Stephen King is quite picky about how his work is adapted. If you want to make a movie out of one of his stories that’s fine, but if he doesn’t like the end result, you can’t use his name to promote it.
For Misery, King was especially strict about the movie deal, but with James Caan and Kathy Bates in the cast, a script by William Goldman, and Rob Reiner directing, he was very happy with the end result.
Because so many King stories are very lengthy, they’ve been perfect for the mini-series format, and Mick Garris adapted The Stand, Bag of Bones, Desperation, the TV version of The Shining, while also creating the Masters of Horror cable series.
Garris is absolutely one of King’s favorite directors, and as Garris tells TG about his relationship with King, “We have very similar backgrounds. We both came out of working class backgrounds, him on the East, me on the West. We had a lot of the same cultural references growing up, broken homes that led us to become readers and watchers. We just really get along. Even though there will be years going by where we don’t see one another, but when we do, it’s like we’re best friends again.”
Now Garris is branching out into the world of sci-fi with Invasion, which the Hollywood Reporter tells us is being sold as The Outer Limits meets Mad Men.
Garris told the Reporter that Invasion is “a bit of a different direction for me, but it’s great because I get to make a period movie with a modern sensibility.”
And like Mad Men, as well as the best science fiction of the fifties, you get the impression that both are about what lies beneath the seemingly perfect surfaces of the time. Garris told the Reporter it takes place in a time of “men in ties and hats when you thought you could trust the government.”
If Invasion is indeed a look back at classic sci—fi of yesteryear, it would indeed be very cool. Both Garris and King grew up with sci-fi and horror back in the early glory days of both genres, and bringing it together with the modern retro sensibilities of Mad Men could be very interesting indeed.
