by George Beahm
Consider the similarities to King himself. The story and film are set in 1959, when King was twelve years old; the backdrop is small-town Maine, recalling Lisbon Falls, where he attended high school. And his best friend is Chris, who (as in the story) goes on to the University of Maine at Orono, as King did. King, who worked at the Worumbo Mill in Lisbon Falls during high school and college, feared being trapped in that small town.
In the movie, we meet four young teens. The narrator is a twelve-year-old boy named Gordie Lachance, who is the smart one; he goes on to become a bestselling writer. All the others—his best friend, Chris Chambers; Teddy Duchamp; and Vern Tessio—die, never seeing their dreams come to fruition because, as John Lennon once remarked, “Life is what happens when you’re making other plans.”
Chris, who realized his dream of being accepted to the university, intervenes in a knife fight in a fast food restaurant and gets killed; Teddy, a real wet end, dies ingloriously in a car crash, taking others with him; and Vern, everybody’s good buddy, dies in an accidental house fire.
At the end of the movie, we see Gordon Lachance watching Ace Merrill, who terrorized him when he was twelve. Ace, now overweight and resigned to his humdrum life at the mill, heads for a bar where he’ll seat his butt on a barstool and bitch about life.
A coming-of-age story, a journey from innocence to experience, the boys’ journey doesn’t end when they find the dead body in the woods and attempt to claim it. The journey ends further down the road when Gordon becomes an adult, successful by anyone’s standards.
In 1986, when Reiner screened the film for Stephen King, Reiner recalled seeing King visibly moved. “I have to go away,” King said, and he did. When he returned, he told Reiner some of the personal details that made the viewing such an emotional event for him: It brought King’s past back to life, on the big screen, and he was overwhelmed.
But even without knowing the backstory—the connective tissue to King’s life—it stands on its own. It’s a time machine that takes us back to our past, to a time when we too were twelve and life seemed simple, until we realized our lives are infinite in possibilities, waiting for us to make life’s big choices.
Multiple Takes
Rob Reiner: “In the book it was about four boys, but after about five days of driving around I realized this was really Gordie’s story. In the book, Gordie was kind of a dispassionate observer, but once I made Gordie the central focus of the piece then it made sense to me: this movie was all about a kid who didn’t feel good about himself and whose father didn’t love him.
“And through the experience of going to find the dead body and his friendship with these boys, he began to feel empowered and went on to become a very successful writer. He basically became Stephen King” (The Telegraph, June 12, 2011).
“King is a good writer. He pens wonderfully complex characters and great dialogue. Yet when people adapt his books into movies, they tend to … just concentrate on the horror and the supernatural—all the things that seem to be the most overtly commercial. It’s a grave mistake because they lose many levels of his work by doing the obvious” (Alan Jones, Starburst magazine, 1991).
Wil Wheaton (Gordie Lachance), on River Phoenix, during a reunion with Reiner and cast members: “I spent much of the next few days remembering all the things we did together during production, thinking about how much I looked up to him and how much I loved his entire family. I don’t know what would have happened to us if he hadn’t overdosed, if he ever would have come back from the edge, or if we would even have had anything in common … but when he was fifteen and I was thirteen, he was my friend. That’s the person I knew, and that’s the person I miss.… As I drove home from the theater I was overwhelmed by conflicting emotions. It was wonderful to see those guys again, and especially to reconnect with Jerry, but it was also tremendously sad to truly feel River’s loss for the first time. That turbulent mix of joy and sorrow stayed with me for several days.… Most actors will go their entire careers without doing a movie like Stand By Me, or working with a director like Rob Reiner. I got to do both when I was 12. For a long, long time, I felt like I needed to top or equal that, and it wasn’t until I was in my early thirties that I accepted it’s unlikely to happen—movies like Stand By Me come along once in a generation” (WWdn: In Exile, wilwheaton.typepad.com, March 21, 2011).
Cinefantastique magazine: “Those who’ve sworn off Stephen King movie adaptations take heart. King’s novella, ‘The Body,’ hardly his most typical or flashy, makes the best screen transfer since Carrie. … [T]he ‘Master of Macabre’ should ditch the killer trucks and direct audiences to this little gem” (January 1987).
Stephen King: I think they like the voice. The voice can’t be filmed, but at the same time, it can be. Rob Reiner’s proved that twice, particularly with Stand by Me. You would freak—or maybe you wouldn’t—if you knew how many people walk up to me on the street and say, ‘Steve, I love your movies.’ These people have no idea I do anything but movies, so for every person who read ‘The Body,’ probably fifteen people saw Stand by Me. I still get royalty checks on that film, big ones! The voice is there, but the only people who are really tapping into the voice are people who read, and they’re a small part of the overall population” (Bill Warren, Fangoria).
6.
The house the Kings rented in Orrington, Maine, when Stephen was teaching at UMO.
Pet Sematary: Sometimes Dead Is Better
Release date: April 21, 1989; Tomatometer: 43%; audience score: 60%. Screenplay by Stephen King; directed by Mary Lambert. Budget: $11.5 million; domestic total gross: $57.4 million.
“I got the idea,” King told Abe Peck of Rolling Stone in 1980, “when my daughter’s cat died. It got run over.… So, anyway, we buried our cat and I started to think about burials.” (The movie pays homage to Smucky, as did the book, with a grave marker that reads, “Smucky, he was obedient.”)
In terms of critical reviews and audience popularity, this movie is not in the first rank, but it deserves a place in any discussion of King’s movies because it’s so Maine in many ways.
To begin with, its real-world setting is Orrington, Maine, where a real pet “sematary” (original child’s spelling) once existed, behind the house that King rented, when he commuted to Orono to teach a class at the University of Maine at Orono as its writer in residence. In front of the house is a winding road used by truckers that predictably results in roadkill.
King, mindful of W. W. Jacobs’s story “The Monkey’s Paw,” took it one step further and imagined that the road claimed not only felines and canines but also people—specifically, Gage Creed, the son of Dr. Louis Creed.
Pet Sematary was the first King movie to bear his name over the title. It was also the first screenplay he wrote for one of his own movies. And it was the first film he insisted be shot entirely in Maine, in Ellsworth, about an hour away from Bangor, which allowed King to stop by weekly. It also allowed him to fit in a cameo appearance as a preacher, filmed at Bangor’s Mount Hope cemetery. These reasons were important enough to King so that he turned down a $1 million offer, which would have meant ceding control, so that the film’s producer, Rich Rubenstein, could afford to secure the rights for just $1,000.
Though none of the principal actors are from Maine, Fred Gwynne (best known for his roles in the TV shows Car 54, Where Are You? and The Munsters), in the role of longtime Mainer Jud Crandall, gives a good performance with a spot-on accent, according to a lifelong Mainer, Dave Lowell, who said most actors fall way short of the accent mark, so to speak.
At its dark heart, Pet Sematary is about the most horrific nightmare a parent can experience: the loss of a child. For that reason, King was reluctant to allow the book to be published, but that’s why the transgressive film comes to life to become a real horror show.
Multiple Takes
Stephen King: “Because Pet Sematary of all my novels was the one I thought would be the most difficult to film, I just simply made it an unbreaka
ble part of the deal that whoever was going to do it, would have to do it in Maine. And Laurel came along, and Bill Dunn came along and said, ‘Yeah, OK, we’ll make it in Maine.’
“And again, why not? You’ve got production facilities, lab facilities, and an acting pool to draw on here in New England. And if you need to go to Boston and New York, they’re 600 miles down the road, and they’re closer than, say, San Francisco is to Los Angeles.
“We’ve got stuff up here that nobody’s seen. Maine’s supposed to be Vacationland. And, ideally, what should happen is that people should look at the movies and say, ‘We’d like to go there.’ And they should come and say, ‘Gee, this is as great as we saw it.’ In other words, a movie like Pet Sematary … should serve as a commercial for the state, as much as all the movies made in California, Los Angeles, and New York have served as commercials for those places” (press conference for Stephen King’s Graveyard Shift, 1990).
“I think Dale Midkiff is stiff in places. I think Denise Crosby comes across cold in places. I don’t feel that the couple that’s at the center of the story has the kind of warmth that would set them off perfectly against the supernatural element that surrounds them. I like that contrast better. I think it does what horror movies are supposed to do.… [Mary Lambert] did a good job. She went in and she didn’t flinch. In a way, that’s a pretty good compliment to the way that I work. Because I’ve always wanted to go straight at things and not try to offer a lot of nuance.… My idea is to let go in there and hit as hard as you can. Mary understood that” (Gary Wood, Cinefantastique, February 1991).
Mary Lambert: “Pet Sematary is about a love of a father for his child that is obsessive to the point of breaking certain taboos, passing certain boundaries that shouldn’t be passed. I think I brought a sense of mystery and mysticism to the story that they were looking for. There are certain aspects of this story that take it beyond just another horror movie” (Frederick C. Szebin, Cinefantastique, March 1989).
Denise Crosby: “I can’t imagine not shooting that film in Maine. You needed to be in that place, and we were blessed that we were there and not some Hollywood sound stage” (Bangor Daily News, 1989).
“I think the fact that he wrote the script made a big difference. He can really tell a story. That’s his genius” (Gary Wood, Cinefantastique, February 1991).
Fred Gywnne: “I see it as a frightening fable rather than a horror film, which I think makes it doubly strong. I’d read the book as soon as it came out. I’m a Stephen King nut. I saw it more as a fable for our times.… But it will be interesting to see how the powers that be, where they slot it” (New York Times, May 20, 1989).
Unearthed and Untold: The Path to Pet Sematary
(production company, Oceans Light Productions)
At the fifteenth annual Rhode Island International Horror Film Festival, out of thirty documentaries, Oceans Light Productions’ Unearthed and Untold (estimated release date, 2015) took home a grand prize.
Just so you know: This is a documentary that requires your attention. With luck, once it passes muster with the powers that be, we’ll see it released on DVD, so you can see the work of a two-man team so taken by the novel and film adaptation that they went to Orrington to dig deep into the making of Pet Sematary.
“What we’re doing,” said John Campopiano and Justin White, “is taking a deeper look into the making of the film from two different angles: the perspectives of the Maine locals and the perspectives of the cast & crew. What stories and memories do local Maine residents have of the production? How was the production documented in local television, magazine, and newspaper stories? What did the production do for the county of Hancock and the greater Maine communities? These are just a few of the questions we are exploring in our documentary.
“This documentary began when my cameraman and I traveled to Maine over a year ago to see the filming locations. During that weekend, we were overwhelmed by locals who remembered the production and who had home videos, photographs, and a plethora of stories to share. Everyone was so eager and happy to share their memories that I felt we should somehow document them all. This is when our documentary was born.”
7.
Misery: Staying Alive
He writes stories that cut through the shower of blood. That makes it human. Sharp insights that dig into our innermost secrets.
—Kathy Bates, introducing Stephen King, at Radio City Music Hall, August 1, 2006
Release date: November 30, 1990; Tomatometer: 89%; audience score: 89%. Screenplay by William Goldman; directed by Rob Reiner. Budget: $20 million; total domestic gross: $62 million.
Misery, explained King to Cinefantastique’s Charles Leayman, illustrates “the powerful hold fiction can achieve over the reader. What Misery turned out to be about was the life-saving quality of writing stories, how it takes you away and how it heals: both the people who do it and the people who consume it.”
It’s a theme that King has explored before, in “The Woman in the Room” and also On Writing.
In the movie Misery, writing is also a way back to life for romance novelist Paul Sheldon, portrayed by veteran actor James Caan. In fact, it is his only ticket, which Annie Wilkes holds. His novels about Misery Chastain hold an unhealthy influence over Annie Wilkes, and she in turn holds Sheldon as her captive. Distraught that he killed off her favorite fictional character, she demands that Misery be brought back to life by him. She sees it as quid pro quo: She’s saved his life, and in return he saves Misery’s life.
Mindful of Rob Reiner’s masterful job as director of Stand by Me, King insisted that if he sold the film rights to Reiner’s production company, Castle Rock Entertainment, Reiner had to be its producer or, King hoped, its director. Reiner signed on as director and delivered a work of film art. In any list of top ten King film adaptations, Misery deserves a place of high honor.
Throwing out a broad net, according to Stephen Jones writing in Creepshows, Reiner’s choices for the key role of writer Paul Sheldon included “William Hurt, Kevin Kline, Michael Douglas, Harrison Ford, Dustin Hoffman, Robert De Niro, Al Pacino, Richard Dreyfuss, Gene Hackman and Robert Redford, all of whom turned it down.” Beatty, noted Jones, was interested but was forced to turn it down because of a prior commitment to Dick Tracy. The list narrowed, and Reiner approached James Caan, who was cast in the role.
For the other key role of Annie Wilkes, noted Jones, Bette Midler was considered, but Kathy Bates got the role; in fact, when William Goldman wrote the screenplay, he had written it specifically with Bates in mind.
Since the movie is essentially claustrophobic, taking place in Annie’s isolated farmhouse, the performances of both Caan and Bates had to be riveting, and both were. Caan won no awards for his performance, incurring the wrath of Caan, but Kathy Bates’s stellar performance did not go unnoticed; in fact, it earned her an Academy Award, a Golden Globe, a Chicago Film Critics Association Award, a Dallas-Fort Worth Film Critics Award, and third place in the New York Film Critics Circle Award.
In other words, Kathy Bates nailed it. Like a high-flying acrobat, she soared, she flew, she spun in the air—and landed perfectly. Kathy Bates was Annie Wilkes, in all her implacable horror.
It’s now difficult, if not impossible, to read the book and not see Annie Wilkes in the image of Kathy Bates because of her riveting film performance.
The movie did differ from the book in two critical ways: the role of the sheriff was expanded to open up the claustrophobic movie, which is essentially a one-room play, and, instead of giving Paul Sheldon the ax, Annie Wilkes hobbles him instead.
Multiple Takes
Stephen King: “Every now and then something strange will happen. Some years ago I went to Philadelphia with my son to see a basketball game. Tabby was here, and she heard the window break and there was this guy there and he claimed he had a bomb (in fact it was a bunch of pencils and erasers and stuff and paperclips). He was an escapee from a mental institution and he had this rant about how I’d stolen M
isery from him. Tabby fled in her bathrobe and the police came.… And every now and then there’ll be a letter from someone who is obviously out there in the ozone, people who are convinced I’ve stolen their ideas. One lady wrote to explain how I had overflown her house in a U2 plane and stolen her thoughts for The Shining. But no one has ever actually threatened to kill me, knock on wood. Though there’s a guy out in California, Steven Lightfoot, who believes that Ronald Reagan and I conspired to kill John Lennon” (Tim Adams, September 14, 2000, theguardian.com).
Rob Reiner: “You’re trying to just get the performances you want.… I hire people who can do what they’re supposed to do. I even told Kathy Bates when we were doing Misery, ‘You can’t take this character home. This is too crazy.’ She had started doing that. I said, ‘You let it go. You have your talent, your craft, and you have to trust that when you come to work that it will be there for you.’ And it was; it was fine. I’ve heard people like Daniel Day Lewis never let go of a character. Everyone works differently, but to me you have your work and you have your home life. You have to be able to separate the two” (Lauren Bradshaw, July 22, 2014, clotureclub.com).
“Kathy kept saying, ‘Jimmy’s not relating to me, he’s not listening to me.’ I said, ‘That’s true. He isn’t. His character doesn’t care one iota about yours.’ And I said, ‘You can use that to fuel your rage’” (David Sacks, New York Times, January 27, 1991).
James Caan: “The less I feel I act, the better job I feel I do. I try to keep myself open to possibilities on camera. So Kathy and I work a little different” (David Sacks, New York Times, January 27, 1991).
Kathy Bates: “I have always had a problem with my weight. I’m not a stunning woman. I never was an ingénue; I’ve always just been a character actor. When I was younger it was a real problem, because I was never pretty enough for the roles that other young women were being cast in. The roles I was lucky enough to get were real stretches for me: usually a character who was older, or a little weird, or whatever. And it was hard, not just for the lack of work but because you have to face up to how people are looking at you. And you think, ‘Well, y’know, I’m a real person’” (David Sacks, New York Times, January 27, 1991).