On the bookshelf: The Stand, by Stephen King

I know some people who insist that Stephen King is a poor writer. I've often heard his work talked about as being the literary equivalent of a meal from McDonald's. It's a description the disarming author would probably not mind, indeed it's possible he may have used it himself in one of his hugely entertaining pieces of non-fiction. In many cases, these impressions have been based on the many cinematic adaptations of his work rather than from any first hand reading of the novels. Which is a shame, as the cinematic adaptations cross a wide spectrum, from low budget trash to glossy Oscar winners made by directors ranging from auteurs like Stanley Kubrick to journeyman-for-hire Lewis Teague.

But I think King has penned a few masterpieces in his time. For me, he even has a Holy Trinity of sorts in his work - 'Salem's Lot (1975), The Shining (1977), and The Stand (1978). The Stand was re-issued in 1990, this time with King being able to re-instate material that was edited out of the original publication to bring the hardcover price down to one the market could bear. It is this expanded edition that I recently finished reading. I had forgotten - until I came across the first one - that it had illustrations by long-time Stephen King collaborator Bernie Wrightson, so that was a pleasant surprise.

I love seeing how different film-makers have tackled the challenge of successfully translating a Stephen King novel to the screen. I've read a lot of the books and seen most of the adaptations, and it's fascinating to see the variations in fidelity to the source text, budget, director, and format - feature film or tv mini-series? - and how examples that have both worked and failed can be found across the whole spectrum of variables. And the fact that several novels have been adapted more than once, often in different formats, makes if even more informative.

I'm gonna digress for a moment here. I've just paused to wonder who would find this stuff informative, and why I find this stuff interesting. Which takes me to the purpose of this blog - an attempt to kickstart my own thought processes and get the rusty mental machinery of actually writing to work. So maybe it's the wanna-be-screenwriter like myself who could be interested. Or not, let's see where the hell I'm going with this...

Carrie was adapted into a feature film by director Brian DePalma and screenwriter Lawrence D. Cohen in 1976. It was fairly faithful to the novel and captured the spirit of Stephen King's nasty schoolyard - if anything the film gave the material an even harsher edge. The film was a huge success, launching several careers - even Stephen King's, arguably - with Sissy Spacek and Piper Laurie both receiving Oscar nominations for their performances, no mean feat for a cheap horror movie in one of Hollywood's best ever decades. The novel was adapted again in 2002, this time as a 132 minute telemovie. It has an interesting cast and hews much closer to the novel than the DePalma version, yet is much less effective.

And even bigger contrast is demonstrated by the two versions of The Shining. Stanley Kubrick's film absolutely guts the source text - the shell of the narrative remains, turning Stephen King's crazy spookshow into an intimate look at three people cracking up. And the film is an all-time great, undervalued at the time of release but now receiving due recognition. It's an unsettling film, right down to its very form, with the opening titles scrolling up the screen in a manner usually used for end credits - nothing has happened yet and we're already thrown, not quite knowing what to make of the film.

In 1997, The Shining was adapted again as a three part television mini-series directed by Mick Garris from a teleplay - Christ, how I hate that word, it's still a screen, why can't they use screenplay or just written by - a teleplay, I say, by Stephen King. This one was slavishly faithful to the novel and fumbled every ball on the way to the screen, not helped by silly things like rocking chairs gently rocking by themselves to lead into commercial breaks, as if to remind the audience - before the messages from the sponsors - that something spooky is going on in the Overlook Hotel. Big set pieces like little Danny Torrence being stalked by the hedge animals (a large lion, rabbit, and dog) - which Kubrick wisely avoided completely in 1980, but could have been realised wonderfully in 1997 - are ineffective and flat. Stephen King writes in vivid images and contrasts the total silence of the sunny late Autumn day with the soft clump of snow falling off the animals as they move, unseen. It's all there - the pictures (and even the soundtrack) are so clear, and work so wonderfully. Yet the mini-series smothers the whole scene with "hey guys, this is a spooky bit" music, and is too eager to get to the (not that great) CGI hedge animals, leeching everything effective from the scene. If the money to write and record the music had gone into a smaller number of CG shots (which would be more effective for the extra budget per shot), the scene would have been terrific. A similar "less is more" approach would have improved the entire mini-series, which has a good cast and is technically proficient but misses King's moods and tones completely.

'Salem's Lot became an effective television mini-series in 1979, directed by Tobe Hooper from the teleplay - there's that word again - by Paul Monash. Monash, who had previously adapted Peyton Place (one of Stephen King's admitted influences on 'Salem's Lot) for television, plays fast and loose with King's narrative and characters, yet the end result is much more memorable than the more faithful 2004 mini-series.

The Stand made it to the screen as a four part mini-series for television in 1994, directed by Mick Garris from a script by King. It's a decent enough show, probably ranking as one of the better television adaptations of a Stephen King novel, and it had a sensational cast including Gary Sinise, Molly Ringwald, Miguel Ferrer, Laura San Giacomo, and Rob Lowe, but it fails to capture the epic scope and sense of doom of the novel. Reading the novel again, it's so hard to decide which sort of adaptation I would like to see more - a HBO series running over three years to get every little detail in there, or a stripped-to-the-bone and bigger-than-life cinemascope spectacular, leanly racing through the narrative with vivid imagery? Not that it matters now that the ultimate adaptation of the novel has arrived.

Marvel Comics have embarked on a large scale comic book (or shall I say 'graphic novel'?) adaptation of King's novel. It comprises six books, each made up of five issues, and is everything a fan of the novel could want. One of King's goals when writing The Stand was to create an epic story that would play like a dark Americana version of Tolkien's The Lord of the Rings. If there are other fans of The Stand like me out there - and I suspect there are many - King succeeded. The Stand is, for me, a beloved story that is always a joy to dive into, the beats of the story as familiar as the back of my hand and pleasurably anticipated whenever I read the book. And the Marvel Comics adaptation is - so far - absolutely nailing the story.

On the bookshelf: Dracula, by Bram Stoker

I'm re-reading Bram Stoker's classic Dracula for the umpteenth time - I read it at least once every few years, and it never fails to captivate me. I wouldn't have thought it possible - I've killed the impact of many of my favourite books through excessive re-reading (I have to rest 'Salem's Lot, The Shining, and the Dune series for a goodly number of years before I pick them up again) - but I'm enjoying the Stoker novel more than ever. I own the hardcover edition of the book illustrated with the wonderful paintings of Greg Hildebrandt (see above) - and although on this reading I'm encountering an irritating number of editorial errors ('from' is frequently typed as 'form'), it's not detracting from my enjoyment. I love the contrast of the highly literary device of telling the story through journals and diary entries (a device which was old-hat even when Dracula was first published in 1897) with the almost hysterical alarm at wanton female sensuality. Of course, cinematic adaptations and derivations of Dracula are legion, and enjoying the book as much as I am prompts me to recall my favourites and thoughts on other major adaptations.

Nosferatu, eine Symphonie des Grauens (F. W. Murnau, 1922) can seem badly dated - certainly it has no-hope of frightening a contemporary audience. But it's imagery, once seen, is indelible, especially the grotesque Count Orlok (the legendary Max Schreck), and many of the special camera effects are still arresting. All the characters in the film were given new names in the flimsiest of attempts to disguise the unlicensed adaptation, which didn't pull the wool over the widow Stoker's eyes. She was very nearly successful in having every print and negative of the film destroyed. I've never owned the DVD, due to the bewildering array of versions of this public domain film on the market, some of them lacking the colour tinting, some looking like the print was found in a trashcan, some with poorly translated intertitles, some with horrendous new scores... the list goes on. Rumours of a forthcoming Blu-ray release excite me - surely whoever is taking the trouble to create a High Definition disc will be trying to get it right. It's been some years since I last saw this film so I'm sure to enjoy it even more for the wait.

Dracula (Tod Browning, 1931) is not a particular favourite of mine, despite Bela Lugosi's cold, commanding Count. Like Nosferatu I haven't seen it in a while, but it always seemed stiff and stagey to me - perhaps the result of it being more directly adapted from the hit play by Hamilton Deane and John L. Balderston than the novel. I'm probably due for another look at this one - Philip Glass wrote a score for it in 1999 which is available as an alterate audio track on the DVD, and that at least is worth checking out.

The 1958 Terence Fisher Dracula is another one which is a little lost on me. Hammer Films, the UK studio responsible for this, the 50s Frankenstein films, and scores of other horrors to keep Christopher Lee, Peter Cushing, and Vincent Price in work for years, brought brilliant Technicolor design, dollops of gore, and busty vampire brides the like of which would never have been allowed in the 1930s, but the waste of Christopher Lee's mellifluous voice - Stoker's verbose Count is given only a handful of lines in this film, and a couple of the later films give him no dialogue at all - is a major liability to me.

One of my favourite versions was made for British television by the BBC in 1977. The two part Count Dracula was the first time I'd seen Stoker's story accurately conveyed on screen. It's a strange beast, part po-faced BBC period drama (the props, locations, and costumes were no doubt staples of many a Jane Austin adaptation), part Doctor Who (the use of video-tape for interiors and what would have been at the time cutting edge video effects but are now quaint oddities). But for once, most of Stoker's vision hits the screen intact, and the cast is brilliant, particularly Jack Shepard's Renfield and Frank Finlay in the definitive interpretation of Van Helsing - so good he would play the role again as Dr. Hans Fallada in Tobe Hooper's terrible but highly entertaining 1985 sci-fi/zombie apocalypse fiasco Lifeforce.

John Badham's 1979 Dracula was based on a hugely successful revival of the Deane/Balderston play, and like the 1931 version the role of the Count was played by the same actor who had played him on stage. This time Frank Langella dons the cape, and it is one of my favourite versions, trumping the 1977 BBC version through lavish big budget production values. It's generally not as highly regarded as the Bela Lugosi or Christopher Lee adaptations, although I don't understand why. Langella's magnetic Count is given terrific support by the likes of Donald Pleasance and Laurence Olivier (the latter positively hamming it up as Van Helsing), with Kate Nelligan a standout as the progressive Victorian Miss who comes under the vampire's spell. The photography and production design are gorgeous and the whole package is wrapped up in a lush score by John Williams which is equal parts horror, romance, and action - a score that would surely be as highly regarded as his work for films such as Star Wars (1977), Superman (1978), and Raiders of the Lost Ark (1981) but for the fact that this version of Dracula remains a barely remembered box office failure.

There's one last important adaptation of Stoker's novel which I'm going to discuss here, and of course it is Bram Stoker's Dracula (Francis Coppola, 1992). My excitement grew in the months leading up to the release of this film - were we to finally see a good version of the story that remained faithful to Stoker? It certainly seemed so - from his name in the title to the inclusion of all the main characters (most other adaptations usually collapse Lucy's three suitors into two characters, if not one, and Lucy and Mina swap names randomly at the whim of the screenwriters) it looked like Coppola and screenwriter James V. Hart (riding high on Steven Speilberg's filming of his screenplay Hook, in that period of grace where no one had yet seen the film) were determined to bring Stoker's novel to the screen. And the cast was a terrific line-up, never mind the dubious casting of Keanu Reeves. The lurid mess which ended up on the screen saw an attempt at a faithful re-telling crowded out by an invented romance between Dracula and Mina, here depicted as the re-incarnation of his centuries dead sweetheart. The way James Hart crowed about this plot addition, you'd think he'd written Hamlet - no matter that exactly the same ploy was used by a 1973 television version starring Jack Palance as the Count. What is the point in trying to include all of Stoker's story and then having to rush through it to make room for a Count with a bleeding heart? Stoker's eroticism is as cold as the grave - Dracula refers to Mina as his "wine press" - but Gary Oldman's Count can hardly bear to bring himself to inflict the fatal bite upon Winona Ryder's Mina, so rent is he from his love for her. If you didn't need a sick bucket for the gore, you'd still want one handy for the romance. The performances from the aforementioned stellar line-up seem to come from ten different films, every actor encouraged by their indulgent Uncle Francis to find the histrionic madness in their character, with the result that Tom Waits as Renfield - the one bona fide madman of the text - seems sane beside the shrilling of everyone from Reeves and Ryder to Anthony Hopkins and Richard E. Grant. And the crying shame of it all is that so many good, even great, qualities are in this film, from Eiko Ishioka's stunning costumes and Greg Cannom's exceptional make up work to Sadie Frost's vampish (I'm sorry, there's no other word for it) Lucy and the darkness and power of Wojciech Kilar's score, by turns lyrical and brooding. With so much that is so right, it's amazing that the film as a whole is so wrong.