A Certain Point of View: Writing, Film and Stuff

On Quora, an anonymous member asks: If '11.22.63' was a movie, do you think it deserves more than 1 star? From what I understand,  11.22.63  was going to be a feature film (aka “theatrically-released movie”), but the people involved (the late Jonathan Demme had optioned it) had an incredibly hard time adapting it into a viable screenplay.  11/22/63  (the novel) is a long and exquisitely detailed book, so the film version was abandoned. Fortunately, J.J. Abrams is a huge fan of the book, and when he emailed Stephen King to say how much he’d loved it, he also mentioned that it should be made into a miniseries. © 2011 Scribner (I love that book cover!) So…J.J. Abrams, James Franco, Stephen King, and Bridgette Carpenter teamed up and produced  11.22.63  for the Hulu streaming network. Not as a movie, but as a nine-part series. © 2016 Hulu  (This guy doesn’t look like Lee Harvey Oswald as much as Gary Oldman did in  JFK,  but he did a great job.) But t

As a writer/reader, I’ve learned over the years to stop expecting book-to-movie adaptations to recreate novels, short stories, plays, or Broadway musicals with 100% fidelity. It is a nearly impossible task to translate a medium - such as literature - that concerns itself mostly with the internal, mental, and emotional processes of a story’s characters  perfectly  into another medium (film or TV) that is mostly visual and needs imagery and motion to tell a story. I’m a huge fan of Stephen King’s 2011 novel. It was the first King novel I bought after a long drought (nearly 10 years) since I had bothered to get one of his books ( Wizard and Glass ). But when I found out that Stephen King had written a time travel story in which the protagonist’s task is to prevent JFK’s assassination, I was eager to see how Steve-O would pull that rabbit out of his magician’s hat. I read the novel in less than a week - a miracle of sorts, because at the time I had a lot going on in my life, most

In 2011, even before Scribner (a division of Simon & Schuster) published Stephen King's time travel novel  11/22/63, director Jonathan Demme ( The Silence of the Lambs ) announced that he had acquired the film rights. He was intrigued by its premise - a 21st Century high school English teacher travels back in time to prevent John F. Kennedy's assassination in Dallas on November 22, 1963.  Demme would write the screenplay and direct the feature film, while King would be the project's executive producer. It was a good idea on paper, but the reality was something entirely different. According to Rolling Stone's Andy Greene, "[t]he book...had  a rather rocky first step on its road to the screen. Director Jonathan Demme was the first license to it, though King had complete veto power over every aspect of the project. "He was pretty adamant that it be a theatrical film," says the bestselling author. "It was like, 'Jon, I don't kno