Spoonfeeding a “stupid” audience: How Stephen King’s ‘The Running Man’ was dumbed down
One of the biggest recurring criticisms Stephen King has faced throughout his career from the snootier subset of the literary world is that he’s little more than a popcorn author, somebody who churns out cheap and cheerful genre novels that don’t have anything to say on a deeper or more profound level.
Obviously, not every writer gets into the business dreaming of winning a Pulitzer for their work, and all King has to do to stick a middle finger up to his critics is point towards his sales figures: more than 400million copies of his bibliography have been shifted, and the dozens of film and television adaptations of his back catalogue have made him one of modern literature’s most popular and wealthy scribes.
King may have specialised in horror and fantasy, but the evidence is right there to underline how readers can’t get enough. He doesn’t pen highbrow stories, nor does he want to. That said, it’s ironic that a page-to-screen blockbuster published under a pseudonym that its creator blasted for deviating too far from the source material was altered by a studio adamant the average viewer was too stupid to get it.
On the plus side, The Running Man is getting a much more faithful update from Edgar Wright, who’s made it clear that he’s adapting King’s novel and not remaking the Arnold Schwarzenegger cult favourite. A beloved slice of 1980s cheese, the story’s originator wasn’t best pleased with the ‘Austrian Oak’ turning his everyman protagonist into a beefy wrecking ball of revenge, and one scene in the third act left the producers convinced that audiences needed to have the information spoonfed.
When the host of the titular game show, Richard Dawson’s Damon Killian, tries to convince audiences that Jesse Ventura’s Captain Freedom has killed Schwarzenegger’s Ben Richards and Maria Conchita Alonso’s Amber Mendez, it’s swiftly revealed that the scheming TV personality had used face replacement technology to pull the wool over the viewer’s eyes.
Theatrical audiences were supposed to stumble upon that realisation by themselves to drum up extra tension and leave them shocked that the heroes had seemingly failed in their mission before the ruse was revealed. However, one overzealous executive decided that the dearth of active brain cells in any given theatre made the whole bait-and-switch a pointless endeavour.
“We had an idiot producer who was on this movie,” screenwriter Steven E DeSouza told CinemaBlend. “Who, after the test screening, said, ‘You gotta change that’. He says, ‘Our audience is too stupid. They don’t get it’. The test screening was in Palm Springs; we must have had at least 600 people in the audience, if not more, and there were maybe like two dozen cards saying, ‘I don’t understand how they put a different face on a guy’. And I go, ‘This is 20 cards’. And all of them: ‘Why did you attend the movie? Came with grandchild.'”
With the filmmakers overruled in favour of the studio decreeing that audiences need to have their hands held, the additional scene spelling out the ploy was added and shot at the producers’ request, based entirely on his assumption that the people watching The Running Man would all be lacking between the ears.
