Giving Hollywood the Chills

By Richard Zoglin

Stephen King's scary bestsellers become hot film properties

Across the land, a mysterious fever has gripped the film making community.

In North Carolina, a movie crew builds an entire replica of an elaborate 250-year-old Southern mansion--and proceeds to burn it to the ground. Bands of talent scouts comb through used-car lots from Montana to Kentucky in search of their newest star-to-be: a 1958 Plymouth Fury.

Meanwhile, back in Hollywood, producers feel driven to offer huge sums of money to an ex-English teacher from Maine whose novels have an uncanny knack for winding up high on the bestseller list.

The plot for Stephen King's next excursion into the macabre? No, the real-life scenario now being played out by film makers scrambling to bring the works of America's hottest horror writer to the screen. Christine, based on King's recent bestseller about a killer automobile, opened around the country in early December, the sixth film of a King novel and the third to be released in the past five months. It followed last summer's Cujo, about a murderously rabid St. Bernard, and The Dead Zone, starring Christopher Walken as a schoolteacher tormented by his ability to foresee the future.

Nor is the cavalcade of King-inspired fright fests about to stop. Firestarter just finished shooting in Wilmington, N.C., for May release, and Children of the Corn, based on a King short story, is also scheduled to open next spring. Meanwhile, the busy author is adapting his 1978 novel The Stand for Director George Romero, and has provided five original stories for Creepshow II, a sequel to the horror omnibus he wrote (and co-starred in) two years ago. Indeed, Hollywood seems ready to snap up virtually anything King sets to paper short of his grocery list--and there is no guarantee some enterprising director will not put that on celluloid some dark and stormy night. ("The cucumbers, he sensed, were acting strange...") None of the books has arrived onscreen with as much dispatch as Christine.

Producer Richard Kobritz bought the movie rights for $500,000 after reading King's manuscript last year; production began on April 25, four days before the novel's publication. "You knew it was going to be a bestseller," explains Kobritz.

"That was axiomatic." Directed by John Carpenter (Halloween), the film eliminates the book's more lurid excesses, stripping it down to a tense tale of a dorky teen-ager whose 20-year-old Plymouth has an evil will of its own. The gleaming heap was actually played by 24 different vehicles, only three of which were still running by the end of the fender-bending filming.

For eye-popping special effects, Fire-starter--complete with fireballs hurtling toward the screen, human torches and a climactic conflagration--may turn out to be the most sensational King thriller yet.

A Dino De Laurentues production, it stars George C. Scott, Martin Sheen, and Drew Barrymore as an eight-year-old girl who can rouse flames by focusing her mind. "I thought it would be neat to see all these fires and effects," says E.T.'s little buddy, who picked up the book at home one day and told her mother she wanted to play the lead. "I set a lot of people on fire, but they deserve it."

The progenitor of all this filmic frenzy is a boyishly easygoing New England native who sets to work each morning to the accompaniment of blaring rock music.

King, 36, his wife Tabitha and three children divide their time between a 23-room Bangor mansion and a summer place in the foothills of the White Mountains. His houses bear a few traces of his ghoulish trade -- like a collection of two dozen grotesque masks, many of them sent by fans.

He hates to fly and visits Hollywood as seldom as possible. "It's real strange out there," he says. "Every time I go, I feel like I should take my passport."

Not that he feels badly treated by the studios. His screenplays for Cujo and The Dead Zone were reworked by others, but he still liked the finished films. And he is enthusiastic about Christine. "I wanted to go back and see it over again," the author says. "I've been lucky. I've had six adaptations of my novels, and there hasn't been a real dog in the bunch." (His only major reservation was with Stanley Kubrick's elegant, brooding 1980 version of The Shining; King found the director too "pragmatic and rational.") Though he has finished three drafts of a screenplay for The Stand, King vows that he has given up trying to adapt his own novels to the screen. "It's like sitting on a suitcase," he says. " Everything has to be condensed to fit in. Time is the master of everything." What is more, he has refused to sell the movie rights for Pet Sematary, his new run away bestseller about strange doings in a country graveyard, claiming that the grisly novel is better left unfilmed. "The book hurts; the film would hurt more," he says. "I don't need the money, and I don't need that."

Hollywood may try to change his mind. Starting with Brian De Palma's Carrie in 1976, each movie version has turned a profit (The Dead Zone has grossed $20 million since its late October release, while Christine has raked in a more modest $10 million). King's deftly spun tales of vampires, haunted hotels and psychically advanced humans have brought a measure of class and complexity to a genre domiated by crass scare films like Friday the 13th. "King creates youthful protagonists who are very much in tune with what's going on in the contemporary world of adolescents," says De Palma. "In books, he is the new Disney." Adds Christine Producer Kobritz (who also produced the TV movie of 'Salem's Lot): "He captures middle-class America exactly, just like John O'Hara did."

The Down East Disney keeps his word processor clicking at a phenomenal rate. He has just finished collaborating with fellow Horror Novelist Peter Straub (Ghost Story) on a fantasy novel called The Talisman. After that comes a new collection of short stories, and a lengthy monster opus called IT is in the works. Says Straub: "Steve is a workaholic who wouldn't be happy if he wasn't writing."

For a film industry with a wary eye on the box office, that could be the best news for '84.

-- By Richard Zoglin. Reported by Russell Leavitt/Los Angeles

With reporting by Russell Leavitt/Los Angeles