As March 2024 wrapped, it was revealed that Osgood Perkins’ The Monkey, based on the short story of the same name, had both put together a stellar cast and completed production all in secret. But now the secret is out, and it joins Mike Flanagan’s The Life Of Chuck and Gary Dauberman’s Salem’s Lot as upcoming Stephen King movies that are finished filming and are awaiting a release date. That was an exciting development to discover – but it’s not the only cool King-related story to emerge from the last seven days.
Tomorrow marks the official 50th anniversary of the novel Carrie, the first book that King had published, and the world has delivered some great headlines on the eve of the celebration. This week’s edition of The King Beat has Carla Gugino reflecting on the making of Gerald’s Game, a resurrected article about the author from the run-up to the release of Carrie, some advice on the art of storytelling, and more, so let’s dig in.
Carla Gugino Reflects On The Intense Experience Of Making Gerald’s Game With Mike Flanagan
In accepting the role of Jessie Burlingame in writer/director Mike Flanagan’s Gerald’s Game, Carla Gugino took on an extreme acting challenge. Not only does the film feature the actor handcuffed to a bed for the majority of the runtime, but the story goes to some dark places as the character is forced to confront horrific trauma from her childhood. Ultimately, Gugino is phenomenal in the movie, and she delivers what is arguably her best performance – but in the run-up to it, she was concerned that the work could potentially lead to the end of her career.
Promoting her new series The Girls on the Bus, Carla Gugino recently sat down with Buzzfeed, and she spoke in part about her recent contributions to the horror genre and her collaborations with Mike Flanagan. She has been featured in five Flanagan projects, including The Haunting of Hill House, The Haunting Of Bly Manor, Midnight Mass and The Fall Of The House Of Usher, but Gerald’s Game marked the first time they had worked together, and she quickly saw him as a filmmaker with a specific vision:
[W]hat I was really compelled by was Mike's voice as a filmmaker, and with Gerald's Game, you know, it was always considered an un-adaptable book by Stephen King. Also, someone was attached to play the role before. So, from the moment that I spoke to Mike Flanagan to the moment we were filming Gerald's Game, it was literally two weeks.
Adapting Stephen King’s Gerald’s Game was Mike Flanagan’s dream project for a long time, and he would even bring a copy of the novel to pitch meetings for inevitable inquiries about his personal passion. As noted by Gugino, the book was considered unfilmable because of the story’s content and limited scale, and Flanagan got a number of “Nos,” but Netflix gave him a “Yes” following the successful streaming debut of his 2016 film Hush.
Between the limited amount of time there was in pre-production and the reputation of the Stephen King book, there were some concerns that the lead actress had. Gugino continued:
To come on to that role in that project, in which I was chained to a bed within that period of time, was a real risk. And I thought, ‘We're either going to do something really special here, or this is the end of my career.’ You know what I mean? There's no middle ground here. I'm so thankful that it was the former.
Gerald’s Game not only earned high marks from critics upon release (CinemaBlend’s Mike Reyes gave it a four star review), but it also came out at the perfect time, as it debuted on Netflix just three weeks after the blockbuster theatrical debut of Andy Muschietti’s IT: Chapter One. It was a stepping stone to Mike Flanagan making Doctor Sleep – another one of the best Stephen King movies of all time – and now he not only has The Life Of Chuck on the way, but he is also working towards his next King-related dream: adapting The Dark Tower saga.
It’s wild to think that this wonderful legacy established within the last decade almost went up in smoke. Carla Gugino explains that if she hadn’t said yes to Gerald’s Game when she did, the whole project would have potentially died:
I didn't even know until later that it was sort of the movie would fall apart shortly thereafter if I couldn't have gone on board. His ideas, his clarity of vision, and the way into the story, it was just so precise. It made perfect sense to me. I aligned with it right away, and I thought, I really want to come help this person bring their vision to the screen.
We can only hope that Carla Gugino and Mike Flanagan continue to work together a lot in the years to come – and I still maintain that she would be a terrific Randall Flagg.
You Can Read The First Bangor Daily News Article About Stephen King From May 1973
There’s a lot of hoopla to be made about the 50th anniversary of Carrie, as there’s an argument that no single individual has had a greater influence on pop culture in the last half-century than Stephen King. His books and the adaptations they have inspired are beloved unto themselves, but they have become part of our everyday language: Cujo, Christine and Carrie alone are synonymous with fierce dogs, out-of-control cars and disastrous prom nights, and clowns, cornfields and coming-of-age tales are forever tied to IT, Children Of The Corn and “The Body”/Stand By Me. Because of the immensity of his body of work, it’s particularly wonderful to take a look back at where it all started.
Timed to the special anniversary, Bangor Daily News has published an article celebrating the legacy of Stephen King, and the piece includes a clipping that exists as the newspaper’s first ever article about the literary icon. It was published on May 25, 1973, a little less than a year before Carrie arrived in bookstores, and it profiles the author as a teacher who has struck it rich with his first publishing deal.
It’s a sweet piece to read knowing everything that is going to happen to Stephen King in the years that follow, but there are two paragraphs in particular that stand out and illustrate who King is as both a writer and a person. In terms of the former, there is this bit that comes from an unnamed colleague of the author’s from the University of Maine:
A former editor of the Maine Campus, the university newspaper, remembers that, ‘King was always late. We would be pulling our hair out at deadline. With five minutes or so to go, Steve would come in and sit down at a typewriter and produce two flawless pages of copy. He carries stories in his head the way most people carry change in their pockets.’
Stephen King clearly has a mind for storytelling unlike any other… but that’s also easy to say in the year 2024 knowing that he has published nearly 100 books. For a fellow student to see that in him when he was in his early 20s is downright astonishing.
Perhaps even better than that is this penultimate paragraph from the article, which well-illustrates that King not only loves to write, but he loves teaching other people to write:
Five of his students at Hampden Academy have asked his advice on novels they are writing and he is encouraging them as best he can, which is one of the reasons he hasn't decided to quit teaching despite his new-found fortune.
Stephen King hasn’t been a full-time employee at a school in a long time, but that doesn’t mean that he has given up educating. Case in point…
Stephen King Offers Advice For Writers: “See The Story, Not The Words”
If you’re an aspiring writer, I can’t more highly recommend Stephen King’s On Writing: A Memoir of the Craft. In addition to being an intimate work about King’s life, his expressed passion is palpable and inspiring, and the advice he offers is priceless. Once you read it, you only want more… which is why it’s great that he occasionally doles pearls of wisdom via social media.
Part of what makes Stephen King so special is the fact that he doesn’t plan out his books; he has an idea, he starts writing, and he discovers along the way where the characters take him. It’s a big part of his special gift as an author and reflected in some advice he dropped on Twitter this past Sunday. The host of the Talking Scared podcast (on which King has been a guest) posted about being frustrated by language and efficiency in his own writing, and King quote tweeted him explaining why that approach is not productive:
No, no. See the story, not the words. See it scene by scene. Move the narrative at the speed it wants to go. Worry about the words? That’s for the 2nd draft. Most of them in the 1st draft will be right.
I can certainly relate to this point. Even when I’m attempting stream of consciousness writing while pursuing an idea, I can sometimes get caught up in the minutia and wording of a particular sentence… and it can eventually get so frustrating that it saps my energy from the work in general. There may be a temptation to sit down and produce two flawless pages in five minutes, but that’s unrealistic, and you can’t get to the second draft if you don’t ever finish the first.
It’s something to keep in mind next time you open a word processor and start creatively clacking away.
Recommendation Of The Week: “A Face In The Crowd”
We talked about Stephen King’s love of writing, but now let’s discuss another one of his passions: baseball. This past week saw the official launch of the 2024 Major League Baseball season, and thus far, King has plenty of reason to smile, as his beloved Boston Red Sox are off to a strong 5-2 start. I figured that I would let this development inspire my Recommendation Of The Week, which is how I landed on “A Face In The Crowd.”
Co-written by Stewart O’Nan and originally released in 2012 as an e-book (Cemetery Dance has since published a hardcover edition), “A Face In The Crowd” tells the story of Dean Evers – a lonely, elderly widower who is watching a Red Sox game on television one day and is shocked to see his deceased business partner in the stands behind home plate. At first, Dean just thinks he is seeing things, but the colleague keeps reappearing at games day after day, and then he begins to notice that other people from his past are there as well. Confounded, he finally tries to solve the mystery by attending a game in person.
That does it for this week’s edition of The King Beat, but I’ll be back with a new column next Thursday here on CinemaBlend, and you can spend the days between now and then digging into my Adapting Stephen King series – a chronological exploration of King books and film.
