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,...

I haven’t seen  The Dark Tower,  but from what I have heard of it, I think the four screenwriters (Nikolaj Arcel, Akiva Goldsman, Jeff Pinkner, and Ander Thomas Jensen) and the film’s director (Arcel) may have been forced by certain considerations to adapt the  Dark Tower  series the way they did. First, as  Quora's Matt Reda points out in his answer, Stephen King’s series is made up by eight novels; seven of them are the main series, while  The Wind Through The Keyhole  (which King says is Book 4.5, and fits between  Wizard and Glass  and  The Wolves of the Calla ) is a side jaunt written after the series ended with  Book VII: The Dark Tower. This is a huge story, as big, say, as J.K. Rowling’s  Harry Potter  series and almost as big as J.R.R. Tolkien’s Middle Earth mythology, which would include  The Hobbit, The Lord of the Ring,  and  The Silmarillion. That’s a lot of story to tell! Ideal...

It (2017) AKA It: Chapter One Directed by: Andy Muschietti Screenplay by: Chase Palmer & Cary Fukunaga and Gary Dauberman Starring: Jaeden Lieberher, Bill Skarsgard, Wyatt Oleff, Jeremy Ray Taylor, Sophia Lillis, Finn Wolfhard, Jack Dylan Grazer, Chosen Jacobs, Nicholas Hamilton, Jackson Robert Scott From Page to Screen On September 15, 1986, Viking Press, a division of Penguin Random House, published It, a 1,138 horror novel by Stephen King set in the fictional town of Derry, Maine. In It, seven pre-adolescent children band together as the "Losers' Club" and confront It, an evil entity that exploits their innermost fears and takes many forms, including that of Pennywise the Dancing Clown. The novel depicts the Losers' Club's efforts to defeat It in two time periods - the late 1950s and 1985 - and often alternates between the two eras. Dust jacket of the original 1986 hardcover edition. Art by Bob Giusti. Lettering by Amy Hill. (C...

“Stand by Me” is a moving coming-of-age comedy drama directed by Rob Reiner. Adapted from Stephen King’s novella The Body by screenwriter-producer Bruce A. Evans and Raynold Gideon, this 1986 comedy drama follows the misadventures of four pre-teen boys (Wil Wheaton, River Phoenix, Corey Feldman and Jerry O’Connell) who hike through the woods outside the small town of Castle Rock, Oregon to look for a missing teen’s corpse. Like director Robert Mulligan’s “Summer of ‘42” and other coming-of-age movies, “Stand by Me” is not a plot-driven movie. It’s a character piece that focuses on Gordie (Wheaton), Chris (Phoenix), Teddy (Feldman) and Vern (O’Connell) during a weekend-long trek in the Oregon woods to find a dead kid’s body before a band of teenage hoodlums led by Ace Merrill (Kiefer Sutherland) does. On the surface, “Stand by Me” is one of those “small” films that are better suited for after school television specials than the silver screen. But King’s well-written novella is...

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...