I have a written agreement with my favorite author to adapt one of his stories into a movie.
I bet you don’t read that every day from someone who lives in this area.
It’s true, though, at least if we’re being technical here. Everyone’s favorite ‘master of macabre’ and one of the most prolific authors of the past half-century, Stephen King, has had a longstanding policy with up and coming filmmakers that they can adapt any of his available short stories into a film for the price of one American dollar.
There aren’t a whole lot of rules that come with the agreement, only that you as the filmmaker are not allowed to profit from the movie that you’ve made. King’s policy and subsequent mandate is really about supporting those who want to break into the film industry, and he’s made his vault of stories available as something of a springboard into a hopeful door of opportunity for all sorts of budding Spielbergs, Hitchcocks and Tarantinos.
Allow me to share with you a very old blog post I wrote a decade ago, back to the summer of 2010. It describes the news that I’d received from the office of Mr. King.
The blog post, dated October 8, 2010 states the following:
“My birthday (25th, BTW) fell on a Monday this year, which produced the appropriate groan of “Son of a b****, it’s my birthday and the work week’s just starting”. However, after powering up my Mac and opening up my email, I discovered a gem of an email that brightened the entire week, and then some.
A message from Stephen King’s office. Yes, THAT Stephen King. This requires some explanation, and I’m more than happy to provide it…
A little over a year ago, I picked up King’s latest collection of short stories entitled Just After Sunset (at the D&E in Outlook, of all places). I blazed my way through it, but one story in particular caught my eye and stayed with me long after reading it. Fast forward almost a year later, and I re-read the same story. It was then that I became fully committed to adapting it into a short film, and I contacted King’s people requesting permission to do so.
That email on my birthday was the response I got. It contained a contract which I was to sign, along with a witness, and I also was to include one American dollar. On the Friday of that week, I sent everything on its way and I now have the rights to the story, which I’ve been feverishly writing notes on before I get down to scripting it.
The short story in question is called Mute. It’s a quick read at just over 30 pages and has a total of five characters, with two of them being very minor and more of an afterthought. Without giving too much away in describing it – although who am I to stop you from going out and reading it yourself – Mute is about a man driving along the highway in Anywhere, USA and thinking about all the trouble he’s been having at home. He stops to pick up a hitchhiker who is deaf and mute and ends up using his new passenger as stress relief, venting about his problems and his worries about the future. Of course, being a Stephen King story, there might be some tragedy involved and things may not be what they seem.
Mute is one of those stories that reminds me of a good Hitchcock tale. The questions that it raises about morality and forgiveness really hooked me and the content and characters just scream “MOVIE!!!” when I read it. I hope I can do it justice.
If all goes to plan, I’ll be shooting this just after the new year, either late in January or early February. In the meantime, I’m looking at a pre-production cycle entailing the writing process, location scouting, casting auditions, budget raising and equipment rentals/purchases. Oh my, the excitement that awaits me.”
Quite a barrage of excitement from younger me, right? I remember being on Cloud 9 about this news and I understood the work that was still in front of me. I needed a script, I needed a new video camera and assorted moviemaking gear, and I needed a cast.
Ten years later, and two out of those three things happened. I wrote the script, wrapping it up by the following February in time for the long weekend, during which my friend Kyle and I did a reading and timed it out (a fellow King fanatic himself). I eventually got a new video camera too. Where I found trouble was assembling a cast for this movie, and it all just kind of got shoved to the backburner.
Life just moved on and got more and more busy and the movie never got made. To this day, I still have the signed contract from Stephen King’s office in my own office. It’s sitting behind me right now.
‘Mute’ is a real gem of a story and I think my adapted script is fairly solid, but maybe I’m looking at this from the wrong way now that I’m older and there’s all kinds of new technology to produce something and publish it online.
Could something like this work perhaps as an audio performance? Like an old-time radio play?
The possibilities these days truly are endless…
For this week, that’s been the Ruttle Report.
