Name: Stephen King on Letterman, April 1, 1982
Uploaded: 2019-04-13T04:44:50.000Z
Description: Watch the stand-up comedy video 'Stephen King on Letterman, April 1, 1982' from Don Giller on Comedy Buff. Published 2019-04-13. Transcript available.

Watch the stand-up comedy video 'Stephen King on Letterman, April 1, 1982' from Don Giller on Comedy Buff. Published 2019-04-13. Transcript available.

Welcome back to the show.
Stephen King is the best-selling author of such books as Carrie and The Shining,
both of which were made into old-fashioned movie thrillers.
His other horror novels include The Stand and Salem's Lot, which became a TV
special.
He has now ventured into an original screenplay entitled Creepshow,
which is vows till...
We've got a little mix-up here. What does it say there?
Which he vows. Okay.
Which he vows. Oh, I'm sorry. Okay.
Which he vows will make his audience crawl out of the theater. There you go.
Which you have this man's personal guarantee that you're going to be crawling
out of the theater.
That's the essence of this.
Please make this assuming young man who makes his living, frightening people,
Stephen King.
Nice to be here, sir. Sorry I botched your introduction.
The last time we chatted you, I guess the fire starter had just been issued.
And that dealt with people who had telekinesic powers?
Pyrokinesis.
Pyrokinesics.
You get hot, you know, that's basically it.
And that means you can start fires just by thinking about them.
Well, it really apparently happens.
I don't know why we're talking about this, but people do burn up, you know.
And I'm asked often where I get my ideas.
I got that one from the National Enquirer.
Which for years is run stories about people who just burn up and there's a lot
of spot heat.
And you don't even get that much heat if you're cremated.
Where there's a guy that has to break up your bones with a rake after you go
through.
You know, they turn on the pilot light.
This is when you get cremated.
We're a lot tougher than we think.
But these people just, they go up.
But that's not, I mean, they're not having telethons for this.
It's not a real, you know.
Not yet, I don't think so.
But now, but do you, have you ever witnessed this or witnessed any kind of...
Sherry's kids, I just flashed on them.
I'm sorry.
Go ahead.
Have you ever witnessed something like that happen?
Somebody move something with their mind or start a fire or anything?
I saw a lady bend a key once, in all seriousness.
This was just after Carrie, which had to do with, you know, objects moving,
telekinesis.
And there was a lady in my home state who said,
you ought to go and check this woman out.
She was a hairdresser in a beauty parlor in Brunswick, Maine.
So, okay.
I went down and saw her.
And she's about 55, very pleasant.
And she said, oh, yes, you're the young man who wrote the book, you know.
And she said, do you have a key that you don't need anymore?
And I said, yeah.
I had an old apartment key in it, like that, in her hand.
She just placed it in her hand and bent it without...
Maybe it was a trick, you know.
I'm fooled by Doug Henning and all the magicians.
My son fools me with the old, you know, water-in-the-glass trick.
But it happened.
I saw it happen.
And if it was a trick, she was a very strange magician living and working in Brunswick
in
50 years.
A couple of nights ago, we had Gayon Wilson on the show, the cartoonist who
does wonderful
things, but very peculiar.
Yeah.
And he said that he thinks that he...
So he got a very odd start in life.
He was actually born dead and had to be brought back to life.
And he thought that that left him with a peculiar outlook.
Do you have anything like that in your background that would set you on this
road?
No, I was a live birth.
I was pulled out with the forceps, you know, like that.
But I know Gayon, and Gayon's warped.
He's great, but he's really warped.
Did you have an actor, a normal childhood?
Yeah, I think I had a pretty normal childhood.
You know, on the surface, that is, you go to school, you come home, you do your
chores.
It was like underneath that I thought that there were things under the stairs,
you know.
I would go down into the basement, we lived in an apartment house, and I'd go
around the
furnace to get the potatoes or the onions or whatever it was.
But you have to be real careful because you sense something that's just there,
ready to
grab.
Yeah, yeah.
But you hide it because then people think that you're warm.
Yeah.
Now this motion picture...
Now everybody knows, I'm sorry.
This was not a novel, this was an original screenplay, Creepshow, and this is,
I guess
this is just a poster from, well, I'm confused now.
Tell us what we, this looks like it's going to be a comic book.
Yeah, it was based on, I'm doing it with George Romero, who did, yeah, Night of
the
Living Dead and Dawn of the Dead, and we were both scared to death by these
comic books
when we were kids, the ECs, the horror comics, the things your mother would
take away
from you.
Yeah.
And that's what it's based on.
And he, I read that that's, Night of the Living Dead is your favorite movie.
I like that.
That was the dead people that wander through the mall.
Yeah.
George is a, George is a ferociously talented director, and I think we got
something cooking
in this movie.
Now you're also in this film, aren't you?
Do we have a scene of you in?
There I am.
Yeah, here you are.
What, what is, what, something has gone wrong here.
Well, um, actually, uh, what went wrong was when my agent said yes.
No.
Well, I play a guy named Geordie Verrill in this story, and Geordie's not
terribly bright.
I guess maybe George saw it as typecasting, you know.
Um, he would make Lenny and Steinbeck's of Mice and Men look like Einstein in
comparison.
A meteor lands on his property, and it's full of this sort of super seed that
starts to grow
all over his yard and his cars and his house, and finally it starts to grow all
over him.
And in the picture you showed, he's just realized that, uh, he started to, uh,
to get green.
Oh, oh, I see.
Yeah.
Started to get green.
Uh, okay.
Well, let's, let's continue on with the photos.
These are all from, um...
Creepshow.
Yes, sir.
That's E.G. Marshall, uh, who's in a, um, a story called They're Creeping Up On
You.
Um, it's about bugs.
It's about cockroaches.
He, he has a, as a matter of fact, he has a New York apartment, and he's caught
in a blackout,
and we, we went to Costa Rica, and we got 4,000 giant cockroaches, and, uh,
these, I mean,
these guys are big.
These guys are like this, you know.
They're about a foot long.
Now, I, I don't understand that.
You go to Costa Rica, and there are places you can go buy cockroaches?
No, you, you get them out of caves.
There are Costa Rican caves where they have these roaches that are called
giganticus.
We had a roach wrangler on this picture who went down.
Well, you've seen the credits.
I mean, you have horse wranglers.
We had a roach wrangler.
And he got them.
And in some of these caves, these roaches, millions of them live in bat guano.
And some of these guys would go in in their, uh, scuba suits, you know, their
rubber suits,
and you would lie face down in the bat guano very quietly.
And after a while, the roaches, which are timid, would begin to move, and you
could motorboat
all over these caves and, uh, in and out and everything.
Oh, boy.
Um, and you say they're about a pound, pound and a half?
Well, they're about that long.
I don't know how much they'd go by the pound.
Does this have anything to do with the picture?
This is Leslie Nielsen, eh?
It's Leslie Nielsen and Ted Danson, who was in Body Heat and, uh, the Choir
Boys.
He's the one that's just sticking up here.
Leslie, uh, plays a Hollywood producer who catches his wife cheating and takes
his wife
and the lover and buries them in the sand below the high tide line, and then
videotapes
the proceedings.
It's a fun picture, I tell you.
Now, you mentioned that there are, it's actually, uh, how many stories in the
film?
There are five stories.
Five little, okay.
This is actually the longest of all the stories.
It's called The Crate, and it runs about, uh, I guess maybe 45 minutes or so.
And, uh, it's about a janitor and a couple of, uh, faculty members who are
played by Hal
Holbrook and Fritz Weaver who find a thing under the stairs.
When you're writing these things, the screenplay or the novels, is it possible
for you to frighten
yourself, or are you too much on top of manipulation like that to be frightened
by things you write?
Well, it's probably an awful thing to say, but most of the time your reaction
is kind
of, you know, like, this is really going to hurt somebody and make them,
you know, squirm.
And that's why if you have a really good horror movie, you shouldn't let
anybody get
out.
You shouldn't lock the doors, make them stay in, make them watch, uh, make them
beg and
crawl and wait for it to be over.
Now, in the...
I've scared myself a couple of times, but mostly what you feel is you feel good.
When were you scared?
What things did you do that scared you?
When I wrote the, there's a scene in The Shining where the little boy goes into
the,
um, into the room and, uh, there's a dead lady in the bathtub, and that scared
me a lot.
That's strange. I mean, it came out of your head, but yet when you put it on
paper, it
frightened you.
Yeah, I think sometimes your imagination gets a little bit out of control, and
that doesn't
happen a lot, even when you're writing. A lot of times you just, there's a
feeling that
you're doing it what you're supposed to be doing, but that time...
Uh, now, Creepshow, you vowed that people would crawl out of the theater. Is
that an accurate
assessment of, uh, what you anticipate?
Boy, that'd be great. You know, jujubies in their hair from trying to hide
under the
seats and all that. I don't know if it'll happen, because you never know.
Worse than bat guano, huh? Uh, it's called Creepshow. When will it be out, sir?
Uh, July.
July. Good luck to you. Thank you very much for being here.
All right, thank you.
Stephen King. We'll be right back, folks. Carol Leeper will be here.
Thank you very much. Thank you very much for being here.
Thank you very much for being here.
Thank you very much for being here.
Thank you very much for being here.
Thank you very much for being here.
Thank you very much for being here.
Thank you very much for being here.
Thank you very much for being here.
Thank you very much for being here.
Thank you very much for being here.
Thank you very much for being here.
Thank you very much for being here.
You're welcome.
Thank you very much for being here.
Thank you very much for being here.