Sundays with Stephen: The Beginning
This post is a quick explanation of a project of ours that I like to call “Sundays with Stephen”
The basic idea is simple enough: Watch every Stephen King movie in chronological order, one per week, with no regard for quality. Every. Single. One.
Stephen King more than any other author sums up American literature, good and bad, in the late 20th/early 21st century. He writes popularly accessible fiction addressing a wide variety of topics, even genres, unselfconsciously, and his work sells very, very well. He is the best at what he does (whether or not what he does appeals to you personally).
In addition, King has been very willing to lend his work to adaptations, even actively participating in many of them, as a writer and actor. This has resulted in a very wide body of work on film over the last three and a half decades… some of it very good. Some very bad. These adapations of his extremely popular work, in a mass entertainment medium, make up a broad cross-section of American cinema.
(Ok, enough pretentious academic stuff)
So myself and the roommate decided that we would watch them all, and document the experience. Tune in every Sunday to see the results. Will The Shining keep us awake? Will The Dead Zone foster even greater love for Christopher Walken?
Will I hang myself from the balcony rather than sit through Maximum Overdrive? Check back to find out.*
I’ve already had at least one well-meaning friend warn me off this endeavour, but I shall not be dissuaded from this noble cultural experiment. I’m ready; bring on the films, Netflix!
Update: Whoops, I forgot the rules for this little exercise.
Official Sundays with Stephen Rules:
1) All Stephen King films shall be watched in chronological order, one per week, until the most recent has been seen or shown.
1a) For the purposes of this exercise, only feature length theatrical releases shall apply. No TV movies or miniseries are mandatory; we may watch some, at our discretion.
2)All movies shall be watched in their entirety. DVDs shall be obtained from Netflix, unless already owned, and Director’s Cuts, if available, will be the preferred version screened(s)
3) Psychotropic drugs, mood elevators, and large doses of alcohol are… recommended, in the case of Maximum Overdrive.
4) Official screening order determined by IMDB
5) Only films written by Stephen King, or based on original works by King, shall apply. NO UNOFFICIAL SEQUELS (I’m looking at you, direct to video Children of the Corn movies)
*Note: If I do hang myself, I promise that I will put a post up here, in lieu of a suicide note, as a post-dated blog entry. If I fail to do so.. well, I’ll be dead. So I will no longer fear your scorn.
No Children of the Corn sequels? But when so many of the movies, especially the later ones, are more loose adaptations of ideas than translations of King’s works, where do you draw the line between story and screenplay?
Couldn’t find a copy of the second one, could you?
I haven’t looked, to be honest, on the second Children of the Corn. My standard would be, I suppose, whether or not he actually *wrote* the material the movie is based on. The problem with the Children of the Corn movies is that after the first, they’re not really based on anything he came up with. They have murder, and I suppose, they have corn. It’s pretty shaky.
In the Stephen King Goes to the Movies short story collection, he has a foreword explaining his take on the film adaptations of the various stories inside. He actually likes the first Children of the Corn, though not as much as his story; he then states that he has no interest in or control over the sequel franchise, and doesn’t even know how many of them have been made, or if there are future plans to make others. Here, lemme type up the relevant paragraph:
I know it’s a bit of a gray area sometimes; mostly it’s not so hard though. When it’s taken from an entire novel, like The Shining, It, Carrie, Firestarter, Christine, The Dead Zone, etc, or when he was definitely involved in adapting his own material for a movie, like in some of the short-story anthology movies (Creepshow 2, Tales from the Darkside), it’s pretty easy. When he was completely involved, like Creepshow or Maximum Overdrive, it’s even easier (though someone should really go back in time and convince him not to do Overdrive… ugh).
I’m not saying I absolutely *won’t* watch unofficial sequels; I’ve been dying to see, and then drink until I forget, my dusty old copy of Return to Salem’s Lot.
They’re just not required, and would be extra credit, so to speak. I guess I could see the logic in watching I – IV, but since he didn’t even know about 5, 6 or 7, they’re right out.
(Hmm… Netflix has 1-7, except for 2. Why not 2, I wonder…)
Oh yeah, I forgot to say, we do know that there is a limit to how much adaptation King will allow, because of the whole Lawnmower Man lawsuit. Since that’s the only one he’s ever insisted they take his name off, I think that’s a pretty good measure of how far you’d have to go to be out of bounds here, so long as it was based on an actual King story to any reasonable degree.
I don’t know what the deal with the second movie is, either. I assume it’s some dispute between Miramax, who produced 2 and the direct-to-video sequels following it, and Paramount, who owns video distribution rights. I brought it up since I’ve been down that path: Children of the Corn II was (is? too lazy to check) on the IMdb bottom 100 list, so hey, why not, right? I did manage to find a copy, one that appears to be a Hong Kong–made VHS rip, and…we had to take a few breaks in the middle.
This project sounds interesting whatever parameters you set for yourselves, but it probably is a good idea to exclude that one. And Maximum Overdrive isn’t that bad. At least in that one the killing machines are mobile (cf. The Mangler).
Oh, I know, objectively I suppose, that Maximum Overdirve isn’t the worst movie ever. But it’s also a personal hatred of mine. Something about the sheer inherent stupidity of that film, layer upon layer, just bothers me.
It’s sort of tragic too; according to the Wikipedia, there was a nasty accident on set and a guy lost his eye making that. I mean, wow. Losing your eye to make a bad movie about killer semis and rednecks.
Which I suppose is the other point, I mean, there’s no one for me to root for. I’m not really pro-truck enslavement, but I’m definitely anti-redneck. It’s a bit like the tagline to the vomitious Alien vs Predator movie: No matter who wins, we lose.