How Stephen King Feels About His Awful Movie Adaptations

Stephen King is a famously prolific writer, publishing a book just about every year for much of his career. Over his five-plus decades in the spotlight, many of those books — and plenty of his short stories — have been turned into films or TV projects. King adaptations certainly vary in quality — if you're curious, here are the best and worst King movies – and while fans are used to the gamble inherent in watching any given King adaptation, it seems the author himself is quite content with the whole process. After all, he's not the one making the movies.

"I'm not a hard guy to get along with," King told Deadline, insisting that he doesn't mind when filmmakers make his work their own — which might be why some King adaptations bear very little resemblance to their source material. Still, King doesn't mind that, either. Disagreeing with writers who view their own writing as sacred, he said, "I've worked with an awful lot of movie people over the years that I think are very, very smart, very persistent and find ways to get things done. And I like that."

When the bad reviews and disappointing box office numbers occasionally roll in, King is happy to wash his hands of the process. "If it doesn't work so well, I can say, well, they went out and they gave their best shot but I didn't have anything to do with it," he said. "I'm just a bystander in this car wreck."

There's something else that Stephen King fans know all too well about his opinion of his movies: sometimes it differs wildly from the general consensus. The stories of how King really felt about "The Shining" are well-documented; while many horror aficionados consider it one of the best genre movies of all time, King himself was disappointed in Stanley Kubrick's film. "I think 'The Shining' is a beautiful film and it looks terrific and as I've said before, it's like a big, beautiful Cadillac with no engine inside it," he told Deadline. 

Specifically, King takes issue with the way Kubrick characterized Jack Torrance, the mad writer played by Jack Nicholson. "He's crazy as a s***house rat. All he does is get crazier," King complained. "In the book, he's a guy who's struggling with his sanity and finally loses it. To me, that's a tragedy. In the movie, there's no tragedy because there's no real change."

King also agrees with critics who dislike Shelley Duvall's portrayal of Jack's wife Wendy. In an interview with BBC News to promote "Doctor Sleep," his 2013 sequel to his original novel, King complained, "Shelley Duvall as Wendy is really one of the most misogynistic characters ever put on film. She's basically just there to scream and be stupid and that's not the woman that I wrote about." Ouch. (And also: wrong, in this writer's opinion.)

While Stephen King has written several screenplays — including the 1997 miniseries adaptation of "The Shining" in which he attempted to right the perceived wrongs of Stanley Kubrick's film — he's only ever directed his own work once. In the trailer for the 1986 film "Maximum Overdrive" (via YouTube), King appears as himself and speaks directly to the viewer, acknowledging that movies based on his books haven't always been great. "A lot of people have directed Stephen King novels and stories," he says, "and I finally decided, if you want something done right, you oughta do it yourself!" He smiles maniacally, and we're off.

"Maximum Overdrive," unfortunately, was not the critical success King was likely hoping for. It's a deeply silly movie about electronics and machines coming to life, mostly embodied by an evil truck with a Green Goblin mask that terrorizes people in a remote diner. The score by AC/DC isn't half-bad, as 80s cheese goes, so there are a lot of reasons to enjoy "Maximum Overdrive" anyway — but it's certainly not "good." In fact, some consider it Stephen King's worst film ever.

In the years since his ill-fated directorial attempt, King has attempted to explain why that movie is so bonkers. He told The Kingcast (via Screenrant), "At that time, I was doing a lot of cocaine and I was drinking a lot. You can tell!" Camera assistant Silvia Giulietti simply told Slashfilm, "He didn't know where to put the cameras."