that I am still single...

[MrsRafaelBarba]

Cujo was good, my only issue was the kid.

He grated my nerves to dust, why was he allowed to live?

Same issue with The Shining miniseries, Courtland Meade was awful.

[MarkHB]

The wheel of ka turns: The Dark Tower megaproject may be back on again, this time at Sony.

 

Those who would snark have forgotten the face of their father.

[King of Birds]

The wheel of ka turns: The Dark Tower megaproject may be back on again, this time at Sony.

I was eating lunch and saw this news bit, and thought "Is this just to tease us again? Is this the Marten behind all this, again?"

 

So do we start the whole "Who could play Roland" saga again?

[MarkHB]

So do we start the whole "Who could play Roland" saga again?

 

Probably; they have an all-new script for The Gunslinger and no director, so going back to Javier Bardem seems like a longshot.

[methodwriter85]

James Franco is going to be Jake Epping in 11/22/63? The hell?

 

The guy IS a good actor and he's the right age, but I really thought they were going to go with a guy who had an "everyman" quality. Someone like James Wolk would've been perfect.

 

I don't really see how it'd be possible to continue the story  for multiple seasons...but we'll see.

Edited April 11, 2015 by methodwriter85

[FurryFury]

The wheel of ka turns: The Dark Tower megaproject may be back on again, this time at Sony.

 

Ugh. I'm a big fan of the books (well, the first 4), and I really, really do not want to see them adapted. This is not ASOIAF, written by an ex-TV writer and relatively easily adaptable (at least at first). The Dark Tower is almost guaranteed to fail, especially on big screen. I was so glad when Abrams realized it a few years ago, and then when Howard's project seemingly died too... Oh well.

[Maharincess]

I just found this thread and I'm loving it! Laid up after surgery and am being kept from severe boredom by all of you.

I just want to add my 2 cents. In my opinion Thinner was the worst Steven King movie. I really liked the book but thought the movie was terrible.

Carrie and The Shining are my favorites. They are what I call "end of the bed movies", meaning I'm walking by the TV and notice one of them is on so I forget what I'm doing and sit on the end of the bed and watching it.

I'm sure that makes absolutely no sense. I blame the pain killers!

Thanks for the entertainment.

[methodwriter85]

Will Poulter is the new Pennywise. I'm digging it.

 

Are they going to keep it a period piece or are they updating it, with "present day" being 2016 (or whatever) and the kid's childhoods being in 1986?

 

I will be so pissed if they try to Giver-it and make the kids teenagers. Ugh. Please, please don't. I can take a slight 14-year old playing 12. I can't take hunky 25-year olds playing "16." As Super 8 showed, you can do a story about kids and not have to turn them into oversexed high school juniors in order to have a big hit!

 

On the other end, I'll be annoyed if they try to reduce the thirty-year time lap for the purpose of casting Jennifer Lawrence for Beverly or something. LOL.

 

I mean, I'd take the latter over the former, if we must have characters in their 20's or 30's. However, this needs to stay about childhood fears. If you make these kids teenagers, it's basically just a rip-off of Nightmare on Elm Street.

Edited May 9, 2015 by methodwriter85

[Bruinsfan]

Having younger kid actors becomes hugely problematic if they keep the celebratory gangbang from the end of the flashback story. Though I'd be quite happy to see that particular plot element become a victim of streamlining the script.

[FurryFury]

I can't imagine any adaptation keeping that moment. Ugh.

[methodwriter85]

Wait, that happened for real? Seriously? (I've never read the book, I just know the 1990 t.v. movie.)

Edited May 9, 2015 by methodwriter85

[BatmanBeatles]

Yes indeed.

[Cobalt Stargazer]

Wait, that happened for real? Seriously? (I've never read the book, I just know the 1990 t.v. movie.)

 

Yes, that was actually part of the book. I think its how they even defeated It the first time around, but I don't entirely recall.

[methodwriter85]

But they were like 10! They shouldn't be beyond playing doctor at that point! Damn.

 

Was it explicit or just implied? In the movie they just become like blood brothers.

Edited May 9, 2015 by methodwriter85

[Hybridcookie]

About that scene, I'm spoiler tagging just in case:

 

I think they're about 12, and that scene happens after they sort of (but not really) defeat the creature when they're kids. Defeating the creature, they can feel themselves forgetting/slipping away from each other, so they all have sex with Beverley as way of connection.

From TV Tropes: 'In the novel, the gang, drained of energy after their first encounter with It in Its lair in the sewers, re-power themselves by losing their virginity with Bev. Is it emotionally significant to the story? Yes, but it's still a bunch of children having sex one after the other in a sewer'

It lasts about 5 1/2 pages, but only her encounters with 2 of the boys are described

Edited May 10, 2015 by Hybridcookie

[Bruinsfan]

A LOT of King's stories have an undercurrent of child molestation or too-early sexual development (when it's not spelled out right on the page, as in this novel). Enough that I've often wondered if he's working out issues of real-world abuse in his past.

[BatmanBeatles]

All I know is that he has daddy issues which show up in his work.

[millennium]

A LOT of King's stories have an undercurrent of child molestation or too-early sexual development (when it's not spelled out right on the page, as in this novel). Enough that I've often wondered if he's working out issues of real-world abuse in his past.

 

King's reliance on the theme of child molestation has become embarrassing.      His great works -- Carrie, Salem's Lot, Night Shift, The Stand, Dead Zone, Different Seasons,  Pet Sematary and Skeleton Crew -- contain scarcely a whisper of it.    If it truly was an "issue" of his, I would think it would have emerged somewhere in those books.   But it never did.  

 

The first time I can recall him using child molestation was in "The Library Policeman" in Four Past Midnight.   I was disgusted by it at the time, not only due to the subject matter, but by the inescapable feeling that King was employing it as a gimmick to make a shitty story seem more significant.   He seems to have developed a dependency on it since then.   It's his go-to bogeyman these days when he finds himself unable to create or sustain an atmosphere of convincing horror. 

 

He himself said many years ago:

 

 

 

“I recognize terror as the finest emotion and so I will try to terrorize the reader. But if I find that I cannot terrify, I will try to horrify, and if I find that I cannot horrify, I'll go for the gross-out. I'm not proud. ”

 

I just read Dr. Sleep.   The conversation between Dick O'Halloran and 8-year-old Danny about child molestation was repulsive.   No man would ever speak so graphically to one so young about something so awful.   It was grossly inappropriate and jarred me right out of the story.   I am convinced King employed it for shock value alone. 

 

Overall, Dr. Sleep was just terrible.  

 

It's a pity Stephen King has no one close enough or brave enough to tell him that it's over.

I loved Storm of the Century.  It was so compelling, scary, and the conclusion was really heart wrenching. 

 

 

I have always regretted that Storm of the Century was never written as a novel.  

I can't imagine any adaptation keeping that moment. Ugh.

 

That was the cherry (no pun intended) atop the steaming pile of shit that was IT.

Edited May 23, 2015 by millennium

[FurryFury]

I wouldn't call It a pile of shit. It did have a few well-written, engaging moments (I especially love the ending). But that scene was absolutely unneeded and felt more like a gimmick, yes.

[Bruinsfan]

Overall I like the novel, but it would be improved drastically by being rendered down to a 200-300 page Cliff's Notes version.

[millennium]

I wouldn't call It a pile of shit. It did have a few well-written, engaging moments (I especially love the ending). But that scene was absolutely unneeded and felt more like a gimmick, yes.

 

But see, novels aren't about  moments.   That's the problem.   It's supposed to be a cohesive, credible, evolving story.   To say it had a few engaging moments is the equivalent of going to see a blockbuster movie and coming away with "well, it had some good effects."   It doesn't carry the day for me.

 

Reminds me of Lisey's Story, one of King's colossal failures.   The only good thing was the story within the story, about the father, the two brothers and the basement.   He should have scrapped the rest and gone with that story alone.   Even though I liked that part of the novel, the best I can say for the book as a whole is that it was abysmal.

Edited May 24, 2015 by millennium

[Schweedie]

I've always loved It the novel, in all of its 1100-page glory.

 

I'm not sure how I feel about the idea of Will Poulter as Pennywise. It's true he's got a very distinctive look, but his age just makes me doubtful. Then again no one will ever measure up to Tim Curry for me, so perhaps going for someone entirely different is the right move. I do think a new adaption with better effects could be fun, though! (If 'fun' is the right word.)

 

I often think about how The Long Walk, my favourite of King's books, could be done. A part of me really, really wants to see it, but another part knows it probably wouldn't work.

[Luckylyn]

I often think about how The Long Walk, my favourite of King's books, could be done. A part of me really, really wants to see it, but another part knows it probably wouldn't work.

Frank Darabont has the rights to The Long Walk but hasn't gone forward with it.     I do think it could be adapted with creativity like what Danny Boyle did for 127 Hours.   Plus, intercutting what the tv coverage for something like that would be could be some awesome dark satire.

[Schweedie]

Frank Darabont has the rights to The Long Walk but hasn't gone forward with it.     I do think it could be adapted with creativity like what Danny Boyle did for 127 Hours.   Plus, intercutting what the tv coverage for something like that would be could be some awesome dark satire.

 

Good point about 127 Hours. That was James Franco stuck under a rock for most of the movie, and it was certainly gripping enough! I remember reading that Darabont had the rights to The Long Walk and not being sure whether to be excited or worried about the possibility. But yeah, adding stuff like television coverage and commentary, the way they did with the Hunger Games, would be interesting. That was one of the things I enjoyed about the way they adapted that film, getting out of Katniss' head and seeing the other stuff - that could work for The Long Walk, too. (The ironic thing is that this would probably be seen as a copy of the Hunger Games now, despite it being so much older.)

 

I wonder if they'd allow for the Walk to just be a walk, or if they'd try to add more action to it. There isn't a whole lot of action in the book and it doesn't need it, but I wonder if they'd trust an audience not to be bored with it the way it is.

[Rick Kitchen]

Cary Fukunaga has dropped out of directing It after clashes with the studio.

[Luckylyn]

I actually think his idea of making two separate films was an interesting idea.   I'm rolling my eyes at the studio concerns about Poltergeist using a clown in their advertising.   The clown's not the reason the movie didn't meet expectations.

[King of Birds]

King, about this Fukunaga news.

[millennium]

This article surmises that the project's probably dead.

 

http://www.washingtonpost.com/entertainment/it-remake-indefinitely-pushed-back/2015/05/26/5f6b9d8a-0387-11e5-93f4-f24d4af7f97d_story.html

Good point about 127 Hours. That was James Franco stuck under a rock for most of the movie, and it was certainly gripping enough! I remember reading that Darabont had the rights to The Long Walk and not being sure whether to be excited or worried about the possibility. But yeah, adding stuff like television coverage and commentary, the way they did with the Hunger Games, would be interesting. That was one of the things I enjoyed about the way they adapted that film, getting out of Katniss' head and seeing the other stuff - that could work for The Long Walk, too. (The ironic thing is that this would probably be seen as a copy of the Hunger Games now, despite it being so much older.)

 

I wonder if they'd allow for the Walk to just be a walk, or if they'd try to add more action to it. There isn't a whole lot of action in the book and it doesn't need it, but I wonder if they'd trust an audience not to be bored with it the way it is.

 

Not all books are meant to be movies.   Sometimes I wish they'd just leave certain stories alone.   But they'd make a movie out of King's grocery list if he handed it over to them.

[millennium]

Then again no one will ever measure up to Tim Curry for me, so perhaps going for someone entirely different is the right move.

 

I thought the clown in American Horror Story Freak Show made Tim Curry look like Bozo.  

 

[methodwriter85]

Too bad. I was really looking forward to seeing what Will would have done.

[SoSueMe]

Having younger kid actors becomes hugely problematic if they keep the celebratory gangbang from the end of the flashback story. Though I'd be quite happy to see that particular plot element become a victim of streamlining the script.

Thank you. I agree and I'm glad I'm not the only one.

I'm not sure if I remember that from the movie (maybe I blocked it out, lol). But I remember it from the book and way back then I was all WTF??? What was his point I wonder? That females wield all this power to make or break a brave, successful hero or....that females are there to be used as a resource for men when they feel they need some. It still makes me angry. I wonder if SK has ever been called out on it or commented on it.

Edited May 26, 2015 by SoSueMe

[SFoster21]

I think it was just a teenage boy fantasy and I think that the point was that love conquers evil. I think "gangbang" was not the vibe that King was going for. More like sacrifice, giving, sharing.

It was not in the TV movie.

I can't remember the name of the novel about the Vietnam War era. The first part was made into a movie with Anthony Hopkins. Really liked that book.

[King of Birds]

I can't remember the name of the novel about the Vietnam War era. The first part was made into a movie with Anthony Hopkins. Really liked that book.

Hearts in Atlantis.

[SFoster21]

Hearts in Atlantis.

Thank you! Seriously had no clue. Loved that book!

[Anela]

I think the story that grossed me out the most, was called Survivor. I was sick to my stomach, reading what the character resorted to. It's been something like fifteen years since I read it, and I won't read it again. I've just googled and found that it was called Survivor Type, and it looks like a short movie was made of it.

 

I avoided The Stand, after mum said it made her sick to her stomach. I remember Rage, and The Long Walk. I also liked The Mist, and the more realistic ending than the movie had.

[Luckylyn]

The Stand is worth a read and the miniseries is great to watch.    It's what made me a huge Stephen King fan.

[FurryFury]

I concur, The Stand also made me a fan for life (well, until the last 2 Dark Tower book - can't read a new Stephen King story since 2004). Didn't care about the mini-series, TBH. Also, the original edition has way less of gory/weird stuff, so you can try it, if you find it.

[Anela]

Thanks, I will try the original. I watched the mini-series when I was a teenager, but I didn't expect them to get as gory as the books. 

[Rick Kitchen]

I concur, The Stand also made me a fan for life (well, until the last 2 Dark Tower book - can't read a new Stephen King story since 2004). Didn't care about the mini-series, TBH. Also, the original edition has way less of gory/weird stuff, so you can try it, if you find it.

 

Have you tried "11/22/63"?  I love it, but then I love time travel books.  I'm disappointed it's going to be made into a Hulu show.  Dammit.

[methodwriter85]

I'm disappointed that James Franco is playing Jake Epping. It's not that he's a shitty actor and he is the right age but he doesn't have that Everyman Quality that Jake should have had.

Edited May 28, 2015 by methodwriter85

[TattleTeeny]

Same issue with The Shining miniseries, Courtland Meade was awful.

 

I didn't love him either but I have to admit, he made me almost cry for him a few times -- especially the part with the bees. The poor little boy sounded legitimately afraid and it broke my heart a little! And after that, I felt so mean for not liking his performance.

 

Favorite book: 'Salem's Lot, particularly that scene of the guys having to leave the big sideboard in the Marsten House basement...and then having to go back in to leave the lock. Ooooh, that was perfect! I love the movies too. While the original was pretty silly, it had some good chilling scares in it, and I love the aesthetic of it as a whole. 

 

Favorite movie: Probably Misery as far as quality and adaptation, The Shining (both; original for fun, and miniseries for an honorable adaptation), 'Salem's Lot (both), and Pet Sematary for Dale Midkiff (and that epic head-bump on the nightstand). I also love Silver Bullet to my BF's chagrin.

Edited June 24, 2015 by TattleTeeny

[Demented Daisy]

http://www.flickeringmyth.com/2015/07/more-images-and-videos-from-the-set-of-stephen-kings-112263-starring-james-franco.html-- some images and video from the set of  11/22/63.

 

ETA

 

http://ihorror.com/stephen-kings-cujo-getting-a-strange-new-reboot/-- a reboot of  Cujo that sounds awful.

Edited July 7, 2015 by Demented Daisy