Show Business: Giving Hollywood the Chills

Stephen King's scary bestsellers become hot film properties

Across the land, a mysterious fever has gripped the film making community.

In North Carolina, a movie crew builds an entire replica of an elaborate 250-year-old Southern mansion—and proceeds to burn it to the ground. Bands of talent scouts comb through used-car lots from Montana to Kentucky in search of their newest star-to-be: a 1958 Plymouth Fury.

Meanwhile, back in Hollywood, producers feel driven to offer huge sums of money to an ex-English teacher from Maine whose novels have an uncanny knack for winding up high on the bestseller list.

The plot for Stephen King's next excursion into the macabre? No, the real-life scenario now being played out by film makers scrambling to bring the works of America's hottest horror writer to the screen. Christine, based on King's recent bestseller about a killer automobile, opened around the country in early December, the sixth film of a King novel and the third to be released in the past five months. It followed last summer's Cujo, about a murderously rabid St. Bernard, and The Dead Zone, starring Christopher Walken as a schoolteacher tormented by his ability to foresee the future.

Nor is the cavalcade of King-inspired fright fests about to stop. Firestarter just finished shooting in Wilmington, N.C., for May release, and Children of the Corn, based on a King short story, is also scheduled to open next spring. Meanwhile, the busy author is adapting his 1978 novel The Stand for Director George Romero, and has provided five original stories for Creepshow II, a sequel to the horror omnibus he wrote (and co-starred in) two years ago. Indeed, Hollywood seems ready to snap up virtually anything King sets to paper short of his grocery list—and there is no guarantee some enterprising director will not put that on celluloid some dark and stormy night. ("The cucumbers, he sensed, were acting strange...") None of the books has arrived onscreen with as much dispatch as Christine.

Producer Richard Kobritz bought the movie rights for $500,000 after reading King's manuscript last year; production began on April 25, four days before the novel's publication. "You knew it was going to be a bestseller," explains Kobritz.

"That was axiomatic." Directed by John Carpenter (Halloween), the film eliminates the book's more lurid excesses, stripping it down to a tense tale of a dorky teen-ager whose 20-year-old Plymouth has an evil will of its own. The gleaming heap was actually played by 24 different vehicles, only three of which were still running by the end of the fender-bending filming.

For eye-popping special effects, Fire-starter—complete with fireballs hurtling toward the screen, human torches and a climactic conflagration—may turn out to be the most sensational King thriller yet.

A Dino De Laurentüs production, it stars George C. Scott, Martin Sheen, and Drew Barrymore as an eight-year-old girl who can rouse flames by focusing her mind. "I thought it would be neat to see all these fires and effects," says E.T.'s little buddy, who picked up the book at home one day and told her mother she wanted to play the lead. "I set a lot of people on fire, but they deserve it."