The movie Stephen King hated so much he sued the production team: “No meaningful resemblance”
American writer Stephen King can best be described as prolific, having written over 200 short stories, novels and novellas since the 1960s. But, what King really hates is people who don’t take his work seriously.
That’s fair enough, considering his contribution to the literary world. But it’s not quite as simple as you think. King isn’t angry at those members of the public who read his work and don’t like it, or label him as a certain type of writer; that’s bound to happen. King has a problem, mainly, with studios that don’t, or don’t want to, understand his work yet still want to adapt it for the screen.
Mainly working within the horror and thriller genres, King has enamoured readers for decades with his tales, which often incorporate supernatural elements. Beginning with 1976’s Carrie, directed by Brian De Palma, over 60 of King’s stories have been adapted for the big screen.
From It to The Shining, The Shawshank Redemption, The Green Mile and Stand By Me, many of King’s stories have resulted in box office and critical hits. However, with so many adaptations out there, it’s not a surprise that several are pretty terrible, like 2022’s Firestarter, which is widely considered one of the worst.
Elsewhere, some adaptations have proved successful, but King himself has hated the finished product, most notably, The Shining. Upon the release of Stanley Kubrick’s film, King said: “That’s what’s wrong with [Kubrick’s] The Shining, basically…the movie has no heart; there’s no centre to the picture. I wrote the book as a tragedy, and if it was a tragedy, it was because all the people loved each other. Here, it seems there’s no tragedy because there’s nothing to be lost.”
However, there was one adaptation that the author hated so much that he sued the entire production. The incident occurred in 1992 when Brett Leonard released The Lawnmower Man, supposedly based on King’s short story of the same name. It was first published in 1975 and re-released as part of his 1978 collection Night Shift, receiving its first on-screen adaptation in 1987 as a Dollar Baby short film directed by New York University student James Gonis.
Yet, in 1992, the story was made into a feature which deviated so heavily from the story that King had no choice but to begin legal action. The author’s original source material follows a man named Harold Parkette, who hires a company to cut his lawn, soon discovering that the lawnmower can operate without human interference. Instead, Harold sees the company employee acting bizarrely, chasing after the machine naked on all fours while eating the grass. The employee claims that he’ll sacrifice Harold if he disagrees with this new way of gardening, resulting in his unfortunate death.
The 1992 version of The Lawnmower Man couldn’t be more different, with only very few similarities linking them together. In the movie, Jeff Fahey plays a mentally disabled gardener, and his ability to control the lawnmower stems from his superhuman abilities, which have been forcibly produced via scientific experimentation carried out by Pierce Brosnan’s Dr Larry Angelo. Thus, the film focuses on the powers of science and technology, something that King’s story does not centre around.
King was not happy about his name being credited on a movie that differed so starkly from his source material. In fact, the movie was originally going to be called Stephen King’s The Lawnmower Man, but he successfully had the name changed.
According to court documents, King believed the film “bore no meaningful resemblance” to his story. The author was awarded $2.5million, winning even more when it was discovered that New Line Cinema hadn’t removed his name from VHS copies.
