Harlan Ellison's Watching (32 page)

So why is it that films made from Stephen King's stories turn out, for the most part, to be movies that look as if they'd been chiseled out of Silly Putty by escapees from the Home for the Terminally Inept?

This question, surely one of the burning topics of our troubled cosmos, presents itself anew upon viewing
Firestarter
(Universal), Dino De Laurentiis's latest credential in his struggle to prove to the world that he has all the artistic sensitivity of a piano bench. Based on Steve King's 1980 novel, and a good solid novel it was, this motion picture is (forgive me) a burnt-out case. We're talking scorched earth. Smokey the Bear would need a sedative. Jesus wept. You get the idea.

The plot line is a minor key-change on the basic fantasy concept King used in
Carrie
. Young female with esper abilities as a pyrotic. (Because the people who make these films think human speech is not our natural tongue, they always gussie up simple locutions so their prolixity will sound "scientific." Pyrotic was not good enough for the beanbags who made this film, so they keep referring to the firestarter as "a possessor of pyrokinetic abilities." In the Kingdom of the Beanbags a honey-dipper is a "Defecatory Residue Repository Removal Supervisor for On-Site Effectation.")

The conflict is created by the merciless hunt for the firestarter—eight-year-old Charlene "Charlie" McGee, played by Drew Barrymore of
E.T.
fame—that is carried out by a wholly improbable government agency alternately known as the Department of Scientific Intelligence and "The Shop." Charlie and her daddy, who also has esper abilities, though his seem to shift and alter as the plot demands, are on the run. The Shop has killed Charlie's mommy, for no particularly clear reason, and they want Charlie for their own nefarious purposes, none of which are logically codified; but we can tell from how oily these three-piece-suiters are, that Jack Armstrong would never approve of their program. Charlie and her daddy run, The Shop gnashes its teeth and finally sends George C. Scott as a comic-book hit man after them; and they capture the pair; and they run some special effects tests; and Charlie gets loose; and a lot of people go up in flames; and daddy and the hit man and the head of The Shop all get smoked; and Charlie hitchhikes back to the kindly rustic couple who thought it was cute when she looked at the butter and made it melt.

The screenplay by Stanley Mann, who did not disgrace himself with screen adaptations of
The Collector
and
Eye of the Needle
, here practices a craft that can best be described as creative typing. Or, more in keeping with technology, what he has wrought now explains to me the previously nonsensical phrase "word processing." As practiced by Mr. Mann, this is the processing of words in the Cuisinart School of Homogeneity.

The direction is lugubrious. As windy and psychotic as Mann's scenario may be, it is rendered even more tenebrous by the ponderous, lumbering, pachydermal artlessness of one Mark L. Lester (not the kid-grown-up of
Oliver!
). Mr. Lester's fame, the
curriculum vita
, that secured for him this directional sinecure, rests on a quagmire base of
Truck Stop Women, Bobbie Joe and the Outlaw
(starring Lynda Carter and Marjoe Gortner, the most fun couple to come along since Tracy and Hepburn, Gable and Lombard, Cheech and Chong),
Stunts
and the awesome
Roller Boogie
. The breath do catch, don't it!

Like the worst of the television hacks, who tell you everything three times—Look, she's going to open the coffin! / She's opening the coffin now! / Good lord, she opened the coffin!—Lester and Mann reflect their master's contempt for the intelligence of filmgoers by endless sophomoric explanations of things we know, not the least being a tedious rundown on what ESP is supposed to be.

The acting is shameful. From the cynical use of "name stars" in cameo roles that they might as well have phoned in, to the weary posturing of the leads, this is a drama coach's nightmare. Louise Fletcher sleepwalks through her scenes like something Papa Doc might have resurrected from a Haitian graveyard; Martin Sheen, whose thinnest performances in the past have been marvels of intelligence and passion, has all the range of a Barry Manilow ballad; David Keith with his constantly bleeding nose is merely ridiculous; and Drew Barrymore, in just two years, has become a puffy, petulant, self-conscious "actor," devoid of the ingenuousness that so endeared her in
E.T.

And what in the world has happened to George C. Scott's previously flawless intuition about which scripts to do? It was bad enough that he consented to appear as the lead in Paul Schrader's loathsome
Hardcore;
but for him willingly to assay the role of John Rainbird, the ponytailed Amerind government assassin, and to perform the part of what must surely be the most detestable character since Joyboy's mother in
The Loved One;
Divine in
Pink Flamingos
or Jabba the Hut with a verve that borders on teeth-gnashing, is beyond comprehension. It has been a while since I read the novel, but it is not my recollection that the parallel role in the text possessed the McMartin Pre-School child molester mien Scott presents. It is a jangling, counter-productive, unsavory element that is, hideously, difficult to sweep from memory. That it is in some squeamish-making way memorable, is not to Scott's credit. It is the corruption of his talent.

Dino De Laurentiis is the Irwin Allen of his generation: coarse, lacking subtlety, making films of vulgar pretentiousness that personify the most venal attitudes of the industry. He ballyhoos the fact that he had won two Oscars, but hardly anyone realizes they were for Fellini's
La Strada
and
Nights of Cabiria
in 1954 and 1957—and let's not fool ourselves, even if the publicity flaks do: those are
Fellini
films, not De Laurentiis films—long before he became the cottage industry responsible for
Death Wish
, the remakes of
King Kong
and
The Hurricane
, the travesty known as
Flash Gordon, Amityville II
and
Amityville 3-D, Conan the Barbarian
and the embarrassing
King of the Gypsies
.

But Dino De Laurentiis is precisely the sort of intellect most strongly drawn to the works of Stephen King. He is not a lone blade of grass in the desert. He is merely the most visible growth on the King horizon. Stephen King has had nine films made from his words, and there is a formulaic reason why all but one or two of those films have been dross.

Next time I'll try to codify that reason.

Until then, and more about these films later, go see
Repo Man
(if you can find it) and
Indiana Jones and the Temple of Doom
. Avoid with all your might
Streets of Fire
. Don't miss
Ghostbusters
. And prepare yourself to avoid all reviews and blandishments that will suggest you see
Gremlins
, one of the most purely evil films ever visited on the filmgoing public.

I will deal at length with each of these as soon as I blight my friendship with Stephen King.

The Magazine of Fantasy & Science Fiction
/ October 1984

Pinter works, though he shouldn't; and I'll be damned if I can discern why; he just does. Bradbury and Hemingway don't; and I think I can figure out why they don't, which is a clue to why Stephen King doesn't, either. Xenogenesis seems to be the question this time around, and if you'll go to your Unabridged and look it up, I'll wait right here for you and tell you all about it when you get back.

Times passes. Leaves flying free from a calendar. The seasons change. The reader returns from the Unabridged.

Now that we understand the meaning of the word Xenogenesis, let us consider why it
is
that King's books—as seemingly hot for metamorphosis as any stuff ever written by anyone—usually wind up as deranged as Idi Amin and as cruel as January in Chicago and as unsatisfying as sex with the pantyhose still on: why it
is
that the children, hideous and crippled offspring, do not resemble their parents.

First, I can just imagine your surprise when I point out that this thing King has been around in the literary consciousness a mere ten years. It was just exactly an eyeblink decade ago that the schoolteacher from Maine wrote:

Nobody was really surprised when it happened, not really, not at the subconscious level where savage things grow . . . Showers turning off one by one, girls stepping out, removing pastel bathing caps, toweling, spraying deodorant, checking the clock over the door. Bras were hooked, underpants stepped into . . . Calls and catcalls rebounded with all the snap and flicker of billiard balls after a hard break . . . Carrie turned off the shower. It died in a drip and a gurgle . . . It wasn't until she stepped out that they all saw the blood running down her leg.

Second, I'll bet none of you realized what a fluke it was that King took off so abruptly. Well, here's the odd and unpredictable explanation, conveyed because I happened to be there when it happened. (Who else would tell you this stuff, gang?)

Doubleday had purchased
Carrie
for a small advance. It was, in the corporate cosmos, just another mid-list title, a spooky story to be marketed without much foofaraw among the first novels, the "learn to love your brown rice and get svelte thighs in 30 minutes" offerings, the books one finds in the knockoff catalogues nine months later at $1.49 plus a free shopping bag. But King's editor read that opening sequence in which the telekinetic, Carrie White, gets her first menstrual experience before the eyes of a covey of teenage shrikes, and more than the lightbulb in the locker room exploded. Xeroxes of the manuscript were run off; they were disseminated widely in-house; women editors passed them on to female secretaries, who took them home and gave them to their friends. That first scene bit hard. It was the essence of the secret of Stephen King's phenomenal success: the everyday experience raised to the mythic level by the application of fantasy to a potent cultural trope. It was Jungian archetype goosed with ten million volts of emotional power. It was the commonly-shared horrible memory of half the population, reinterpreted. It was the flash of recognition, the miracle of that rare instant in which readers dulled by years of reading artful lies felt their skin stretched tight by an encounter with artful truth.

Stephen King, in one emblematic image, had taken control of his destiny.

I'm not even sure Steve, for all his self-knowledge, has an unvarnished perception of how close he came to remaining a schoolteacher who writes paperback originals as a hobby and to supplement the family income in his spare time when he's not too fagged out from extracurricular duties at the high school.

But just as Ian Fleming became an "overnight success" when John F. Kennedy idly mentioned that the James Bond books—which had been around for years—were his secret passion; just as
Dune
took off in paperback years after its many rejections by publishers and its disappointing sale in hardcover, when Frank Herbert came to be called "the father of Earth Day" and the novel was included in
The Whole Earth Catalog
; just as Joseph Heller, Joseph Heller's agent, Joseph Heller's publisher and the Eastern Literary Establishment that had trashed
Catch-22
when it was first published, began trumpeting Heller's genius when
another
literary agent (not Heller's), named Candida Donadio, ran around New York jamming the book under people's noses, telling them it was a new American classic; in just that inexplicable, unpredictable, magic way, Doubleday's in-house interest spread. To
Publishers Weekly
, to the desk of Bennett Cerf, to the attention of first readers for the film studios on the Coast, to the sales force mandated to sell that season's line, to the bookstore buyers, and into the cocktail-party chatter of the word-of-mouth crowd. The word spread: this
Carrie
novel is hot.

And the readers were rewarded. It
was
hot: because King had tapped into the collective unconscious with Carrie White's ordeal. The basic premise was an easy one to swallow, and once down, all that followed was characterization. That is the secret of Stephen King's success in just ten years, and it is the reason why, in my view, movies based on King novels never resemble the perfectly decent novels that inspired them.

In films written by Harold Pinter as screenplay, or in films based on Pinter plays, it is not uncommon for two people to be sitting squarely in the center of a two-shot speaking as follows:

CORA: (Cockney accent) Would'ja like a nice piece of fried bread for breakfast, Bert?

BERT: (abstracted grunting) Yup. Fried bread'd be nice.

CORA: Yes . . . fried bread
is
nice, in't it?

BERT: Yuh. I like fried bread.

CORA: Well, then, there 'tis: Nice fried bread.

BERT: It's nice fried bread.

CORA: (pleased) Is it nice, then?

BERT: Yuh. Fried bread's nice.

Unless you have heard me do my absolutely hilarious Pinter parody, or have seen every Pinter play and film out of unconstrained admiration for the man's work—as have I—then the foregoing copy cannot possibly read well; nor should it, by all the laws of dramaturgy,
play
well onscreen. But it does. I cannot decipher the code; but the cadences work like a dray horse, pulling the plot and character development, the ever-tightening tension and emotional conflict, toward the goal of mesmerizing involvement that is Pinter's hallmark.