I never read the Stephen King book, but I've seen the mini-series. And I can't help but think the mini-series was executed as one great big joke not at all meant to be taken seriously. The whole thing is just so overly infused with triteness, cliches, and sentimentalism.
Thoughts?
Well, I was at Laurel Entertainment when they produced it and I can tell you a few things.
One -- Stephen King wrote the screenplay and had creative control over it and it was most definitely not intended, in any way, as a joke.
Two -- if you want to go back and check you will find that there is pretty much not a single thing -- not a scene or a line of dialogue in the mini-series that wasn't in the book -- "triteness, cliches, and sentimentalism" et al. Most of the changes, with very few exceptions, were editorial -- cutting the book down to fit the time available (and addressing certain standards and practices issues).
Three -- I think that there were definitely some less than stellar casting choices -- but also some very good choices. Molly Ringwald - bad. Jamie Sheridan - bad. Laura San Giacomo - bad. On the other hand - Gary Sinise -- good. Miguel Ferrer -- good.
It's one of those problems. It's a TV mini-series with a finite budget and a very large cast and you're going to end up, inevitably, filling that cast with a lot of TV names.
Four -- and I say this with all love and respect to Stephen King. There are writers whose work can be taken right up off the page and put on the screen and it works fine. Raymond Chandler. Dashiell Hammett. Then there are others whose work is fine on the page -- but simply cannot be taken directly off the page and put on the screen. It doesn't work fine.
And Stephen King, I'm afraid, is one of those writers. His dialogue may work fine on the page, but try to have actors act it, and it performs like lead. It's one thing to have, when you're writing a novel, this idea that one should never take two lines to say something when you can take twenty or fifty or a hundred lines to say the same thing.
That doesn't work in the movies.
I invite, for those who doubt this, to compare Kubrick's "The Shining" -- a great movie, hated by Stephen King because it is terribly unfaithful to his book, as distinct from the TV mini-series for "The Shining" which Stephen King loves -- because it is extremely faithful to his book (and why shouldn't it be -- he wrote the teleplay) -- and is, as far as I'm concerned, completely unwatchable. I've never been able to sit through it.
And I think that King's book is great.
But you can't simply transcribe the book's scenes into screenplay format and think that you've written a screenplay.
And King just has this kind of almost wince-inducing "folksiness" about his dialogue that you just sort of pass over when you read it -- but it is like fingernails on a blackboard when you hear it performed.
NMS
