Stephen King: Uncollected, Unpublished - Revised & Expanded Edition (49 page)

The Delbert Grady who appeared in the novel had killed his wife by shotgun and his daughters with a hatchet, while caretaking the Overlook one winter. Presumably, these two girls (aged 6 and 8) were the models for the twins Kubrick portrayed in his film. Perhaps as a deliberate snub to Kubrick, Watson tells Torrance in this version that Grady killed himself with a shotgun, and was alone at the time. 

King also moved the Masked Ball from the novel’s date of 29 August 1945 (also used in the unproduced moviescript) to 15 May that same year. 

A further addition to the original storyline is the Gage Creed Band and its bandleader, the definitely
not
one and only Gage Creed, played by Big Steve himself, wonderfully camping the role. Of course, Gage Creed is the name of the little boy killed on Route 15 in
Pet Sematary
and whose sneaker was found in Atropos’ lair in
Insomnia
. This is a nice little in-joke for King’s faithful fans, to go with his enjoyable acting cameo. 

There are, of course, many other links from this script to King’s other fiction and these are summarized in this chapter’s feature panel. King again does not name the unfortunate bathtub suicide, but she is no less menacing to young Danny Torrance in this version. 

It is unclear if the screenplay is set in 1996 or 1997, a deliberate update from the 1977 of the original novel. This change in dates was apparently to satisfy the viewing audience (the mini-series was originally screened in 1997) by providing a current timeline.  

There is one error in the script
–
while at one point it is stated that on Route 50 it was 23 miles from the Overlook Hotel to Sidewinder, when Dick Hallorann hired a Sno-Cat in Sidewinder to drive to the Overlook he went past a sign that read, “Overlook Hotel 37 miles.” 

Certainly this is the better of King’s two scripts but all three visualisations (including Kubrick’s) somehow fail to capture the psychological power of the novel.
The Shining
is one of King’s greatest novels and will certainly be on the reading list for students of the American Novel for decades to come. 

Links From
The Shining
To Other King Fiction 

The Shining
is one of King’s major works, existing in three forms – the novel, the mini-series screenplay and the unproduced movie screenplay.
Before the Play
was published separately in two different versions and these relate some of the early history of both the Overlook Hotel and Jack Torrance (as that story is a virtual prequel the extensive links from it are not summarized here). The links from the various versions of
The Shining
to King’s other fiction are summarized below.  

John “Jack” Torrance
Misery
¹⁰³
,
Desperation
(Telescript)
¹⁰⁴
,
The Dark Tower VI 

Daniel “Danny” Torrance
The Dark Tower II
,
Storm of the Century
 

Dick Hallorann
It
¹⁰⁵
 

Gage Creed
Pet Sematary
,
Insomnia
¹⁰⁶
 

The Overlook Hotel
Misery
,
The Regulators 

Overlooked
The Stand
¹⁰⁷
 

Sidewinder, Colorado
Misery
,
The Talisman 

Stovington, Vermont
The Stand
,
Everything’s Eventual 

Stovington Prep
The Dead Zone 

The Shine
The Stand
(
Complete and Uncut
version) 

⁹⁸
The Stephen King Story
, George Beahm, p.106 

⁹⁹
Creepshows: The Illustrated Stephen King Movie Guide
, Stephen Jones, p.19-23 

¹⁰⁰
Feast of Fear: Conversations with Stephen King
, Tim Underwood and Chuck Miller (editors), p. 79-80 

¹⁰¹
Creepshows: The Illustrated Stephen King Movie Guide
, Stephen Jones, p.109-111 

¹⁰²
Weber has also appeared as Steve Ames in
Desperation
, as Clark Rivingham (in the
You Know They Got a Hell of a Band
episode of
Nightmares & Dreamscapes: From the Stories of Stephen King
);and 8x10 Man (in the
Revelations of Becka Paulson
episode of
The Outer Limits
) 

¹⁰³
He is referred to, but not named 

¹⁰⁴
He is named in the note for a character’s actions 

¹⁰⁵
Hallorann’s appearance in
It
was as an army cook in Derry in 1930, but in
The Shining
he was born in 1918, making him rather young to be a soldier. It seems clear King intends this is the same character but there is a timing error between the stories. 

¹⁰⁶
Different Gage Creeds – a small boy in the two linked stories; a band leader in the Mini-Series screenplay of
The Shining
only 

¹⁰⁷
In the Uncut book version only. Brad Kitchner is addressing the Free Zone Committee in Chapter 58, Section 3: “We had two of the generators going yesterday, and as you know, one of them overloaded and blew its cookies. So to speak. What I mean is that it overlooked. Overloaded rather. Well … you know what I mean.” 

The Shotgunners (Undated
) 

The screenplay for an unproduced movie,
The Shotgunners
is held in Box 2318 of the Special Collections Unit of the Raymond H. Fogler Library at the University of Maine, Orono. The good news for potential readers is that this screenplay can be accessed by attending the Library, as it is not held in a Restricted Box. There are 113 pages in the screenplay, covering 423 scenes.
 

According to various sources the legendary film director Sam Peckinpah died while pre-producing this script. Peckinpah made
Straw Dogs
,
The Wild Bunch
and was famed for the violence portrayed in his later films, long before the emergence of Quentin Tarantino in the 1990s. 

The Shotgunners
is clearly the forerunner of
The Regulators
; the Richard Bachman credited companion volume to King’s
Desperation
. While the premise is the same, the characters are completely different. It appears this screenplay actually developed into
The Regulators
novel. If Peckinpah was indeed working on pre-production for this screenplay when he died in 1984, it was over a decade until it appeared reworked as
The Regulators
in 1996. Bachman’s dedication in the book, “Thinking of Jim Thompson and Sam Peckinpah: legendary shadows” would seem to confirm the story. 

Further, in a non-fiction piece,
Digging The Boogens
,
¹⁰⁸
published
Twilight Zone Magazine
for July 1982, King has this to say about the plot of Taft International’s 1982 film
The Boogens
, directed by James L. Conway:  

A Colorado silver mine is closed by a series of explosions and cave-ins in 1912; miners are trapped, and most of them die (all of this background is elegantly presented over the credits in a series of frontier-style newspaper headlines and gorgeous sepia photographs). Seventy years later, a mining company reopens the mine. What else do you need?  

Sound familiar? Perhaps this movie partly inspired
Desperation
,
The Regulators
and
The Shotgunners
? 

The location of Maple Street for the shootings also links
The Shotgunners
to
The Regulators
, although it should be noted that the house numbers are separated by two blocks from each other. In
The Shotgunners
the house numbers range from 1 to 12 and Maple Street is in an unnamed Ohio suburb or town near what was, in 1874, Marionsville, Ohio. In
The Regulators
the house numbers range from 240 to 251 and Maple Street is in Wentworth, Ohio. 

In this America Under Siege tale the shootings begin late one afternoon. While the timeline is clearly modern day an exact year or decade is not provided. Cars start to cruise onto Maple Street and shotguns protrude from them, randomly shooting at people and houses. Various survivors gather together as one by one the victims mount. The group soon realize that something is very wrong
–
no police are attending, there is no reaction from the outside world. Bill Hoffman, Georgia Kellogg and Lou Stein determine to escape and make it across the intersecting Hyacinth Street. 

They find themselves in the Ohio of about 1874, the year six radicals, known as The Shotgunners, were hanged for their crimes. The leader of the group that executed the Shotgunners was a Hoffman and we therefore assume the modern day attack is some form of revenge from beyond the grave by the Shotgunners on Hoffman’s descendant and his neighbors. The modern day group see seven mounted men, which turn out to be straw men on wooden horses. The Shotgunners cruising Maple are also straw men, but very much active and firing their shotguns. After one final massive attack on the street, dawn arrives and Maple Street returns to our reality.  

The police arrive and find Bill Hoffman wired to a stake, with his eyes sewn shut, just like the scarecrow that had stood near the 1874 hangings. 

The key characters in the screenplay are the Shotgunners; Bill Hoffman; the Ashley family; Andy and John Bellingham; Alicia and Tom Brewton; Mike and Angie Connaught; Georgia Kellogg; the Parker family; the Stein family; Susan Stuben; Alan and Marlene Wilson; and Hannibal, the Connaught’s Irish Setter (this is the only character name King retained for
The Regulators
, where Hannibal was the Reed’s German Shepherd, unfortunately the poor dog was killed in both versions). Of course, the main characters in
The Regulators
are a sort of alternate reality use of the character names from
Desperation
. 

The unfortunate Bill Hoffman was a divorced father of two who lived at 9 Maple Street and worked as a bank officer. His wife had left him and taken their two daughters to California. Georgia Kellogg, the pretty 7-11 clerk who ventured to the 1874 reality with Hoffman and Stein, was one very lucky young lady. For some reason the Shotgunners chose not to shoot her outside the store. Later she made it to the Ashley house. She was wounded while returning from the altered reality but survived. Lou Stein, the 14 year old, son of Al and Kathy, lived at 11 Maple Street. He survived the shootings, unlike his mother, who broke her neck trying to climb a fence and his father, shot dead. 

The Ashley family lived at 1 Maple. The father, Roger (also called Richard in the screenplay) was not at home at the time of the shootings. His wife, Priss and their two children, eleven year old Stacey and six year old Anne, also survived. The Bellinghams lived at number 5. While the parents were not at home, the handsome fifteen year old twin boys, Andy and John were, and both were able to survive the massacre. (In
The Regulators
the twins were the 17 year old Reed boys, David and Jim. Jim died under the influence of Tak.) 

Alicia and Tom Brewton lived at 7 Maple and both were shot dead. Mike and Angie Connaught were the residents of number 3. Mike, handsome and in his mid-40s and Angie, pretty but a little overweight, were luckier and both survived.  

The Parker family lived at 4 Maple. Rob was the father of Herbie and Carl and husband of Darla. The street’s resident bore and a big gun collector and shooter, he was a writer for magazines on hunting and related matters, often working from home. He attacked the Shotgunners’ Dodge with his Uzi but was quickly shot and wounded. He then looked into the Dodge and saw, to his horror, two scarecrows just before he threw a grenade. He died, along with Darla who fired at the Shotgunners’ LTD; six year old Herbie and twelve year old Carl were shot and killed while struggling for a gun with his each other. 

The Stubens resided at 11 Maple. Susan survived the shootings and her husband Steve (also called Hank), was not on the street during the incident. Alan and the unpleasant Marlene Wilson lived at number 5. Drunk, Marlene approached one of the cars and was shot dead. Alan, about 50 and an alcoholic, survived. 10 Maple was vacant, as the Plummers had moved away before the shootings. 

The Shotgunners drove standard road vehicles, including a Chevrolet, a Dodge, a Ford LTD, an Oldsmobile, a Plymouth, a Ford Country Squire Wagon, a Pontiac Bonneville and a mid-seventies model Thunderbird. The problem for the residents was that there were hundreds of these vehicles, lined up in the alternate reality at each end of Maple, waiting to enter the street, all bristling with shotguns. 

In the screenplay the Shotgunners themselves were all stuffed dummies but were animated and used shotguns to kill their victims. In the later novelized version the killers were characters from Seth Garin’s favorite movie,
The Regulators
. A creature called Tak used the autistic Garin’s mind to attack and murder many Wentworth locals. The strange weapons and vehicles the Regulators used looked as if they had come from the mind of a child and, of course, they had. We are told the original Shotgunners were a radical offshoot of the Ku Klux Klan. They were basically nothing more than robbers and terrorists. Six of them were hanged outside of Marionsville, Ohio on 18 August 1874. 

Readers of
The Regulators
will recall that Cynthia Smith worked at the E-Z Store 24 on the corner of Poplar and Hyacinth.
The Shotgunners
version has Rudy Halpern and Georgia Kellogg as clerks at the 7-11 on the corner of Maple and Hyacinth. Cynthia and Georgia survived, Rudy was shot dead.  

While the action in
The Shotgunners
is undated that in
The Regulators
occurs on 15 July 1996. Of course, while the theme and storyline of the two are similar, in the screenplay it is supernatural revenge that causes the murders; while in the novelized version it is the power of a strange creature, Tak, operating through an autistic boy that is the basis of the killings. 

This screenplay should make a better movie than the rather crazed altered reality storyline of
The Regulators
. Filming that story would require either full animation; or a mix of live action and animation.
The Shotgunners
could be filmed fairly cheaply as a standard violent horror movie of the type that Sam Peckinpah would undoubtedly have made a good fist of directing. 

Perhaps King will choose to sell or revise this Screenplay for production at some point in the future, now that he has allowed the production of a mini-series version of
Desperation
, directed by Mick Garris. Indeed, might we one-day see Garris or even Quentin Tarantino helm the film of
The Shotgunners
? We should indeed be so lucky. 

¹⁰⁸
See
Stephen King: The Non-Fiction
by Rocky Wood and Justin Brooks. Abingdon, Maryland: Cemetery Dance Publications, 2009