Dino De Laurentiis is the Irwin Allen of his generation: coarse, lacking subtlety, making films of vulgar pretentiousness that personify the most venal attitudes of the industry. He ballyhoos the fact that he had won two Oscars, but hardly anyone realizes they were for Fellini's La Strada and Nights of Cabiria in 1954 and 1957—and let's not fool ourselves, even if the publicity flaks do: those are Fellini films, not De Laurentiis films—long before he became the cottage industry responsible for Death Wish, the remakes of King Kong and The Hurricane, the travesty known as Flash Gordon, Amityville II and Amityville 3-D, Conan the Barbarian and the embarrassing King of the Gypsies.
But Dino De Laurentiis is precisely the sort of intellect most strongly drawn to the works of Stephen King. He is not a lone blade of grass in the desert. He is merely the most visible growth on the King horizon. Stephen King has had nine films made from his words, and there is a formulaic reason why all but one or two of those films have been dross.
Next time I'll try to codify that reason.
Until then, and more about these films later, go see Repo Man (if you can find it) and Indiana Jones and the Temple of Doom. Avoid with all your might Streets of Fire. Don't miss Ghostbusters. And prepare yourself to avoid all reviews and blandishments that will suggest you see Gremlins, one of the most purely evil films ever visited on the filmgoing public.
I will deal at length with each of these as soon as I blight my friendship with Stephen King.
The Magazine of Fantasy & Science Fiction / October 1984
INSTALLMENT 4:
In Which We Discover Why The Children Don't Look Like Their Parents
Pinter works, though he shouldn't; and I'll be damned if I can discern why; he just does. Bradbury and Hemingway don't; and I think I can figure out why they don't, which is a clue to why Stephen King doesn't, either. Xenogenesis seems to be the question this time around, and if you'll go to your Unabridged and look it up, I'll wait right here for you and tell you all about it when you get back.
Times passes. Leaves flying free from a calendar. The seasons change. The reader returns from the Unabridged.
Now that we understand the meaning of the word Xenogenesis, let us consider why it is that King's books—as seemingly hot for metamorphosis as any stuff ever written by anyone—usually wind up as deranged as Idi Amin and as cruel as January in Chicago and as unsatisfying as sex with the pantyhose still on: why it is that the children, hideous and crippled offspring, do not resemble their parents.
First, I can just imagine your surprise when I point out that this thing King has been around in the literary consciousness a mere ten years. It was just exactly an eyeblink decade ago that the schoolteacher from Maine wrote:
Nobody was really surprised when it happened, not really, not at the subconscious level where savage things grow . . . Showers turning off one by one, girls stepping out, removing pastel bathing caps, toweling, spraying deodorant, checking the clock over the door. Bras were hooked, underpants stepped into . . . Calls and catcalls rebounded with all the snap and flicker of billiard balls after a hard break . . . Carrie turned off the shower. It died in a drip and a gurgle . . . It wasn't until she stepped out that they all saw the blood running down her leg.
Second, I'll bet none of you realized what a fluke it was that King took off so abruptly. Well, here's the odd and unpredictable explanation, conveyed because I happened to be there when it happened. (Who else would tell you this stuff, gang?)
Doubleday had purchased Carrie for a small advance. It was, in the corporate cosmos, just another mid-list title, a spooky story to be marketed without much foofaraw among the first novels, the "learn to love your brown rice and get svelte thighs in 30 minutes" offerings, the books one finds in the knockoff catalogues nine months later at $1.49 plus a free shopping bag. But King's editor read that opening sequence in which the telekinetic, Carrie White, gets her first menstrual experience before the eyes of a covey of teenage shrikes, and more than the lightbulb in the locker room exploded. Xeroxes of the manuscript were run off; they were disseminated widely in-house; women editors passed them on to female secretaries, who took them home and gave them to their friends. That first scene bit hard. It was the essence of the secret of Stephen King's phenomenal success: the everyday experience raised to the mythic level by the application of fantasy to a potent cultural trope. It was Jungian archetype goosed with ten million volts of emotional power. It was the commonly-shared horrible memory of half the population, reinterpreted. It was the flash of recognition, the miracle of that rare instant in which readers dulled by years of reading artful lies felt their skin stretched tight by an encounter with artful truth.
Stephen King, in one emblematic image, had taken control of his destiny.
I'm not even sure Steve, for all his self-knowledge, has an unvarnished perception of how close he came to remaining a schoolteacher who writes paperback originals as a hobby and to supplement the family income in his spare time when he's not too fagged out from extracurricular duties at the high school.
But just as Ian Fleming became an "overnight success" when John F. Kennedy idly mentioned that the James Bond books—which had been around for years—were his secret passion; just as Dune took off in paperback years after its many rejections by publishers and its disappointing sale in hardcover, when Frank Herbert came to be called "the father of Earth Day" and the novel was included in The Whole Earth Catalog; just as Joseph Heller, Joseph Heller's agent, Joseph Heller's publisher and the Eastern Literary Establishment that had trashed Catch-22 when it was first published, began trumpeting Heller's genius when another literary agent (not Heller's), named Candida Donadio, ran around New York jamming the book under people's noses, telling them it was a new American classic; in just that inexplicable, unpredictable, magic way, Doubleday's in-house interest spread. To Publishers Weekly, to the desk of Bennett Cerf, to the attention of first readers for the film studios on the Coast, to the sales force mandated to sell that season's line, to the bookstore buyers, and into the cocktail-party chatter of the word-of-mouth crowd. The word spread: this Carrie novel is hot.
And the readers were rewarded. It was hot: because King had tapped into the collective unconscious with Carrie White's ordeal. The basic premise was an easy one to swallow, and once down, all that followed was characterization. That is the secret of Stephen King's success in just ten years, and it is the reason why, in my view, movies based on King novels never resemble the perfectly decent novels that inspired them.
In films written by Harold Pinter as screenplay, or in films based on Pinter plays, it is not uncommon for two people to be sitting squarely in the center of a two-shot speaking as follows:
CORA: (Cockney accent) Would'ja like a nice piece of fried bread for breakfast, Bert?
BERT: (abstracted grunting) Yup. Fried bread'd be nice.
CORA: Yes . . . fried bread is nice, in't it?
BERT: Yuh. I like fried bread.
CORA: Well, then, there 'tis: Nice fried bread.
BERT: It's nice fried bread.
CORA: (pleased) Is it nice, then?
BERT: Yuh. Fried bread's nice.
Unless you have heard me do my absolutely hilarious Pinter parody, or have seen every Pinter play and film out of unconstrained admiration for the man's work—as have I—then the foregoing copy cannot possibly read well; nor should it, by all the laws of dramaturgy, play well onscreen. But it does. I cannot decipher the code; but the cadences work like a dray horse, pulling the plot and character development, the ever-tightening tension and emotional conflict, toward the goal of mesmerizing involvement that is Pinter's hallmark.
We have in this use of revivified language a sort of superimposed verbal continuum at once alien to our ear and hypnotically inviting. To say more, is to say less. It does work.
But if we use the special written language of Bradbury and Hemingway as examples, we see that such "special speaking" does not travel well. It bruises too easily.
Perhaps it is bec
ause of the reverence lavished on the material by the scenarists, who are made achingly aware of the fact that they are dealing with literature, that blinds them as they build in the flaws we perceive when the film is thrown up on the screen. Perhaps it is because real people in the real world don't usually speak in a kind of poetic scansion. Perhaps it is because we love the primary materials so much that no amount of adherence to source can satisfy us. But I don't think any of those hypotheses, singly or as a group, pink the core reason why neither Bradbury's nor Hemingway's arresting fictions ever became memorable films. When Rock Hudson or Rod Steiger or Oskar Werner mouth Bradburyisms such as:
"Cora. Wouldn't it be nice to take a Sunday walk the way we used to do, with your silk parasol and your long dress swishing along, and sit on those wire-legged chairs at the soda parlor and smell the drugstore the way they used to smell? Why don't drugstores smell that way any more? And order two sarsaparillas for us, Cora, and then ride out in our 1910 Ford to Hannahan's Pier for a box supper and listen to the brass band. How about it? . . . If you could make a wish and take a ride on those oak-lined country roads like they had before cars started rushing, would you do it?"
or Gregory Peck or Ava Gardner carry on this sort of conversation from Hemingway:
"Where did we stay in Paris?"
"At the Crillon. You know that."
"Why do I know that?"
"That's where we always stayed."
"No. Not always."
"There and at the Pavillion Henri-Quatre in St. Germain. You said you loved it there."
"Love is a dunghill. And I'm the cock that gets on it to crow."
"If you have to go away, is it absolutely necessary to kill off everything you leave behind?
I mean do you have to take away everything? Do you have to kill your horse, and your wife and burn your saddle and your armor?"
what we get is the auditory equivalent of spinach. The actors invariably convey a sense of embarrassment, the dialogue marches from their mouths like Prussian dragoons following Feldmarschall von Blücher's charge at Ligny, and we as audience either wince or giggle at the pomposity of what sounds like posturing.
This "special speaking" is one of the richest elements in Bradbury and Hemingway. It reads as inspired transliteration of the commonplace. But when spoken aloud, by performers whose chief aim is to convey a sense of verisimilitude, it becomes parody. (And that Bradbury and Hemingway have been parodied endlessly, by both high and low talents, only adds to their preeminence. They are sui generis for all the gibes.)
The links between King and Bradbury and Hemingway in this respect seem to me to be the explanation why their work does not for good films make. That which links them is this:
Like Harold Pinter and Ernest Hemingway, Ray Bradbury and Stephen King are profoundly allegorical writers.
The four of them seem to be mimetic writers, but they aren't! They seem to be writing simply, uncomplicatedly, but they aren't! As with the dancing of Fred Astaire—which seems so loose and effortless and easy that even the most lumpfooted of us ought to be able to duplicate the moves—until we try it and fall on our faces—what these writers do is make the creation of High Art seem replicable.
The bare bones of their plots . . .
A sinister manservant manipulates the life of his employer to the point where their roles are reversed.
An ex-prizefighter is tracked down and killed by hired guns for an offense which is never codified.
A "fireman," whose job it is to burn books because they are seditious, becomes secretly enamored of the joys of reading.
A young girl with the latent telekinetic ability to start fires comes to maturity and lets loose her power vengefully.
. . . bare bones that have underlain a hundred different stories that differ from these only in the most minimally variant ways. The plots count for little. The stories are not wildly inventive. The sequence of events is not skull-cracking. It is the style in which they are written that gives them wing. They are memorable not because of the thin storylines, but because the manner in which they have been written is so compelling that we are drawn into the fictional universe and once there we are bound subjects of the master creator.
Each of these examples draws deeply from the well of myth and archetype. The collective unconscious calls to us and we go willingly where Hemingway and Bradbury and Pinter . . . and King . . . beckon us to follow.
Stephen King's books work as well as they do because he is writing more of shadow than of substance. He drills into the flow of cerebro-spinal fluid with the dialectical function of a modern American mythos, dealing with archetypal images from the pre-conscious or conscious that presage crises in our culture even as they become realities.
Like George Lucas, Stephen King has read Campbell's The Masks of God, and he knows the power of myth. He knows what makes us tremble. He knows about moonlight reflecting off the fangs. It isn't his plots that press against our chest, it is the impact of his allegory.
But those who bought for film translation 'Salem's Lot, Cujo, Christine, "Children of the Corn" and Firestarter cannot read. For them, the "special speaking" of King's nightmares, the element that sets King's work so far above the general run of chiller fiction, is merely white noise. It is the first thing dropped when work begins on the script, when the scenarist "takes a meeting" to discuss what the producer or the studio wants delivered. What is left is the bare bones plot, the least part of what King has to offer. (Apart from the name Stephen King, which is what draws us to the theater.)
And when the script is in work, the scenarist discovers that there isn't enough at hand to make either a coherent or an artful motion picture. So blood is added. Knives are added. Fangs are added. Special effects grotesqueries are added. But the characters have been dumbed-up, the tone has been lost; the mythic undercurrents have been dammed and the dialectical function has been rendered inoperative. What is left for us is bare bones, blood and cliché.
It is difficult to get Steve King to comment on such artsy-fartsy considerations. Like many other extraordinarily successful artists, he is consciously fearful of the spite and envy his preeminence engenders in critics, other writers, a fickle audience that just sits knitting with Mme. Defarge, waiting for the artist to show the tiniest edge of hubris. Suggest, as I did, to Steve King that Cujo is a gawdawful lump of indigestible grue, and he will respond, "I like it. It's just a movie that stands there and keeps punching."
How is the critic, angry at the crippling of each new King novel when it crutches onto the screen, to combat such remarks? By protecting himself in this way—and it is not for the critic to say whether King truly believes these things he says in defense of the butchers who serve up the bloody remnants that were once creditable novels—he unmans all rushes to his defense. Yet without such mounting of the barricades in his support, how can the situation be altered?
Take for instance Children of the Corn (New World Pictures). Here is a minor fable of frightfulness, a mere thirty pages in King's 1978 collection Night Shift; a one-punch short story whose weight rests on that most difficult of all themes to handle, little kids in mortal jeopardy. Barely enough there for a short film, much less a feature-length attempt.
How good is this recent adaptation of a King story? Los Angeles magazine began its review of Firestarter like so: "This latest in a seemingly endless chain of films made from Stephen King novels isn't the worst of the bunch, 'Children of the Corn' wins that title hands down." That's how bad it is.
Within the first 3½ minutes (by stopwatch) we see four people agonizingly die from poison, one man get his throat cut with a butcher knife, one man get his hand taken off with a meat slicer, a death by pruning hook, a death by sickle, a death by tanning knife . . . at least nine oncamera slaughters, maybe eleven (the intercuts are fastfastfast), and one woman murdered over the telephone, which we don't see, but hear. Stomach go whooops.
Utterly humorless, as ineptly directed as a film school freshman's class project, a
cted with all the panache of a grope in the backseat of a VW, Children of the Corn features the same kind of "dream sequences" proffered as shtick by Landis in An American Werewolf in London, De Palma in Carrie and Dressed to Kill, and by even less talented of the directorial coterie aptly labeled (by Alain Resnais) "the wise guy smart alecks." These and-then-I-woke-up-and-it-had-all-been-a-bad-dream inserts, which in no way advance the plot of the film, are a new dodge by which Fritz Kiersch, Corn's director, and his contemporaries—bloodletters with viewfinders—slip in gratuitous scenes of horror and explicit SFX-enhanced carnage. This has become a trope when adapting King's novels to the screen, a filmic device abhorrent in the extreme not only because it is an abattoir substitute for the artful use of terror, but because it panders to the lowest, vilest tastes of an already debased audience.
Harlan Ellison's Watching Page 24