Storm of the Century (2 page)

The second reason to stick with a major network is that a little foot-binding can be good for you. When you know your story is going under the gaze of people who are watching for dead folks with open eyes (a no-no on network TV), children who utter bad words (another no-no), or large amounts of spilled blood (a gigantic no-no), you begin to think of alternative ways of getting your point across. In the horror and the suspense genres, laziness almost always translates into some graphic crudity: the popped
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eyeball, the slashed throat, the decaying zombie. When the TV censor takes those easy scares away it becomes necessary to think of other routes to the same goal. The filmmaker becomes subversive, and sometimes the filmmaker becomes actually elegant, as Val (Cat People) Lewton’s films are often elegant. The above probably sounds like a justification, but it’s not. I am, after all, the guy who once said I wanted to terrify my audience, but would horrify it if I couldn’t achieve terror . . . and if I couldn’t achieve horror, I’d go for the gross-out. What the fuck, I’d say, I’m not proud. Network TV has, in a manner of speaking, taken away that ultimate fallback position. There are some visceral moments in Storm of the Century--Lloyd Wishman with the axe and Peter Godsoe with his rope are just two examples--but we had to fight for every one of them, and some (where five-year-old Pippa scratches her mother’s face and screams “Let me go, you bitch!” for example) are still under strenuous discussion. I’m not the most popular person at Standards and Practices these days--I keep calling people and whining, threatening to tell my big brother if they don’t stop teasing me (in this case the part of my big brother is most frequently played by Bob Iger, who is ABC’s top guy). Working with Standards and Practices on such a level is okay, I think; to get along really well with them would make me feel like Tokyo Rose. If you want to know who ends up winning most of the battles, compare the original teleplay (which is what I’m publishing here), with the finished TV

program (which is in edit as I write this).

And remember, please, that not all the changes which take place between original script and final film are made to satisfy Standards and Practices. Them you can argue with; TV timing is beyond argument. Each finished segment must run ninety-one minutes, give or take a few seconds, and be divided into seven “acts,” in order to allow all those wonderful commercials which pay the bills. There are tricks that can get you a little extra time in that time--one is a form of electronic compression I don’t understand--but mostly you just whittle your stick until it fits in the hole. It’s a pain in the ass but not a gigantic one; no worse, say, than having to wear a school uniform or a tie to work. Struggling with network TV’s arbitrary rules was often annoying and sometimes dispiriting with The Stand and The Shining (and what the producers of It must have gone through I shudder to think of, since one stringent Standards and Practices rule is that TV dramas must not be built upon the premise of children in mortal jeopardy, let alone dying), but both of those shows were based on novels that were written with no regard for network TV’s rules of propriety. And that’s the way novels should be written, of course. When people ask me if I write books with the movies in mind, I always feel a little irritated . . . even insulted. It’s not quite like asking a girl “Do you ever do it for money?” although I used to think so; it’s the assumption of calculation which is unpleasant. That kind of ledger-sheet thinking has no business in the writing of stories. Writing stories is only about writing stories. Business and ledger-sheet thinking comes after, and is best left to people who understand how to do it. This was the sort of attitude I adopted while working on Storm of the Century. I wrote it as a TV

script because that’s how the story wanted to be written . . . but with no actual belief that it would ever be on TV. I knew enough about filmmaking by December of 1996 to know I would be writing a special-effects nightmare into my script--a snowstorm bigger than any that had been previously attempted on television. I was also creating an enormous cast of characters--only, once the writing is done and the business of actually making a show begins, the writer’s characters become the casting director’s speaking parts. I went ahead with the script anyway, because you don’t do the budget while you’re writing the book. The budget is someone else’s problem. Plus, if the script is good enough, love will find a way. It always does.* And because Storm was written as a TV miniseries, I found myself able to push the envelope without tearing it. I think it’s the most frightening story I’ve ever written for film, and in most cases I was able to build in the scares without allowing Standards and Practices cause to scream at me too much.**

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[*And, I thought, what the hell--if Storm is never made because it budgets out at too high a number, I’ll do it as a book after all. I found the idea of novelizing my own unproduced screenplay quite amusing.]

[** In the end, S & P were reduced to screaming about some fairly petty shit. In Part One, for instance, a fisherman says that the approaching bad weather is apt to be “one mother of a storm.” S & P insisted the line be changed, perhaps believing this was my sly way of implying “one motherfucker of a storm,”

thus further corrupting American morals, causing more schoolyard shootings, etc. I immediately made one of my whining calls, pointing out the phrase “the mother of all . . .” had been originated by Saddam Hussein and had since passed into popular usage. After some consideration, Standards and Practices allowed the phrase, only insisting “the dialogue not be delivered in a salacious way.” Absolutely not. Salacious dialogue on network TV is reserved for shows like 3rd Rock from the Sun and Dharma and Greg.]

I have worked with director Mick Garris three times --first on the theatrical film Sleepwalkers, then on the miniseries of The Stand and The Shining. I sometimes joke that we’re in danger of becoming the Billy Wilder and I.A.L. Diamond of the horror genre. He was my first choice to direct Storm of the Century, because I like him, respect him, and know what he can do. Mick had other fish to fry, however (the world would be a much simpler place if people would just drop everything and come running when I need them), and so Mark Carliner and I went hunting for a director. Around this time I had snagged a direct-to-video film called The Twilight Man from the rental place down the street from my house. I’d never heard of it, but it looked atmospheric and starred the always reliable Dean Stockwell. It seemed like the perfect Tuesday evening time-passer, in other words. I also grabbed Rambo, a proven commodity, in case The Twilight Man should prove to be a lemon, but Rambo never got out of the box that night. Twilight Man was low-budget (it was an original made for the Starz cable network, I found out later), but it was nifty as hell just the same. Tim Matheson also starred, and he projected some of the qualities I hoped to see in Storm’s Mike Anderson: goodness and decency, yes . . . but with a sense of latent violence twisting through the character like a streak of iron. Even better, Dean Stockwell played a wonderfully quirky villain: a soft-spoken, courtly southerner who uses his computer savvy to ruin a stranger’s life ... all because the stranger has asked him to put out his cigar!

The lighting was moody and blue, the computer gimmickry was smartly executed, the pace was deftly maintained, and the performance levels were very high. I reran the credits and made a note of the director’s name, Craig R. Baxley. I knew it from two other things: a good cable-TV movie about Brigham Young starring Charlton Heston as Young, and a not-so-good SF movie, I Come in Peace, starring Dolph Lundgren. (The most memorable thing about that film was the protagonist’s final line to the cyborg: “You go in pieces.”)

I talked with Mark Carliner, who looked at The Twilight Man, liked it, and discovered Baxley was available. I followed up with a call of my own and sent Craig the three hundred-page script of Storm. Craig called back, excited and full of ideas. I liked his ideas and I liked his enthusiasm; what I liked most of all was that the sheer size of the project didn’t seem to faze him. The three of us met in Portland, Maine, in February of 1997, had dinner at my daughter’s restaurant, and pretty much closed the deal.
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Craig Baxley is a tall, broad-shouldered man, handsome, prone to Hawaiian shirts, and probably a few years older than he looks (at a glance you’d guess he was about forty, but his first theatrical work was Action Jackson, starring Carl Weathers, and so he’s got to be older than that). He has the laid-back, “no problem, man” attitude of a California surfer (which he once was; he has also worked as a Hollywood stunt-player) and a sense of humor drier than an Errol Flynn foreign legion flick. The low-key attitude and the nah, I’m just fuckin’ with you sense of humor tend to obscure the real Craig Baxley, who is focused, dedicated, imaginative, and a touch autocratic (show me a director without at least a dash of Stalin and I’ll show you a bad director). What impressed me most about the dailies as Storm of the Century began its long march in February of 1998 was where Craig called “Cut!” At first it’s unsettling, and then you realize he’s doing what only the most visually gifted directors are capable of: cutting in the camera. As I write this I have begun to see the first “outputs”--sequences of cut footage on videotape--and thanks to Craig’s direction, the show seems almost to be assembling itself. It’s risky to assume too much too soon (remember the old newspaper headline “DEWEY DEFEATS TRUMAN”), but based on early returns, I’d say that what you’re about to read bears an eerie resemblance to what you will see when ABC telecasts Storm of the Century. My fingers are still crossed, but I think it works. I think it may even be extraordinary. I hope so, but it’s best to be realistic. Huge amounts of work go into the making of most films, including those made for television, and very few are extraordinary; given the number of people involved, I suppose it’s amazing that any of them work at all. Still, you can’t shoot me for hoping, can you?

The teleplay of Storm was written between December of 1996 and February of 1997. By March of 1997, Mark and Craig and I were sitting at dinner in my daughter Naomi’s restaurant (closed now, alas; she’s studying for the ministry). By June I was looking at sketches of Andre Linoge’s wolfs head cane, and by July I was looking at storyboards. See what I mean about TV people wanting to make shows instead of lunch reservations?

Exteriors were filmed in Southwest Harbor, Maine, and in San Francisco. Exteriors were also filmed in Canada, about twenty miles north of Toronto, where Little Tall Island’s main street was re-created inside an abandoned sugar-refining factory. For a month or two that factory in the town of Oshawa became one of the world’s largest soundstages. Little Tail’s studio main street went through three carefully designed stages of snow-dressing, from a few inches to total burial.* When a group of Southwest Harbor natives on a bus trip visited the Oshawa stage, they were visibly staggered by what they saw when they were escorted through the defunct factory’s tall metal doors. It must have been like going home again in the blink of an eye. There are days when making movies has all the glamour of bolting together the rides at a county fair . . . but there are other days when the magic is so rich it dazzles you. The day the people from Southwest Harbor visited the set was one of those days.

[* Our snow consisted of potato flakes and shredded plastic blown in front of giant fans. The effect isn’t perfect . . . but it’s the best I’ve ever seen during my time in the film business. It should look good, dammit; the total cost of the snow was two million dollars.]

Filming commenced in late February of 1998, on a snowy day in Down East Maine. It finished in San Francisco about eighty shooting days later. As I write this in mid-July, the cutting and editing processes--what’s known as postproduction--has just begun. Optical effects and CGI (computer
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graphic imaging) effects are being built up one layer at a time. I’m looking at footage with temporary music tracks (many of them lifted from Frank Darabont’s film The Shawshank Redemption), and so is composer Gary Chang, who will do the show’s actual score. Mark Carliner is jousting with ABC in the matter of telecast dates--February of 1999, a sweeps period, seems the most probable--and I’m watching the cut footage with a contentment that is very rare for me. The script that follows makes a complete story, one that’s been overlaid with marks--we call them

“scenes” and “fades” and “inserts”--showing the director where to cut the whole into pieces . . . because, unless you’re Alfred Hitchcock filming Rope, films are always piecework. Between March and June of this year, Craig Baxley filmed the script as scripts are usually filmed--out of sequence, often with tired actors working in the middle of the night, always under pressure--and finished up with a box of pieces called “the dailies.” I can turn from where I’m sitting and look at my own set of those dailies--roughly sixty cassettes in red cardboard cases. But here is the odd thing: putting the dailies back together again to create the finished show isn’t like putting a jigsaw puzzle back together. It should be, but it isn’t . . . because, like most books, most movies are living things with breath and a heartbeat. Usually the putting-together results in something less than the sum of the parts. In rare and wonderful cases it results in more. This time it might be more. I hope it will be.

One final matter: what about people who say movies (especially TV movies) are a lesser medium than books, as instantly disposable as Kleenex? Well, that’s no longer exactly true, is it? The script, thanks to the good people at Pocket Books, is here anytime you want to take it down and look at it. And the show itself, I’d guess, will eventually be available on videotape or videodisc, just as many hardcover books are eventually available in paperback. You’ll be able to buy it or rent it when (and if) you choose. And, as with a book, you will be able to leaf back to check on things you may have missed or to savor something you particularly enjoyed; you will use the REWIND button on your remote control instead of your finger, that’s all. (And if you’re one of those awful people who have to peek ahead to the end, there is always FAST FORWARD or SEARCH, I suppose . . . although I tell you, you will be damned for doing such a thing).