The 1982 movie Stephen King almost made with Steven Spielberg: “We had a communication breakdown”
Steven Spielberg and Stephen King have spent half a century at the top of their respective professions, and the prospect of Steve squared teaming up for a movie could have been one for the ages.
Unfortunately, this was the early 1980s, and you couldn’t ping a few emails back and forth. Obviously, telephones and letters could have been an option, but the author made himself so scarce that the filmmaker had no idea where he was or how to track him down for their would-be collaboration.
By then, King was already waist-deep in Hollywood, with Brian De Palma’s Carrie igniting the industry’s obsession with adapting his work for the big screen. Spielberg was fresh off Raiders of the Lost Ark, which only served to cement his reputation as the undisputed king of blockbuster cinema.
King wasn’t a scribe-for-hire, though, but he wasn’t against the idea. It wouldn’t be until 1992’s Sleepwalkers that he’d write a screenplay for a feature that wasn’t based on one of his existing stories. However, he did make his screenwriting debut ten years previously, when he penned George A Romero’s anthology, Creepshow.
Things could have turned out differently that same year, with King revealing that Spielberg had tried to contact him to gauge his interest in joining forces to crack the script for Poltergeist. “It didn’t work out,” he admitted. “Because it was before the internet, and we had a communication breakdown.”
Spielberg was credited with the story, co-wrote the supernatural horror with Michael Grais and Mark Victor, produced the picture alongside Frank Marshall, and, depending on who you choose to believe, may have replaced The Texas Chain Saw Massacre‘s Tobe Hooper behind the camera and ghost-directed it himself.
A huge hit at the box office and a three-time Academy Award nominee, Poltergeist was one of the most acclaimed horrors of the decade, but that doesn’t make it any less fascinating to wonder how it would have turned out as a King/Spielberg collaboration. “I wanted him to help me out with the script and sort of write it with me, but he was unavailable,” the latter admitted.
Even in the ’80s, it couldn’t have been too difficult to track down somebody who spends 95% of their time in their home state of Maine, but apparently, the reason why Spielberg’s missive went unanswered was that King was enjoying the life of a Victorian-era tradesman: “I was on a ship going across the Atlantic to England.”
Between Poltergeist and The Talisman, the dynamic duo have spent decades trying to put their heads together and partner on a production, but if it hasn’t happened by now, then the chances are as slim as they’ve ever been.
