“It just didn’t happen”: when Stephen King almost wrote a movie for Sam Peckinpah
He might be one of the most heavily adapted authors in history, but relative to the number of his stories that get brought to screens, either big or small, Stephen King has only been hands-on in a very small percentage of them.
Since Brian De Palma got the ball rolling with 1976’s horror classic Carrie, there have been over 50 feature-length adaptations of stories that originated from King’s imagination, and that’s not even counting the dozens that are in various stages of development at studios and streamers across Hollywood.
On television, there have been more than 30, but of that raft of projects quickly closing in on triple figures, little more than a dozen have been scripted by the man himself. That doesn’t even include screen-only creations like Storm of the Century, Sleepwalkers, or Rose Red, either, but Sam Peckinpah almost got the best of both worlds.
There aren’t many similarities between them as creatives: King became synonymous with page-turning horror and struck fear into the hearts of readers everywhere, while ‘Bloody Sam’ ushered in a new era of cinematic violence with balletic displays of bloodshed in films like The Wild Bunch, Straw Dogs, and The Getaway.
Over a decade before the two books were even published, King revealed to Deadline that he met with Peckinpah not long before the filmmaker’s death in December 1984 to discuss the possibility of combining mirror novels The Regulators and Desperation into a single picture.
“I had a meeting with Sam Peckinpah a few months before he died, and he was really interested in turning that into a movie called The Shotgunners, and I wanted to write the screenplay for it,” he admitted. “I thought it would make a terrific R-rated action adventure, the kind of thing Sam was terrific at. It just didn’t happen and never went any further than that.”
In an ambitious literary feat, The Regulators and Desperation hit shelves on the same day. The former was credited to the famous pseudonym Richard Bachman, with the latter penned under King’s real name. The two stories unfold in parallel universes, with the novels sharing characters, albeit in different worlds.
The Regulators focuses on the shotgun-wielding titular group terrorising the streets of suburban Ohio in a quartet of vans gunning down anyone who steps outside their door, while Desperation follows people abducted by the deputy of the fictional mining town while travelling down a desolated Nevada highway.
Two King tales unfolding in two separate universes that exist fractionally apart from each other being translated into a gun-ho action thriller from the maverick auteur behind The Wild Bunch was a mouthwatering combination, but Peckinpah’s passing ultimately nixed the idea.
The page-to-screen pipeline has been nothing if not inconsistent, but partnering up those two minds for a movie that suited each of their sensibilities could have turned out to be something very special.
