by Rocky Wood
The Moderator, who is King’s personal assistant, responded as follows:
Steve got the idea to do this 2 or 3 years ago, I think. He had asked me to get the audio versions of Hearts in Atlantis to listen to while he drove to Florida to get him back in the groove and then planned to begin writing it when he arrived. I don’t know what happened between November and January, but he started writing another project instead. I’d asked him recently if he still planned to write it but he wasn’t sure if he would as he has other projects… he’s working on that are taking priority.
King began The House on Value Street, a novel inspired by Patty Hearst’s kidnapping, while living in Boulder in the late summer of 1974. It did not work and he abandoned it after six weeks. What happened to the manuscript is unknown. King gives some detail of the work in Danse Macabre:19
It was going to be a roman à clef about the kidnapping of Patty Hearst, her brainwashing … her participation in the bank robbery, the shootout at the SLA hideout in Los Angeles – in my book, the hideout was on Value Street, natch – the fugitive run across the country, the whole ball of wax. It seemed to me to be a highly potent subject, and while I was aware that lots of non-fiction books were sure to be written on the subject, it seemed to me that only a novel might really succeed in explaining all the contradictions… I gathered my research materials … and then I attacked the novel. I attacked it from one side and nothing happened. I tried it from another side and felt it was going pretty well until I discovered all my characters sounded as if they had just stepped whole and sweaty from the dance marathon in Horace McCoy’s They Shoot Horses, Don’t They? I tried it in media res. I tried to imagine it as a stage play, a trick that sometimes works for me when I’m badly stuck. It didn’t work this time.
Kingdom Hospital was a milestone in King’s career. His second attempt at series television, it ran over 15 hours in 2004. According to the ABC website, Stephen King’s Kingdom Hospital was:
…the haunting new drama series created directly for television by the award-winning, bestselling master of horror. Using Lars Von Trier’s Danish mini-series Riget (a.k.a. The Kingdom) as a point of inspiration, King tells the terrifying story of The Kingdom, a hospital with a bizarre population that includes a nearly blind security guard, a nurse who regularly faints at the sight of blood and a paraplegic artist whose recovery is a step beyond miraculous. When patients and staff hear the tortured voice of a little girl crying through the halls, they are dismissive of any suggestion of mysticism or unseen powers … but at their own peril.
The Sony TV website told us, “Kingdom Hospital stands as a supposed shimmering example of modern medicine, but its doctors and patients have begun to collide with lurking supernatural forces which reveal its troubled history. Built upon the site of a great fire, which killed many children over 100 years ago, the hospital still hosts remnant spirits of the unsettled dead.” King used his own near death experience as the inspiration for the character of Peter Rickman. In the last episode, he gave cameo appearances as Johnny B. Good and a lawyer on TV in addition to the audio cameo as the AA sponsor on the telephone in episode six.
To date, copies of the telescript for all nine episodes King wrote or co-wrote have yet to surface.
The first two-hour episode was shown 3 March 2004 and garnered over 14 million viewers, the best new series launch on ABC-TV for over 2 ½ years, although ratings rapidly declined for later episodes. The network unforgivably split the series, with a two-month gap between the ninth and tenth episodes. Ironically, perhaps the finest episode in the series was King’s sad, compelling and redemptive take on events following an alternate reality 1987 World Series, Butterfingers, the last shown before the enforced break.
King and Richard Dooling wrote the teleplays. One episode, in the first known collaboration with her husband, was based on a storyline by Tabitha King. The overall story was original to King, using characters by Lars van Trier. Craig R Baxley directed, as he had Rose Red, The Diary of Ellen Rimbauer and Storm of the Century. Ed Begley Jr. played Dr. Jesse James; Andrew McCarthy appeared as Dr. Hook; Jack Coleman as Peter Rickman; Diane Ladd as Mrs. Druse; and Bruce Davison played Dr. Stegman. The DVD was released in late 2004.
In a column titled A Kingdom That Didn’t Come in Entertainment Weekly for 9 July 2004 King explains why he thinks the series flopped in the ratings. Importantly, he states, “As late as March, Rick [Dooling] and I delivered a season 2 ‘bible’ which the Alphabet net bought, paid for and eagerly received.” Unfortunately there are no plans to produce that second series.
The episodes and writers were: Thy Kingdom Come (Stephen King); Death’s Kingdom (King); Goodbye Kiss (King); The West Side of Midnight (King); Hook’s Kingdom (King and Richard Dooling); The Young and the Headless (Dooling); Black Noise (Dooling); Heartless (Dooling); Butterfingers (King); The Passion of Jimmy Criss (Stephen King, based on a storyline by Tabitha King); Seizure Day (Dooling); Shoulda Stood in Bed (King); Finale (King). The Passion of Jimmy Criss was retitled On the Third Day for the DVD release, perhaps as a result of the runaway success of Mel Gibson’s The Passion of the Christ.
There were many subtle, and none too subtle links, from Kingdom Hospital to King’s other fiction and the series itself is mentioned in The Dark Tower VI: Song of Susannah.
Land of 1,000,000 Years Ago was advertised in Dave’s Rag as “…the new King story!!!!” It is assumed this was written, or was to be written, by young Stephen (only eleven at the time). The advertisement read, “‘Land of 1,000,000 Years Ago.’ Exciting story of 21 people prisoners on an island that should have been extinct 1,000,000 years ago. Order through this newspaper.” The same edition of the newspaper (Summer 1959) advertises a “New Book by Steve King!,” Thirty-One of the Classics. The text of that advertisement, “Read ‘Kidnapped,’ ‘Tom Sawyer,’ and many others!!! If you order in three weeks, only 30c. Contact Steve King %Dave’s Rag’ (sic).” Dave’s Rag itself was a newspaper self-published by Steve King’s brother, Dave. King relates much of its history in On Writing and two King stories from the newspaper, Jumper and Rush Call are reviewed in a separate chapter of this book.
According to a 1986 article in Time magazine King was working on ‘Livre Noir, a detective story in French, “the language that turns dirt into romance.” The quote is presumably from what the article called “the indisputable King of horror” himself. The story also revealed King, promoting It at the time, had “plans to study French in order to finish” the story, indicating it had at least been started.
Milkman was an aborted novel, from which two segments, Morning Deliveries (Milkman #1) and Big Wheels (Milkman #2), were re-written and published as short stories. Big Wheels was first published in a 1980 anthology, New Terrors 2 before King completely re-wrote it for an appearance in Skeleton Crew.
Mr. Rabbit Trick may be the first story King ever wrote. According to an article by Martyn Palmer in The Times magazine (re-published in The Australian Women’s Weekly magazine for January 2004) King, “…first started writing as a seven-year-old, when he presented his mother with a short story called Mr. Rabbit Trick, about magic animals.” As the article resulted from an interview King gave in Los Angeles to promote The Dark Tower V: Wolves of the Calla we can presume King revealed this information. King also refers to what is almost certainly the same story in part 8 of the “C.V.” section of On Writing, in which he notes he wrote four or five “Mr. Rabbit Trick” stories. He sold four of them to his mother for a quarter a piece, “That was the first buck I made in this business.”
In April 2005 it was revealed that King had co-written a script for a sequel to the movie, The Night Flier, based on his short story of the same name. Producer Richard P. Rubinstein told Fangoria magazine, “Mark Pavia, director of the original, came to me with a screenplay for the sequel,” the producer reports. “I don’t usually like sequels, but I thought the script was good and gave it to Stephen to see what he thought.” Not only did King enjoy the screenplay, he decided to get directly involved.
“I thought the script would sit on his shelf for a while,” Rubinstein says, “but suddenly, Steve came to me with a corrected and rewritten screenplay by himself. When I told Mark, I thought he was going to have a heart attack. There were some things he would miss from his original version, but now he had an improved one co-written by Stephen King himself!”
King’s office confirmed he had indeed written an updated draft while in Florida during the winter of 2004-5. The current title for the unproduced movie is The Night Flier 2.
On the Island is a novel King wrote in the period from 1985-90. In an interview with Tim Adams for The Guardian (UK) and published in September 2000, King said the following of the novel, “I started a book … about 15 years ago. It was called On the Island, and it was about rich people who talked these street kids into going to an island and being hunted, with paintballs. And they get there and they find these guys are actually shooting live rounds, and in my story there were two or three who escaped and waited for these rich guys to come back. I’ve got it on a shelf somewhere.” Rocky Wood observed a box containing this manuscript in King’s office in late 2002. It is as yet unclear whether King actually completed the novel (compare “I started…” with “I’ve got it on a shelf…”)
Pinfall is a screenplay segment written for the movie, Creepshow 2. However, there is much speculation as to exactly how much, if anything, of it King wrote. It seems certain the story idea was his – Spignesi states the segment was “based on an unpublished King short story”20. Copies of the screenplay segment, which was cut from the film, circulate but it is far from certain that King did in fact write it.
King wrote The Pit and the Pendulum, and he and Chris Chesley sold copies of it at Durham’s elementary school. It “novelized” the 1961 movie of the same name. All trace of the story has been lost. King tells its story (“…turned out to be my first best-seller”) in section 18 of the “C.V.” part of On Writing. King’s entertaining re-telling of the whole incident, in which he also reveals selling copies of another story, The Invasion of the Star-Creatures that summer, is highly recommended. Concluding his retelling of the incident King says:
Miss Hisler told me I would have to give everyone’s money back. I did so with no argument, even to those kids (and there were quite a few, I’m happy to say) who insisted on keeping their copies of V.I.B. #1. I ended up losing money on the deal after all, but when summer vacation came I printed four dozen copies of a new story, an original called The Invasion of the Star-Creatures, and sold all but four or five.
It is possible this story is the The Star Invaders or a version of the same tale. That story is subject of a separate chapter in this book). Note that some kids “insisted on keeping their copies” of this story. Unlikely though it may seem, is it possible a copy will turn up one day when one of King’s ex-schoolmates cleans out an old box of keepsakes?
King had previously related the history of The Pit and the Pendulum in Douglas Winter’s The Art of Darkness:21
One day I went to Brunswick to see the American International Film of The Pit and the Pendulum with Vincent Price, and I was very impressed by it – very, very scared. And when I went home, I got a bunch of stencils, and I wrote a novelization of the movie, with chapters and everything – although it was only twelve pages long. I bought a ream of typewriter paper, and I bought a stapler and some staples, and I printed, on Dave’s machine, about two hundred and fifty copies of this book. I slugged in a price of a dime on them, and when I took them to school, I was just flabbergasted. In three days, I sold something like seventy of these things. And all of a sudden, I was in the black – it was like a license to steal. That was my first experience with bestsellerdom. But they shut me down. They took me to the principal’s office and told me to stop, although there didn’t seem to be any real reason. My aunt22 taught in that school, and it was just not seemly; it wasn’t right. So I had to quit.
According to Chris Chesley, there was another such story, although he doesn’t provide the title. Chesley told Beahm:23
In another story, King playfully wove fact and fiction, using the real names of fellow students in a fictional hostage situation. “It was all of twenty pages,” recalled Chesley, “and it was a story where he used real kids who had taken over the grammar school. Of course, the people that were in the story read the story; because of things like that, King was lionized. He could take real people and set them into this setting where we were heroes. In this story, we died fighting the National Guard. The kids he liked best ‘died’ last; so naturally, we were all wondering when we were going to ‘die’.”
Poltergeist was a screenplay by King, written for Stephen Spielberg, who apparently turned down each draft as excessively scary. It is not known whether any copies exist. The movie was produced using a script written by Spielberg and two others.
In his introduction to The Old Dude’s Ticker, King mentions he wrote two pastiches24 about 1971-1972. “The first was a modern day revision of Nikolai Gogol’s story, ‘The Ring’ (my version was called ‘The Spear,’ I think).” That one is lost. The other story was, of course, The Old Dude’s Ticker, which is the subject of a chapter of this book.
The Street Kid’s Genesis is the title King gave a “vernacular version of the Book of Genesis” from the Bible. King wrote this piece and sent it to Steve Gould. The date and length are unknown.
Training Exercises is an unproduced film treatment. According to the Castle Rock newsletter for May 1986:
Training Exercises is a treatment developed by Stephen King. It concerns a number of elderly WWII and Korean warhorses who own their own Pacific Island and trick young kids into coming each year to participate in a harmless “training exercise.” The hero is a kid of 18 or so, a down-and-out and would-be actor from L.A., who answers an ad and becomes part of this year’s Training Exercise. Except it all turns out to be real, with blood, bullets and death. These old guys have been slaughtering people for years.
Interestingly, King plugged Battle Royale by Koushun Takami in his Entertainment Weekly column for 12 August 2005. King’s short take on the novel:
Forty-two Japanese high school kids who think they’re going on a class trip are instead dropped on an island, issued weapons ranging from machine guns to kitchen forks, and forced to fight it out until only one is left alive. Royale bears some resemblance to Richard Bachman’s The Long Walk.
In Stephen King Collectibles: An Illustrated Price Guide25 author George Beahm writes of an Untitled work not referenced anywhere else in published King research: “…I know of an unpublished story in short manuscript form, inscribed to the mother of one of King’s childhood friends from Durham ….” It is unclear whether this is an otherwise unknown story, or a simply a manuscript of an unpublished short story noted elsewhere in this chapter.
Untitled: King told Douglas Winter this in an interview:
I can remember the first real horror story that I wrote. I was about seven years old, and I had internalized the idea from the movies that, when everything looked blackest, the scientists would come up with some off-the-wall solution that would take care of things. I wrote about this big dinosaur that was really ripping ass all over everything, and finally one guy said, “Wait, I have a theory – the old dinosaurs used to be allergic to leather.” So they went out and threw leather boots and leather shoes and leather vests at it, and it went away.26
Untitled: The Lisbon Monthly for November 1986 carried an article titled Stephen King: “Lisbon High’s Most Celebrated Alumnus”. In this article Ambra Watkins reports King “also wrote a successful script for Class Day about Batman and Robin.” More detail appears in the 1967 Lisbon High School Yearbook which reports:
Two members of The Drum staff decided to write their own little skit for class night based on the television program, “Batman” … Danny Emond and Steve King began writing their comic tale … After finishing the script, the (senior class) committee approved the writing, made minor changes and began to put it together for the
stage. Steve and Danny took the leading roles of Batman and Robin. The plot concerned a possible attack on Lisbon High which was to be prevented by the daring duo … When Batman and Robin were needed, the two appeared on a tricycle down the middle of the gymnasium.
A photo from the yearbook shows King played Robin in the skit, performed on the evening of 7 June 1966. The class graduated the following day.
Untitled: In February 2007, author Stephen R. Donaldson reported on his official website:
Incidentally (for you trivia buffs), he [King] and I once collaborated – with quite a few other writers – on what I think of as a “gag” story. It was so long ago that I’ve forgotten most of the details. But the purpose of the exercise was to raise money for a charity at an sf/f convention. Without any prior discussion, each writer in turn wrote for 30-45 minutes, then folded the paper so that only the last sentence was visible. With only that last sentence for “context,” the next writer attempted to continue the “story.” I had to go on from King’s last sentence. The result, as I recall, was hysterically surreal.
Donaldson recalls this was around 1980. It seems likely that the finished result was later auctioned.