Argh.
I just found out via AICN that they’re making a movie of my favorite Stephen King short story, “1408.”
The story (which isn’t very long) appeared in the collection Everything’s Eventual, and is about a paranormal investigator spending the night in a supposedly haunted hotel room. It’s a brilliant short story and genuinely scary.
Apparently, the movie will star John Cusak as the writer/investigator, and Samuel L. Jackson as the only other character in the story — the hotel manager who tries to talk him out of it.
Good actors, yes….but I can’t help but shake the feeling that this is going to be yet another King adaptation that totally misses the point.
Well, this’ll be my chance to see if John Cusak can fail me. He hasn’t yet, but this is a big opportunity to bomb.
We can hope.
Incidentally, TNT is doing a miniseries of Nightmares and Dreamscapes in July. I’m happy to say they got William H. Macy for “Umney’s Last Case”.
And someone bought the film rights to “Cell”. Not a shock.
I would much rather see 1408 adapted as a short film instead of feature-length . . . It just seems like to stretch the movie out to the 90-ish-minute-mark, like you said, the filmmakers would miss the point . . .
Of course, “Brokeback Mountain” was based on a short story, too, and by all accounts nailed the point. So maybe, maaaybe, there’s hope.
My main concern isn’t the length, but rather that Stephen King film adaptations almost always suck.
My thoughts exactly, much as I love both of the actors involved. The lead-in half of “1408” is the truly brilliant part of the story. I just can’t see it being filmed really well to suit the needs of a big-screen, big-budget sort of film. C’est la vie.
My concern over length stems from wondering just how some of the information in the beginning of the story would be condensed so that Hollywood can focus on what they perceive the more important action to be . . .
And, yeah, most King adaptations suck . . . :)
The big problem I have with King movies is that I always feel as if they travel through some sort of weird time-warping process in either production of pre-production. To me, they always feel sloooooooooooow, as if the idea of movies and television being a different medium from books hasn’t quite struck those involved with the conversion. A hallmark of King’s works is that it takes time to get the story told and get it all out in the open, but this doesn’t work well on the screen because there’s usually a lot of backstory and filling in blanks throughout the story (like many other novels).
I love the story of The Langoliers (another short) and enjoyed the movie version, but I don’t think it translated that well to the screen. I’ve also got all of Kingdom Hospital to watch right now (which is showing on SciFi this week/next week).
Still, with Cusak and Jackson in it, I’m sure they’ll do a good job.
I wonder if there’ll be any snakes in it?