Oh, and any Doper who’s just read The Stand really ought to check out ivylass’s Superflu on the SDMB thread from a couple of years ago. Fun.
It makes soooooo much more sense now…
The Stand is my favourite King book. I sure as heck didn’t mind the longer version–the more, the better, I thought.
I did not watch the miniseries they made of it. Just let me ‘see’ the book in my mind, thankyouverymuch.
First time I went to Las Vegas, I thought of it as it was in the book.
When King (is? or was?) good, he was very, very good.
The miniseries was a cheap and lifeless product. Truly. just a two-dimensional production. Maybe someday, someone will do King’s masterpiece justice.
devilsknew, I’d love to see it done with the big budget treatment, but it seems like a pretty tough one to pull off. King’s adaptations have never drawn huge audiences, nothing compared to Clancy and Grisham, and this story would take a GIANT budget to do convincingly.
Getting a reasonably faithful TV-miniseries is probably the best outcome we can reasonably hope for.
Yes, but I believe with the correct vision, and the leadership that entails from a great director, with only a slightly larger budget with great attention to ennui, the overall feeling, natural settings, and correct editing a masterpiece lies in wait.
It’d only be about 9 hours long…the book is longer than LOTR. A single 3-hour epic would simply have to chop so much that’d it’s ruin the details that make it great.
I think the uncut version was better. I really like King when he gets into the little details about characters. He can be very good at digging into a characters past to explain the characters motivation. For example the Trashcan Man becomes a much more complex character when you get his background (Hey Trashy, What’d ole lady Semple say when you lit up her pension check?).
IMO, King has always been great with characters while his plots can get somewhat sloppy.
As far as Kings movies are concerned, The Stand was ok, not great. The problem with King and movies is that his some of his best books are usually so long that to make a movie you have to cut out a lot of stuff. I’d love to see ‘The Talisman’ made into a full movie (not made for t.v.) but I fear that they would have to cut out so much it wouldn’t work well.
Slee
I only ever read the original. (Multiple times.) Did the extended version start with all hell breaking loose on page one? That was one of my very favorite aspects of The Stand, which is definitely my favorite King book.
The original (paperback) was around 700 pages, btw.
While it was my favorite, I’ve read maybe 30 of his books, short story compilations, and four-novella collections. Right behind The Stand is the short stories, (Night Shift and Skeleton Crew) and novellas. (Different Seasons, Four Past Midnight [?], and…uh…there’s one more, IIRC.)
Favorite story is probably Survivor Type from Skeleton Crew.
Some have done pretty well.
I though Carrie found a largish size audience.
The Body (Stand By Me) and Shawshank Redemption – both from the same four novella collection – were fairly well received. I was under the impression they both did big numbers at the box office.
And don’t forget The Running Man; surely Ahnold put the asses in the seats. (Also a novella, possibly from the same collection as The Body and Shawshank.)
The key is distillation with artistic integrity. King has always been marketed as a product and his art has suffered for that. Primal King has never been done. Nobody has focused with the integrity and deep psychology that is needed. Eventually they’ll wise up and put a team of Psychological consultants in the credits.
The miniseries was great – for a television mini.
When it worked, it really worked. Of course, it had serious flaws. That pretty-boy-playing-at-ugly was certainly not Harold Lauder. T’weren’t Tom Cullen, either. M-O-O-N, that spells “miscast.” And Flagg definitely ought not to look so fresh and plump. He’s the Walkin’ Dude. The Dark Man. The Man with No Face. He does not wear denim that’s stressed at the boutique and he sure as shit doesn’t walk out of the Mojave desert looking like he just stepped out of a freaking day-spa.
Apart from the casting, though, the main problem was just that it was made for television, which is kind of silly for an adaption of a book like The Stand. I want to be physically terrified during the Lincoln Tunnel scene. I want to see Larry Underwood’s hard-on wither when he finishes singing the American National Anthem to greet the dawn and ducks back into the tent to find his companion OD’d. (And I don’t mind saying so.) I want to see Nick Andros’ brains on the walls. I want real epic horror, with all the poignant and mundane touches that made the book so awesome.
With the length, it might work as a trilogy, divided into roughly the same sections as the novel. (Probably been too long since I read it to really know how plausible this is, though.)
Nah, that was one of the books that he published as Richard Bachman. Did anyone who actually read it bother to go see the movie? I mean, it doesn’t appear that it bears much resemblance to the book at all. Ahnold? WTF? He could just as credibly have been cast as Carrie.
The Shawshank Redemption was almost flawless, though. I like Morgan Freeman and can find no fault with his performance, which was excellent, but… um… Red? That’s trivial, though. I more disturbed by the abridgement of the title and the replacement of the Rita Hayworth poster. That stuff’s important!When your protagonist squeezes himself, naked, through a tight canal, to emerge, dripping, into a new life – you want the passage to be marked with someone like Rita Hayworth. Bo Derek does not have the hips, breasts, or waist for it; she is not the correct archetype.But noooooooo… we’ve got to take something that’s absolutely central and discard it to indicate that time has passed. Find another way! Argh!
And speaking of Different Seasons, Apt Pupil was adapted for film, too, with Ian Mckellan as the poor put-upon Nazi. Not too bad. The only novella from Different Seasons that hasn’t been adapted for the screen is The Breathing Method – which is probably just as well, since it is too short to be a feature and probably too gruesome (and, let’s face it, ridiculous) to bother trying.
Thanks! That was a lot of fun.
I think the uncut version of The Stand is meatier, with more depth. I especially liked the vignettes, what Bateman called “the second wave of deaths” due to the loss of technology. Very short snippets…one kid falls down an abandoned well, one guy overdoses on pure heroin, one woman gets locked in an abandoned cold storage locker (that one gave me the willies, I tell you) etc.
If I may, regarding Shawshank It was Raquel Welch on the wall, not Bo Derek, which is faithful to the book. It’s my understanding there was a scene filmed where one of the guards did squeeze through the hole to see where it went, but it was cut for time.
Well… IIRC in the book the poster changed too, also to indicate time had passed. I don’t have it in front of me but I do remember some passage about how the poster changed but was always in the same place or something like that.
Also, I liked how they turned Red from a literal to an ironic nickname. I guess it was partially in the delivery, but it just worked for me.
I think he meant 400 manuscript pages, not 400 printed pages.
I agree that the miniseries was good by the standards of tv. A lot of it was nothing special, but it did have several redeeming moments. Kareem was quite entertaining as the Monster Shouter (though perhaps not entirely true to the book). The production design set the right moods in the right places. And the use of music in a few key spots was excellent – particularly Larry’s impromptu Eve of Destruction and the aforementioned Don’t Fear the Reaper.
I’ve only read the uncut version, but I would be interested to see the original release. I really don’t think I’ve benefitted from knowing about The Kid and exactly what he did to Trash.
Aw, I gotta disagree there, I thought Bill Fagerbakke as Tom was excellent, and fit my mental image of Tom very nicely. I agree about Harold though - that was some horrible casting, there.
Of course, it’s my opinion that there will never again be a casting decision so perfect as that of Michael Clarke Duncan as John Coffey in the Green Mile. When I first saw it, it was almost eerie - it was as if someone had reached into my brain and showed me my mental image.
I no longer own the original version, but didn’t they cut the original ending; i.e., where Randy wakes up on a beach or whatever?
IIRC, the uncut version ends with an epilogue of Flagg and a bunch of primitive native-type people. I know that it wasn’t in the original version, but I can’t remember how the original ended anymore.
What, nothing but love for Rob Lowe as Nick Andros? I don’t know who I saw as Nick, but I’m pretty sure it wasn’t Rob Lowe.
The original ending was somewhat vague, as Frannie and Stu were on their way back to Maine in an RV. They stopped off at Mother Abagail’s old house, and Fran asks something like “Will people learn? Will they know now?” and Stu answers “I don’t know.”
The End.
I liked the original Stand. It was nice and tight. But I liked the new one too. Sometimes I get the urge to re-read, and it’s always clear to me whether I want to read the original or the expanded.
My favorite expanded part was the second wave of deaths, definitely; my least favorite part was about Fran and her mother. I preferred the vagueness of not knowing just how it went when she told her parents; I also just don’t like Fran.