How Stephen King’s secret pseudonym cost George Linder a fortune
Between 1977 and 1984, Stephen King’s career entered a strange phase when he published five novels under the pseudonym Richard Bachman.
At that time, there was an unwritten rule that successful authors should only publish one book per year, so they didn’t run the risk of flooding the market. King, though, was overflowing with ideas, and after Carrie was published in 1974, he was in a rush to get more of them onto shelves.
So, King reworked four manuscripts he’d written in high school and college, and later one additional novel, and they were published under the Bachman moniker. He and his publisher did everything they could to keep the secret that Bachman was actually King, because it also served another important purpose. King wanted to know if he could sell books purely because they were good, or if his massive sales figures were a result of ‘Stephen King’ becoming a brand name in a short amount of time.
Amazingly, King managed to keep his alias a secret until 1985, when a Washington DC book shop employee became suspicious of the similarities in writing style between King and Bachman. He discovered the truth at the Library of Congress, and when he phoned King’s publisher to say he intended to go public with his findings, the author took control of the situation by giving him an exclusive interview.
Three years before the world realised it had been hoodwinked, though, a first-time movie producer named George Linder read Bachman’s fourth opus and became excited at the prospect of turning it into a film. The book was 1982’s The Running Man, a dark, dystopian sci-fi story about an educator who loses his job for teaching his students about civil rights, then finds himself competing on a violent 30-day game show to win prize money to feed his hungry family. For every hour the “running man” stays alive while professional killers hunt him, he earns $100, and if he lasts the full 30 days, he wins a billion smackaroos.
When Linder enquired about buying the film rights, he was shocked by how pricey they were, especially considering Bachman’s books weren’t exactly selling gangbusters at the time. Still, he forged ahead and made a deal for $20,000 up front, plus an additional $100,000 if he could actually get the movie into production. It was a massive chunk of change for a guy whose previous business ventures involved lightweight bicycles and hi-tech wheelchairs, but he truly believed The Running Man was his ticket to Hollywood, so he took the gamble.
Linder, a complete novice in the moviemaking business, enlisted the help of two friends and wrote a screenplay adaptation of the novel over the course of nine months. However, when they began showing it around ‘the town’, he became frustrated at the lack of progress when dealing with a myriad of producers, studio executives, financiers, and agents, none of whom he had any prior experience with. Then the news that Bachman was, in reality, Stephen freakin’ King broke, and all of a sudden, everyone in Hollywood wanted to make the movie.
A stunned Linder finally discovered why he’d been forced to pay such a pretty penny for the rights, and he likened the experience to finding a Rembrandt masterpiece in K-Mart. In mid-1985, he signed a deal with Taft/Barish Productions, whereupon his script, which was not-so-graciously dubbed “amateurish”, was overhauled entirely by future Die Hard scribe Steven E De Souza. It soon became the garish, over-the-top, American Gladiators-style sci-fi action thriller audiences would come to know and love, and things worked out extremely well for Linder, who is still attached to the 2025 remake as an executive producer.
