Stephen King's new book 11/23/63 is like what Triple Agent was for Eric Rohmer: They are both late works that
explore the era of their authors childhood, though not so much in a vein of
romantic nostalgia but through a more critical lens. The subject of Rohmer's Triple
Agent is the opaqueness of others, even
those that are closest to us, through a look at humanity at its extreme within
the behind-the-scene politics of the Popular Front in France in the thirties,
as the Russian Fiodor betrays his Greek wife Arsinoé. While for King
it is the cultural and emotional legacy of the post-WWII American rural life, with the
large catastrophe being the assassination of John F. Kennedy in Dallas Texas on
November twenty-third in nine-teen-sixty-three. In 11/23/63, Jake Epping time-travels from the present to the past
to do something "good", make the world a better place, but what he finds there is
just as racist and vicious as anything today - and say that the assassination
was prevented, whose to say the world would a better place? Even though
the two artists are different in sensibility they very much to speak to a
certain regional populace for both of their respective countries, with Rohmer
being in the tradition of a French discursive and articulate intellectual
tradition while for King that of a blue-collar and mainstream America - the voice
of the people.
To get ready for the class on The Shining (tonight, Monday June 11th at 7PM) in the
series In Nayman's Terms: The Films of Stanley Kubrick at the Miles Nadal JCC, I've found and transcribed a rare interview
with Stephen King where he discusses his thoughts on the Kubrick adaptation as
well as other anecdotes. Vincent LoBrutto in his excellent Kubrick biography
Stanley Kubrick: A Biography first
brought up this King interview, which I then found in the June 1986 issue of American
Film that I was able to find at the Film Reference Library.
Though to start off here is how most people would be
familiar with King's views on Kubrick's adaptation of The Shining, from the introduction to the reprint edition of The
Shining:
"My single conversation with the late Stanley Kubrick, about six months before he commenced filming his version of The Shining, suggested that it was this quality of the writing that appealed to him: What, exactly, is impelling Jack Torrance toward murder in the winter-isolated rooms and hallways of the Overlook Hotel? Is it undead people, or undead memories? Mr. Kubrick and I came to different conclusions (I always thought there were malevolent ghosts in the Overlook, driving Jack to the precipice), but perhaps those different conclusions are, in fact, the same. For aren't memories the true ghosts of our lives? Do they not drive all of us to words and acts we regret from time to time?"
*****
"King of The Road" by
Darrel Ewing and Dennis Myers (American Film, June 1986)
He's the self-proclaimed "Sears catalog with a
plot," the chronicler of contemporary America's dreams, desires, and
fears. His name is synonymous with literary horror. He is Stephen King, and he
holds the imagination of millions of Americans hostage. Mixing humor and horror
into the landscape of middle-class America, King fascinates and terrifies
people in record numbers. With his extensive mainstream popularity, he is, in
effect, the literary counterpart of Hollywood's Stephen Spielberg. Spielberg
and King have similar sensibilities. Both situate the evil aspects of the world
within the commonplace. The difference between the two, of course, is that
Spielberg offers transcendence and escape, but for King the horror is never
ending, and often apocalyptic.
King's film credits include eleven movies based on his
writings, with another four in development, and Maximum Overdrive, the first film he has not only written but also
directed. Based on his short story "Trucks," it is set for a national
release date in July.
Question: Can you
talk about Maximum Overdrive -
what was it like directing your first movie?
Stephen King: The
movie is about all these vehicles going crazy and running by themselves, so we
started shooting a lot of gas pedals, clutches, transmissions, things like
that, operating themselves. We had one sequence: The gas pedal to the floor,
the gas pedal goes up, the clutch goes in, the gear shifts by itself, the
clutch comes out, and the gas pedal goes back to the floor again. We were able
to shoot everything but the transmission from the driver's-side door. The
transmission was a problem, because we kept seeing either a corner of the
studio or a reflection.
So I said: This is no problem, we will simply take the
camera around to the other side and shoot the transmission from there. Total
silence. Everybody looked at everybody else. You know what's happening here,
right? I'd crossed the axis. It was like farting at the dinner party: Nobody
wanted to say you've made a terrible mistake. I didn't get this job because I
could direct or because I had any background in film; I got it because I was
Stephen King.
So finally [cameraman] Daniele Nannuzzi told me I'd
crossed the 180=degree axis and that this simply wasn't done, and although I
didn't understand what it was, I grasped the idea that it was breaking a rule.
Later on I called George [Romero] up on the phone and I
said, "What is this axis shit?" and he laughed his head off, and
explained it, and I said, "Can you break it - the rule?" He said, "It's
better not to, but if you have to, you can. If you look at The Battleship
Potemkin" (which I never have),
"it crosses the axis all the time and the guy [Sergei Eisenstein] gets
away with it." Then I saw David Lynch and asked him: "What's this
about crossing the axis?" and he burst out laughing and said,
"Stephen, you can do anything. You're the director." Then he paused
and said, "But it doesn't cut together."
Question: What
effect were you aiming for in Maximum Overdrive?
King: I wanted it
to move fast. It's a wonderful moron picture, in that sense. It's a really
iilliterate picture in a lot of ways. There isn't a lot of dialogue in it. It's
fast. A lot of things explode. It's very profane, very vulgar, quite violent in
some places. We're going to have trouble with the Ratings Board, I guess.
Question: Did you
pay attention to character relations in the story or did you want to wow the
audience with spectacle?
King: I'm
interested in my people. One of the few really sensible things that anybody
said at the story conference that we had at MGM in L.A. - those people, what an
alien mentality! - But somebody did say that if the charactersdon't stand out
and this is just a movie about machines it'll be a bad picture. Their solution
was to suggest that a lot of dialogue and scenes between the major characters
be added for character and texture. I was always calling them the jumbo
"John! Oh, Martha!" scenes because they're like soap operas. We shot
'em. We just cut 'em all out in the editing room, every single one.
It's like that classic moment in The Swarm where Fred MacMurray and Olivia De Havilland have
this scene, and Fred says the equivalent - I swear this is true - he doesn't
actually say this, he says something like, "The bees are coming, and we'll
all probably be killed, but thank Christ I'm not impotent anymore." That's
really what they want.
I'm interested in character eccentricity, in the
interactions of daily life that you don't necessarily see on the screen. I'm
not particularly interested in character in the traditional sense of, let's
say, Scorsese. I prefer Hitchcock, because the character that you find really
interesting in his picture are always in supporting roles, like the old lady
who lectures about the birds in The Birds:
"They can't. It's simply not possible. Their brain pans are too
small."
Question: What do
you feel are some of the scariest moments in your film adaptations?
King: You mean
that scared me in the theater? When that hand comes out of the grave in Carrie at the end. Man, I thought I was going to shit in
my pants.
Question: You had
no idea ... ?
King: Yeah, I knew
they were going to do it, and I still almost shit in my pants. The first time I
saw Carrie with an audience they
previewed it about a week and a half before Halloween. They didn't do a
screening in Maine, but they did one in Boston, so my wife and I went down to
the theater, and I just looked around in total dismay, because the regular
picture that they were showing was Norman, Is That You? with Redd Foxx. The theater was entirely full of
black people. We looked like two little grains of salt in a pepper shake, and
we thought: This audience is just going to rate the hell out of this picture.
What are they going to think about a skinny little white girl with her
menstrual problems? And that's the way it started, and then, little by little,
they got on her side, you know, and when she started going her shtick, I mean,
they're going, "Tear it up!" "Go for it!" and all this
other stuff. These two guys were talking behind us, and we were llistening to
them, and at the end they're putting on their coats and getting ready to leave.
Suddenly this hand comes up, and these two big guys screamed along with
everyone else, and one of them goes, "That's it!" That's it! She ain't
never gonna be right!" And I knew it was going to be a hit.
Question: What do
you think of the movies adapted from your books?
King: Firestarter
is one of the worst of the bunch, even though in terms of story it's very close
to the original. But it's flavorless; it's like cafeteria mashed potatoes.
There are things that happen in terms of special effects in that movie that
make no sense to whatsoever. Why this kid's hair blows every time she starts
fire is totally beyond my understanding. I never got a satisfactory answer when
I saw the rough cut. By that time, Dino [De Laurentiis] was regularly asking me
for input, so I'd give him the input. Sometimes he'd take it. In that case...
The movie has great actors, with the exception of the
lead, David Keith, who I didn't feel was very good - my wife said that he has
stupid eyes. The actors were allowed to do pretty much what they wanted to do.
Martin Sheen, who is a great actor, with no direction and nobody to him - and I
mean there must have been literally no direction - with nobody to pull him in
and say, "Stop what you're doing," he simply reprised Greg Stillson
[in The Dead Zone]. That's all there
is; it's the same character exactly. But Greg Stillson should not be in charge
of The Shop [secret government organization in Firestarter]. He's not the kind of guy who gets that job.
Question: You were
disappointed in The Shining - if
you were directing it now, what would you do with it?
King: Oh, I would
do everything different. There's a lot to like about it. But it's a great big
beautiful Cadillac with no motor inside. You can sit in it, and you can enjoy
the smell of the leather upholstery - the only thing you can't do is drive it
anywhere. So I would do everything different. The real problem is that Kubrick
set out to make a horror picture with no apparent understanding of the genre.
Everything about it scream that from the beginning to the end, from plot
decisions to that final - which has been used before on The Twilight
Zone.
The best illustration of what's wrong with that movie, and
I guess it is a scary moment - yeah, there is one scary moment in The
Shining. It's a classic fairy tale
situation, the Bluebeard situation, where Bluebeard says, "You can go
anywhere in the castle, but don't go into this room." Only in this case,
what Bluebeard says is, "You can do anything you want or go anywhere you
want, but you can't look at my book - which I'm going to leave right
here." So she can't help it, she looks at it. And we're frightened when
she does that because we know the conventions of the genre and we know that the
conventions of the genre demand that she be caught. The it gets worse, because
when she starts to thumb through the pages she sees that he's writing the same
thing over and over again: "All work and no play makes Jack a dull
boy." And she's thumbing through it faster and faster and faster, and
we're cutting back and forth to her face, from the book to her face, from the
face to the book, back and forth, and it's great, because you know he's going
to come.
Then for some reason that I still don't understand,
Kubrick cuts away and shows us Nicholson approaching her. Now, sometimes this
works. Hitchcock said that if you show the bomb under the table and then have
the guy sitting down, it's worse than if the bomb just explodes, and that's
right, except that sometimes it's wrong. In this case, you know that he's
there, you don't need to see him, and what should happen is that while she's looking at the book, there
should be just this [King grabs the interviewer's shoulder], and cuts away and
shows us Nicholson first, so there's no payoff. That's the end of it; that's
the dissipation of the climax.
I wanted to like that movie. I was so flattered that
Kubrick was going to do something of mine. The first time he called, it was
7:30 in the morning. I was standing in the bathroom in my underwear, shaving,
and my wife comes in and her eyes are bugging out. I thought one of the kids
must be choking in the kitchen or something. She says, "Stanley Kubrick is
on the phone!" I mean, I was just floored. I didn't even take the shaving
cream off my face.
Just about the first thing he said was, The whole idea of
ghosts is always optimistic, isn't it?" And I said, with a hangover and
one eye almost open, "I don't understand what you mean." He said,
"Well, the concept of the ghost presupposes life after death. That's a
cheerful concept, isn't it?" And it sounded so plausible that for a moment
I just floundered and didn't say anything, and then I said, "But what
about hell?" There was a long pause on his end, and then he came in a very
stiff voice and said, "But I don't believe in hell." He doesn't
believe in ghosts, either, he just found the whole concept very optimistic,
which is what leads his version of the happy ending for Jack Torrance - this
closed loop where he is always the caretaker. He didn't seem to want to get
behind the concept of the ghost as a damned soul.
Question: It
sounds as though he was trying to rewrite the horror genre.
King: I'm sure
that he wanted to bust it open, to do something new with it, but it is very
unbustable, which is one of the reasons it has endeared as long as it has.
Question: What was
it you liked about David Cronenberg's direction of The Dead Zone?
King: If there
were no element of horror in my books, they'd be the dullest books ever
written. Everything in those stories is totally ordinary - Dairy Queens -
except you take one element and you take that out of context. Cronenberg did
the ordinary, and nobody else who has used my books really has. I thought that
Lewis Teague, who directed Cujo,
did to a degree, except that Teague always seems to me to get this kind of
soap-opera look in his people and his sets. But once you got them to the house,
I mean, that movie just Sonny Liston. I love it.
One of the guys who worked on Dead Zone, someone I respect very much, told that Dino was
the first producer David Cronenberg ever had who forced him to direct. Who
forced him to approach the job, not as this gorgeous toy that was made for
David Cronenberg, but as a job where he had a responsibility to the producer
and to the audience. And that's another reason why Dead Zone was a good picture.
Question: Where
did you get the idea for it?
King: For some
reason I had just a scene in my mind of this teacher, and a test going on, and
how quiet the room is when you're having a really tough test, and everybody is
bent over and there's no sound whatsoever, and then this girl finishing up and
handing her test paper to the teacher, and their hands coming into contact, and
the teacher saying, "You must go home at once. Your house is on fire.
Everybody's going to die." And everyone in the room looks up, sort of
pinning him with their eyes, and him being very self-conscious and like a crazy
person. Something like that.
The scene never ended up in the book at all - it was just
a focus point. The story was supposed to be about this guy who eventually would
shake hands with the man is going to blow up the world. I got interested in the
idea of whether it would be possible to write a moral novel where an assassin,
an American assassin, actually was a good guy, or where the act would be
justified. When you write a novel - well, at least for me, because I never
think about theme as a starting point - I just think about story. But sometimes
about three-quarters o the way through the first draft you'll discover that
there is a theme, or the potential for a theme. Or you discover what it is that
you were actually talking about all along.
In Dead Zone, I
thought that what I was talking about was the way that we sometimes think gifts
or special talents are actually the things that cause people to be totally
rejected by society. Books like Carrie and Firestarter are
instinctive rebellings against that. I think that Dead Zone is the only time that I was able to go back and
actually approach the whole rewrite of the book with one unifying idea in mind,
which made it into a novel. I mean, it's actually sort of thoughtful.
Pet Sematary to
some degree is the same: It's supposed to be a reflection on what happens when
people in a materialistic society, people who live only for materialistic
reasons, come into contact with questions of faith and death and outside
forces.
Question: What do
you think of America at present? Is it ordinary?
King: I think the
same thing about it that I have always thought: I think it's fantastic. We're
killing ourselves; we're fiddling while Rome burns. I mean, while we've got
enough explosives to turn planet Earth into the second asteroid belt, the
largest weekly magazine in the country talking about where celebrities shop,
and why people in Hollywoo don't want to serve finder foods any more. It all
seems really ridiculous to me, but I love it. I love everything about it.
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