by George Beahm
It takes an honest man to make such an admission. As Clint Eastwood reminds us, “A wise man knows his limitations.”
Directing is a craft and an art that, like any such endeavor, requires years to master. King, who had never put in the time, did the best he could, but he was in over his head, and he knew it. In one instance, he was setting up to shoot a scene, and the cameraman told him that he was shooting it cross-axis. King didn’t understand what he was doing wrong, until it was pointed out to him.
Nominated for two Golden Raspberry Awards (Worst Director for King, Worst Actor for Emilio Estevez), the campy movie, according to the film Web site Rotten Tomatoes, got a 17 percent approval rating from critics, but fans gave it a 50 percent rating. In other words, it was a movie more for fans than critics, a popcorn movie at which you’re best advised to check your brains at the door and go in to have a good time.
When asked by Cinefantastique’s Gary Wood if he’d consider directing again, King demurred. “I can’t see myself doing anything like this again, at least not until my family has all grown up. I want to be around to enjoy them while I can.”
King never sat in the director’s chair again, preferring to sit himself down in front of his computer to instead put it into maximum overdrive. (He has since expressed a desire to direct Lisey’s Story.)
One anecdote that didn’t make the news: King, at the time of filming already a household name and recognizable figure in public, had his family down for a visit on the set. They went to a local restaurant for a sit-down meal, and King remarked that he was surprised when no one came up to him with a piece of paper in hand to get an autograph. But when they left the restaurant, they saw why: Dozens of fans had lined up outside for an autograph, waiting for him and his family to finish their meal.
Southerners are nothing if not polite.
22
THE STAND
1978
On his Web site, King wrote that:
for a long time—ten years, at least—I had wanted to write a fantasy epic like The Lord of the Rings, only with an American setting.… Only instead of a hobbit, my hero was a Texan named Stu Redman, and instead of a Dark Lord, my villain was a ruthless drifter and supernatural madman named Randall Flagg. The land of Mordor was played by Las Vegas.
And, like Tolkien’s epic fantasy, King’s epic American fantasy grew in the telling, until it became, in the view of Doubleday executives, too big to publish as is. Consequently, to keep the cover price down, the decision was made to cut text; the only question was, Who would make the cuts? The publisher’s staff or the author?
Accounts of exactly what happened, and how, vary in the retelling. Bill Thompson’s recollection differs from King’s, but one thing is indisputable: The original manuscript was cut by four hundred manuscript pages, resulting in a final page count of 823 pages.
Published in 1978, The Stand reflected the publisher’s concerns, not the author’s; King had input but not final say in the matter of editorial cuts. Years later, in 1990, King gave his side of the story. As he explained,
The cuts were made at the behest of the accounting department. They toted up production costs, laid these next to the hardcover sales of my previous four books, and decided that a cover price of $12.95 was about what the market would bear.… I was asked if I would like to make the cuts, or if I would prefer someone in the editorial department to do it. I reluctantly agreed to do the surgery myself.
King, in fact, also wanted to simultaneously publish a limited edition of The Stand but was thwarted by contractual concerns; Doubleday’s book club edition trumped King’s own desires to issue a small run, which would have appealed to his ardent collectors willing to pay a premium price for an elaborate edition; thus, it would have had no impact whatsoever on Doubleday’s cheapie edition. Doubleday’s intransigence on this issue was one of a number of growing concerns that would eventually lead to an acrimonious divorce between author and publisher.,
King, who appreciates a beautifully printed and bound book, found nothing to like in the physical production values of The Stand, which he termed ugly and bricklike in appearance. He knew he had to pick his fights, and this one was a losing battle, so he tactically retreated. Years later, though, he would reenter the battlefield and emerge victorious by holding his ground: He’d eventually see the book published the way he, not the publisher, intended.
Taking a Stand Against Doubleday
In 1973, when King was anxious to sell a novel to Doubleday, his situation was so dire that he was ecstatic when Carrie sold for $2,500. Five years later, the working relationship between author and publisher had frayed to the point of completely unraveling.
In all of this, however, King’s relationship with Thompson remained one of mutual respect, personally and professionally. As is often the case, despite problems with the publisher, the editor remained in the good graces of the author.
But King had several concerns with Doubleday’s ironclad contracts. Some key points:
Book advances: For the five Doubleday books, King got a total advance of $77,500, while the publisher earned millions.
Limited editions: Citing contracts with book clubs, Doubleday refused to allow King to publish a limited edition of The Shining the first time around. (In truth, a thousand copies of a limited edition has no effect on sales of the trade edition, as King has repeatedly proved.)
Being taken for granted: King’s perception was that, despite being the goose that lays the golden eggs, his publisher’s staff took him for granted, a perception shared by William G. Thompson, his editor, who sided with King. (Thompson was fired by Doubleday when King left.)
The editorial cuts: Doubleday’s bean counters, who were more concerned about cover price than about what the readers wanted, requested cuts to King’s large canvases, first on The Shining and then on The Stand. So, according to King, both books were arbitrarily cut in length to accommodate the money men in suits, to the books’ detriment.
Yearly allowance: King had signed a contract that gave him $50,000 a year from his royalty earnings. It was supposed to allow him to defer income and thus save him money on taxes, but it backfired because he earned so much that he couldn’t, in his lifetime, ever see the royalties totaling $3 million paid back to him.
The 50/50 split on paperback sales: King hated this clause, which was the straw that broke the camel’s back. As King recalled it was “non-negotiable” and “finally led to our parting of the ways,” he recalled in Fear Itself.
King had no agent, little clout, and no ally, but he found support in a young literary agent looking for clients in the science fiction, horror, and fantasy genres. The up-and-coming agent was thirty-four-year-old Kirby McCauley, who first met King at a literary party for James Baldwin in New York City. As McCauley told Castle Rock,
I had heard of Steve, but frankly, when I went to the party I had only read one thing by Steve. Before the party, I went out and got a copy of ’Salem’s Lot, and I was blown away by it. I loved it. So I went to the party and said to Steve, “I love that book, but to be honest, I haven’t read anything else by you.” So we started to talk about writers in general and the field of horror and science fiction. As it turned out, Steve’s interests and my interests were very much alike. He was more interested in talking about relatively unknown writers like Frank Belknap Long and Clifford Simak and people whom I knew or represented, than he was in staying in a corner and talking with James Baldwin.
It’s a beginner’s mistake, and an understandable one, for an author to sell books without agency representation, but for whatever reasons, King remained agentless for all six Doubleday books, to his detriment: When he asked Doubleday for an advance of $3.5 million for a package deal on his proposed new novels after The Stand, he was turned down. It was McCauley who engineered a big deal, but not at Doubleday; McCauley struck a deal with New American Library.
“By the time I met Steve,” he told Castle Rock in 1986, “I had made it over the hump as a literary age
nt. I was earning a modest income, but I was by no means big time. But I did represent a number of minor, prestigious writers in the science fiction and fantasy field. Steve and Tabby, quite frankly, took a chance. It put me in a whole different league. Not just income, but now that of a major agent.”
Kirby McCauley, who died in August 2014, had also represented Roger Zelazny, and George R. R. Martin, best known for his TV miniseries Game of Thrones, who wrote at length, and affectionately, in a blog on his Web site:
Kirby was good-looking, fast-talking, charming … and he was there with us in the con suite. The established agents of the day never came to cons. Kirby came to all of them.… He was One of Us. He was a fan. He knew SF, fantasy, horror. Robert E. Howard, H. P. Lovecraft, Clark Ashton Smith, he knew more about all of them than you did.… He was the best agent any writer could hope for. He made amazing deals for me, helped launch my career in 1976, and relaunched me in 1994 when I came back from the dead.… I was by no means his biggest success story, either. He did as well or better for a dozen other young writers on his list … and one of them, this guy from Maine named Stephen King, did better than all of us together. It is probably an exaggeration to say that Kirby McCauley was entirely responsible for the huge SF boom of the late 1970s and the horror boom of the early 1980s, but he sure as hell helped.
MICHAEL COLLINGS ON THE STAND (1978)1
To place The Stand in the context of a larger body of interrelated works is not to diminish its impact as a story. Although long, it is one of the three or four best novels to read for an introduction to King’s style, techniques, and sheer storytelling ability. Its cast of characters is enormous, as befits a work about the end of things and about new beginnings. Unusual for a King novel, its settings range from New England to Los Angeles, with multiple stops at key places throughout the Midwest, finally focusing on Boulder, Colorado (where King lived for a short time in the mid-1970s), and Las Vegas, Nevada.
Its genre is equally all-inclusive. The story begins as a straightforward science-fictional extrapolation: what if there were a superflu that destroyed almost every human alive (along with most of the larger land mammals)? How would the survivors deal with such pragmatic questions as what to do with the bodies, how to re-create an orderly society, how to bear up under almost unimaginable burdens of guilt, loneliness, and despair? Within a few chapters, however, King adroitly shifts genres, as the survivors begin dreaming true dreams and feeling the call of the Dark or the Light. He moves almost seamlessly from SF into high fantasy, with theological, moral, allegorical, and philosophical overtones that highlight even more the commonplace personalities and actions of his characters as they struggle against nearly insuperable odds. As the dreams and visions intensify, so do biblical allusions—and suddenly the reader discovers that the novel had become an apocalyptic vision dealing with the End of Things and the physical revelation of Evil. Without relying on elevated tone, self-consciously heroic personages, or other traditional elements of epic, The Stand nevertheless takes on epic qualities of breadth and scope, magnitude and significance (again amplified in the restored 1990 edition).
To support such an ambitious undertaking, King builds on the literature of questepic, apocalypse, high fantasy, and horror. He amplifies his already expansive vision with specific references to Herman Melville’s Moby-Dick; H. P. Lovecraft’s mythos of the Great Old Ones; John Milton’s epic Paradise Lost (especially through oxymorons such as “dark life and hideous good cheer”); J. R. R. Tolkien’s The Lord of the Rings; H. G. Wells’s end-of-the-world nightmare, The Time Machine; George Orwell’s classic tale of the bureaucratic Dark regime, 1984; Bram Stoker’s archetypal conflict between good and evil, Dracula; Edgar Allan Poe’s “The Raven,” as well as his tales of madness and mystery; William Golding’s allegorical apocalypse, The Lord of the Flies; Richard Adams’s equally allegorical beast-fable, Watership Down; and others. Along the way King invites into his novel W. B. Yeats, Robert Frost, Ernest Hemingway, William Faulkner, William Shakespeare, Bob Dylan, “The Who,” Cary Grant, and Charlotte’s Web, as well as a handful of his own novels and stories. The result is a richly embroidered tapestry that is simultaneously an extraordinary story on its own merits and a perceptive anatomy of late-twentieth-century, technologically oriented, morally confused American society on the brink of destroying itself.
1 from The Stephen King Companion (1995)
23
CEMETERY DANCE’S DELUXE EDITIONS OF THE DOUBLEDAY BOOKS
The traycased “Artist Edition” of Carrie published Cemetery Dance.
To the frustration of King’s American fans, some of his hardback books—notably Doubleday—have sported cheapie glue bindings. The printing industry calls this “perfect” binding, but it’s not; once the glue dries out, and it eventually will, the book will literally split in two, permanently damaging it.
The interior pages for books are printed in sheets that are folded and then gathered. With “perfect” binding, the pages are gathered and one edge sliced off, producing a pile of loose pages; hot glue is then affixed to the left-hand side and bound into the book. But despite the assurances from the publisher that the binding will hold, it won’t. It’s a cheap way to save a few pennies per copy at the customer’s expense. It means the book will not hold up under repeated readings, because each time it’s opened it puts stress on the glue that dries and cracks.
With “sewn” signatures, the F&Gs (folded and gathered sheets) are sewn together with thread and then glued in. This process keeps the book intact, and, with care, it will outlive the original owner and can be handed down to the next generation. It is how books ought to be produced, but unfortunately King’s early Doubleday books were simply glued together.
Given that publishers tout hardbacks as the preferred edition for gift giving, the fact remains that it’s not the hardback boards that make the book itself permanent—it’s the binding that literally holds the book together. The purchasers of hardback books with “perfect” bindings are thus short-changed: They’re paying a premium price for a subpar product in terms of book production.
With the exception of the “Complete and Uncut Edition” of The Stand (1990) in trade and limited editions, King’s Doubleday books—Carrie, ’Salem’s Lot, The Shining, The Stand (1978 edition), Night Shift, and Pet Sematary—were unimaginatively designed, printed on standard interior paper stock, glue-bound, and lacked illustrations.
Here’s the difference:
Michael Alpert, who designed all of Philtrum Press’s publications, likened a book—its layout, typography, design, and production values—to a “private theater.” If you’ve seen his work, notably for The Eyes of the Dragon, you know exactly what he means: It’s an oversized volume; printed on heavy, white stock that recalls the texture of napkins; and has generous margins, a beautiful typeface, and appropriate illustrations. Alpert showed us how beautiful a book can be, and how its production values and design aesthetic enhance the reading experience.
Doubleday’s King books aren’t private theaters; they are small, darkened rooms poorly lit with a naked lightbulb dangling from a frayed wire.
King’s classic books deserve a better presentation.
In 2014, we finally get what King and his books deserve from Cemetery Dance, which published Carrie in December 2014, the first of six Doubleday books, to be followed by ’Salem’s Lot, The Shining, Night Shift, The Stand, and Pet Sematary.
Cemetery Dance calls them “deluxe special editions.” Issued in small print runs for collectors willing to pony up for handsome editions, the higher production values come at a correspondingly higher price than their cheaper brethren. (Don’t confuse this with Plume’s Collectors Edition of Carrie in trade paperback; the Cemetery Dance editions are in hardback.)
Carrie features newly commissioned art by Tomislav Tikulin. It includes a new introduction by Stephen King on why he wrote the book, and it concludes with a lengthy piece by Tabitha King (from the New American Library Collectors Edition). I
t is an oversize edition measuring seven by ten inches. It is printed on a heavy, high-grade interior paper, with a better distinctive finish and “feel” than traditional book stock. It has a full-color wraparound jacket. It has high-quality endpapers and a sewn signature; it will hold up under repeated readings. The book is also protected by a slipcase or tray case, depending on the edition you buy, and they have foil stamping.
The limitation page, illustrated by longtime Cemetery Dance artist Glenn Chadbourne, is printed in a tinted rust-red ink for the trade edition; the artist edition prints the art in full color and sports a different dust jacket and illustrated endpapers.
The last color plate is a full-page reproduction of the original Doubleday cover art.
All of this doesn’t come cheap, but for fans of King’s classic books that consistently rank high among their favorites, it’s a small price to pay to finally own them in handsome editions: $85 for the least expensive edition, in hardback, with jacket and in a slipcase, in a run of 3,000 copies; $225 for the numbered and signed “artist edition” in a tray case, in a run of 750 copies; and $1,000 for an oversize lettered edition in a tray case, in a run of 52 copies, with enhanced production values. (Note: The books are not signed by Stephen King.) For more information, go to: cemeterydance.com.
24
THE EARLY BACHMAN BOOKS:
RAGE(1977), THE LONG WALK(1979), ROADWORK(1981), THE RUNNING MAN (1982)
No, that’s not me. I know who Dick Bachman is, though. I’ve heard the rumor. They have Bachman’s books filed under my name at the Bangor Public Library, and there are a lot of people who think I’m Dick Bachman. I went to school with Dicky Bachman and that isn’t his real name. He lives over in New Hampshire and that boy is crazy! That boy is absolutely crazy. And sooner or later this will get back to him and he’ll come to Bangor and he’ll kill me, that’s all.