The Jack Nicholson movie Stephen King hated: “Wake up and earn the paycheque”
History has shown that one of the easiest ways for a Stephen King adaptation to earn Stephen King’s approval is to remain faithful to the source material, which is why he’s one of the very few people who harbour ill will towards Stanley Kubrick’s The Shining.
Most people would agree that the legendary filmmaker’s intense, atmospheric, and dread-inducing psychological chiller is one of the greatest horror movies ever made, even if it was inexplicably seared into the record books as the only one of Kubrick’s films to be nominated at the Razzies.
Shelley Duvall’s ‘Worst Actress’ nod was eventually rescinded due to the stories that emerged of her nightmarish experience working under the meticulous and often tyrannical director, but King hasn’t changed his mind about her performance. For some, it’s one of the genre’s finest showcases that oozes terror from every pore, while for the author, she’s nothing but the human equivalent of a screaming dishrag.
King didn’t think Jack Nicholson was the right person to play Jack Torrance, either, voicing his frustrations that instead of embodying the character he put on the page, the star simply leaned into the manic and wild-eyed bag of tricks that had served him incredibly well in various other productions.
The prolific writer and horror icon was a fan of Nicholson in general, though, despite his famous disdain for The Shining. Everybody knows that King has opened both barrels on Kubrick’s masterpiece many times over the years, but what’s less well known is that there’s another one of the three-time Academy Award winner’s credits he couldn’t stand.
“Disliked Anger Management, another in a long line of dopey, half-awake comedies,” he wrote in Entertainment Weekly. “Yes, Adam Sandler is a funny man. Yes, Jack Nicholson is a fine actor and a funny man. But you have to earn it every time out, and here are two guys coasting along without a director ballsy enough to tell them it’s time to wake up and earn the paycheque.”
King approves of Sandler, and he approves of Nicholson as individuals, but when they co-starred in the same movie? Not so much. The latter admitted that 9/11 convinced him to focus on prioritising comedy over drama, and there were few bigger names in the genre in the early 2000s than Sandler. Anger Management wasn’t great, but seeing as it delivered exactly what everyone was expecting, what else did he want?
It’s a movie starring Sandler that he also produced through his Happy Madison banner, so nobody expected him to do anything other than bust out his usual shtick. The prospect of Nicholson appearing alongside him guaranteed scenery chewing and enough ham to fill a dozen picnic baskets, which is what Anger Management delivered.
