KING ON SCREEN - Mark Reviews Movies

King on Screen, Dark Star Pictures

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Review by Mark Dujsik | August 10, 2023

As of this writing, Stephen King has written more than 60 novels and a couple hundred short stories or novellas, and a considerable number of those works have been adapted—and even remade—into movies or for television. King on Screen sets out to examine those adaptations, and if that sounds like a tall task, it is. More importantly, though, director Daphné Baiwir never gives us a sense of what the purpose of this examination might be, besides reminding us of just how many pieces of King's writing have found their way to screens both big and small.

It's an aimless documentary, barely guided by a series of talking heads who also don't appear to know what the point of this exercise is. All of the interview subjects are filmmakers, each of them having directed at least one screen adaptation of King's work, while being filmed by Baiwir with such various degrees of quality that one can kind of gauge which of them were added because some bigger names declined to participate. That's not including King himself, by the way, who only appears by way of archival footage.

We hear a lot about Rob Reiner's double contribution to the King pantheon of films in Stand by Me and Misery, for example, and see multiple clips from Andy Muschietti's popular, two-part adaptation of It, which reminded a lot of people that King's work can still hold plenty of sway on popular culture. Without those two directors, it's up to the rest to offer personal anecdotes about experiencing Reiner's films and being traumatized by the TV miniseries version of the one about the demonic clown.

There are significant gaps here, in other words, and the subjects' vamping on projects they weren't involved in does little to fill them. We're reminded again that King despised Stanley Kubrick's version of The Shining, and we twice get to hear story—one account right after the other—of the filmmaker calling the author in the middle of the night to randomly ask about religion. Fans of King or Kubrick or both—the very audiences this documentary was made for—know all of this already, but at least we get to hear Mike Flanagan explain how he convinced King that his vision of marrying the novel and the film of The Shining for his adaptation of Doctor Sleep was the right approach.

To its credit, the movie does spare some attention to overlooked/forgotten King adaptations, such as Taylor Hackford's Dolores Claiborne and Frank Darabont's The Mist, which is often overshadowed by the director's previous two, more straightforward dramas based on King works. Darabont, whose The Shawshank Redemption is held up as one of—if not the—best of King film adaptations (His The Green Mile is mightily impressive, too), is the obvious star of the documentary. Baiwir gives the director carte blanche to speak on whatever topic he wants, for as long as he wants to.

If any of the interviewees included here deserve the screen time, it is Darabont, who is personal friends with King, helped put the author's reputation in the cultural landscape as more than just "that horror guy," and clearly knows his stuff about the challenges of adaptation. Baiwir might give him too much freedom and too much attention, though, as a lengthy stretch in the middle of the documentary becomes devoted to behind-the-scenes tales of how his first adaptation was gradually acknowledged and his second one was made.

Considering how many projects are tossed into an "and the rest" sort of montage during the closing credits, the strict focus on just two films for so long comes across as playing favorites. It might be true, but that doesn't make it any less fair to everyone else and not at all aligned with the entire goal of examining the full canon of King's work on assorted screens.

Structurally, King on Screen is a mess, too, feeling throughout like the rapid-fire prologue summarizing a subject that has become so common in documentaries as of late. Baiwir attempts to transition between movies and TV projects by an assortment of chronological (beginning with the also-absent Brian De Palma's Carrie), creative (following an actor, director, or adaptation from one project to the next), or thematic (religion and politics, for example) threads, but it's all so haphazardly executed that it's difficult to find in any rational or emotional design behind the process. At least one comes away from the movie with a handy list of others to revisit.

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