“It’s not a real bad picture”: the 1992 movie Stephen King defended before suing it into oblivion
Words often aren’t worth the paper they’re printed on in Hollywood, with Stephen King rushing to the defence of a movie, only to turn around and sue the absolute shit out of it a few months later.
When you become a one-man Hollywood pipeline like King, chicken salad and chicken shit are almost guaranteed to emerge in equal measure. When the adaptations are good, they can be really good and occasionally great, but when they’re bad, they can be fucking awful.
It’s been 50 years since Brian De Palma’s Carrie got the ball rolling, and despite many of those page-to-screen translations committing heinous crimes against the good name of cinema, the author’s brand remains as strong as ever. However, there was one time when he didn’t want to be the brand at all.
Derived from his short story of the same name, or at least, it was supposed to be, co-writer and director Brett Leonard’s 1992 sci-fi horror was initially marketed as Stephen King’s The Lawnmower Man. Having taken some serious liberties with the source material, though, things got very ugly very quickly.
Shortly after it hit cinemas in March of that year, King didn’t seem too dejected. “It’s not a real bad picture,” he maintained. “I mean, the reviews haven’t been very good, but the reviews in this genre are never very good. Gene Siskel has never liked a horror movie, and very few critics do. In a sense, if critics like the movie, you’re not doing your job.”
He said that April of ’92, less than two months after The Lawnmower Man debuted in cinemas, where it turned a modest profit. It sounded a lot like King was suggesting that critics had been unfair to the film, and that he hadn’t expected it to be drowning in acclaim anyway, when horror wasn’t typically associated with such fawning.
By the following month, he was taking them to the cleaners. The scribe sued the filmmakers in May, demanding that his name be removed from the title, changing Stephen King’s The Lawnmower Man to plain old The Lawnmower Man, based on how wildly it differed from the source material.
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His lawsuit was adamant that it “bore no meaningful resemblance” to his writing, and the courts ruled in his favour, forcing the studio to excise his name from the title and the advertising, as well as awarding him a tidy $2.5million settlement, although his name was still listed in the credits.
Despite forking out millions, New Line Cinema still didn’t learn its lesson, and when the movie debuted on home video as Stephen King’s The Lawnmower Man all over again, the studio was held in contempt of court for violating the agreement and given 30 days to rectify the error. In February, King said it wasn’t that bad, and in May, he sued it, which was quite the shift in opinion.
