I’ll admit he wasn’t who I saw in the part, but I didn’t think he did a bad job of it.
And dammit, I’m totally going to have to watch the miniseries again now. sigh
The Stand certainly had the makings of being one of King’s best, perhaps his very best. If only he’d had some sense of how to end it. Instead, like Mother Abigail, it kind of dried up and wandered around in the freaking desert and got lost and then sort of died.
He had the same problem with It shortly after that, another book with an incredible build-up that he couldn’t make good on.
If you really want to read the very best of King, get a copy of The Shining. That book by itself makes him one of the best 20th century authors and redeems him for a lot of his shortcomings.
True. Although, to be fair, it [The Running Man] was republished as part of the four-in-one volume The Bachman Books, so Ellis wasn’t totally off-base.
Heh heh. Now that I’d like to see.
Well, as one critic said, “At least they cast Rob Lowe so he wouldn’t have any lines.”
I don’t know, he just didn’t fit with me. I can see Gary Sinise as the poor country hick, and Bill as Tom Cullen, but Rob Lowe was a “they could have done that better.”
Jamey Sheridan wasn’t cheerily sinister enough, either. And Harold was supposed to be fat, then lose weight and become Hawk.
I can see how, for logistic purposes, Rita and Nadine would have to be combined. Larry’s relationship with Rita was too subtle, I think, to translate well into the small screen. I would have liked to see Leo properly with Nadine and not Lucy. Nadine’s abandonment of that small boy was a key part of her slide into madness, as she slowly but surely turns to evil.
The Uncut opens with Charlie Campion, the military base guard, frantically waking up his family and getting out before lockdown setting everything in motion.
Yeah, you’re probably right. In my mind I have a distinction between “Steven King movies” and movies inspired by a King book. Carrie is the former, Shawshank and Stand By Me are the latter.
One big factor is the cost, The Stand would have to be a big sFX blockbuster type movie, all the other successful movies are fairly simple movies. The Green Mile, Shawshank, It for exmple, all were fairly small casts with essentially one setting and no effects. To do The Stand it’d have to be Kings most successful movie by a factor of 2 to be profitable.
Yeah, it does say that, but Ellis Dee confirmed that the same number of pages were missing from the paperback versions.
Wha?? Stand by Me is from the short story The Body. It’s not “based on,” it is the story. They just changed the title. It’s not a full-lengthed novel, (neither is Shawshank), both are from a book of four stories called “Different Seasons.”
I’m not sure I understand your distinction.
My advice: Don’t start with The Stand. It is fundamentally unsatisfying. I would recommend you make your first King book 'Salem’s Lot or The Dead Zone. Or one of his early short-story collections – Night Shift or Skeleton Crew.
Like I said, it’s all in my head and probably doesn’t stand up to scrutiny. Not sure what it is, but some of his movies are heavily branded as Steven King movies. They all seem to have a certain quality about them that’s different from Shawshank and Stand By Me. Maybe it’s just the difference between ones based on short stories and ones based on novels, I don’t know.
When I saw Shawshank and Stand By Me I didn’t know they are even King stories, they seemed more Hollywood than The Shining, Carrie, Cujo and Misery.
Like I said, it’s probably just some ethereal structure in my own mind that defies close inspection. In retrospect, maybe it’s the distinction between King’s “horror” stories and the rest.
Granted, I think his psychological horrors translate better to film than his monsters and things that go bump in the night. I was terrifed after reading It, but the mini-series disappointed. Your mind can conjure up much more scarier stuff than is dreamt of in Hollywood.
:eek:
Different strokes, I guess. To me, The Stand is proper capital “L” Literature – a compelling epic with some of the most developed characters King has ever produced, and perfectly balanced between the creepily supernatural and the spookily plausible – and 'Salem’s Lot and The Dead Zone are among the principal reasons that King has the “hack” label hung on him. 'Salem’s Lot struck me as a poor imitation of H.P. Lovecraft that was so hokey and dull I had a really hard time getting through it. The Dead Zone was better, and certainly readable, but still eye-rollingly corny much of the time. It hasn’t aged well, that’s for sure.
Nowhere near the quality of The Stand or The Shining, which are really too good to fit into King’s niche of “supermarket fiction,” (or, as he called it, “the literary equivalent of a cheeseburger and fries.”)
Silentgoldfish, the poster was changed in the novella? I don’t remember that at all. How embarrassing. I’ve been griping about that for years.
Eh, Lowe was a bit too mature and beefy to be cast as Nick, who was supposed to be in his early twenties but be baby-faced enough to be mistaken for a teenager – but that was easy to take, and may have actually worked better than keeping him as a man-boy. I’m not exactly a fan of Rob Lowe, but I think he turned in a good enough performance as Nick that he didn’t stand out too much as conspicuously wrong.
Certainly not like Harold and Flagg, who were just wrong, wrong, wrong – not just with the casting, but also the wardrobe and makeup. I mean, Harold’s zits were fake-looking enough without them wandering all over his face from scene to scene, and I’m pretty sure that the Hardcase wouldn’t use a blow-dryer and rely quite so heavily on Nivea for Men. 
Stephen King sometimes seems like two different writers to me. He can write unapologetic schlock horror that revels in what it is and can be a lot of fun. “Go for the gross-out!” And then he can turn around and write stuff that seems so much more serious.
He says that the Bachman pseudonym was required simply because his publishers worried that he was saturating the market with his ridiculously prolific output – but I think when you look at those novels it’s clear that he just wanted to write things without the pressure to write a “Stephen King” novel. Some of his best work, in my opinion. When Dick died, it seems that he gained a bit more flexibility in what people would accept as “Stephen King.”
I still wish that someone would adapt Rage for the screen. Of course, real world events that transpired after it was published pretty much ensure that it ain’t never gonna happen. About as much chance as someone making a faithful version of The Running Man. Damn you, world, for becoming as dark as Steve-O’s twisted imagination!
Funny, I’ve said this exact thing, almost word for word. Rage is one of the best things Stephen King ever wrote (and I’ve read a lot of his work). Once the school shootings started becoming commonplace, and especially after Columbine, fate was sealed - Rage will forever be just a phenomenally good short story.
It would console me a bit if they’d figure out a good way to make “The Long Walk”, which ranks right below Rage in my opinion, into a viable movie. Doubt it could happen though, I don’t think it would translate very well into a movie.
For those who didn’t like the miniseries:
This page links to an unproduced script for The Stand, which was to be a 2-hour film produced by George Romero. It’s an unusual treatment, with Larry, Stu, and Nadine (and for some reason, Joe/Leo) the only characters who are flushed-out, and nearly all other characters and subplots pushed to the background or eliminated entirely.
King pulled Rage from circulation after a high school shooter turned out to have a copy in his locker, so it’s highly unlikely that he’ll ever sell the film rights to anyone.
You’re exactly right. King’s horror stories are heavily billed as Stephen King movies. But his non-horror movies – even if they involve the supernatural – are usually released with nary a mention of King.
The biggest exception was Apt Pupil, which was not supernatural at all but was still billed as a King flick. (Likely because the movie sucked.) The other downplayed release was Hearts In Atlantis.
The problem with Hearts was the same problem with K-Pax, which wasn’t a King book: immediately aftyer 9/11, studios were rushing out “feel good” movies as fast as they possibly could, and all the movies suffered for it. Schlocky in the extreme.
As for the short story vs. novel distinction, I don’t know. There is an endless parade of crap based on his full length novels, but so too is there an endless list of crappy movies based on short stories. (Although Creepshow was good, but that was multiple shorts put together into one movie.)
I think his novellas have generally held up the best on translation to the big screen.
I really liked the original when it was first published, and I have read the longer version more times than I have the first printing. I am now rereading the original version and have found some areas that I can’t believe were left out. I really missed the deaths that were not related to the superflu. The whole “No Great Loss” theme. I also missed the televised execution scene that Frannie was watching. (The names were being drawn from a barrel by the revolutionaries.) The substitution of the old man for “The Kid” didn’t bother me as much as the removal of many of the story lines of how the people got to Boulder. I liked the extra details of the trip (appendicitis, the gun battle for the women) and there seemed to be something missing without that. Campion’s escape was abbreviated to the point of seeming almost like SOP for the base.
The thing I found most disturbing to be deleted was the bull session between Baldy and East Texas (Stu and Glenn) was when Glenn convinced Stu that full planes do not crash. When I first read the novel, I belived that so much that I actually looked for the study. A minor detail, that does nothing for the plot, but does so much for the book as a whole.
Overall, after rereading the abridged version, I don’t think I will do it again. The longer one is so much better for the details IMHO.
Sgt Schwartz
I’ve not read the original, but based on how the uncut flowed and was developed I totally agree. I just can’t quite imagine the abridged version being better.