The movie adaptation that moved Stephen King to tears: “It had the emotional gradient”
The relationship between Stephen King and cinema has always been an inconsistent one, something to be expected when his bibliography is so voluminous it hasn’t even come close to being picked clean, which by extension makes him an easy source of adaptations.
His name has become a brand unto itself, and that inbuilt popularity means there are always going to be people interested in seeing a movie or TV show derived from one of his stories. The downside is that quantity and quality haven’t always gone hand-in-hand, but there have been more than a few classics to emerge from the endless page-to-screen pipeline that starts with King.
The author may not have cared much for The Shining but it’s one of the greatest horrors ever made, while Frank Darabont mastered the prison drama with The Shawshank Redemption and The Green Mile, with Rob Reiner also doing a nice line in King by way of Misery and Stand by Me.
Several of those aforementioned titles exist as King’s favourite adaptations of his own work, but only one of them reduced him to a blubbering wreck. Reiner’s 1986 coming-of-age drama was semi-autobiographical in nature, with the writer using his own formative experiences as a youngster to inform the characters.
Even though he’d lived it and then typed it, he still couldn’t contain himself when he saw it realised on-screen, explaining why and how it deeply affected him on an emotional level when singing its praises to Rolling Stone as the single best movie based on one of his books that had ever been put to film.
“I thought it was true to the book and because it had the emotional gradient of the story. It was moving,” he said. “I think I scared the shit out of Rob Reiner. He showed it to me in the screening room at the Beverly Hills Hotel. I was out there for something else, and he said, ‘Can I come over and show you this movie?’. And you have to remember that the movie was made on a shoestring. It was supposed to be one of those things that opened in six theatres and then maybe disappeared.”
Needless to say, that was not the ultimate fate of Stand by Me, which opened wide and went on to earn over $50million at the box office, secure an Academy Award nomination for ‘Best Adapted Screenplay’, and make the Golden Globes shortlist for ‘Best Picture – Drama’ and ‘Best Director’.
“When the movie was over, I hugged him because I was moved to tears,” King confessed. “Because it was so autobiographical.” He was far from the only person who experienced leaky tear ducts during the movie, but nobody else who found themselves overcome with emotion was the person who wrote the source material.
