Stephen King: Uncollected, Unpublished - Revised & Expanded Edition (36 page)

Maximum Overdrive (1985)
 

The screenplay of
Maximum Overdrive
is difficult to find but copies do circulate in the King community and are sometimes available from online King specialists. Often there is no final or authorized version of a movie screenplay, as they are constantly adjusted during filming and some alterations are never properly documented. This chapter was compiled from the commonly circulating version dated May 22, 1985. King expert Tyson Blue
⁷⁴
has reviewed an earlier draft, dated February 8, 1985 and titled
Trucks
. At other times the movie was simply to be known as
Overdrive
. 

Maximum Overdrive
represented King’s directorial debut. King found the task enlightening and the fact that he has never attempted to helm another movie or television episode indicates that, in retrospect, he did not find the task to his liking. Beahm quotes King as saying, when asked if he did in fact enjoy being behind the camera, “I didn’t. I didn’t care for it at all. I had to work. I wasn’t used to working. I hadn’t worked in 12 years.”
⁷⁵
Jones makes this interesting comment
⁷⁶
:  

“I’d like to direct once,” Stephen King told
Starburst
magazine in the early 1980s, “because I have a feeling that I could probably make a movie that would scare a lot of people
very badly
. I
think
I have the capability, but I’m not sure. I might really screw it up.” The King of Horror didn’t know how prophetic he was. 

King fans and moviegoers alike probably do prefer that King continue to spend his time on prose and screenplays, delivering original product and allowing other directors to interpret his stories. While this sometimes leads to such unfortunate productions as
Dreamcatcher
the result can equally be superior product such as
The Green Mile
.  

Maximum Overdrive
is often said to be an adaptation of
Trucks
but in fact the stories have no real connection other than the base idea of trucks becoming sentient and attacking humans. Both stories illustrate King’s thematic fascination with machines gone wild, which, while not entirely original to the writer from Maine, he has certainly made his own over the years. King’s original stories in this category go back as far as 1960 with
I’ve Got to Get Away!
(rewritten as
The Killer
). Among other such King stories with this theme are his high school effort
Code Name: Mousetrap
; the semi-autobiographic
The Mangler
;
Christine
;
Uncle Otto’s Truck
;
The Sun Dog
and
Word Processor of the Gods
(originally published as
The Word Processor
). A great many elements of
The Dark Tower
cycle also fit this theme, for example
The Bear
, a stand alone story that appears in a revised version as a section of
The Dark Tower III: The Wastelands
.  

Trucks
was made into a television movie, which debuted on the USA Network on 29 October 1997 and was issued on DVD one year later. That production has one of the worst ratings at for any King adaptation at
www.imdb.com
of only 3.5 out of a possible 10! 

In
Maximum Overdrive
, a New Worlds tale, the Earth passed into the tail of Rhea-M, a rogue comet, at 9:47am EST on 19 June 1987. At 9:48am a sign on the First Bank of Wilmington building suddenly flashed “FUCK YOU,” instead of “9:48” and “79” degrees. Machines became sentient all over the world and started attacking and killing humans. A drawbridge in Wilmington, North Carolina, acting of its own volition, opened with cars and trucks still on it, causing multiple crashes and many deaths. At a nearby Little League Field a pitching machine and a Pepsi dispenser attacked the players and coach. All over the city and suburbs machines such as lawn mowers and kitchen devices attacked their previous masters. 

A group of people was trapped at the Dixie-Boy Truck Stop on Route 17 near Wilmington by sentient trucks. Just after dawn the next day a bulldozer attacked the building in which they were taking refuge and a battle ensued, with the humans using illegal weapons that had been stored at the Truck Stop by its owner. A number of customers and employees were killed by machine gun fire from an army truck and the survivors were then forced to refuel vehicles under threat of the machine gun. That evening Wilmington, North Carolina was on fire. The remaining survivors at the Dixie-Boy were able to escape via a sewer pipe. In apparent anger the remaining trucks demolished the now empty buildings. 

The survivors made it four miles cross-country to a coastal marina and set off on a sailboat. They were immediately attacked by a Coast Guard boat, which fired on them. After Robertson blew the attacking boat up using a bazooka they sailed on toward Haven, an island about six miles off the coast. There were said to be no motor vehicles of any kind on the island. King sends a clear message with the choice of name for this island. Of course, the Haven in Maine appearing in
The Tommyknockers
is quite the opposite of the word’s dictionary meaning!  

Six days later, at 3:16pm on 27 June 1987, the Earth left the tail of the comet. 

The movie
Maximum Overdrive
debuted in American movie theaters on 25 July 1986. Made on a budget of $10 million and largely shot in Wilmington, North Carolina in July and August of 1985 it took only $7.4 million at the box office and was largely regarded as a flop. The heavy metal soundtrack inserted by King, featuring the Australian band AC/DC, may not have assisted the appreciation of wider audiences, although King is largely unapologetic about that aspect of the movie. Members of
www.imdb.com
rate the movie a very poor 4.6 out of a possible 10, a little below our assessment of its worth.  

Emilio Estevez played Bill Robinson; Pat Hingle appeared as the dislikeable Hendershot; Laura Harrington as Brett; Holter Graham as Deke; and King provided an entertaining cameo as “Man at Cashpoint” (
see the feature panel for more detail
). Estevez is the son of Martin Sheen, who starred in
The Dead Zone
movie and
Firestarter
. The movie was released on video in 1988 and on DVD in 2001. 

King wrote a related short non-fiction piece that may be of interest to readers.
A Postscript to “Overdrive”
appeared in the February 1987 issue of
Castle Rock: The Stephen King Newsletter
. The article particularly focuses on the requirement to delete scenes from the movie to secure an R-rating in preference to the original and “dreaded” X rating the production attracted. 

Considering it has been two decades since
Maximum Overdrive
was released it seems certain the screenplay will never be published. However, King fans and readers who cannot access a copy of the script can always rent or buy the DVD to experience this unique King work. 

Maximum Overdrive
: The Key Characters 

Bill (“Billy”) Robertson:
On parole, he was a cook working at the Dixie-Boy Truck Stop Restaurant on 19 June 1987. He had been jailed after robbing a 7-11 when he was 23. During the siege at the Dixie-Boy he was something of a hero. Good looking, he and Brett Brooks quickly built a romantic relationship. He was one of the survivors who escaped the Truck Stop on 20 June and survived to sail off toward Haven. 

Brett Brooks:
Pretty and young, she was hitchhiking when trapped at the Dixie-Boy on 19 June 1987. One of the survivors, she escaped the Truck Stop the following day. She and Bill Robertson quickly formed a romantic relationship. She received a minor gunfire wound on 21 June but sailed on to Haven with the other survivors. 

Hendershot:
Owner of the Dixie-Boy Truck Stop, he employed parolees to maximise his profits. A cigar smoker, he stored illegal arms at the Truck Stop, some of which he used in the fight against the sentient vehicles. He was shot and killed on 20 June 1987. 

Deke Keller
was playing baseball when the machines started attacking humans and he later made his way to his father’s workplace. He was one of the survivors who escaped on 20 June and survived to sail off toward Haven the next day. 

Duncan (“Dunc”) Keller:
Deke’s father, another parolee and the Fuel Station Manager at the Dixie-Boy Truck Stop on 19 June 1987. Diesel shot into his eyes just after 9:50am as the machines started attacking humans. Later that day, he was run down and killed by a garbage truck.  

Curtis (“Curt”) Spaulding
married
Connie
on or about 19 June 1987 (they were both only seventeen). After being chased by vehicles and crashing they were trapped at the Dixie-Boy Truck Stop on their wedding day. Both escaped on 20 June and survived to sail off toward Haven. 

Reginald Speakes
aka “
Asshole
,” while not a major character, was played in a cameo by King. Speakes was married and resided at 249 Cedar Street, Wilmington, North Carolina. On 19 June 1987, shortly after the Earth passed into the comet’s tail, an ATM insulted him, using the highlighted nickname. Fans of King’s acting should watch the movie simply to see King’s reaction when the ATM sends its message! 

⁷⁴
The Unseen King
, Tyson Blue, p.130-136 

⁷⁵
The Stephen King Story
, George Beahm, p.154 

⁷⁶
Creepshows: The Illustrated Stephen King Movie Guide
, Stephen Jones, p.44-46
 

Mobius (c. 1979
) 

The manuscript of
Mobius
is held in Box 1212 of the Special Collections Unit of the Raymond H. Fogler Library at the University of Maine, Orono. 17 double-spaced pages make up this complete story. The manuscript is headed “by Stephen King” and was written when Kirby McCauley was still his agent (from 1977 to 1988). Readers wishing to enjoy this story may do so at the Fogler as it is kept in a publicly accessible box.
 

This is both an America Under Siege and a New Worlds tale for reasons that will become clear. In this short story a student is called urgently to the Westhaven Physical Sciences laboratory. Wayne Parsons worked with Dr. Weaver on the Mobius, a futuristic machine, the capabilities of which had not yet been determined. Time-travel experiments using the machine were banned by “the trustees” due to the dangers of unintended consequences. Indeed, theoreticians had been given ten years to consider the consequences of time travel using the Mobius, which was the biggest thing since the Moon landings a decade before. There were actually two nuclear powered Mobius machines, which run back-to-back.  

As Parsons arrived a hugely fat man was trying to escape the building but Weaver shot him dead. Amazingly, a passing couple did not react to the sound of the four shots he fired. When Parsons examined the fat man’s body he found his own features on the face of the corpse. 

Weaver then forced Parsons to enter the Mobius at gunpoint, having set the return time for thirty minutes earlier and Parsons arrived in an idyllic land, which he called “Limbo.” The women there were very attentive of him when he first arrived but as he grew fat the young girls began to laugh at him. Their men lived in the Hills. After Parsons finally became grossly fat and 47 years had passed he decided to return on the Mobius, knowing that Weaver was waiting to kill him. 

He successfully avoided death on this second return, thirty minutes before he had left but, as he was about to meet himself arriving at the lab, he disappeared. As he did not meet and warn himself of the danger time would loop eternally. (
What is known of Parsons and Weaver is summarized in this chapter’s feature panel
). 

The story is rather derivative, there being any number of science fiction and time travel tales along the same lines. This may explain its lack of publication. It could be that King and McCauley were unable to sell it, or simply that King realized its lack of originality and held it back from the market. 

The story is set in 1979. Considering King’s penchant for setting stories in timelines just after the year in which he writes this may mean it was written in 1978 or 1979. 

Mobius
– The Lead Characters 

Wayne Parsons 

Born in 1956, he was a 23 year old, 160lb student at the Westhaven Physical Sciences complex in 1979 when Dr. Weaver forced him to travel through time using the Mobius machine. He spent 47 years in an idyllic land but grew grossly fat and returned to 1979 where he successfully avoided being shot and killed by Weaver (as had happened to his older, fatter self the first instance he had time traveled). As a result he did not meet and warn himself and time would loop eternally. The first version of Parsons was 70 years old when he was shot dead in 1979. 

Dr. Weaver 

Born in 1920, he worked at the Westhaven Physical Sciences complex. In 1979 he forced Wayne Parsons to use the Mobius to travel through time, creating a permanent time loop paradox.