A Certain Point of View: Writing, Film and Stuff

#80sChristmasList The 1980s coincided with my high school and college years. They also coincided with the last decade of the Cold War, the advent of new technologies, and the emergence of Tom Clancy and the technothriller genre of popular fiction. The following is a sampling of various Christmastime lists from across the decade, although the default year is 1985, which was my freshman year at Miami-Dade Community College. I eventually ended up owning all of them; if I didn't receive them during the holidays, I'd get them later as birthday presents or, as in the case of my first personal computer, an out-of-the-blue gift from a relative. And, of course, once I got a few jobs, I'd buy things on my own. Personal computer (I was given one in 1987, an Apple IIe that cost approximately $2,100, or $4,774.56 in 2019) New-release VHS tapes of feature films (average cost in 1985: $79.99, or $190.85 in 2019) Novels by Stephen King Novels by Tom Clancy Music albums on...

How many movies have been made based on Stephen King's It ? It  has been adapted twice for filmed audio-visual media. The first filmed version of  It was a TV limited series; the second was a duology of theatrically-released movies.  The first adaptation of Stephen King’s 1986 doorstop of a novel was a 1990 adaptation made as a two-part ABC miniseries for television. Among the cast members: Tim Reid, Harry Anderson, Annette O’Toole, John Ritter, and Richard Thomas. The miniseries also featured Tim Curry as the evil Pennywise the Clown. Adapted for television by director Tommy Lee Wallace and Lawrence D. Cohen (who also adapted King’s  Carrie  for director Brian De Palma in 1976),  It  was okay but a watered-down take on the scary novel about a group of friends who must face off against a monstrous entity known as “It” twice. Once as kids in 1960, then again as adults in 1990. (Like  11,22.63,  the TV version of It avoids the year ...

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...

Cover for Stephen King's Creepshow by Jack Kamen. © 1982 Plume Books, an imprint of Penguin Books  In July of 1982, Penguin Books imprint Plume published Stephen King's Creepshow, a graphic novel based on George A. Romero's eponymous horror film, which had premiered in Cannes two months earlier but would not hit theaters for another four months. Written by King and illustrated by the late Bernie Wrightson under his professional nom de plume "Berni Wrightson," Creepshow (like the film it is derived from) is a graphic homage to the horror comics published by EC Comics in the 1950s. The 64-page book presents the same five stories in King's screenplay for the movie, two of which ( The Crate and The Lonesome Death of Jordy Verrill ) were adaptations of prose stories the author had published in men's magazines in the 1970s ; the other three segments were written specifically for Romero's film. Creepshow's quintet of horror tales consists of: ...

Creepshow (1982) Written by: Stephen King Directed by: George A. Romero Starring: Adrienne Barbeau, Carrie Nye, E.G. Marshall, Ted Danson, Hal Holbrook, Fritz Weaver, Leslie Nielsen, Stephen King, Viveca Lindfors On November 12, 1982, nearly six months after its world premiere, Warner Bros. released Creepshow, a horror anthology film featuring five vignettes written by Stephen King and directed by the late George A. Romero ( Night of the Living Dead ). Intended as an homage to the horror-themed comics published by William Gaines' EC Comics - especially Tales from the Crypt - in the 1950s, Creepshow was the first collaboration between the two Masters of Horror and spun off two sequels as well as a comic book scripted by King and illustrated by Berni Wrightson. Though it was produced in the early 1980s, Creepshow deliberately channels the look and storytelling tone of the Eisenhower-era comics that were largely responsible for the creation of the Comics Code Authority and...

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 li...

(C) 2010 Simon & Schuster  Long, long ago, at an early age so far back in my timeline that I can’t exactly remember, I decided that I would become a writer someday. Sure, like most boys in my peer group, I had dreams of pursuing other, more traditionally “manly” careers. At various times in my childhood I dreamed of becoming an astronaut, a pilot, a soldier, a Marine, and – at one point – even President of the United States. But reality – in the shape of a physical disability – flattened most of those naively unrealistic career dreams as surely as an African elephant will squash a ripe tomato. Luckily, I fell in love with the written word early in life; family lore has it that my maternal grandmother Ines taught me how to read – using ABC blocks – before I was two years old. (Mom used to tell a story – perhaps apocryphal – about how she and my father returned to Miami after their last trip to Paris and my grandmother proudly showed them the unlikely spectacle of ...

Stephen King's Misery focuses on Paul Sheldon, a writer who has made a comfortable living for himself by writing a series of Harlequin-type historical romances featuring a gorgeous English woman named Misery Chastain. For millions of his mostly-female readers, the romantic adventures of Misery are as riveting as, say, the mayhem endured by Jack Bauer on 24 , and although Paul was willing to write more books in the series to get those royalty checks, he is now growing weary of his character and her non-contemporary world. And, like many novelists, he wants to get on with the business of writing a serious work that might place him on the same literary level as Faulkner, Steinbeck and Hemingway Giving in to his heart’s desire, he does what his legions of fans and his agent least expect him to do: he kills off Misery Chastain. Unfortunately, when Paul is involved in a one-car accident out in the middle of nowhere, he’s saved from certain death by Annie Wilkes, a former nurse who...

Dust jacket of the original 1986 hardcover edition. Art by Bob Giusti. Lettering by Amy Hill. (C) 1986 Viking Press/Penguin Random House I'm glad I don't live in Maine. Oh, I'm not talking about the real New England state that was once part of Massachusetts and is famous for its lobsters and still very rural ambiance. I've never even been there, although I wouldn't rule out a tourist excursion at some point in the future, though if I do go, it would probably be in the summer, since winters up North are too chilly and snowbound for this Miami native's taste. No, the Maine I'm talking about is the Maine that exists in the imagination of Stephen King. Quite a few of his novels are set there, most of them in the fictional towns of Castle Rock, Tarker's Mills, Jerusalem's Lot, Little Tall Island....and Derry. Here, in towns that have existed since before the American Revolution, the inhabitants of these communities have coexisted with vampires...

(C) 1987 Viking One of the things I like about Stephen King is his versatility as a storyteller. Yes, he focuses on horror and the supernatural -- telekinetic teenagers, vampires, creatures from other dimensions and even a really "killer" flu -- and is therefore not considered to be a "serious" writer. However, considering the vast output of King books and his longevity as a bestselling author, if nearly 45 years of novels, short story collections, screenplays, original teleplays and a loyal fan base doesn't make him a serious writer, I don't know what would.  I used to buy each new King novel either in paperback or, when I could afford it, in hardcover. Gradually my tastes shifted to military fiction by Tom Clancy, Stephen Coonts and Harold Coyle, but I never stopped liking King's books.  One of my favorites is his 1987 excursion into fantasy, The Eyes of the Dragon . Essentially a story for younger readers -- aimed at kids 12 and up -- and beau...

Pros: Good - if a bit overlong - script. Fine cast and great performances. Cons: Leisurely pace might be a turn-off to some viewers. One of the few good things about television and the home video business is that, on occasion, a box-office "flop" that is simply a good movie that didn't find a receptive audience in theatrical release can still make a comeback thanks to repeated airings on cable networks such as TNT and through sales and rentals of videocassettes (remember those?), DVDs, and Blu-ray discs. Such is the case of Frank Darabont's first major feature film, 1994's The Shawshank Redemption, which he adapted from a Stephen King novella ( Rita Hayworth and Shawshank Redemption ) which had been published in a mid-1980s anthology, Different Seasons . Though it was given good reviews in its initial release back in 1994, The Shawshank Redemption tanked at the box office...badly. Viewers, perhaps puzzled by its strange title or by it...