“I’m easy to please”: the Stephen King adaptation he called a disappointment
At any given moment there are at least a handful of Stephen King adaptations in development for film or television, and it would be ridiculous to assume the author would feel compelled to comment on every single one of them.
After all, the pipeline has been in full flow ever since Brian De Palma brought Carrie to the screen in 1976, and because the supernatural terror is a horror classic, King has found himself praising it as not only one of the finest translations of his work but one of the very few he believes is superior to the source material.
When he loves a movie or series inspired by his writing – whether it’s Carrie, The Shawshank Redemption, or The Green Mile – then he’s happy to sing its praises out loud. On the other side of the coin, when he isn’t best pleased then he’ll speak his mind, too. Under the Dome stands out as one prominent example, as does his own disastrous self-directed effort Maximum Overdrive.
There have been so many King stories hoovered up by Hollywood over the decades that the consistency has been all over the place, but it must have stung a little for the prolific author to admit that the adaptation of a book containing one of his favourite lines that he’s ever written was bungled on its way to cinemas.
Just two years after it was published, King’s Needful Things gathered together Ed Harris, Max Von Sydow, Bonnie Bedelia, J.T. Walsh, Amanda Plummer, and more to regale audiences with the story unfolding in the author’s staple fictional setting of Castle Rock, Maine, where von Sydow’s shopkeeper Leland Gaunt asks prospective customers to perform a deed in exchange for any item they’ve become particularly attached to.
It didn’t make huge deviations from its literary inspirations, but the execution was sorely lacking. When asked by Lilja’s Library whether he feels any excitement about the constant production line bringing his bibliography from page to screen, King ended up singling Needful Things out for some criticism.
“Some of them were disappointments, you know, Needful Things, for instance,” he offered. “But some of them are really fun to watch, and I’m easy to please.” That speaks volumes about what he thought of the 1993 movie if he made a point of naming it specifically as a disappointing adaptation before immediately admitting that it doesn’t take much to win him over.
The book begins with an ominous intonation of, “You’ve been here before,” which King branded as “the best first line I ever wrote”. Unfortunately, his enthusiasm for seeing his greatest opener brought to life by a roster of talented actors would have dissipated when he discovered that Needful Things in its celluloid form was little more than 120 minutes of cinematic sludge.