The unmade Stephen King adaptation that was called “too gruesome and intense” for TV
At this stage, thanks to the subgenre’s unyielding popularity, most studio bosses, network executives, or streaming service head honchos would eagerly snap up a Stephen King adaptation.
Things have even reached a stage where the horror legend’s bibliography has come full circle and started being subjected to remakes, reboots, and reimaginings. With that in mind, the notion of a TV station turning down the chance to adapt a King story seems fanciful, but it happened.
Not only did it happen, but he wrote the script himself. In general, King doesn’t scribble a lot of screenplays, at least relative to how many of his tales have reached live-action. He’s amassed 20 writing credits, which seems like a lot, but it’s worth remembering that there are over 100 film and television projects based on his back catalogue, so it’s a drop in the ocean, all things considered.
Hollywood has been relentlessly mining his imagination since Brian De Palma’s Carrie got the ball rolling in 1976, and it shows no signs of slowing down. Having so many of his stories optioned has been a lucrative business for the Maine-based maverick, and, ironically, one of the very few that were turned down never made it into live-action at all.
Years before his first novel was published in 1974, the short story Strawberry Spring first appeared in the pages of Ubris, the University of Maine’s literary journal. Set at a fictional college, the story finds an unnamed narrator recalling the killing spree of a serial murderer nicknamed ‘Springheel Jack.’
King described it as being “about a psychopathic Jack the Ripper-type killer who is roaming a fogbound college campus.” When NBC decided to capitalise on his surging popularity by optioning the rights to three of his spine-chilling endeavours and bringing them to the screen, he was happy to oblige.
Choosing Strawberry Spring as his entry point, he quickly discovered that just because the network had hired him to adapt his own work, he wouldn’t be given creative carte blanche. “About a month after turning the script in, I got a call from an NBC munchkin at Standards and Practices (read: The Department of Censorship),” he wrote in Danse Macabre.
“The knife my killer used to commit his murders had to go, the munchkin said. The killer could stay, but the knife had to go. Knives were too phallic,” King explained. “I suggested we turn the killer into a strangler. The munchkin evinced great enthusiasm. I hung up, feeling like a very brilliant fellow, and turned the stabber into a strangler.”
He’d compromised his original writing to satiate the suit’s desires, but it still wasn’t enough. Recalling that “the script was finally coughed out of the network’s large and voracious gullet by Standards and Practices,” he was told in no uncertain terms that Strawberry Spring was dead in the water: “Too gruesome and intense was the final verdict.”
To this day, Strawberry Spring still hasn’t made it to the screen. However, it did make history as the first of King’s stories to be adapted into a podcast, with an eight-episode audio-only version releasing in 2021 with Garrett Hedlund as the narrator, so it technically got there in the end.
