3 ms·

I only discovered King a few years ago, having purposely avoided his books as something that "everyone liked". Now I am a fan. However, I am less fond of the fi

by dsq 2y ago

I only discovered King a few years ago, having purposely avoided his books as something that "everyone liked". Now I am a fan. However, I am less fond of the film adaptations. I think that it is very challenging to make King's books into movies. The Shining is one of the more successful adaptations and ironically that which King most despises.

garblegarble 2y ago
I always thought King adaptations work best the less he is involved with them - adapting a story to another medium requires a very different way of thinking, and a novellist (especially an incredibly talented one like King) isn't always well suited to the visual storytelling medium.
- mindcrime 2y ago
  > I always thought King adaptations work best the less he is involved with them Maximum Overdrive[1] certainly provides some support for this hypothesis. About the only good part of this movie is the soundtrack, which was provided by AC/DC. [1]: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Maximum_Overdrive https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Maximum_Overdrive
  - robterrell 2y ago
    Directing a movie requires very different skills. Even on just a personality level: an author can be reclusive, but a director has to be extremely social, because a film is made by a large crew of people. And there's the obvious other skills too (this interview is from American Film magazine): Stephen King: The movie is about all these vehicle goings crazy and running by themselves, so we started shooting a lot of gas pedals, clutches, transmissions, things like that, operating themselves. We had one sequence: The gas pedal goes to the floor, the gas pedal goes up, the clutch goes in, the gears shifts by itself, the clutch comes out and the gas pedal goes back to the floor again. We were able to shoot everything but the transmission from the driver's side door. The transmission was a problem, because we kept seeing either a corner of the studio of a reflection. So I said: This is no problem, we will simply take the camera around to the other side and shoot the transmission from there. Total silence. Everybody looked at everybody else. You know what's happening here, right? I'd crossed the axis. It was like farting at the dinner party. Nobody wanted to say you've made a terrible mistake. I didn't get this job because I could direct or because I had any background in film; I got it because I was Stephen King. So finally [cameraman] Daniele Nannuzzi told me I'd crossed the 180-degree axis and that this simply wasn't done, and although I didn't understand what it was, I grasped the idea that I was breaking a rule. Later on, I called George [Romero] up on the phone and I said, "What is this axis shit?" and he laughed his head off and explained it, and I said, "Can you break it -- the rule?" He said, "It's better not to, but if you have to, you can. If you look at The Battleship Potemkin" (which I never have), "it crosses the axis all the time, and the guy [Sergei Eisenstein] gets away with it." Then I saw David Lynch and asked him: "What's this about crossing the axis?" and he burst out laughing and said, "That always gets me." And I asked if you could do it, and he gave me this startled look and said, "Stephen, you can do anything. You're the director." Then he paused and said, "But it doesn't cut together."
    - nimithryn 2y ago
      Amazing quote. Can you share a link to the article, if it exists?
      - robterrell 2y ago
        I clipped it years ago but found it again here with google: https://sites.google.com/site/cultoddities/home/carrie/carrie-1976/carrie-76-press/stephen-king-american-film-interview https://sites.google.com/site/cultoddities/home/carrie/carri... Aaaand... there's actually a much more relevant set of quotes about The Shining, like: There's a lot to like about it. But it's a great big beautiful Cadillac with no motor inside. You can sit in it, you can enjoy the smell of the leather upholstery -- the only thing you can't do is drive it anywhere. So I would do everything different. The real problem is that Kubrick set out to make a horror picture with no apparent understanding of the genre. Everything about it screams that from the beginning to the end, from plot decisions to that final scene -- which has been used before on "The Twilight Zone."
- rob74 2y ago
  Yes, but you can adapt the story to the visual medium ("show don't tell" and all that) while staying true to its original intention. Or you can turn King's autobiographical character into a stereotypical psycho axe murderer.
  - garblegarble 2y ago
    I'll preface this by saying that my love of cinema is more about the visual than the characterisation, so it may be that we're coming at this from two different angles... I do love both the book and Kubrick versions of The Shining, and I don't think either detracts from the other. I can't help but think keeping Jack's character more faithful to King's character of a good man slowly being corrupted by the hotel and resisting would have really changed the pace of Kubrick's movie for the worse, and taken away a lot of his really beautiful compositions. I think King's panned adaptation for the 1997 miniseries is evidence supporting that Kubrick's character adaptations were good choices for the film he was making / the medium shift. Edit: not sure why you're being downvoted, I think your characterisation of the changes Kubrick made to Jack's character is entirely valid
- tetris11 2y ago
  Agreed. The Dark Tower series works very well as independent books exhuding their own exotic charm. As a canonical series, it's a jumbled mess of barely connected themes tied together only by Kingcs own ego (maybe that's the point, but its still narcissistic). At some point he even tries to take credit for Harry Potter and Star Wars, albeit in a vague "everything's connected" type of way. I tell anybody who wants to read the series to simply read the first book, and the last chapter of the last book. He's a brilliant writer, but his strength lies in leaving some things to mystery, instead of micromanaging his worlds.
  - CamperBob2 2y ago
    I tell anybody who wants to read the series to simply read the first book, and the last chapter of the last book. I don't know about that. The whole idea behind the series is to serve as a recounting of Roland's mistakes along the way, and how he progressively refines his course at each iteration. Cutting to the proverbial chase just leaves the reader (and Roland) stuck in the cycle forever. You have to suffer alongside him (and his companions) to get it, I think.
    - tetris11 2y ago
      The suffering becomes gratuitous after a certain point (spiderman? really?), so I think I just rejected that aspect and focused more on what made the Gunslinger so good: a slow relentless chase across an unknown world where the lines of good and evil are neither defined nor relevant.
      - CamperBob2 2y ago
        Yeah, valid point there. I almost called it quits a couple of times myself. By the end it was obvious that King was writing from a place that is uncomfortably familiar on a personal level. "Christ, I'm so tired of this project. If I were less conscientious, I could just walk away from it. Let's chop out some features and link in some third-party libraries so we can ship it already."
- kcplate 2y ago
  It’s my opinion, and probably only my opinion that the shorter his stories, the better they are. I love love love his short stories, but his novels are only meh for me—-two exceptions being the The Stand and Misery. I have read most of his stuff except for anything released in the last 3 years or so. I think even his short stories adapt better to movies as well…Shawshank, Stand By Me, The Green Mile…all three to me are simply awesome movies but were heavily adapted from the source story. Misery was good as well, but I kind of blame the casting of Kathy Bates as a genius move that really made that one work.
  - anjel 2y ago
    Agreed, The Stand, notwithstanding.

by dsq 2y ago

garblegarble 2y ago

I always thought King adaptations work best the less he is involved with them - adapting a story to another medium requires a very different way of thinking, and a novellist (especially an incredibly talented one like King) isn't always well suited to the visual storytelling medium.

mindcrime 2y ago
> I always thought King adaptations work best the less he is involved with them Maximum Overdrive[1] certainly provides some support for this hypothesis. About the only good part of this movie is the soundtrack, which was provided by AC/DC. [1]: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Maximum_Overdrive https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Maximum_Overdrive
- robterrell 2y ago
  Directing a movie requires very different skills. Even on just a personality level: an author can be reclusive, but a director has to be extremely social, because a film is made by a large crew of people. And there's the obvious other skills too (this interview is from American Film magazine): Stephen King: The movie is about all these vehicle goings crazy and running by themselves, so we started shooting a lot of gas pedals, clutches, transmissions, things like that, operating themselves. We had one sequence: The gas pedal goes to the floor, the gas pedal goes up, the clutch goes in, the gears shifts by itself, the clutch comes out and the gas pedal goes back to the floor again. We were able to shoot everything but the transmission from the driver's side door. The transmission was a problem, because we kept seeing either a corner of the studio of a reflection. So I said: This is no problem, we will simply take the camera around to the other side and shoot the transmission from there. Total silence. Everybody looked at everybody else. You know what's happening here, right? I'd crossed the axis. It was like farting at the dinner party. Nobody wanted to say you've made a terrible mistake. I didn't get this job because I could direct or because I had any background in film; I got it because I was Stephen King. So finally [cameraman] Daniele Nannuzzi told me I'd crossed the 180-degree axis and that this simply wasn't done, and although I didn't understand what it was, I grasped the idea that I was breaking a rule. Later on, I called George [Romero] up on the phone and I said, "What is this axis shit?" and he laughed his head off and explained it, and I said, "Can you break it -- the rule?" He said, "It's better not to, but if you have to, you can. If you look at The Battleship Potemkin" (which I never have), "it crosses the axis all the time, and the guy [Sergei Eisenstein] gets away with it." Then I saw David Lynch and asked him: "What's this about crossing the axis?" and he burst out laughing and said, "That always gets me." And I asked if you could do it, and he gave me this startled look and said, "Stephen, you can do anything. You're the director." Then he paused and said, "But it doesn't cut together."
  - nimithryn 2y ago
    Amazing quote. Can you share a link to the article, if it exists?
    - robterrell 2y ago
      I clipped it years ago but found it again here with google: https://sites.google.com/site/cultoddities/home/carrie/carrie-1976/carrie-76-press/stephen-king-american-film-interview https://sites.google.com/site/cultoddities/home/carrie/carri... Aaaand... there's actually a much more relevant set of quotes about The Shining, like: There's a lot to like about it. But it's a great big beautiful Cadillac with no motor inside. You can sit in it, you can enjoy the smell of the leather upholstery -- the only thing you can't do is drive it anywhere. So I would do everything different. The real problem is that Kubrick set out to make a horror picture with no apparent understanding of the genre. Everything about it screams that from the beginning to the end, from plot decisions to that final scene -- which has been used before on "The Twilight Zone."
rob74 2y ago
Yes, but you can adapt the story to the visual medium ("show don't tell" and all that) while staying true to its original intention. Or you can turn King's autobiographical character into a stereotypical psycho axe murderer.
- garblegarble 2y ago
  I'll preface this by saying that my love of cinema is more about the visual than the characterisation, so it may be that we're coming at this from two different angles... I do love both the book and Kubrick versions of The Shining, and I don't think either detracts from the other. I can't help but think keeping Jack's character more faithful to King's character of a good man slowly being corrupted by the hotel and resisting would have really changed the pace of Kubrick's movie for the worse, and taken away a lot of his really beautiful compositions. I think King's panned adaptation for the 1997 miniseries is evidence supporting that Kubrick's character adaptations were good choices for the film he was making / the medium shift. Edit: not sure why you're being downvoted, I think your characterisation of the changes Kubrick made to Jack's character is entirely valid
tetris11 2y ago
Agreed. The Dark Tower series works very well as independent books exhuding their own exotic charm. As a canonical series, it's a jumbled mess of barely connected themes tied together only by Kingcs own ego (maybe that's the point, but its still narcissistic). At some point he even tries to take credit for Harry Potter and Star Wars, albeit in a vague "everything's connected" type of way. I tell anybody who wants to read the series to simply read the first book, and the last chapter of the last book. He's a brilliant writer, but his strength lies in leaving some things to mystery, instead of micromanaging his worlds.
- CamperBob2 2y ago
  I tell anybody who wants to read the series to simply read the first book, and the last chapter of the last book. I don't know about that. The whole idea behind the series is to serve as a recounting of Roland's mistakes along the way, and how he progressively refines his course at each iteration. Cutting to the proverbial chase just leaves the reader (and Roland) stuck in the cycle forever. You have to suffer alongside him (and his companions) to get it, I think.
  - tetris11 2y ago
    The suffering becomes gratuitous after a certain point (spiderman? really?), so I think I just rejected that aspect and focused more on what made the Gunslinger so good: a slow relentless chase across an unknown world where the lines of good and evil are neither defined nor relevant.
    - CamperBob2 2y ago
      Yeah, valid point there. I almost called it quits a couple of times myself. By the end it was obvious that King was writing from a place that is uncomfortably familiar on a personal level. "Christ, I'm so tired of this project. If I were less conscientious, I could just walk away from it. Let's chop out some features and link in some third-party libraries so we can ship it already."
kcplate 2y ago
It’s my opinion, and probably only my opinion that the shorter his stories, the better they are. I love love love his short stories, but his novels are only meh for me—-two exceptions being the The Stand and Misery. I have read most of his stuff except for anything released in the last 3 years or so. I think even his short stories adapt better to movies as well…Shawshank, Stand By Me, The Green Mile…all three to me are simply awesome movies but were heavily adapted from the source story. Misery was good as well, but I kind of blame the casting of Kathy Bates as a genius move that really made that one work.
- anjel 2y ago
  Agreed, The Stand, notwithstanding.