The one movie Stephen King knew was doomed from the start: “Like farting at a dinner party”
Having spent the last half-century watching his back catalogue become one of Hollywood’s favourite production pipelines, Stephen King probably has a good idea of which ones are destined to succeed.
The author has admitted there are several adaptations that improve upon his writing, and there are a couple of subpar tales that became equally mediocre in live-action. The page-to-screen revolving door has never stopped turning since Brian De Palma’s Carrie inadvertently launched one of the industry’s favourite crazes back in 1976, and it shows no signs of slowing down.
Naturally, the incessant desire from Hollywood’s major studios to devour as much of King’s back catalogue as possible has delivered the good, the bad, and the ugly of film and television, and the creator of the source material was responsible for one of the worst, even if he’s never been too proud to admit it.
Presumably, King sat back, watched countless filmmakers tackle his prose, and wondered, ‘How hard can it be?’ As he discovered when he made his one and only movie as a director, the answer is very, and the end result was too bad even to be appreciated as an ironic cult classic. 1986’s Maximum Overdrive was a critical and commercial disaster, getting the first-time filmmaker on the Razzies shortlist for ‘Worst Director’.
King was struggling with substance abuse issues throughout the shoot, which inevitably exacerbated the picture’s dismal quality because it’s hard to imagine a world where much good can come from a novice director with no experience taking the reins on a costly genre flick while, in his words, “coked out of my mind.”
The 180-degree rule, or crossing the axis, is one of the first things anyone interested in cinema should learn. King remained oblivious, though, leading to an awkward moment on set. “It was like farting at a dinner party,” he recalled. “Nobody wanted to say you’ve made a terrible mistake. I didn’t get this job because I had any background in film; I got it because I was Stephen King.”
Even though it was explained to him, King still struggled to wrap his head around it. Fortunately, despite his inexperience, he was still a famous and well-connected guy. “Later on, I called George [A Romero], and I said, ‘What is this axis shit?'” he told American Film. “And he laughed his head off.”
He also asked David Lynch, who “burst out laughing.” King nonetheless quizzed him if he could get away with it, which led to a measured response. “He gave me this startled look and said, ‘Stephen, you can do anything. You’re the director’. Then he paused and said, ‘But it doesn’t cut together.'”
It was clear from the beginning that King wasn’t cut out to be a filmmaker, something he was happy to acknowledge in the aftermath of Maximum Overdrive. Not only that, but he got that feeling early on, but it was already too late.
