Icon #12 - Stephen King: The REAL Lawnmower Man - The Daily Zeitgeist

Episode Transcript
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Speaker 1 (00:02):
Hello the Internet, and welcome to this spinoff episode of
Ye Guys. Stephen Stephen, Stephen caneven. For some reason, I
kept having that go through my head, which we're calling
the iconograph. Instead of looking at the Zeikes through current
events on Monday mornings, we are looking at the Zeikes
through the powerful pop culture horcruxes that.

Speaker 2 (00:24):
Are our icons.

Speaker 1 (00:27):
We use these icons to create meaning.

Speaker 3 (00:30):
To build identity, to scare the identity, scare the shit
out of ourselves at sleepovers, shit to learn that the
proper way to welcome a new roommate is to stand
outside their room on the first night, channing fresh fish,
fresh fish.

Speaker 1 (00:45):
Until they start crying. And most importantly, they teach us
that sometimes you black out and do irreparable damage to
your life and your family, and sometimes you black out
and write Kujo's right. Today we're talking about Stephen King.
I'm gonna say an especially appropriate subject for our show

(01:10):
about the zeitgeist, because I'd contend uh he has a
better grasp of our cultural shared consciousness than maybe anyone,
or at least that's what he views his job as is.
We're working in the mythpool, is what he calls it,
Drinking from the myth Pool. I'm thrilled to be joined,
as always by my co host, mister Miles.

Speaker 2 (01:32):
Hello, Hello, could it be more different than maybe Tupac
in that a bro I'm I think I'm talk to
Stephen to Stephen from Tupac's lips to Stephen King's eyeglasses.

Speaker 1 (01:43):
We're all here, Stephen, Stephen King's tiny coin slot like eyes.

Speaker 4 (01:49):
There those are.

Speaker 1 (01:50):
He's got tiny, deep eyes, the likes of which like
a dolly. He's got Biden eyes. He's got where you Yeah,
I feel like you should be pushing coins into them. Miles.
I think we've gotten especially appropriate guests, thank God, especially

(02:12):
appropriate subject a poet and podcaster, and you can hear
on the American Hysteria Podcast exploring the fantastical thinking and
irrational fears of Americans through the lens of moral panics,
urban legends, and conspiracy theories. Please welcome the brilliant, the
talented Chelsea Webers.

Speaker 5 (02:34):
I'm thrilled. I'm thrilled to be here.

Speaker 6 (02:35):
And you know, I love Stephen King, but I don't
have I didn't read the autobiography.

Speaker 5 (02:41):
I don't have that grasp on his life. So I'm
just here to learn and I'm so excited.

Speaker 4 (02:46):
I just know he's from Maine. Black people are like
on him.

Speaker 1 (02:51):
And but he's such a fan of black people. You
guys have super.

Speaker 4 (03:05):
But I just know.

Speaker 2 (03:06):
But he's one of those people too that I I
always saw, like the book on the rack at the
grocery store, like there would always be a Stephen King book,
like when they would sell books at the checkout at
a grocery store. And then beyond that it would always
be me hearing about some movie like, oh, that's Stephen King.

Speaker 1 (03:22):
Yeah, that's exactly that I had that Stephen King because
like my main interaction, I've read carry and like probably
i'd say like five Stephen King books just randomly, like
based on oh I needed a paperback, Well I was
about to board a flight or something like that. So
it's you know, I think I've read The Missed Carrie.
I haven't read it. I've read what my favorite thing

(03:45):
I've ever read by him was like a short story
that wasn't even like supernatural or like a horror thing.
It was I think it was called like All that
You Leave Behind or something that was just like a
great work, like the guy can write.

Speaker 5 (03:59):
I'll tell you great writer.

Speaker 1 (04:01):
It flows through him. Yeah, my main interact with him
was sleepover movies. And I didn't realize like all of
the movies that I watched all the like first probably
twenty horror movies that I watched were written by him
or like based on his work. It was crazy the
lock that he had on on just like that type

(04:25):
of movie, like movies for people between the ages. I
don't know if it was four people between the ages
of eight to like fifteen, but that's who was watching
them shits in the in the eighties.

Speaker 4 (04:36):
That was like YouTube before YouTube or like you've seen it,
like that's the whole you know.

Speaker 1 (04:42):
But I do just want to talk about this idea
that he has. He calls it mining the collective unconscious
for what he calls pressure points, which are these like
shared fears. And he's like, yeah, you know, you've got
your obvious ones like fear of spiders, fear of snakes,
that everyone knows about. But I feel like one of

(05:04):
his talents is he's really good at finding the less
obvious ones. And in now all these years later, it
seems obvious that clowns are fucking creepy his health, but
when he wrote it, the most popular spokesperson for the
most famous brand in the United States was a clown,

(05:26):
Ronald McDonald. Ronald McDonald was like was everywhere, like they
it was like the face of McDonald's. And it's not
that people weren't scared of clowns before he wrote it,
but I don't think it was a mainstream understanding, Like
people didn't know that people were scared of clowns in

(05:48):
the way that like pop culture notes, like he found
that pressure point at a time when they were like
a thing a hospital for children. Let's do this clown,
call it this this terrifying clown.

Speaker 6 (06:03):
And I have to say it is a bit of
an expert on Keller clown Phantom clown Panics. Please listen
to our episode of the history of how clowns became scary.
But we do have John Wayne Gacy in the seventies.

Speaker 1 (06:15):
And didn't jump off the clowns.

Speaker 5 (06:18):
Didn't help the clown.

Speaker 6 (06:19):
But yeah, it was like Boso was the most popular
act in America. Everybody loved Boso, Like no kids were
scared of Boso.

Speaker 1 (06:27):
The clown was on TV in syndication when I was
a kid, like into the late eighties or early nineties, like
I remember, I think it was WGN, like the Chicago
local TV that we all got like everywhere.

Speaker 4 (06:41):
In America some reason.

Speaker 1 (06:43):
Yeah, yeah, that was like an after school thing where
Boso the Clown would have a kid try and throw
a ping pong ball into a popcorn bucket. For some reason.
I was like riveted. I was like, got thirty bucks
that this kid focks this one up. But just some
other pressure points that I want to call out that
I think he identified our you know, fear of prison

(07:07):
in Shawshank, Green Mile. Fear of dogs, which like is
a thing obviously but not like killer dogs was not
really dogs are the thing that like you can't hurt
in a movie, or everyone's gonna be mad at you,
and he made like the Killer Dog movies. Fear of
insanity addiction is everywhere in his work, like The Shining

(07:30):
being the best example. Fear of cars. I think like
it's almost like he looked at the things that are
most likely to kill you in the and was like, Okay,
so our brain at some level understands like these are
the things that are gonna kill us, and we just
have to like will ourselves to ignore these dangers to

(07:51):
like get through our everyday lives, and he was good
at being like, nah, we're gonna like dig into the
like fear of illness obviously, that's like the big thing
kills most people. And he made the stand fear of
narcissistic charismatic leaders, the dead zone, the stand. And he
was also like channeling I don't know, like he was

(08:12):
on the school shooting thing, Like he wrote a novel
called Rage about school shooters like in the seventies, and
then he had to pull it off of shelves when
school shootings actually started becoming such a thing that he
was like being blamed for a lot of school shootings.

Speaker 4 (08:30):
Damn.

Speaker 2 (08:31):
I mean entirely pre sages the like GLP one ozembic
craze with thinner exactly.

Speaker 4 (08:38):
You know.

Speaker 1 (08:41):
He also presaged cars with the maximum overdrive and also
stranger things. I don't know how he foresaw it, but
stranger Things is really infant. I do just want to
go through like to fully. Oh but sorry before we do, Chelsea.
One of the things that kept popping up in my
head as I was going through, like the list of

(09:04):
things that actually kill people that he was like good
at channeling. I was like, where is Stephen King's bees, right, true,
because bees do kill a lot of people who are
allergic to bees. And there's also that corresponding moral panic
about killer bees that you guys just start doing an

(09:24):
episode about right now. Yeah.

Speaker 6 (09:27):
I just recorded with Akila Hughes, who's so funny, and
she brought me some information about killer bees and other
insect panics, and I mean it is shocking. I mean,
unless there's a book I'm not thinking of or you're
not thinking of that is insect focused.

Speaker 5 (09:42):
Yeah, I think that's coming next, right.

Speaker 2 (09:44):
That's he's saving up right right right. Oh, that's just
like magnum Opus.

Speaker 1 (09:50):
At the end, Victor says he Be's story is the
horror short story The Man in the Black Suit, which
features a pivotal terrifying being counter. So that's from nineteen
ninety four.

Speaker 5 (10:00):
So Victor is not the it's not like the whole
thing is.

Speaker 1 (10:03):
It's not like he wrote Candy Man, which would have
made sense if you wrote I do just want to
go through just because like I knew he wrote a
lot of hits, but I just want to go through
this eight year span from like when Carrie comes out
to nineteen eighty two because he's like Lebron in terms

(10:25):
of his like longevity, like he's been able to do
it better longer, but like this is where his career started,
Like this is the first eight years of his career.
Seventy four, he releases his debut novel, Carrie and Like
it's immediately optioned and turned into a horror movie classic
by Brian de Palmer seventy seven The Shining, So three

(10:47):
years later, The Shining seventy eight, also seventy seven, Children
of the Corn is just dashing that off in like
some little like magazine. Seventy eight, he writes The Stand,
He writes The Long Walk and the Dead Zone. I
said the Long Walk by the way. He will get
to this, but he starts writing under the pseudonym Richard

(11:09):
Bachman because they were like, we're releasing too many books
by Stephen King, and rather than slowing down, he's just like,
I'm gonna Chris gains this shit a little bit called me. Yeah,
so he called it Dick Bachman. A nineteen eighty fire starter,
immediately a movie eighty one Kujo, which he doesn't remember writing,

(11:30):
as we'll get to and then I just want to
talk about nineteen eighty two. Here real quick because he
writes The Running Man as Richard Bachman, starts the Dark
Tower series, which is one of like writes that as
Stephen King, which is one of his fan favorite series
that expands his whole career, and then releases the book
of four short stories slash novellas. And I just want

(11:51):
to tell you those four short stories include apt Pupil,
a short story called The Body which becomes Standby, and
then novella that becomes Shawshank Redemption. That's what what was.
The fourth was just kind of the fourth one was
the one that, like all the literary critics were like,

(12:13):
this is the really good one.

Speaker 4 (12:15):
Oh damn.

Speaker 1 (12:16):
Yeah.

Speaker 6 (12:16):
What it feels like is like how people think. Some
people think that Shakespeare was multiple people, right, like a
bunch of people in one like yeah something trench Coat.

Speaker 2 (12:27):
Yeah, run a generational run five movies in a single year,
and like three of them are stand By Me, Shawshank,
and The Running Man, Like those are fucking classics. Wait,
usually I know you sometimes you'll crunch the numbers about
people's careers. Do you have figures on how much money?

Speaker 4 (12:48):
This fucking is kind.

Speaker 1 (12:49):
Of wild because like Shawshank didn't do well when it
first came out. Uh, stand By Me did pretty well,
Harry did really well. Uh, The Running Man did fine.
But it's they're just like massive in terms of their
impact and like being things that everybody watched on VHS.

Speaker 4 (13:07):
Yeah, yeah, and I guess that's true.

Speaker 1 (13:09):
He does say that, like a lot of the stories
that come out at this time, he's like either written
or like started writing when he was younger, and they
were just like waiting to burst out of him. And
he compares it to like a bunch of people being
in line at like a revolving door and like just

(13:30):
like pressing to like get through. And then he was
on a ton of cocaine. We don't get many PSAs
for cocaine, right, and this won't be one of them.
But this portion of his career he was on so
much cocaine that he doesn't remember writing Kujo, for instance,

(13:53):
at all.

Speaker 2 (13:54):
Is because the times are just so good that he
was like I basically had unlimited cocaine, iile and a
bunch of paper to write story about it.

Speaker 1 (14:03):
It was like it was at a time when the
entertainment industry was basically like you know, yeah, you go
to an event and there's drinks and baptisms of cocaine
of course, yeah, yeah, but yeah, he talks about like
that he has a teacher in college who puts this
idea in his head of like there's this myth pool

(14:25):
where we all go down to drink, and like it's
this shared like collective thing of myths that we're all
kind of working from.

Speaker 6 (14:33):
It's the same thing that David Lynch talked about too,
and I feel like there's a similarity between them.

Speaker 5 (14:37):
He talked about the unified field though.

Speaker 6 (14:40):
His ideas all kind of like we're pulled up from
this shared consciousness, which I think is very cool.

Speaker 1 (14:45):
Yeah, and I think it's a helpful way to like
think about creativity. And there's he also I appreciated. So
he wrote this book in the seventies, I think late
seventies that is about horror, like the just horror genre,
both in television, movies and literature. And he gives a

(15:09):
big shout out to the Campfire story the Hook where
the urban legend where like two young lovers narrowly avoid
an attack by an escaped prisoner with a hook, and
he like used it to be like, look, there's no
there's no symbolic beauty in horror. It's just it's just
like telling you a story that has a certain shape

(15:30):
to it that's designed to scare you, but it is
it is a cool like dance. Macab is the name
of his nonfiction book about horror, and it has like
some cool insights as well as him being wildly wrong
about various filmmakers. We'll get to his bad take on
his on the movie The Shining. He hated Stanley Kubrick's

(15:51):
The Shining, but he also like hates Wes Craven. He's like,
and then there's this nobody bozo Wes Craven who sucks top.

Speaker 4 (16:00):
About my yah yah, yeah, I was gonna say.

Speaker 1 (16:04):
He he also, uh, just he has this weird thing
with slang where so he's like, here's the hook story,
and he like tells it the way somebody would around
a a campfire. But at one point he's he uses
the phrase he says and so the guys like doesn't
want to leave the thing, but the girl wants to leave,

(16:26):
and the guy so jacked off that she's scared about
it that he peels out, and so he means like,
so he thinks that the word jacked off means pissed
off whatever. His very unique superpower is grasping how people
use slang or like having an ear for that is

(16:47):
not one of them. It's very strange.

Speaker 2 (16:50):
Just yeah, just hang out, just hang out in Maine,
do your coke, and get all these kind of slang
terms wrong.

Speaker 4 (16:56):
That's the kids are really jacking me off.

Speaker 1 (17:01):
What Buddy set away from. Yes, But another thing that's
interesting in Dance macab where he talks about how the
best thing for horror is economic anxiety and how there's
always this growth in horror around times of economic anxiety.
And you'll notice that his career launches like in the

(17:21):
late seventies when there's this like famous malaise. He talks
in the book about the Amityville horror and that this
is actually like one of the things that's really cool
to see. Like he he's kind of good, like he'd
be a good guest on the Daily Zeicheist other than
the lazy racism. Not knowing how people talk is like

(17:43):
he analyzes the Amityville horror and he's like, if you
think about it, like the whole book and movie are
a economic horror story where they like invest all this
money in this house they're like it's I'm the first
person in my family to own a house and it
immediately like is the worst investment ever. And like there

(18:06):
are scenes where like Josh Brolin like is losing his
ship looking for some like money that he misplaced and stuff.
So and he said that he like went to see
the movie and like somebody behind him in the theater
was like the bills as they were like as the
house is just demolishing itself. But his characters frequently are

(18:30):
trying to make ends meet in a town that is
kind of on the brink of collapse, right, So that
that brings us to Carrie, which I guess first like
he he credits his love of horror or like you know,
the thing that he feeds his imagination with with just

(18:50):
like horror movies and comics that are like fucked up.
He's a little twisted when it comes to his taste
in this stuff. And he's horror as a harmless blow
off for anxieties and bad feelings. Again, a harmless blow
off for anxieties. It's a weird way of saying.

Speaker 5 (19:07):
It's like a little closer.

Speaker 2 (19:09):
Yeah, yeah, yeah, the visually I can see what you're saying.

Speaker 4 (19:12):
Yeah, you're blowing off.

Speaker 2 (19:13):
Okay, yeah, yeah, yeah for sure, uh jack off.

Speaker 1 (19:20):
But that is a theory that's been backed up by
experts who think that we watch horror movies as a
useful tool for reducing anxiety by allowing people to play
with being scared. And that's sort of his theory of
the case.

Speaker 2 (19:34):
See, because I'm I'm wired so differently that while watch horror,
if there's something like really like people like you got
to check the shit out. But other than that, I
do not gravitate towards it at all. Like, in fact,
I'm like, bro, no, I'm good. I have enough terrorizing
shit going on in my mind. But I think I
wonder if there's a version of where you're at on
the sort of spectrum of anxiety where it's like, if

(19:56):
you're kind of right here, it's fun to just kind of.

Speaker 4 (19:59):
Keep hitting that nerve, or if it works the other way.
I don't know how you.

Speaker 6 (20:03):
I mean, I'll say as someone like the totally opposite
side also is very like by anxiety. Sometimes I just
like stay up late reading stories about people finding people
who are secretly living in their house, you know, and
I'm just like like, because you're like it's just like me.

Speaker 5 (20:25):
Yeah, but I've just been a horror kid my whole life.

Speaker 6 (20:28):
I mean, speaking of Stephen King, it was like I
remember so vividly going to Blockbuster as long back as
I can remember, five years old, and I would break
off and go to the horror section and just like
walk through, like it was like a haunted house. And
the movie I always gravitated to look at the cover
of was Stephen King's It, and I was just waiting
for the day I'd like find a way to watch it.

(20:49):
And you know, it's like I've just always been that way.
I just love horror and it does calm me down.

Speaker 5 (20:54):
It's weird, it's so odd, Like.

Speaker 1 (20:57):
I feel like that was a multi multi vhape set, right,
it was like.

Speaker 5 (21:04):
Titanic of Horror. Yeah, the TVHS set.

Speaker 1 (21:08):
Yep, he was the King of Blockbuster. Like there's so
so many I didn't mean to say king, but you know,
you get it. So at the time he's writing, he
writes Carrie, he and his family live in a double
wide trailer. He's teaching English at a private high school,
earning extra money working summers at an industrial laundry facility,

(21:30):
and moonlighting as a janitor. So I think we can
count him as another one of our icons whose roots
are firmly in the soil of like everyday life and
like working class existence. We've yet to cover anyone who
had like a very privileged background. I think the thing

(21:52):
that everyone seems to be dealing with is you know
what everyone else. It just feels like it's weird that
this thing that everyone's struggling to which she is privilege,
And it's like the one poison that a great artist
can't actually survive is privilege. But so he's working as
a janitor when he gets not, I don't think he's

(22:15):
on I don't think he has cocaine money.

Speaker 5 (22:16):
At that point he needs Carrie to get.

Speaker 1 (22:20):
He did do a bunch of drugs. He did do
drugs in college. He experimented with LSD, peyote and mescaline
in college. But I don't think he had cocaine.

Speaker 4 (22:34):
Yeah, step by step, Steven, step by step, that's right.

Speaker 1 (22:37):
Uh. So he is working in the as a janitor
and gets this idea for the opening scene of Carrie,
which is a he's cleaning the girl's locker room shower
and imagined the opening in which a girl gets her
first period but doesn't know what it is, and then
all the other girls start pelting her with sanitary apkins.

(23:00):
Were just kind of weird out of context for him
to be, like, I was sitting there picture and the
girls taking showers while I was cleaning the thing.

Speaker 4 (23:07):
What were you doing?

Speaker 2 (23:08):
I was cleaning the girls showers, all right, Stephen, Yeah, yeah,
oh okay.

Speaker 1 (23:15):
But he at this time is writing for basically the
place that you could get horror stories published at this
time were neody magazines, which included publications like Cavalier, which
is such a funny early for runner of like magazines

(23:36):
with names like smut and Jugs that this one's like,
I say, the people in the pages of this magazine.

Speaker 2 (23:41):
Are really quite cavalier arer for those of the Cavalier
at it.

Speaker 1 (23:47):
So in nineteen seventy two, one of his friends gave
him shit for writing for misogynistic magazines and bet him
ten bucks that he couldn't write a story from a
woman's point of view. Just want to give a quick
shout out that friend's name, Flip Thompson. Bring back people
named Flip.

Speaker 6 (24:05):
I say it sounds like a villain, he would write. Yeah,
in the nineteen fifties.

Speaker 2 (24:10):
Yeah, also sounds like a guy who wouldn't challenge him
on something like that. He's like, I challenge you now
to write from the other perspectives, all.

Speaker 5 (24:18):
Right, Flip Jener studies.

Speaker 1 (24:21):
Yeah, he's uh so, he's working as a janitor, has
that idea for the opening scene. He's also recently read
a Life magazine article about telekinesis which said that girls
in adolescents have been known to have powers right around
the time of their first period. So those two ideas merge.

(24:42):
But the only reason we have Carrie is because of
his wife, Tabitha. And I would say that that could
be that would be true. You could say that of
his entire career. There's a couple anecdotes from his first
couple of books here. But he threw he wrote through
the first three pages of Carrie and threw them in
the trash, and his wife fished them out and urged

(25:05):
him to continue and helped him better understand the female perspective.
And I just want to say, as somebody like he
has kind of had a career long struggle with writing,
women like to try and imagine what that first draft
was where she had to be like brother, how frequently

(25:26):
were the girls, you know, flouncing boobally around and.

Speaker 2 (25:31):
You know what I mean, right, right, right, right right.
Where do you think these people exist, Steven? These are
real people in your mind?

Speaker 4 (25:37):
Yeah, I believe so, I just don't know.

Speaker 5 (25:40):
And I feel like Carrie is really like it's really good.
You say this as a born woman.

Speaker 6 (25:46):
Yeah, it was like I felt really good about it,
And I always thought that it was a pretty amazing
feat for the seventies.

Speaker 1 (25:54):
Yea, for a man in the seventies.

Speaker 6 (25:56):
Able to do that because most men were just extremely
angry at feminism.

Speaker 2 (26:00):
Right, So, yeah, shout out to Flip Thompson and Tabitha
the hero him. Yeah that god, those that draft he
crumpled up and threw in the garbage. Can I the
money i'd pay to read that?

Speaker 5 (26:15):
Yeah, no kidding.

Speaker 4 (26:16):
Yeah, the pre Tabitha drafts.

Speaker 5 (26:18):
Please got to be somewhere.

Speaker 6 (26:20):
It'll be like in a college you can visit in
his notes one day, right right right?

Speaker 4 (26:24):
Yeah.

Speaker 1 (26:24):
The novel has this like pseudo documentary like true crime.
Feel like he does a thing where it's written like
it's like pasted together from different like magazine accounts of
this thing that happened, and you don't know exactly what
it is yet, like as as it's going on, but
it gives the book a sense of dread that you're

(26:45):
like coming towards something. And suproducer Victor pointed out, like
he just read Carry Again and was saying that, like
were it written today, like all of these different details
of the book, Like he it's about a loner character
who is like has this sexual, repressed upbringing, and then

(27:10):
like something terrible happens. It would be like this is
way too on the nose a metaphor for like a
school shooting. Yeah right right, like and just like a
foreboding thing happening at high schools. We're just so used
to that now. Yeah, yeah, again, he's like kind of
mining this collective unconscious and.

Speaker 2 (27:28):
Did you imagine that he's but he's always just kind
of off by like a couple of degrees because in
his mind.

Speaker 4 (27:33):
He's like the girl's locker room man.

Speaker 2 (27:36):
He things going on, just likeentually getting there, it's like
everything was like, oh yeah, no, that wasn't about jail.
That was just I just wanted to write the N
word a bunch.

Speaker 6 (27:47):
I would even say that it's also a novel about
the fear of the mean girl, because the girls in
that novel are so mean scary.

Speaker 5 (27:55):
Yeah, and in the movie a.

Speaker 1 (27:56):
Rejection so yeah, yeah, I mean high schools, fucking Texas.

Speaker 2 (28:01):
Also picturing these girls in high school is being so
mean to the janitor Stephen.

Speaker 4 (28:09):
Yeah, dick Stephen. Everyone plug your noses.

Speaker 5 (28:13):
Come on, guys, Well that happens an it too.

Speaker 6 (28:17):
One of the Beverly's dad is a janitor, and everyone
makes fun of.

Speaker 5 (28:20):
Her for having the chanitor.

Speaker 4 (28:22):
Shit.

Speaker 5 (28:22):
Wow, so there's something there.

Speaker 4 (28:24):
Yeah, there's a lot here.

Speaker 5 (28:26):
Steven's collective Unconscious.

Speaker 7 (28:28):
Yeah.

Speaker 1 (28:29):
So first publishes the hardcover as usual, does pretty well,
and the paperback rights are sold for four hundred thousand dollars,
and the paperback goes on to sell one million copies
in its first year, which is like, that's great. You know,
Bible numbers, it's putting up Bible numbers out here.

Speaker 4 (28:48):
King James people.

Speaker 1 (28:49):
Pointed out it's also smart that it's an inversion of
Cinderella essentially, like it's you know, going to the ball
at the end, right, and then kind of goes He
was planning to underscore this connection by having Carrie leave
one of her dancing shoes at the prom but uh,
I don't know, he got drunk and forgot to do that.

Speaker 2 (29:11):
I wonder if Tabitha goes Come on, Stephen, we've been
doing we're working on this.

Speaker 1 (29:16):
Speaking of Tabitha, he gets his idea for his follow up,
which is the modern day, like nineteen seventy five modern
day vampire story Salem's Lot. He's teaching Dracula to his
students at the time and discussing the book with Tabitha,
and she's like, can you imagine if Dracula came to herman?

(29:37):
And that's basically the plot of Salem's Lot, Like it
just paints a picture of like early Tabitha being like
the Blues Clues guy leading a toddler around by the nose,
with like really obvious paths to the conclusion, like just like, gee,
I wonder what it'd be like if Dracula was my
neighbor and then like stares wordlessly at Steven until he

(29:59):
like starts writing the novel she's signing him.

Speaker 6 (30:02):
I can also see him as a teacher going and
then giving the prompt to his students and being like
this one's interesting.

Speaker 4 (30:09):
No, not good enough, this is dry, not sexy enough.

Speaker 1 (30:11):
Yeah, Brian the editor said that Stephen King couldn't look
more like a janitor. His glasses look like they came
with a broom. Yeah oh yeah. So Brian to Palmers
carry huge hit. Salem's Lot too long to turn into
a movie, so it becomes the first of many Stephen

(30:32):
King books to get the TV mini series treatment. Among
them it in the Stand. So takes a couple of
years and writes his next book, which is The Shining,
which is again kind of a Tabitha joint in the
sense that she suggests that they move temporarily moved to
another part of the country and just pick a place
at random, and so he pulls out an atlas and

(30:54):
randomly points his finger and they land on Colorado. While
staying in Boulder, they book a hotel to have a
night to themselves because they have kids at this point,
which is the Stanley Hotel, and it's Halloween and it's
the last day of the season before the hotel closes
for the winter. And says that like the Bellman is

(31:15):
like showing them around, and there's like they have the
orchestra playing for them at dinner even though they're the
only people in the in the place. And all the
other tables in the restaurant had the chairs turned upside
down and like placed on top, and so it's like
they just happened to like have dinner in the setting
of The Shining right on Halloween. He's like, I don't know,

(31:38):
maybe maybe there's something here.

Speaker 2 (31:41):
Every fucking time with this guy, with this guy, because
Tabitha is like, we should go somewhere else.

Speaker 1 (31:48):
Tabitha set that ship.

Speaker 4 (31:50):
Nothing without Tabitha.

Speaker 6 (31:52):
I know, Tabitha literally did the spin the globe. Yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah,
that's prompt.

Speaker 1 (32:02):
By the way, the Stanley Hotel where they were having
dinner is also the hotel where they filmed Dumb and Dumber.
Jeff Daniel stays in the Stephen King Sweet, which is
supposedly haunted.

Speaker 6 (32:14):
Rinds and jumps on the bad Yeah that's right, what
we'll take it.

Speaker 4 (32:19):
Yeah, okay.

Speaker 1 (32:21):
But yeah, so it's pretty well known that he hates
Stanley Kubrick's movie version. His big complaint. I mean, he's
got many big complaints, but he was very annoyed that
they cast Jack Nicholson and says that, like, you know,
Jack Nicholson, like in his book, the main character is
the writer is the Jack Nicholson character and he like

(32:44):
has a redemptive arc. And for Stephen King, he says
Jack was an autobiographical character full of King's least desirable
traits the book like writer's black excessive drinking, hostility toward
the family. The books, Jack ultimately redeems himself, battles his
demons long enough to save his family, blowing up the
Overlook Hotel and it's evils once and for all. In

(33:07):
Kubrick's movie, Jack is a psycho who becomes even more
of a psycho and is crucially never redeemed. This is
a quote from King. The character of Jack Torrance has
no arc in that movie, absolutely no arc at all.
When we first see Jack Nicholson, he's in the office
of mister Olman, the manager of the hotel, and you
know then he's crazy as a shithouse rat. All he

(33:27):
does is get crazier, which is like kind of true.
But it's like, I don't need the bad guy in
my horror movie to like have a redemptive arc, right,
you know, Well.

Speaker 6 (33:38):
That's the difference between a book and a horror movie.
Probably it is like I understand that frustration, but yes,
the same time, it was never gonna.

Speaker 5 (33:46):
It was never gonna.

Speaker 6 (33:48):
Unless it's a mini series, like it has a lot
more depth, I think, because you have three you know sections,
you can actually do it in but really hard.

Speaker 2 (33:57):
Yeah, I mean, do you think he's just also taking
it personally because it was autobiographical exactly?

Speaker 4 (34:01):
Yeah, God fuck, I'm supposed to be okay in the.

Speaker 1 (34:07):
End, right, And this is a time when like he's
writing about an alcoholic author, and he is an alcoholic author,
and so he's probably a little too close to it,
but he still can't like let it go. Like years later,
like the version of Dance Macob that I read had
a ForWord written by him, I think in like twenty ten,

(34:31):
and he still is talking about how bad The Shining is.
He's like, I mean, you want you want your movie
to have a cool ending. Like in the book The
Shining he blows up the Overlook Hotel. In the movie
he freezes to death. How dorky is that? Which is
like orky is an unforfortunate choice because it's like very uh,

(34:55):
it is exactly what Kubrick has that he doesn't is
the ability to make this story cool and like not dorky.

Speaker 4 (35:04):
I'm surprised he didn't take shots at like Stanley Kubrick
being dead. Also like just getting that Eddie.

Speaker 2 (35:09):
He's like, who's laughing now, Stanley, Oh that's right, you
probably can't read this anyway.

Speaker 6 (35:16):
The Illuminati, Yeah, I do think he was.

Speaker 1 (35:22):
It is weird that he hasn't written a book about Illuminati,
because that is the thing that's going to kill us
all or has he I don't know, Victor let us know.
It is worth noting though that I think he part
of like the big head of steam of him thinking
that Kubricks Shining wasn't ship was built up because it

(35:43):
was considered like a bad movie when it was first released.
It was nominated for Razzies for like worst Director. Shelley
Devall was like nominated as like worst actress. I know,
it's just so great in it, and like that's it's
a thing like he makes fun of that perform rmance.
He he really like has very i don't know, just

(36:06):
middle brow like taste in movies where he's just like,
I don't know, yeah, the West Craven thing. At one
point he's like talking about, you know, mining the fear
of cars in Dance Macobb and he's like, you know,
not so there are some good movies about like how
dangerous cars are, unlike Turkey's like Mad Max. It's like, right,

(36:29):
come on, man, like what are you talking about. That's
not a Turkey, that's a good one. Embarrassingly, he eventually
is like, all right, everybody likes that version of The
Shining so much, We're gonna take the Pepsi challenge here.
I'm gonna make my own version of The Shining. It's
gonna be called Stephen Kings The Shining. It's gonna star

(36:53):
an actor who can really hold down the part of
Jack Torrance, Stephen Weber of Wings And part of the
deal between King, Warner Brothers and Stanley Kubrick was that
King would no longer talk shit about Kubrick's The Shining

(37:14):
and interviews if they let him make this. They're like, fine, dude,
just like shut the fuck up about oh like for us,
also for yourself, it's like hurting everything about it. So
he released this mini series, The Shining, and it, you know,

(37:34):
is a TV mini series remake of like a cinematic masterpiece.
There's like all they bring back a lot of stuff
that just like doesn't work on screen, Like, for instance,
the ending where you know, there's a hedge maze that
they get stuck in. The thing in the book is

(37:55):
that it's a topiery garden with like animals like bushes
carved into animal shapes, and those animals like come to life. Uh,
and the special effects in nineteen ninety seven TV mini
series we're not up to that task.

Speaker 5 (38:11):
Yeah.

Speaker 1 (38:12):
God. Also, Danny is like horrifying invisible friend who's like
he lives in my mouth, like little kid shit possible.
That is one thing he's good as little little kids
can be scary as fuckh is actually like a flying
teenager ghost who like can do that compute like skateboarding. Yeah,

(38:36):
like literally, it's like it's like what if Casper from
the nineties movie Casper combined with like a teenage mutant
ninja turtle.

Speaker 2 (38:46):
God and that also look like shit too, Like those
effects are they kind of do like oh yeah, yeah yeah,
the Jedi Force ghost kind Yeah yeah, exactly.

Speaker 1 (38:57):
I mean it's a fucking television mini I just.

Speaker 2 (39:01):
Love though that they they they know his ip is
so valuable that they're like, dude, you got we just
have to throw them this fucking grudge bone that you
can just fucking get it. Over with, so we just
get back to fucking making money and we don't care
how bad this ship is.

Speaker 4 (39:17):
Just let him fucking be done with it.

Speaker 1 (39:19):
Well, I remember it being like a good pitch at
the time, was like you we've all seen the shining.
That ship is like fucking crazy and scary and like
a masterpiece. The guy who wrote it thinks it sucks
compared to what he wanted to do. Sure, So, like
I remember there being like a good pitch and then
immediately everyone just being like no, no, no, no, you

(39:40):
don't have to watch this. I don't have to watch
this at all turned off. They even changed the here's
Johnny line to just boo chops the thing and then
goes boo.

Speaker 5 (39:53):
Was ad lib.

Speaker 1 (39:55):
Here's Johnny was out lived because in the book the
line was nowhere left run you cunt, So.

Speaker 2 (40:07):
Holy shit, Jack nicklse is like, let me get a
couple with this one really quick.

Speaker 1 (40:13):
You mind if I try a couple other ones? So
that's saying the S word. But yeah, it's exactly like
you say. You know, like what we especially in film form,
at the length of a film, we don't need our
horror monster. Like Anthony Perkins is not we don't need
him to be redeemed at the end of Psycho. We
need to be like freaked out and have seen like

(40:36):
the craziest ship possible like that. The thing that's cool
about The Shining is like the thing Stephen king Will
is always like there's something like profoundly evil about that movie.
It's like, yeah, that's what's cool, like looking for like
how some people might describe your books. Yeah, like the work,

(40:58):
Like you don't get to see things that are so
thoroughly evil in art. You know. There's like the painting
of that guy biting his baby's head off that is
like a clatch one.

Speaker 4 (41:08):
Is that one baby head bite off?

Speaker 1 (41:12):
Saturn Devourus' son is the one. I'm thinking something like that.

Speaker 5 (41:14):
Yeah yeah, it's like yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah yeah.

Speaker 1 (41:21):
And it's like totally different from his other style.

Speaker 6 (41:24):
He's just like oh nuts and like painted all these paintings.
I think, and I might be wrong, but like on
the walls of his house, like he went, you know,
he did some wall painting, which is always a bad sign.

Speaker 2 (41:36):
Yeah, I just hanging out Goya. He's like, hey, man,
you min if I do some can I can I
piece this wall up? Really quick, like, I don't know.

Speaker 4 (41:42):
Man, Yeah, shot at it. This is my daughter's bedroom. Man,
the thing you did in the dining room is a
little edgy. No, no, no, no, this is fine.

Speaker 1 (41:55):
But yeah, it's just I guess it makes sense that
he can't take himself out of it because it's him
writing about.

Speaker 4 (42:02):
You know, is he just?

Speaker 2 (42:04):
I mean, i'd imagine for how prolific he is, as
you know, an iconic in his contribution to like the genre,
that he probably has like a bit of an ego, right, I'm.

Speaker 4 (42:13):
Like, I don't.

Speaker 2 (42:13):
I don't know how he talks about his work enough
because it feels like one of those things where he's
somehow also being like, well, I'm a goat at writing
this shit, but he can't get over the fact that
be like, but I'm not a filmmaker, and that's okay.

Speaker 1 (42:27):
He does, Well, we're going to get to he. I
think his ego peaks along with his cocaine use at
a project that we have coming up of a maximum overdrive.

Speaker 4 (42:38):
That's the movie he did direct, right, I think the
only movie he directed.

Speaker 6 (42:41):
Okay, And I will say it's like I understand if
you make something and you spend years of your life.
And then the thing that is made from the thing
is more famous than the thing, and more people see
the thing, Like that would be frustrating for sure.

Speaker 1 (42:54):
This is just the one where I'd just be like,
let it go, man, like you lost this one. He
doesn't actually seem that often to be like such an asshole.
He just has these like weird, very specific Okay, so
he's human, Yeah, yeah, he's human. The shining He's never
been able to forgive a guy who was driving a

(43:15):
van who hit him in Maine. That guy died a
year later on Stephen King's birthday, and like he's just
like never really been able to forgive that guy and
has like written him into his stories in like really
insulting weird ways.

Speaker 4 (43:30):
But the guy died on his birthday.

Speaker 1 (43:32):
Yeah, he died of a drug overdose on his birthday,
like like later that year, I think. And it is
because like there's a dark darkness, because I remember at
the time him being openly like fuck that guy, like

(43:52):
just being like I don't think I've ever seen somebody
who like so clearly wished someone ill in the public.
And then the guy died of a drug overdose like
later that year.

Speaker 5 (44:02):
And what a good plot that would be for a book,
like can you wish death upon someone and then you
actually kill them?

Speaker 1 (44:09):
Right? But he seems again it's like he seems to
not be able to get the irony or something, or
like he's just shamelessly a character in that story and
it's just like, anyways, that guy was a fucking idiot.
Right year after The Shining came out, he publishes The Stand,

(44:38):
which a lot of people think is his greatest novel.
I think it. The stand are usually like up there
as like the ones that people think are I know,
the New Kennedy Assassination one is very popular with Stephen
King fans, but the Stand is, and The Shining I

(44:59):
think is up there as well. The Stand comes out,
it's this massive work. They eventually add four hundred pages
to it because, like the original version, they couldn't print
it because it would have been like too expensive to print.
So he's again he's just churning out just like fucking

(45:20):
the pros is flowing through him, and he later restores
it to their full length that he had in mind.
But he does it by in nineteen ninety by adding
like nineteen ninety pop culture references to like Freddy Krueger
and Roger Rabbit.

Speaker 4 (45:39):
Which is weirdo.

Speaker 1 (45:40):
Yeah, yeah, there's this one line from Harold was now
holding his pistol in both hands, as he had seen
cops do in the movies. He pulled the trigger and
his bullet smashed the second man's elbow. The second man
dropped his rifle and began to dance up and down,
making high jabbering noises. To Franny, he sounded a little
like Roger Rabbit saying, please, my God, got it in,

(46:04):
got it there. That's how you know I wrote this
in nineteen ninety just cracks his knuckles back again.

Speaker 4 (46:11):
I spoke about it. What else?

Speaker 1 (46:15):
He becomes a pop culture personality, like the One of
the reasons everybody knows what he looks like is he
shows up in this uh it well, he starts going
on David Letterman. He's in a nineteen eighty five American
Express commercial. He's got a flair for the dramatic. He's
like a real ham in these commercials. He later calls

(46:36):
this a major regret, complaining that after that everyone in
America knew what I looked like. Wow, you know he's uh.

Speaker 4 (46:45):
And was disappointed.

Speaker 1 (46:46):
I will say He is supposed to be like very
cool to his fans, Like when people write to him,
he writes them back, and it's just generally like has
been pretty nice to people who are big fans of
He's also like stan Lee where he appears in his movies,
he was that yeah big time.

Speaker 2 (47:09):
I don't know why I've seen Thinner so many times.
That's like the one weird Stephen King Rugby. I don't
know why, just because the one guy's lizard skin too.
His boy turns into a lizard. We're gonna get to Thinner.
His whole Richard Bachman uh persona pseudonym turns on Thinner, Okay,

(47:31):
but yeah, uh, he's making He's writing books that are
like before they're published, they're being turned into movies like
Kujo Christine pet Cemetery Firestarter. Pet Cemetery, by the way,
is at least partially based on like him. They moved
to a place out in like a farm, and there

(47:52):
was a road that like ran by the house that
animals just kept getting hit by cars on and like
just you had to keep your kids away from it.
So he just you know, he is pulling from everyday
life and like things that people should be Afraid of,
you know, other pop culture like places where he shows

(48:15):
up in pop culture. There's a Quantum Leap episode where
it ends with them going back in time to nineteen
sixty four to give a bespectacled teamed team named Stevie
King all.

Speaker 1 (48:29):
Of his story ideas. I don't know why. And then
in two thousand he played himself during a brief cameo
on The Simpsons, which not long after that, the cartoon
series kind of fucked up one of his books because
he wrote he was in the process of writing this
book Under the Dome, which is about a town being

(48:52):
trapped under a giant glass dome. He had been working
on it since nineteen seventy eight, and the Simpsons movie
came out in two thousand and seven and was like
that exact plot. He's like it, as they say, uh huh, Yeah,
the Simpsons did do it. But I mean, if we
believe that there is like a shared unconscious like, it

(49:14):
stands to reason that he and other writers would be
like pooling things out of the same idea points.

Speaker 2 (49:20):
Yeah, and the Simpsons especially for like a lot of
the interesting shit that they kind of were joking about,
but then ends up becoming eerially close to reality.

Speaker 1 (49:29):
Yeah, but yeah, I want to talk about the life
and death of Richard Bachman, his secret literary alter ego,
which began with his desire to publish all the books
that had been rejected prior to Carrie. And his first
one is Getting It On, which is a story about
a school shooting, and they changed the title to Fury

(49:51):
because they're like that, why would it be called getting
it on? You freak?

Speaker 5 (49:57):
Why aren't you calling it blowing and jacking?

Speaker 4 (49:59):
Yeah, flowing in jacket? Well, what year was that.

Speaker 1 (50:06):
It's like, I think it was written before Carrie.

Speaker 4 (50:09):
Wow.

Speaker 1 (50:10):
Yeah, He's like.

Speaker 4 (50:12):
Were there many examples of like kids doing stuff like that?

Speaker 2 (50:15):
I mean no, maybe like University at Texas or something
is like the closest thing.

Speaker 1 (50:20):
There's like, there's definitely mass shootings, but like not a
thing of like high school students like going in and
shooting up there. High school is not a thing. And
he eventually has to pull it off the shelves in
the early nineties after they're like four school shootings that
buy people who had read this book, Oh god, yeah,

(50:43):
and so kind of channels channels something. Yeah, yeah, I
just looked it.

Speaker 6 (50:48):
Up and it looks like the first school shooting was
in nineteen sixty six, so it would make sense that
and it was like a big story, so I bet
that was the yeah.

Speaker 4 (50:57):
Right before then it becomes like something a track in
our modern era. Yeah yeah, yeah, Columbine kind of thing.

Speaker 1 (51:04):
But with The Stand and like, I don't know, it's
it is just interesting because like The Stand, you know,
is about a pandemic and then like years later everyone's like, fuck,
he saw it coming. The Politician in the Dead Zone
is like very Trumpian. Uh, mass shootings obviously become a

(51:26):
bigger thing after he writes that book, and suproducer Victor
pointed out that the ending to The Running Man, the
protagonist flies a plane into the building, killing the executive
and destroying the network. So he's he's down there. Yeah yeah,
And like I don't know, I'm just putting things out there.

Speaker 2 (51:46):
It's the cosmic gumbo man and I'm just just taking
SIPs off.

Speaker 1 (51:50):
But yeah, like last year there was a book, Uh,
there was an adaptation of The Running Man and The
Long Walk, which we're both Bachmann books, and yeah, he
I think it was like five different books that came
out being written by Bachmann they weren't like massive hits.
I will say, like I think he was like, I'm

(52:12):
just going to put these out there under a different
name and they'll be just you know, it'll prove that
these publishers don't know shit. And it was like they
were this guy could probably make a living long term, sure,
not like barely if he was just an author.

Speaker 2 (52:29):
So it really was just like the overflow pseudonym he
used to. It was just it's a Bachmann joint and
it was the Yeah, it was the rejected pile. It
does kind of remind me of like.

Speaker 1 (52:40):
The George Lucas thing where during the original trilogy he's
like furious about the studio notes and then he finally
gets to do all the stuff he wanted to, like
his way with the prequels. Yeah, in this one, it's
just she's, well, what about these ones that they didn't

(53:02):
want and people are like, yeah, no, they're there are
they're not as good as the ones they did want.

Speaker 2 (53:07):
They were they still wanted them.

Speaker 4 (53:11):
Huh.

Speaker 1 (53:12):
So, So He's Got Thinner is a Bachmann book, and
it's when it's about to come out a bookstore clerk realizes, like,
first of all, it's the first one that like really
feels like a Stephen King book, and because it's like
about a curse and stuff like that, it's also has

(53:33):
like some pretty lazy racism because at one point, yes,
at one point, so the book is about a guy
who runs over an elderly Romani woman while getting a
hand job, loves jack in and hand jobs and all
that stuff, and ends up being cursed. And for the

(53:56):
scenes in which the characters speak Romani, he just exerted
random text from Swedish language versions of his books. Like
he didn't even like bother trying. He was just like, yeah,
just take this like lauram Ipsom essentially. Wait, so we're
like that doesn't that's not even a thing. He's like, ah,

(54:16):
my bad, my bad, I get.

Speaker 2 (54:18):
Wait, so it's just Swedish basically. Yeah, He's like that
looks like some weird ship. So that'll Fulham.

Speaker 6 (54:24):
Yeah, probably thought Romani people were like an invention, like
not a real thing, horror, nobody knows what they sound like.

Speaker 1 (54:31):
Yeah.

Speaker 2 (54:32):
Yeah, he's like els Morelda from from Note from the
Hunchback of Notre Dame.

Speaker 4 (54:38):
That these what the heck are these characters? Yeah, because
I remember that the guy who played her.

Speaker 2 (54:42):
Dad was just like a I don't know what this
guy was based on, but he always called him white
Man from town.

Speaker 4 (54:48):
That was his nickname. He's like, hey, white man from town.

Speaker 2 (54:51):
And that was the thing we used to call one
of our teachers behind that man from town.

Speaker 4 (54:56):
Okay, white man from town.

Speaker 1 (54:58):
But a bookstore. Clairek blows the case wide open when
he discovers that the copyrights to the last four Bachmann
books were registered in the name of King's agent, and
a copyright to Rage was actually in King's name. So
he just looked at it. They were like, oh, wait
a second, they didn't do a great job on that.

(55:19):
He never he never did like a true Chris Gaines thing, right,
He never like appeared as Richard Bachman. Yeah. The headshot
that they used was like his publisher's friend.

Speaker 4 (55:30):
Oh okay, So there.

Speaker 2 (55:31):
Was okay, But it would be so funny if to
Stephen King just like a dumb beard or something.

Speaker 6 (55:36):
Just like a swoopy looking Chris Gaines.

Speaker 1 (55:45):
He So the plan was to do Thinner as a
Bachman and then Misery was going to be the next
Bachman and that probably would have like Misery was probably
going to be a bestseller. One way or another. And
so if that, if those meddling kids hadn't found out
who it was under the Richard Bachman mask, he might

(56:06):
have been able to kind of actually build a career
for for Bachman.

Speaker 4 (56:12):
But that as he aspired to do though, Yeah.

Speaker 1 (56:15):
I think he wanted to, but also maybe was getting
tired of doing it. Thinner sold around twenty eight thousand
copies before the Bachman identity was revealed, and then after
that it sold ten times as much.

Speaker 5 (56:26):
So Stephen King is such a better name.

Speaker 1 (56:29):
Yeah, I know.

Speaker 5 (56:30):
Yeah, Richard Bachman is just Kyler.

Speaker 1 (56:33):
The Richard Bachmann thing. He was like in his room
and he was like, I had a Bachman Turner Overdrive
or whatever.

Speaker 4 (56:40):
I was going to say, is that.

Speaker 1 (56:42):
Yeah, he just pulled it off that album. And then
Richard was the name of like one of the authors
on his shelf, and he just look.

Speaker 5 (56:50):
Things.

Speaker 2 (56:51):
Yeahzer Hendrix, Beezer Hendrix. What is that which brings us
to Maximum Overdrive which aka cocaine the movie Overdrive?

Speaker 1 (57:11):
Yeah, yeah, exactly, He's just pulling things off the shelf
Maximum Overdrive. Okay, So, as we've referenced so far, in
addition to chugging excessive amounts of beer and Nike will
In the eighties, he formed a cocaine Habit does not
remember writing Kujo, which he says, I'll just read from

(57:33):
I think this is hit from his on writing memoir.
At the end of my adventures, I was drinking a
case of sixteen outs Tall Boys a night. And there's
one novel, Kujo that I barely remember writing at all.
I don't say that with pride or shame, only with
a vague sense of sorrow and loss. I like that book.
I wish I could remember enjoying the good parts as
I put them down on the page. And he described

(57:55):
cocaine as his on switch. As mentioned, he's my on switch,
face with cocaine. One snort, and it owned me body
and soul, like the missing link. Cocaine was my on switch,
and it seemed like a really good energizing drug. That's
how it feels at first. By the end, he is

(58:17):
a mess. He decides to make this movie Maximum Overdrive
the pitch. His whole reason for wanting to make it
is that he wanted to put Bruce Springsteen in a movie.
And he's like, Bruce Springsteen's gonna star in this movie
about cars. Bruce Springsteen does haunting songs about cars. This

(58:38):
is about haunted cars. And then they're like, no, we're
gonna do Amelio Esteveez instead. He's like, fuck it, I
don't even want to do that. I don't even care anymore.

Speaker 5 (58:49):
I just wanted to meet Bruce.

Speaker 1 (58:51):
Yeah, said Bruce.

Speaker 4 (58:52):
I mean you could just you guys have the same publicist. Yeah, right, Wow,
he really wanted to. That is that's dedication and that's proba.

Speaker 2 (59:03):
Do you think you just listening to a bunch of
Bruce Springsteen while writing this high on cocaine and he's like, yeah, man.

Speaker 1 (59:08):
Is really like inspired by very mainstream pop music, Like
he the shining came from uh the chorus to Instant Karma,
the John Lennon will We All Shine? All? Oh yeah,
that's where he got. He was like he was really
into the Beatles. I remember there being like a Beatles
quote in Carrie.

Speaker 2 (59:29):
I thought he was gonna Shining Star by Earth Wind
and Fire. Yeah, that'd be so funny. He's like, oh yeah, yeah, yeah,
something here.

Speaker 1 (59:38):
But I'd say this is probably Maximum Overdrive or Tommy
Knocker is his novel about aliens who are cocaine. Well,
we'll talk about that, but maxim Overdrive is just like great,
you know if the first early part of his career
is like man cocaine really working for this guy. This
is a good illustration, like where it where it lands you,

(01:00:02):
let's sleep, deprivation, creativity. So it's based on his short
story Trucks, which was published in a nineteen seventy three
issue of Cavalier. The story is about a group of
strangers trapped together in a freeway truck stop diner who
must eventually try to combat a posse of killer vehicles.

(01:00:23):
This is just three years after he wrote Christine, which
is another evil car movie that had already become a movie,
and he's like, nah, fuck it, we're doing this one.
In Maximum Overdrive, every machine on earth becomes mad at
people and like starts trying to kill them. There's like
a part where soda machine like nails someone in the

(01:00:43):
nuts with like a with a soda can.

Speaker 4 (01:00:47):
Just launching cans out they launching.

Speaker 1 (01:00:50):
Yeah, he wrote that, wrote he wrote that.

Speaker 5 (01:00:57):
Shit America's funniest toy I know.

Speaker 2 (01:01:03):
But it's like before that, he's like, yes, this is
fucking yes, Steven More dude, Fuck what else?

Speaker 4 (01:01:09):
What can a waffle iron.

Speaker 1 (01:01:11):
Do I do know that a lot of people die
each year from having soda machines tip over on them?
So uh you know, yeah, yeah, saying. The movie opens
with this paragraph. On June nineteenth, nineteen eighty seven, at
nine to forty seven am Eastern Time, the Earth passed
into the extraordinarily diffuse Tale of Rhea M, a rogue comet.

(01:01:33):
According to astronomical calculations, the planet would remain in the
tail of the comet for the next eight days, five hours,
twenty nine minutes, and twenty three seconds. And then like
that's the only explanation we get for just like going
through a comet's tale is why? Is why this is happening?
The next shot we get as an ATM calling a

(01:01:55):
person played by Stephen King an asshole. He's at the ATM,
and it just says you are an ass home U.
Then I do just we got to play this trailer
real quick?

Speaker 4 (01:02:10):
Okay?

Speaker 2 (01:02:11):
Oh no, bro, he's talking to the Why is it
still him breaking the fourth wall pointing at us. You
snorted my cocaine, didn't you.

Speaker 1 (01:02:23):
Okay, here, nobody snorted his cocaine but him.

Speaker 8 (01:02:27):
I my name is Stephen King. Oh no, I've written
several motion pictures, but I want to tell you about
a movie called Maximum Overdrive.

Speaker 2 (01:02:39):
How clogged up are his sinuses? He's why, dude? And
when do you suald? Like you can't even breathe out
of your nose that you bore because he said that
you wrote nerd.

Speaker 1 (01:02:51):
You know, he said he wrote Tommy Knockers at this
time with both of his nostrils stuffed up because to
stop his like cocaine and those bleeds like you old
my book with like shit just like pramming his nose.

Speaker 2 (01:03:05):
Okay, sorry, back to your on switch, sir, which is
the first one I've directed.

Speaker 1 (01:03:10):
Wow, dickens going on around here?

Speaker 8 (01:03:18):
A lot of people have directed Stephen King novels and stories,
and I finally decided, if you want something done right,
you want to do it yourself.

Speaker 4 (01:03:28):
Oh yeah, brother, did you see the look he.

Speaker 1 (01:03:33):
Smiles and like crosses his eyes. He's like, I'm on
one f I don't know.

Speaker 4 (01:03:44):
Also, that's weirdly Smith voice from The Simpsons.

Speaker 8 (01:03:49):
It was my first picture as a director, and you
know something, I sort of enjoyed it.

Speaker 1 (01:03:54):
Oh what is happening when he perfun?

Speaker 4 (01:03:58):
Yeah? Okay, I wanted someone to do. Stephen king Wright,
you you got whoa heap firing a bazooka.

Speaker 8 (01:04:10):
Here, So come and spend some time with me and
my friends at the Dixie Boy, spend some time in
the dark.

Speaker 4 (01:04:20):
Wow, I'm going to scare the hell out of you.

Speaker 7 (01:04:31):
And that's a promise.

Speaker 1 (01:04:32):
You're going to get us an awful lot of trouble.

Speaker 2 (01:04:34):
Man.

Speaker 4 (01:04:34):
We are ready trouble, maximum terror, Maximum king Maybe tomorrow
will be our world again. Dino de Laurentis presents Stephen
kings over Drive. Wow.

Speaker 1 (01:04:58):
Wow, he got contact, He got contacts and was like, yeah,
I'm a movie star.

Speaker 2 (01:05:04):
A little it looked like he was having trouble with that.
I swear I'm coming to It's so funny because I
feel like so much like there's been so much comedic stuff.
I feel like based off of that, I feel like
like Garth FERENGHI like like and like the Matthew Berry
stuff like has a tinge of this weird like I'm

(01:05:26):
talking to you.

Speaker 1 (01:05:29):
And I'm weird. This is after Kubrick and Brian de
Palma have like famously adapted his movies into like massive hits,
like Yeah, if cocaine was a sentence, it would be.
I finally decided, if you want something done right, you
gotta do it yourself about like directing doing something that

(01:05:51):
he's like already at this point knows he's bad at.
Like one of the things he did during the making
of this is he demanded for this show that had
a killer lawnmower coming after people, he demanded that they
leave blades in the lawnmower. And the people are like,
that's not really how it's done, Steven, and he's like,
too bad, We're leaving it in there. And it like

(01:06:13):
caused like the lawnmower hit a piece of wood and
like sent splinters into the director of photography's eyes and like, babe,
my suit suit. The production for eighteen million dollars and yeah,
I think they got seven O.

Speaker 7 (01:06:31):
Yeah, yeah, that is a little scene. Yeah, to fuck
up a dp's eyeballs. Like the thing they make their
money with their fucking.

Speaker 4 (01:06:42):
Eyes is.

Speaker 5 (01:06:45):
Yeah, the blades to be real?

Speaker 1 (01:06:48):
You know you didn't. Yeah, that's the amazing thing. The law.
So just after the cinematographer suggested removing them because they
weren't visible, and the he allegedly responded, there's no fucking
way we have to be as real as possible. A
really good point, actually very well reasoned, and the walmower

(01:07:12):
ended up being souped up to the point of climbing
up a wooden wedge and shredding it, sending one of
the splinters directly into the cinematographer's eyes, the eyes of
the eye who was specifically like, we don't need to
do this, and.

Speaker 4 (01:07:26):
Okay, it's got to be as real as possible.

Speaker 1 (01:07:31):
We're not.

Speaker 4 (01:07:33):
No one's it's not checking if the grass is mode
behind it, nah, danger man.

Speaker 1 (01:07:39):
So he got sober right after this. Tabitha raided his
drug supply and was like, hey, there's so many plastic
bags with cocaine residue on it here and cocaine spoons everywhere,
loaded all into a garbage can and with like their
kids and friends around, like unloaded the can on the floor.

(01:08:04):
I was like, hey, man, the fuck is this?

Speaker 4 (01:08:07):
Oh like just did like a paraphernalia pile to be like, yeah, wow.

Speaker 5 (01:08:12):
Do we know if she knew about it the rest
of the time or if she just found out it.

Speaker 1 (01:08:16):
I think she just didn't know how serious it was. Yeah, yeah,
you know, And then like went through all his like
the stash. Yeah, yeah, and I'm sure like it's like, well, I.

Speaker 2 (01:08:26):
Mean he is functioning like he's making stuff and he's working,
and I guess.

Speaker 1 (01:08:31):
It turned into the world's biggest asshole.

Speaker 2 (01:08:34):
But then probably just didn't wasn't saying it's like, why
do you have both those holes stuffed up?

Speaker 4 (01:08:39):
Steven? Just real bad allergies again, babe, they just real bad.

Speaker 1 (01:08:45):
Yeah, went through the bookcases and found tucked into file
folders and underneath unopened office supplies the drug paraphernalia.

Speaker 4 (01:08:53):
So I'm good for it.

Speaker 2 (01:08:55):
I mean, typically, like like with like these kinds of
people who end up famous get access to a lot
of drugs and start losing it, Like, there's usually one
more step down further where I'm glad that they're.

Speaker 4 (01:09:06):
Like, hey, what the fuck, bro, what's going on?

Speaker 5 (01:09:09):
He's like, yeah, all right, it was just blinding a
DP with a lot yeah.

Speaker 1 (01:09:16):
Down the direct maximum overdrive and preface it by being like,
I figure, you want something done right, you do it yourself.

Speaker 4 (01:09:23):
This is how you blind a guy.

Speaker 1 (01:09:24):
Hey, dipoma, check this shit out, blinde buddy, this movie
fucking stinks.

Speaker 4 (01:09:35):
Check this out. Motherfucker continues to eat ship.

Speaker 1 (01:09:38):
So he writes it around this time he writes Misery,
which a lot of people he has said was an
allegorical representation of cocaine and booze. And he said that
he didn't know if he would be able to write
after he quit drinking and using drugs, but decided that
he would trade writing for staying married and watching his

(01:10:00):
kids grow up. So that's Steven pretty pretty good work
on his part.

Speaker 4 (01:10:08):
Again. Yeah, the only blinded a guy, but.

Speaker 1 (01:10:12):
Some weird did not seem to slow him down at all. Yeah.
By the way, he's just like kept churning out wheelbarrows
full of novel. You know, people have pointed out that
he has a problem with the magical negro trope. Like
in Shawshank. I would say I didn't think Red was

(01:10:33):
necessarily fit that, but Red was actually named Red because
he was an Irish guy in the book. He e
racist Irish guy at that who would say the end
word a lot. As for the characters who were black
in Stephen King's books, you have people like the Green

(01:10:53):
Miles John Coffee, who can heal your urinary tract infection
by the gentle touch. The gentle touch, the Dick hallerm
from the from the Shining Mother Abigail from the stand.
So it's definitely a thing that he's he's not not
great at.

Speaker 4 (01:11:13):
Yeah, well, you know, I'm not surprised. Yeah, probbly like
you're right, what you know? And I don't know any
black exactly.

Speaker 1 (01:11:21):
I think that's exactly it.

Speaker 5 (01:11:23):
Yeah, that's probably mythical, is the romani people.

Speaker 2 (01:11:27):
Yeah, exactly exactly. Like it's like, I got this, I
think I know how to write this.

Speaker 1 (01:11:33):
Character grabs random rap lyrics from yeah, yeah, yeah, exactly genius.
So nineteen ninety nine, he becomes the subject of a
major national news story after he's struck by a van
nearly killed while going for a walk, and this a
lot of people pointed very similar to Misery, which begins
with an author of suffering and immobilizing injury after a

(01:11:55):
car accident, and then the guy dies. Less than a
year later, on Stephen King's birthday, Stephen King bought the
van that hit him for fifteen hundred dollars with the
intention of personally beating it to pieces with a sledgehammer,
and then eventually just had somebody else destroy it.

Speaker 4 (01:12:13):
I thought he was going to like desecrate the guy's
grave who hit him with the truck or something. He's
just being so petty, He's like.

Speaker 1 (01:12:19):
So he officially said he was very sorry to hear
about this guy's death, but then he shoehorned that guy
into one of his books four years later, in which
the guy was like, I think he has him. He
like he's portrayed as a reckless and particularly stupid person

(01:12:40):
who hits and kills a child who saves King well
high and yeah, it's like the guy was on a
number of drugs at the time of the accident, but
they were all like prescribed drugs, including prozac and ballium,
and that may have impaired his driving. But King's depiction
of this guy who hit him as like a simpleton

(01:13:01):
looking for Mars's bars to quell the munchies is not
not accurate and.

Speaker 5 (01:13:09):
Much like all the time, right, I know exactly, like also.

Speaker 1 (01:13:14):
As a former addict, like have a little fucking.

Speaker 5 (01:13:17):
How injured did he get? Like was this really likely?

Speaker 1 (01:13:21):
Like he was in he was in the hospital for
like I think a month, a full month. Oh yeah, yeah,
so I get it wasn't like a minor inconvenience, like
he was almost killed, but like let it go, man.

Speaker 6 (01:13:35):
Yeah, some non authors can like hold grudges for a
long time and nobody knows about it.

Speaker 3 (01:13:40):
Right.

Speaker 2 (01:13:42):
When your job is to write what's going on down
all the time, it's like kind of seeping into your work.

Speaker 1 (01:13:47):
Stephen one place where he has a bit of a
sadistic streak that I kind of enjoyed was he held
an eBay auction in which the winning bidder would have
a character named after them in his book, The Cell
not one of his most popular ones. It's about a
magical cell phone. I'd say technology also a place where
he struggles. But the winner was Pam Zinga Alexander, the

(01:14:10):
daughter of Miami Dolphins owner h Wayne Hazinga, and she
opted to have a character named after her brother Ray,
And a character named Ray Hazenga shows up in the novel,
helps the heroes, and then shoots himself in the head.

Speaker 5 (01:14:34):
I didn't say what was gonna happen?

Speaker 1 (01:14:36):
Well, well I've been.

Speaker 2 (01:14:42):
Yeah, yeah, yeah, any character you want I'll name after yeah?

Speaker 6 (01:14:45):
Right?

Speaker 2 (01:14:46):
Oh good, Yeah, I love that I've been. Ray makes
no sense right with the or? Is it because like
the phones are making people do? And I'm guessing, yeah,
I guess I just love the You like someone being
so excited, Ray You're gonna be in the book, And
it's like, what, what's with this like ten page description

(01:15:07):
of how he was like shitting himself?

Speaker 4 (01:15:09):
Yeah?

Speaker 1 (01:15:09):
What. The one cool thing that he does is that
he has a thing called the Dollar Baby Program, which
he allows any aspiring filmmaker to option his stories for
adaptation for one dollar. And like the there are some
strict stipulations. This ended in twenty twenty three after forty years,

(01:15:30):
but like you had to send the movie to him
so he could watch it. But wait, it is kind
of a cool thing. So there's like tons and tons
of like student films made out of Stephen King novels.
But yeah, I'd say the one thing, like again, guy's
got the guy can really write. He's got a really

(01:15:50):
great sense of the shared unconsciousness, the fears we all have.
His grasp of slang. However, I just want to from
twenty fourteen's revival, the old soda Burger was stepping dynamite
back then Stepan Nitro, Huh that was that's I think

(01:16:13):
meant to be someone who is hot. From what I
can tell, a character describing a woman who he thinks
is hot is saying she's stepping dynamite.

Speaker 6 (01:16:25):
Is it supposed to be happening in a different time
like this supposed to be old slang?

Speaker 5 (01:16:28):
Or is it supposed to be twenty fourteen slang?

Speaker 1 (01:16:31):
I don't know. I think it's old people talking about
something that happened before they call. He says, somebody is
as gay as old dad's hat band. From the kid,
what is that band like to stand around a hat like?

Speaker 2 (01:16:50):
Said something you'd adorn your hat with that must That's
the only way I could even think of it making
any kind of sense. But again, such dated terminology.

Speaker 6 (01:17:00):
Uh.

Speaker 1 (01:17:02):
A kid from the stand for some reason keeps saying
happy crappy. So hey boy, the kid says, cors beer
is the only beer I'd pissed cords if I could
you believe that? Happy crappy? And it's just like never
clear what that even means?

Speaker 4 (01:17:18):
See what the fuck?

Speaker 1 (01:17:20):
But yeah, he just he doesn't He's always talking about
sucking eggs. He really thinks about sucking eggs a lot. Yeah,
think kids talk about sucking eggs a lot. Suck an
egg where didn't even come from? We're magging your shoe
and beat it is what a twelve year old says
at one point in one of those things and.

Speaker 4 (01:17:38):
Ruined your socks. No thanks, I just darned my stockings.

Speaker 1 (01:17:44):
He also refers to breasts. This is the last thing
that I'll that I'll mention about. For some reason, his
favorite term for boobs is jihoubies, like that of rules
you multiple times in Salem's Lot. It's also in The
Long Walk, which, like, I can't believe nobody noticed that

(01:18:09):
here the same person as Richard Bachman, Like no, everyone
calls him jahoobies uh, and doctor sleep like recently, like
it's just spans his career as the thing?

Speaker 4 (01:18:22):
Is this like a purely like a Stephen king ism?

Speaker 6 (01:18:26):
Uh?

Speaker 4 (01:18:26):
Is this like a main thing?

Speaker 6 (01:18:28):
Like?

Speaker 4 (01:18:29):
Was he the only one?

Speaker 2 (01:18:29):
He's like, hey, man, jahobies, like he's saying it to
other guys and like, dude, what, No, I never I never.

Speaker 4 (01:18:37):
Heard of that?

Speaker 5 (01:18:37):
Ry Shakespearean Again, he's running.

Speaker 1 (01:18:43):
Did you know that houbies was not a term until
Stephen King used to.

Speaker 5 (01:18:48):
Factoids for English class?

Speaker 1 (01:18:53):
All right, anything that you guys wanted to talk about
about Stephen King that we didn't get to but I missed.
I don't think so, Miles. I know you just really
wanted me to hit the Jihuvis thing.

Speaker 2 (01:19:05):
So I that's so, that's so wonderful to hear. I'm
just I'm actually just it's I don't.

Speaker 4 (01:19:12):
I mean, I don't.

Speaker 2 (01:19:12):
I again, like I said, I had such a superficial
knowledge of Stephen King and his work and aside from
just like the sort of like major points, but I
am it is interesting to just see somebody get through
an eighties cocaine addiction somewhat intact. Yeah, I think is
pretty impressive. I feel like any other people that have

(01:19:33):
like one of those eras, it's like it gets way
worse than merely just like unfortunately worse than blinding DP
with a lawnmower like he seems. I just it also
just like as as I'm hearing all this to him,
like damn he really there must have been so many
people that were acting as the guardrails on his career

(01:19:54):
that he might not even realize too.

Speaker 1 (01:19:57):
Habita was doing some load bearing work all through his career.

Speaker 2 (01:20:01):
Well, that's that's the Jesus in the footsteps on the scene. Yeah,
it Tabitha carrying your ass the whole time.

Speaker 1 (01:20:07):
So one set of footsteps, either the footprints in the
mound of cocaine stretching behind us.

Speaker 4 (01:20:13):
Yeah, that was me, right.

Speaker 6 (01:20:15):
I will also say that I really do we joke
and he's got his problems. But I love Stephen King
and I love his work, and I feel like I
owe him a lot, just as someone who's such a
huge horror fan. I mean, yeah, it is one of
my favorite movies, one of my favorite books, and he's
just a fantastic writer. And you said that it's like
the level that he's at being like a grocery store

(01:20:39):
writer if we call him that, Like his books are
among like writers that I don't think are quite as good.
He is a fantastic writer. That man can paint a picture.
Sometimes he goes on a little long with his descriptions,
but I just want to give Stephen some love because
we owe him a lot. He's a huge architect of
American culture and as well, you know, and in addition

(01:21:01):
are the people who helped him along the way and
made sure that.

Speaker 1 (01:21:04):
He absolutely and like I would say, a student, a
student of culture in a way that I obviously respect
him absolutely one of the things that I find most interesting,
and he's very good at it. I wish he was
not so hard like was not so definitive and like
being dismissive of certain people.

Speaker 4 (01:21:23):
But when you get to the summit, though, you can
talk like that.

Speaker 1 (01:21:26):
You know.

Speaker 2 (01:21:27):
I just want to shout out how strong his jeans are.
This is his son, Yes, yes, these kids. I love
how this kid the his This one is the name Joe,
and he's like, I'm going by Joe Hill. Bro, don't
even don't even curse me with this last name.

Speaker 1 (01:21:43):
I'm like, yeah, good for you, man.

Speaker 6 (01:21:44):
You did make kind of a slightly hotter version of himself,
which is always impressive.

Speaker 1 (01:21:49):
And there we go. Yeah, Victor's requesting that we do
a movie night where we watch The Shining and Maximum
over Drive back to back. Understand, Yeah, let's see who's
really fine?

Speaker 4 (01:22:04):
Bye, I'm ready. I'm ready. Let's do it.

Speaker 1 (01:22:07):
Chelsea. Where can people find you? Follow you, hear you
all that good stuff?

Speaker 5 (01:22:10):
Well, thank you for having me, you guys, this was
really fun.

Speaker 6 (01:22:13):
You can really just find me on American Hysteria wherever
you get your podcasts Instagram at American Hysteria podcast And
that's about it. Just listen to the show if you
like this conversation. We talk a lot about horror movies
and a lot about kind of strange history, freaky history,
and social.

Speaker 5 (01:22:30):
Issues as well.

Speaker 1 (01:22:31):
There you go, Miles, how about you find me everywhere?

Speaker 2 (01:22:35):
But fine, check out the new show I'm doing Ain't
at footy where I talk about soccer, European soccer, one
of my other passions, which because it's unfortunately not horror,
but I do like yelling at sportball abroad.

Speaker 4 (01:22:47):
It feels classy or somehow.

Speaker 1 (01:22:51):
Like if there's a correlation between people who don't watch
horror and do watch sports, it's like that's where you
get your heart raising, you know. It's like, well, I
get my beat up by watching sports and just having
my life endage by my team sucking.

Speaker 2 (01:23:05):
Yeah, I know how to do light limbic system hijack
as I watched something. Yeah, yeah for sure. Maybe maybe,
or maybe because I just don't have God in my.

Speaker 4 (01:23:14):
Life, I don't want to.

Speaker 1 (01:23:17):
All right, I'm going to be back after this next
break with the no no not all right. That was

(01:23:38):
our Stephen King conversation. This is the no no, no
no note book don't don't don't where we get to
the stuff that I forgot to mention from the notes
or didn't have time to or in this case, a
question that Miles had that I didn't answer. He asked

(01:24:00):
for the fact, which is how much money does Stephen
King have? Good question that I'm sure is on a
lot of people's minds. According to his Wikipedia I think
is where I found this. He's pulling end or his
net worth is five hundred million dollars a few years ago,
which means A did it incredibly well for himself, and

(01:24:22):
B he did a lot of cocaine, because he should
actually have more money than that. Jk Rowling has I
think two billion dollars by contrast, and Stephen King sold
I think four hundred million copies of his books. Jk
Rowling is at like six hundred million. So but you know,
hers all in a short period of time, fewer chances

(01:24:45):
to dig in and get new contracts. He's a total machine,
so he's probably feel like he should have as much
money as her. But she also doesn't have her career
at a key point fueled by a massively expensive cocaine problem.
She's also another thing that tends to be good for capitalism,

(01:25:08):
which is a fucking asshole, so that that could be
how she's pulling down how her net worth is like
four X. What Stephen King's is is you know, Stephen
King donates I think four million dollars a year to libraries,
local fire departments that need updated life saving equipment, and

(01:25:30):
other organizations that underwrite the arts. So good being a
good human being bad for your ability to be a billionaire.
But you know, shout out to you, Stephen King, for
being the sort of person, bad capitalist, good person. Next,
I want to talk about how he fits into a
thing a theme that we come back to every once

(01:25:52):
in a while, which is the question of you know,
these people with incredible careers, like did they do it
all at like one really prolific period or is it
like across a long period of time. This first came
up in the Einstein episode. Einstein we picture as an

(01:26:14):
old man, but he published all of his most groundbreaking
ideas for the first time in like a few months
in his late twenties. I think. Yeah, his twenty sixth
year is called his miracle year. And we've talked about
Dolly Parton writing Joe Lene and I Will Always Love You,
possibly on the same day, but certainly very close to
one another. And I will say, you know, Stephen King

(01:26:37):
would seem to be the opposite of that. Right, he
does have a pretty consistent and long career, but the
stories that seem to have really like dug into our
shared consciousness were the ones he had I think waiting,
like he describes I think I mentioned this in the
conversation that like he describes the stories coming out of

(01:27:00):
him at his most prolific period as like kind of
being in line at a revolving door, and like, you know,
he only has time to like do one at a time,
but like all these different characters and stories have been
waiting there. You know, I think he was working on
the Long Walk, superducer Victor said in his like when

(01:27:20):
he was in high school. And so this idea of
when people do their best work with King, you have
the appearance of the steadiness. But he's had these story
ideas in his head. And so it's kind of a
combination of the two. It's you know, he's been working
on these stories and said the process of writing them

(01:27:42):
was like a traffic jam of best sellers, just sitting
at the door to his brain waiting for his fingers
to let them out on the shining. Just a couple
of details on that one. They so they changed the
room number, and so in his book it was two seventeen.
In the movie, it's two thirty seven. And in the

(01:28:02):
amazing documentary Room two thirty seven you're told that this
is because it's The Shining is secretly about Stanley Kubrick
faking the moon landing, because the moon is obviously two
hundred and thirty seven thousand miles from Earth. But they
so apparently they wrote a book about the making of

(01:28:22):
The Shining, and there is a letter from the set
of the movie. Basically the head of the hotel is
begging Kubrick to change the room from two seventeen to
two thirty seven because two seventeen is a real room
and they're already getting hit up by turists asking to

(01:28:45):
see room two seventeen, like even before they've completed the film,
so ask them to change it. Like you can literally
see the letter where they're like, I don't know, change
it to two thirty seven, two forty seven, two fifty
seven whatever. Just can't be one that's an actual room number.
And presumably because two thirty seven is the first one

(01:29:06):
he put on the list, that's what they went with
in terms of his drinking and drug use. Again, just
want to go back to this idea because I definitely
don't want to give the impression that, like the quality
of his work was driven by cocaine use. I would say,
you know, he said that he would write sober during

(01:29:28):
the day and edit what he had set down while
drinking at night, which is the opposite of the right
drunk edit sober maxim that's been attributed to Hemingway. In fact,
that is false. Hemingway said that he would never drink
when he wrote, and he was like that my work
is too important for that. He also talked shit about

(01:29:48):
I think it was Faulkner and was like, you can
actually see on the page when Faulkner's had his second
drink because his pros gets sloppy. But basically, you know,
I think Stephen King has essentially said he drank because
he liked drinking. He used drugs because he liked the
way drugs made him feel, and then he justified it

(01:30:10):
to himself as a thing that helped him do his job.
Because he basically said that it's like self serving bullshit.
You want to continue to use drugs, so you tell
yourself a lie that it makes you better at doing
your job. Not true. In his experience. Definitely not true
in my experience, I would say. And then we also

(01:30:31):
have kind of vaguely tangentially related to his drug use.
We have an anecdote from the great Christy Amagucci Maine,
one of our great TDZ aka writer is very funny
TDZ guest host of the podcast Short Center. His dad
worked on four different Stephen King movies as a key grip,
and one of those movies was Maximum Overdrive, and he

(01:30:56):
has a couple of anecdotes from that. So on the
set of Maximum Overdrive, it precisely ten am Stephen King
would say to his assistant something like good to go,
and the assistant would get on the walkie talkie and say,
Steven will have the special now, and someone would bring
him a boiler maker with vodka, because you know, when

(01:31:16):
the coffee is not strong enough, you need a boiler
maker with vodka, and presumably like two highway lane markers
sized lines of cocaine. And then, speaking of presumable cocaine use,
he also had this anecdote from a recent crew screening
of Maximum Overdrive, as told by one of the grips.
I think he said his name is Joe Delesandro, who

(01:31:40):
said that King was in negotiations to do maximum at
the Wilmington, North Carolina Studios as long as the owner,
the Italian filmmaker named Dino de Larentis, a legend legendary
film producer who made a bunch of like Arnold Schwarzenegger
movies and stuff, as long as delrent has let him
direct it, and dealerent was like, I don't know, man, Like,

(01:32:01):
why would I let this rider direct it? And one
day the security guard called Delorentis on his walkie talking
and said, sir, there's a gentleman on a motorcycle here
to see you. And he's like, tell him, I'm not available.
Why are you talking to me? The guards like, he says,
his name is Stephen King. And it turned out that
Stephen King had just gotten on his motorcycle and driven

(01:32:22):
down the East Coast from Maine and also got the
idea of how he wanted the trucks to look in
the movie while on the ride. I just I love
the idea that he's in negotiations to make the movie
and then just drives all night on a motorcycle, arrives
like six states away without warning, without announcing himself again,

(01:32:45):
very cocaine coded behavior and to be like, I've driven
my motorcycle in a straight line without sleeping, and I
funny enough, I got great ideas for the movie on
my Way down Chef's Kiss. Cocaine encoded behavior. Turns out
those ideas not that good. All right, that's gonna do

(01:33:07):
it for Stephen King. Next week we have Jason Pargin
on to talk about how we landed on one of
the most iconic logos of our time, a iconic mythological figure.
It is the default alien face, big head, big oakley,

(01:33:27):
wrap around, black eyes, tiny nosed, tiny mouth, slick back
hair type jeans known as the Grays among alien enthusiasts,
but it's the you know, the default alien. How that happened?
That's coming a week from today. More zekeeist in the meantime,
and we'll talk to y'all then By

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Icon #12 - Stephen King: The REAL Lawnmower Man

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.css-14f5ked{margin:0;word-break:break-word;display:-webkit-box;-webkit-box-orient:vertical;box-orient:vertical;-webkit-line-clamp:2;overflow:hidden;}Icon #12 - Stephen King: The REAL Lawnmower Man