The one person Stephen King would never allow to adapt his books: “He makes me nervous”
Generally speaking, Stephen King hasn’t been overly hands-on with the countless adaptations of his work, possibly because he wouldn’t have the time to write any more novels, novellas, or short stories if he did.
There are always at least a handful of his tales in development for film and television, and relative to how many of them have rolled off the production line since Brian De Palma’s Carrie lit the fuse on what would soon become a never-ending Hollywood trend, King has never been too precious.
He’s written several of the page-to-screen translations himself, he’s crafted a couple of original scripts specifically for live-action, and he’s been credited as an executive producer on plenty. For the most part, though, he doesn’t weigh in and start throwing his weight around to start making executive decisions.
Of course, the downside is that there’s nothing he can do when one of his books becomes a terrible movie, which has happened a lot. On the plus side, when one of them turns out to be a classic or a masterpiece, he can take as much credit as he wants as the originator of the source material.
It feels like every studio executive in Hollywood is constantly on the hunt for the next King story that hasn’t been snaffled up for the screen, even if the point where they started being remade and rebooted began long ago. As far back as the 1980s, though, there was one person he wouldn’t let near them.
“I like the movies,” he said in reference to the onslaught of adaptations. “But there are things that I won’t do. Jon Peters wanted to buy The Dead Zone. I couldn’t see it because he makes me nervous. I don’t think he’s in movies for anything other than as a thing to do. You don’t sell them just to make money; you try to sell them to somebody who’s going to do a good job of it.”
That didn’t work in King’s favour when one of the greatest directors of all time tackled The Shining, but he was probably right to be wary of Peters. He’s the producer who tried to force Tim Burton to include a gigantic mechanical spider in his abandoned Superman Lives, only to realise his dream when he shoehorned it into Will Smith’s derided Wild Wild West instead.
He almost ran Sony into the ground during a tumultuous two-year tenure as the boss that resulted in reported losses of over $3 billion, was paid tens of millions of dollars to stay as far away from Superman Returns and Man of Steel as possible, and developed a reputation for telling outlandish stories that nobody could either confirm or deny, which included forcibly ejecting Charles Manson from a party and putting Robert Blake in a headlock as part of an impromptu audition for a role.
King was hardly the only person that Peters made nervous, considering he chased a rival executive out of his house in a fit of rage, pulled a gun on someone who’d asked him to pay the money they were owed, and once gave an interview with a loaded firearm sitting on a table. There have been too many of the author’s books adapted for the screen to mention, but the one constant is that Peters didn’t produce any of them.
