Stephen King: Uncollected, Unpublished - Revised & Expanded Edition (47 page)

Beryl Evans
The Dark Tower III, IV and V 

David Bright
The Dead Zone
and
The Tommyknockers 

Michael Cunningham
Christine 

Susan Day
Insomnia
(also
Rose Madder
) 

Elizabeth Pillsbury Drogan
Untitled (The Huffman Story)
 

Fletcher
In the Deathroom 

Robert Jenkins
The Langoliers 

Steve Kemp
Cujo 

John Kenton
The Plant 

Stephen King *
The Blue Air Compressor, The King Family and the Wicked Witch, The Leprechaun 

Harold Lauder
The Stand 

John Marinville
The Regulators 

Peter Rosewall
Dedication 

Selena St George
Dolores Claiborne
 

Julia Shumway
Under the Dome 

* King is also mentioned in
Blockade Billy
,
The Library Policeman, The Night Flier, The Regulators, Slade, Sleepwalkers
and
Thinner
. We should perhaps regard these “appearances” as similar to a cameo in a movie or TV show. 

⁹⁶
Stephen King: The Art of Darkness
, Douglas E. Winter
 

Rose Red Screenplay (2000)
 

Rose Red
was carefully staged as a major media event
with both television and book connections. When the prequel novel,
The Diary of Ellen Rimbauer
was released prior to the mini-series, using major characters from
Rose Red
and with a $200,000 marketing campaign there was much speculation as to whether Stephen King or even Tabitha King had written the book. The original paperback itself was purported to be by Joyce Reardon, herself a character in the upcoming mini-series. Some time after the mini-series screened it was revealed that novelist Ridley Pearson had actually written the novel. Pearson is a member of The Rock Bottom Remainders band of which King is a founding member and a sometime player. 

The
Rose Red
project had been in development for a number of years (in a post to his official web site on 2 November 1999 titled
Stephen King Comments on Fears That He’s Unable to Write
King notes he’d recently begun work on
Rose Red
, which “is an expansion of a screenplay I wrote some years ago”) with King and Steven Spielberg attempting to put a project together. When King submitted the haunted house story script Spielberg kept asking for changes and after three drafts King felt the project was no longer his. According to Jones
⁹⁷
King pitched the concept to producer Mark Carliner and Carliner loved the story. King was due to begin writing a new script on the following Monday. Jones continues, “However, the following day King was hit by a mini-van while out walking …” King was nearly killed by Brian Smith’s van on Saturday 19 June 1999. 

Stephen King’s Rose Red
debuted on the US ABC-TV network on the nights of 27, 28 and 31 January 2002. Frankly, it suffered somewhat from poor casting, some strange editing, questionable special effects and outrageous overacting by Nancy Travis (later seen in
Becker
), playing Dr. Joyce Reardon. However, www.imdb.com members rate it a respectable 6.4 out of a possible 10. Craig R. Baxley directed. The other main actors were Kimberly J. Brown as Annie Wheaton; David Dukes as Carl Miller; Matt Ross as Emery Waterman; Matt Keeslar as Steven Rimbauer; Judith Ivey as Cathy Kramer; Melanie Lynskey as Rachel Wheaton; Tsidii Leloka as Sukeena; and Julian Sands played Nick Hardaway. 

Unfortunately Dukes, aged only 55, died on 9 October 2000 while filming
Rose Red
. Most of his scenes had already been shot, with the ironic exception of his character’s death scenes. 

In another cameo Stephen King played a Pizza Delivery Guy, doing his job at Rose Red. The mini-series was released on DVD in 2002 and includes the “Featurettes”
The Making of Rose Red
and
The Diary of Ellen Rimbauer
. 

ABC was encouraged enough by the ratings
Rose Red
garnered to make the prequel as a one-off movie.
The Diary of Ellen Rimbauer
debuted on 12 May 2003 and was a ratings and artistic disappointment. Ridley Pearson and Craig R. Baxley again helmed the screenplay. Lisa Brenner played Ellen Rimbauer; Steven Brand appeared as John Rimbauer; and Tsidii Leloka reprised Sukeena. It was released on DVD in 2003. 

The actual screenplay has not been published. However, there are a very few copies of the official screenplay in circulation. Some of those, signed by King, were sold to benefit the Wavedancer Foundation, set up to assist Frank Muller, the most popular reader of King audio books. Muller was seriously injured in a motorcycle accident in November 2001. 

This chapter was compiled with the assistance of a copy of the screenplay kindly provided by King’s office, for which Mr. King and Ms. Marsha DeFilippo are thanked, and is dated June 1, 2000. There is officially no intention to publish the screenplay as, for instance, was the case with
Storm of the Century
. This is a shame, as it is a witty and entertaining script and reads better than the mini-series views. Of course, readers may view the DVD of the production to experience the story. 

In this America Under Siege tale a professor recruits for an expedition aimed at awakening a house in Seattle she believes is possessed. The original owner of Rose Red, Ellen Rimbauer, had believed that as long as her house was under construction she would not die. She continually made additions to the house following its construction early in the 20th century and, after she disappeared in 1950, the house continued to build itself! 

Professor Joyce Reardon of the University of Washington was obsessed with the psychic happenings at Rose Red. In the almost 100 year history to May 2001 many people had died there or simply vanished (
a list of known victims appears in the feature panel
). The house had grown quiet but Joyce believed that the right people could bring it to life and provide her with hard evidence of psychic phenomena. 

Reardon gathered a group of people with different psychic abilities, headed by a 15 year old autistic girl Annie Wheaton, who was also telekinetic. The others were Annie’s sister, Rachel Wheaton, Emery Waterman, the house’s owner Steven Rimbauer, Victor Kandinsky, Nick Hardaway, Pam Ashbury and Cathy Kramer.  

They entered Rose Red on 25 May and four of them, along with Kevin Bollinger, Kay Waterman and Carl Miller died the following day, after successfully “awakening” the house. Bollinger, from the campus newspaper, went to Rose Red to take photos of Joyce Reardon’s expedition but the house took him while he was in the solarium. He was later “seen,” having hung himself in the mirror library. Emery Waterman’s mother Kay went to the house in search of her son and was “taken” by Sukeena. Carl Miller was Head of the Psych Department and came to Rose Red after receiving a false message. He was led into the side yard by Sukeena, and was killed there. 

In fact the only outsider to come to the house during the expedition and survive was the Belissimo Pizza Man, who never actually entered the building. (As this delivery man bore an uncanny resemblance to master horror writer Stephen King, perhaps some muse warned him against proceeding too far?)  

The remaining members of the expedition escaped the house alive, although Emery Waterman lost four fingers in a door. Joyce Reardon refused to leave and was also taken. In October 2001 the survivors laid roses at the house as demolition of Rose Red was set to begin the following Monday. 

In back-story we learn that John Rimbauer built Rose Red from 1906 until 1909 for his new wife, the former Ellen Gilchrist. Between the end of World War One and 2001 twenty-three people had died or disappeared on the premises. Twenty years older than Ellen, John made his money in oil and they had married on 12 November 1907. He died when Ellen and her servant Sukeena pushed him from the Rose Tower of Rose Red in 1923. In 2001 Cathy Kramer found a dust covered wedding photo showing Ellen and John. She went into a trance and in the dust wrote “NO SUICIDE MURDER ELLEN SUKEENA.” 

At a séance in August 1914 Ellen Rimbauer was told she would live as long as Rose Red was under construction, so she kept making additions to it, both conventional and unconventional. However, she disappeared in the house on 15 January 1950 after last being seen in the Perspective Hallway. 

The Rimbauers had two children. April was born in
April
1911 with a withered arm. She disappeared in the house in 1917. Her brother Adam, born in 1909, had been sent to boarding school the same year. It was presumably because Adam was sent away that he survived the house and it was his grandson Steven who accompanied Reardon into the house in 2001. Steven was then about 25 and Joyce Reardon’s lover. He let her attempt to awaken the forces in Rose Red. When he was eight his mother took him to Rose Red while she looked for valuables, he got lost in the house and “met” Ellen in the attic. Ellen then asked him to help her continue to build Rose Red. Steven survived the 2001 expedition. 

Sukeena was Ellen Rimbauer’s servant. She came to America with the Rimbauers from Africa, where they met her while honeymooning. Ellen never called her a servant but rather a friend, and later a sister. She was severely treated by the authorities after April Rimbauer disappeared in 1917 and helped Ellen push John Rimbauer to his death in 1923. In May 2001 she “took” both Carl Miller and Kay Waterman. 

The members of Reardon’s disastrous expedition were chosen for a variety of psychic skills. The concept will remind horror fans of Shirley Jackson’s classic 1959 novel,
The Haunting of Hill House
, made into an excellent black-and-white movie,
The Haunting
in 1963 but poorly remade in 1999, with Catherine Zeta-Jones and Liam Neeson starring. As King has often acknowledged Jackson’s influence on his writing there is little doubt that
Rose Red
is both homage and King’s take on the “wake-up the haunted house expedition” sub-genre. Indeed, the opening words of Jackson’s novel might well describe Rose Red: 

No live organism can continue for long to exist sanely under conditions of absolute reality; even larks and katydids are supposed, by some, to dream. Hill House, not sane, stood by itself against its hills, holding darkness within; it had stood so for eighty years and might stand for eighty more. Within, walls continued upright, bricks met neatly, floors were firm, and doors were sensibly shut; silence lay steadily against the wood and stone of Hill House, and whatever walked there, walked alone. 

Apart from Joyce Reardon and Steve Rimbauer there were another seven members of the “official” expedition, not including the photographer, Bollinger. The key to awakening the house was Annie Wheaton. A 15 year old autistic girl, Annie was also telekinetic, telepathic and psychokinetic. As a result, Reardon believed she would have the power to wake Rose Red. At the age of five she’d made stones rain on her neighbor’s house after their dog bit her. Annie survived the expedition. 

Her older sister Rachel wanted Annie to go to the Gatt school in Tacoma because she thought someone would understand her there, unlike her parents. The father, George did not like Annie and her mother was afraid of her. Rachel therefore saw the $12,000 offered by Reardon for Annie to attend Rose Red as means to an end. She also escaped the house. 

Emery Waterman, about 28 and plump, was post cognitive. He lost four fingers on one hand when Rose Red slammed the door he was holding but otherwise survived the expedition intact. Victor Kandinsky, a precognitive, followed someone or something he thought was Pam Ashbury in the house and died of a heart attack. Nick Hardaway disappeared in the perspective hallway (for some reason this character and actor always remind your author of the British operative and hero of
The Langoliers
, Nick Hopewell). Viewers of the mini-series often comment on the lack of set up of an explanation for Hardaway’s disappearance. In fact the other characters don’t seem to notice his absence at any point! 

Pam Ashbury was a “touch-know.” She drowned in the little pond in Rose Red’s back yard after following someone or something she thought was Cathy Kramer. Kramer was an automatic writer and was one of the survivors. 

As ever in his screenplays King takes the opportunity to link the script with his other fiction in a number of ways (
Rose Red
is also mentioned in the later
The Dark Tower VI: Song of Susannah
). Andre Linoge of
Storm of the Century
is mentioned in the screenplay as a note for Emery Waterman’s dialogue – “Emery does Andre Linoge and says, ‘Tell the truth and shame the devil.’” Sukeena heard April Rimbauer singing
I’m a Little Teapot
after she disappeared. This was an important tune in
Storm of the Century
. 

Bollinger disappeared and apparently hung himself in the Mirror Library of Rose Red, which had bookcases lined with books and a mirrored floor. In King’s early short story
The Glass Floor
, a library (empty of bookshelves) with a mirrored floor and ceilings was also the location of a number of deaths. 

Carrie White made it rain stones on a house. At the end of
Carrie
there is a letter from Amelia Jenks to her sister Sandra Jenks. In it she discusses her 2 year old daughter Annie (!) who is able to move things around without touching them, so obviously she is telekinetic. The letter is dated 3 May 1988, meaning that Annie Jenks was born in 1986, the same year as Annie Wheaton, who also made stones rain on a house after the neighbor’s dog bit her.