Hints At The Dome

What in the world is going on in Chester's Mill?  The clues  go on and on.  In fact, there are so many clues -- beyond just Pink Stars -- that the math gets a little complicated.  Is there a deep answer the writers are hinting at, or are they creating so many plot trap doors and escape hatches that it's just hard to keep up?

TV guide this week has a pretty good article on Under The Dome.  And quite a few spoilers.  Of course, these are spilled spoilers, meaning that this is the stuff the producers want us to know.  But hey, if you can't read the end of a mystery novel, it can also be fun to snoop through the writers notes; even if they know you're looking.

The article suggests that Barbie's appearance in Chester's Mill is no accident.  He just "happened" to be in town for the big Dome day?  We the viewers assumed it was bad luck.  But it appears there is more at play.  "This year we'll find out that Barbie has a much bigger role in the whole thing.  It wasn't an accident that he was in Chester's Mill at that time." (Mike Vogel)

The Under The Dome crew has also been letting word out that someone will escape the Dome.  (Not Maggie Simpson.)  Also, it seems that time itself my be affected by the Dome, sans Melanie who appears a teenager but might actually be much older.

This season also promises to give us more glimpses outside the Dome, which up until now have been just about nonexistent.

Hey, America, don't fall in love with anyone Under The Dome -- NO ONE IS SAFE.

THE SHINING PREQUEL is moving forward

If you're like me -- and no one is -- then you sighed a bit when you first heard the news that Stephen King's The Shining was being looked at for a prequel.  Really?  Do we need to have a prequel?  Really?  King already gave us a pretty well written sequel.  I  liked it a lot.  But a prequel?

Then something happened to change my mind; I'll tell you what in a moment.

This past week the hollywoodreporter.com confirmed that music video director Mark Romanek is in negotiations to direct the prequel, titled, Overlook.

The article notes:

The film will tell the origin story of the haunted hotel through the eyes of its first owner, Bob T. Watson, a robber baron at the turn of the 20th century.

Former Walking Dead showrunner Glen Mazzara wrote the script. James Vanderbilt, Brad Fischer and Laeta Kalogridis are producing.

Did you catch that Mazzara "wrote" the script.  Of course, as Richard Matheson and Stephen King both attest, a lot of scripts get written that  never happen.  But actually having something on paper makes it all feel a little more real.

But what's their source material?  How about Stephen King.  No, not the Stephen King who gave us Mr. Mercedes, IT and The Stand.  How about a Stephen King who had only published two books, Carrie and Salems' Lot.  For good or for bad, that was a different Stephen King.  The young man was more likely to go for the punch, to try and creep you out, scare you and if all else failed, just be as gross as possible.  The older Stephen King is more focused on the art of storytelling.  (I like both.)

So what's exciting about Overlook is that the source is Stephen King's own prologue to The Shining, which was cut from the book prior to publication in 1977.  What's more, I've read that prologue, and it's great.  That's why I'm excited.  I mean, it's creepy and gross and all out scary!

By the way, I like the miniseries quite a lot.  It's almost pointless to compare it to the Kubrick film because they really are two different stories.  The miniseries is slow; just like the book.  It aptly brings the novel to life.

Perhaps you remember when ABC ran The Shining miniseries, TV guide ran the prequel.  But here's the thing -- it's an abridged prequel.  King actually gave much, much more.  A friend, I'm not saying who, but they do happen to run a very popular Stephen King blog that I think is great -- shared the full manuscript with me a while back.  It blew me away.  And the thought of those dusty pages being turned into a film makes me very excited.

Stephen King: Tots and Terror

Here is an interesting ebay item, a 1981 TV guide with an article by Stephen King on tots and terror.  To tell you the truth, this is the stuff that really makes collecting fun.  Yeah, it's nice to get a first edition of the latest book -- but old weird stuff is even better.

As a collector, I'm not excited about things made for collecting.  Yes, the new covers for Carrie, The Shining and other early books look great.  And their limited editions.  But limited edition just says to me, "We know you're a sucker."  I'd rather goon the hunt than write a big check.

A magazine is fun because it holds the era in its pages.  So not only is there the article by King, but it is surrounded by the culture it was crafted in.

I love the art in this. King says Bambie is the scariest movie.

You can still buy it at ebay.com for $5 plus $5 shipping.  So that ten bucks.

CELL is back

. . . don't answer that cellphone!

The movie adaptation of Cell is back!  David Konow at TG Daily tells us:

You may remember some time back that Cell was going to be directed by Eli Roth from a script by Larry Karaszewski and Scott Alexander (Ed Wood, 1408). Then after the hostile reception of Hostel II, Roth claimed he was moving away from horror films, and this version of Cell fell apart. 

 Now Cell is back up and running, and while King adaptations have never fallen out of favor, perhaps he’s back in the zeitgeist right now because of Under the Dome, which will debut next month on CBS. As Giant Freakin Robot reminds us, we’ve also got the reboot of Carrie, Mercy, and A Good Marriage coming up as well.

Konow gave us this from a previous interview with Alexander

“It probably falls into The Stand-type of story.  -- Like a magnet, it ends up grabbing a lot of characters, a lot of people and a lot of ground. It kinda gets bigger and bigger as it goes along. That was tough in terms of trying to chop it down to movie length.”

The full  article is at tgdaily.com

Before The Play: Some Of The Shining's Scariest Scenes

10,000 Magazines, #9,997
TV Guide, April 26-May 2 1997

I just read my April 26-May 2 copy of TV Guide.  (Well, I read the articles!)  That was the edition that had a cover feature of The Shining, with a great illustration of a snowbound Overlook and an angry Jack Torrance bearing a mallet by Wrightson.

I really was about to toss this aside, wondering why I bought an old TV Guide, when my friend Tim Heintzman told me, "If you were to take a closer look at your 1997 TV Guide, you should find an excerpt from Before The Play that was the original begining of "The Shining" but was cut. This is a part of the unpublished & uncollected works of the Stephen King canon." (HERE)

Wow!  Thanks Tim.  What an awesome read.  And, it gave the entire novel/story more depth.

Here are some scanned images from movie junk archive.  Actually, that website has scanned the entire King portions of  the magazine!

My favorite portion was titled, "Before The Play," by Stephen King.  King offered this note of explanation:

A novel for television is actually a play with its two, three, or four acts presented on different nights.  This was enormous help in adapting The Shining for TV, becuase in its first draft, the story was actually constructed as a play.  It was still a novel, and written in prose rather than dialogue, but instead of five separate parts (which was how the book was set up when it first came out), it was divided into five acts, as are the plays of Shakespeare (and there was a fellow who would probably have appreciated a big creepy miniseries." 

When I finished the book proper, I wrote a prologue called "Before the Play" and an epilogue called "After the Play."  A strenuously edited version of the epilogue stayed in (it's the books final chapter, and entirely different from the miniseries' final scene), but "Before the Play," which contained a number of strange events from the Overlook Hotel's earlier history, was cut out to keep the book from growing too long. 

In any case, there  was some pretty spooky stuff behind the opening curtain, and I'm glad to see the best of it restored to print here.  Whether or not you know the novel, it makes a nice appetizer to the ABC miniseries.  Enjoy it now. . . but maybe a little less later on. 

You know.  After the lights are out.  --Stephen King.

What follows three two wonderful, spooky, dark sections.  The first deals with a young woman named Lottie, and the second section is about Jack Torrance as a child and the abuse he endured from an alcoholic father and the third section is about a murder in the hotel.

I think King gives us the very best stuff first.  Lottie is a selfish, domineering young woman who enjoys lording emotional power over her wealthy young husband.  She forces him to go to the Overlook hotel, instead of on the overseas honeymoon he wanted.  He is fun loving and energetic, while Lottie is a manipulative person filled with anger.  What she experiences at the overlook is both dreadful and serves her right!

Lottie endures a series of nightmares that are terrifying.  Normally I am not interested at all in dream sequences in books -- but these are quite well done.  He dreams seem to revolve around fire and the Overlook.  My favorite is a dream in which Lottie gets on the elevator and . . .

Her unease heightened as the elevator descended and continued to descend . . . for far too long a time.  Surely they must have reached the lobby or even the basement by now, and still the operator did not open the doors, and still the sensation of downward motion continued.  She tapped him on the shoulder with mixed feelings of indignation and panic, aware too late of how spongy he felt, how strange like a scarecrow stuffed with rotten straw.  And as he turned his head and grinned at her she saw that the elevator was being piloted by a dead man, his face a greenish-white corpse - like hue, hie eyes sunken, his hair under his cap lifeless and sere.  The fingers rapped around the switch were fallen away to bones. 

Even as she filled her lungs to shriek, the corpse threw the switch over and uttered, "Your floor, madam," in a husky, empty voice.  The door drew open to reveal flames and basalt plateaus and the stench of brimstone.  The elevator operator had taken her to hell. 

There's lots more of that kind of stuff.  I wish they had included this in the printing of The Shining.  King says that they were concerned about the novel becoming too long (gasp!)  I think it opens the story up.  The Shining is a very closed, tight book.  It revolves around a few central characters.  But this introduction makes it clear as day: It is the hotel  that is haunted -- not just Jack Torrance.

Thanks, Chris C. for the links to find scanned photos.

King Talks DOCTOR SLEEP With EW

Anthony Breznican at EW has a great interview with Stephen King.  Breznican really presses King on the origins of Doctor Sleep and why King chose to return to the world of The Shining.  At first King just jokes that he used to think that Danny just married Charlie from Firestarter.  However, when he really started thinking about where Danny would be now, it seems the story began to carry itself.

King cites part of his inspiration for Doctor Sleep as coming from a morning news show about a cat who could sense when someone was going to die. 

He admits that he likes scaring people -- a lot.  King says, " I wanted to go back to that real creepy scary stuff."

When asked if he was intimidated to return to such a popular book, King admits that he was indeed hesitant, since most sequels "suck."  That's funny -- since it's exactly what many of you are afraid of with Doctor Sleep!

King also reveals a character named Abra -- a nod to the main female character in East of Eden by John Steinbeck.  I love it when King does stuff like that (gives nods in his work to other authors.)  He says it had been a while since he used a kid as a major character, and he was excited to do that.  Me too!  I really connect with King's characters that are children.

In the interview, King also tells us a little more about "The True Knot" and what inspired him to create these villains   

King says animatedly, 

"Doctor Sleep is a sequel to the novel. It’s not a sequel to the Kubrick film. At the end of the Kubrick film, the Overlook is still there. It just kind of freezes. But at the end of the book, it burns down."

King reveals that he hired Rocky Wood to read over the manuscript for consistency.   Actually, inconsistency doesn't bother me much -- I usually just go with the story where it's at.  I mean, novels are not history -- it's just a story.  When someone like King writes, and is digging into their own work, they have a mess on their hands because he's created such a vast universe of fiction.

I also really enjoyed the discussion of King's feelings about a prequel.  I've been reading "Before the Play" in TV Guide, and it's great.

Check out the full interview at shelf-life.ew.com

I think Doctor Sleep is going to work well because King has always been a writer of the time at hand.  He doesn't do a lot with the past, and certainly not much with the future -- he writes about the right now.    That means that a similar amount of time has passed in the world of the Shining as it has for us.  Or, put another way: Both books are set in the time they were written in.  

In the past King's characters with supernatural abilities have often been children or teens.  Carrie, Danny and Charlie all come to mind.  But in Doctor Sleep, King will take us into the adult world.  Danny used his powers as a child to get himself out of a jam -- and it worked quite well!  Now as an adult he can use those powers for a larger purpose to serve others.  (I'm totally guessing here.)

King Movies DOMINATE Scary Scenes

Kelsey Ackerman at examiner.com has posted TV Guide’s countdown of “Scream-Worthy Movies.”  It was interesting just how much Stephen King movies dominated this list!

• #21, Children of the Corn.  What’s scary about that?  “For this list, it is the scene where a calm diner is taken over by murderous children who kill all the adults present in barbaric ways.”

• #17 was the prom massacre in the Brian DePalma classic, Carrie. 

• #12- MISERY!  Andin particular, the scene where Annie uses a sledge hammer to destroy Paul Sheldons legs.

• #3- was none other than The Shining.  

“Here’s Johnny” screams Jack Nicholson in the moment number three from The Shining. As the innkeeper of the overlook motel, Nicholson’s character follows in the footsteps of Norman Bates as the psychotic innkeeper who attempts to kill his wife while she cowers in a locked room. After hacking away at the door with an axe, Nicholson sticks his head in the hole and says one of cinema’s most infamous lines.

So, four out of 25 movies were related to Stephen King – not bad Mr. King! But how did Children of the Corn get on a list of 25 best. . . anything?

The full article is HERE.