2017 has been a great year for Stephen King. This year alone, there have been six adaptations of Stephen King’s work in movies and TV. A new behind-the-scenes featurette on a new Misery Blu-ray, reveals that King wasn’t always on board to let filmmakers adapt his writings, with Rob Reiner revealing how the project came to fruition.
Reiner confessed, “This was a very personal book to Stephen King. It was a book in which he dealt with wrestling with this difficulty that all creative people have, which is being trapped by your own success. Here he was, a writer of horror books, books with supernatural elements to it, and he also wanted to express himself as a writer. So, he had this character, Paul Sheldon, who had become famous writing these Misery novels but wanted to break away and do something special, and Annie Wilkes represented the fanbase that didn’t want that to happen, would be very angry if he went in a different direction. It was a personal book, oddly enough to him.”
“He didn’t want to option it to anybody unless he felt it was in good hands,” Reiner pointed out. “And because he loved Stand By Me — and he had told me it was the best adaptation of anything that he had ever written — he said, ‘I’ll give it to you guys if Rob will either produce or direct it.’ So, he felt comfortable that I would do it.”
