Stephen King is an idiot

Not so much an idiot, just a dude of slightly higher than average intelligence trying to criticize the works of a genius. He's out of his league. It would be like my high school physics teacher going on a rant about how wrong Einstein was.

It has to be hard for any writer to be 100% cool with a movie adaption of their writing. Just think about how intense people get when a movie doesnt match the stuff that they pictured when reading the book, and then imagine how much more powerful that feeling must be when you wrote the book and had a very specific idea of what was supposed ot be going on. When the movie doesnt match what you had in mind as the author, its almost an insult against your ability to describe your story to others.

Ill give him a pass based on that.

Shelley DID complain about her treatment and Stanley fessed up to it.



http://www.cgonzales.net & http://www.drxcreatures.com

Some of you people are crazy. Imagine if you wrote something very personal to you and saw most of that barely touched upon in the film adaptation. Now imagine the entire point of your story ultimately being disregarded. Anyone would be upset over that. If you were in King's shoes, the film being good or bad as its own entity would never supersede how well the film served as a representation of your book. After all, YOU wrote it.

Not really surprised at some of these comments here. Writers seldom get the respect they deserve. Many excellent books and scripts have turned into God awful movies because of a director or producer's huge ass ego. Personally, I really like the novel AND the movie but that doesn't mean I can't also understand where King is coming from.

My horror movie blog:
http://thebloodypitofhorror.blogspot.com/

Everyone involved in this movie has the shining. What more could he have asked for?

So being excited a great filmmaker was going to adapt his book then not liking how it turned out makes Stephen King an idiot?

As for Stephen King saying the film had 'no heart', you have fallen for the classic ploy of taking a snippet of a quote out of context and running with it.

Here's the full context (freely available to all)

Parts of the film are chilling, charged with a relentlessly claustrophobic terror, but others fall flat. Not that religion has to be involved in horror, but a visceral skeptic such as Kubrick just couldn't grasp the sheer inhuman evil of The Overlook Hotel. So he looked, instead, for evil in the characters and made the film into a domestic tragedy with only vaguely supernatural overtones. That was the basic flaw: because he couldn't believe, he couldn't make the film believable to others. What's basically wrong with Kubrick's version of The Shining is that it's a film by a man who thinks too much and feels too little; and that's why, for all its virtuoso effects, it never gets you by the throat and hangs on the way real horror should.

Calling him an idiot seems a bit harsh. But yes, Kubrick tended to make a lot of changes to the books he adapted to film, making them into more his personal vision.

It's standard stuff today but I do assume that King probably at least assumed there would be changes and probably big ones.

Very Good book. GREAT movie.