Name: Stephen King's Honest Opinion About "The Shining" Film | Letterman
Uploaded: 2023-10-02T22:00:10.000Z
Description: Watch the stand-up comedy video 'Stephen King's Honest Opinion About "The Shining" Film | Letterman' from Letterman on Comedy Buff. Published 2023-10-02. Transcript available.

Watch the stand-up comedy video 'Stephen King's Honest Opinion About "The Shining" Film | Letterman' from Letterman on Comedy Buff. Published 2023-10-02. Transcript available.

Good morning and welcome back to the show. My next guest is a best-selling
author who has
written such thrillers as Carrie, The Shining, and The Dead Zone, and his new
book, which is
entitled The Firestarter. Ladies and gentlemen, please welcome Stephen King.
How are you, sir?
I'm fine. How are you?
Fine. You don't look like a guy who would be filled with frightening thoughts.
Neither did Norman Bates.
Norman Bates is a frightening fellow himself. What makes people frightened and
how do you
get it down on paper?
Well, I think people are frightened of almost anything, you know, as far as the
unknown,
anything unexpected, anything that's going to jump out of them, at them in the
dark. You
know, I remember the final scene in Carrie where the hand comes up out of the
grave and
grabs Amy Irving. If you can get people with their defenses
down, and get them in the open, you can grab them and do a job on them. And
that's what I like to do.
What, um, did you always have these thoughts inside of you or did you just see
it as a way to make
money as a writer?
No, um, really, I didn't go to the market. The market came to me. As far back
as I can remember, I've been
interested in ghosts and goblins and things that go bump in the night. And in
the early 70s, I was writing
stories for those magazines where if you hold them up by the side, a picture
falls out. You don't show
your mother, you don't show your mother, that kind of thing. And getting
anywhere from 100 to 200 to 300
dollars for stories. My wife and I were just married. I was working in a
laundry and, uh, um,
she would say, "Hurry up and think of a monster," whenever the bills came due.
So I did the best I could.
Um, has there ever, ever been anything that frightened you in real life that's
made it into a story? Anything
out of your childhood that turned up as a book?
Yeah, there are a lot of things. And I suppose the one thing that, uh, scares
all little kids is the
boogeyman, the thing in the closet. And, uh, you know, I can remember Bill Cosby's
rap about covers,
covers of magic. Uh, you know that there's nothing under the bed and you know
that if you keep your
feet under the covers, it will never grab you anyway. And, uh, even as a grown-up,
I think that as
children we fear these things and we let our fears out. We tell people because
we're unsophisticated.
And as we get older, we still have the fears. We just sublimate them, you know,
and we don't tell
people. But still, most people when they're alone in the dark, uh, things that
you would laugh at in
the daylight begin to seem a little bit like technicolor. There's always a
period for me when,
uh, between the time you get in bed and the time you fall asleep, where stuff
doesn't make, uh, correct
sense. And I remember as a kid thinking that I was, uh, wake up in a real cold
sweat out of that gray period,
thinking that the bed was covered with snakes. Yeah. Uh, and when you get to
examining it,
of course, uh, it was covered with snakes. It was an ugly joke that my parents
played on me from time.
But it would just be lumps and folds of the, uh, of the thing. Uh, why do
people like to be scared
like that? Why do you, why does your kind of thing sell so well? Well, on the
simplest level,
I think people like to be scared, uh, about the same as the old joke about the
guy who beat his head
against a wall. And somebody said, "Well, why do you keep doing that?" And he
said, "It feels good when I stop." And I think that if you're being
scared out of your wits, when the scare ends, when the lights go up or when the
book ends,
you know, you say to yourself, "I thought things were bad for me, but at least
I'm not in that
position." You know, I'm not stuck in the haunted hotel or I'm not, uh, you
know, trapped with a
telekinetic girl or whatever it happens to be. Yeah. Do you, do you ever, uh,
get the communication
from other people who say, uh, you think what you wrote about was frightening?
Here is my personal
story. I get a lot of letters like that. Uh, and sometimes you'll get a letter
from a genuine
ding dong. I mean, most of the people who write to me are straight ahead, you
know,
and they say things that make sense. They're good letters. We try to answer
them as much as we can,
but every now and then you get a letter from a guy who wants to come up with
his Polaroid camera
and, uh, photograph all your ancestors standing behind you, you know, in a
straight line back to Adam
or something like that. Or they will tell you about the time that the ghost got
them or whatever it
happens to be and they'll seize on you as though you were a kindred spirit. You
know these things
yourself. Do you find that annoying when they do that? No, I love it. Yeah? It's
really interesting.
Uh, you, you live in Maine? What part of Maine? We live in western Maine. Um, I'm
not a seacoast boy.
Most people, when they think of Maine, they think of the seacoast, but as far
as I've ever been
concerned, lobster pots are to make coffee tables out of. Uh, is it scary up
there? It's scary at night.
In the woods, in the dark, with the loons on the lake. Now we're getting
somewhere. My guest is
Stephen King this morning. Uh, his most recent work is, uh, The Firestarter and
there's a picture of
someone who looks a little like you, but that's not you, is it? It's a guy who
looks like an author
you had to take this picture for. Yeah, that's, that's Mr. Hyde. You got Jekyll
this morning.
What about, um, um, Jack Nicholson in The Shining? Were you pleased with, uh,
with that? I thought he
did a wonderful job in The Shining. I enjoyed it very much. How did you feel
about the movie itself?
Well, I feel both ways. There, I got to see it four times because of
commitments one place
and another. And there are an awful lot of things about that movie that I think
are flawless and
beautiful and, uh, just marvelous. And then there are other times when, when I
feel as though, uh,
I'd given Stanley Kubrick a live grenade and he heroically threw his body on it.
Uh, when, when you sell something to a motion picture company, uh, I guess
there'd be several
thousand different kinds of deals, but how much control do you have of what
actually gets on,
on the screen? Well, I've never asked for a lot of control. I'm working with a
guy named George
Romero now who did Night of the Living Dead and Dawn of the Dead, uh, a couple
of nursery tales for
younger people, you know. Yes. And, um, I'll be working on the screenplay with
him and, uh, there I would
expect to exercise some control as part of the film company. But as for
actually selling a book to the
movies, you send it off the way you'd send a child off to school and you hope
it will do well and well
will be done by it. But I've never asked for control. Then you're in a perfect
situation. If
they do a great job, you can say, that's my book. And if they do a lousy job,
you can say, I had no
control. Right. Right. I was pirated. Yeah. Uh, what about the, you have
children? Three. Now, uh,
well, uh, how, what are the ages? I've got a daughter who's 10 and a little boy,
uh, who's eight and, uh,
another little guy who's three and a half. Uh-huh. Do the older kids read, uh,
your works? They've seen, uh,
Salem's Lot, which was made into a TV movie. And, uh, they've seen, excuse me,
the TV version of Carrie.
But as far as reading the things, they've never been forbidden. But my daughter
is the great reader
right now. And she's really, uh, involved with horses and things like that. She's
not into vampires
yet. Uh, what kind of things do you read? Everything I can get my hands on,
really. Um, I don't read
really widely in the horror field. If it's something that I really want to read,
I do. But I like general
novels, uh, any kind of nonfiction that looks interesting. Kind of interested
in, uh, Dillinger.
And someday I'd like to write a book about Dillinger and those bad guys.
A former, uh, fellow Hoosier, I believe. Yeah. From Indiana. Yeah. Uh, has this,
tell me the difference between just a horror film and a science fiction film.
They both are kind of
overlapping. Yeah, they do. And, uh, you know, fans argue about this back and
forth for hours.
But my idea of what a horror film is, is it's something that comes out of
nothing. That's
totally inexplicable. And in a science fiction movie, you say, well, we have
this now. So that
maybe in, uh, uh, 20 years or 30 years, we really will be able to clone Ronald
Reagan if we want to.
You know, that sort of thing. Um, so I see that as the difference.
Yeah. Yeah. Uh, I guess the, like Star Wars, the first one, that was all
fabrication because
they said a thousand generations ago. Yeah. So I see that as a fantasy though,
David,
really. Um, basically what they're saying is let's remake Buck Rogers, Flash
Gordon,
or all the things that we remember. It has some science fiction trappings,
the spaceships zoom around, but they're just saying they're there and let's not
worry about why they're
there. What, uh, can you tell me quickly, this is your new book. Are you now
working on the next one?
I'm starting to play around with an idea on paper. You know, the ideas come and
they stay for a while.
And then if they don't go away, you kind of hope that they will because most
writers are pretty lazy.
And if it won't go away, finally, you have to pick it up and do something with
it.
So do you think of a great scary scene and then write a book to it or does it
happen the other way
around? Usually what happens is if you're writing a horror book and this thing
that I'm working on
should turn out to be a real screamer if it goes the way that I want it to, you
get an idea for
something that's really nasty. Yeah. Yeah. Terrific. It's called The Fire Starter
is his latest work.
Stephen King. Thank you very much. We'll be right back.
Thank you.