Fun
Frisky
Nostalgic
Intense
Adventurous
Choked Up
Curious
Romantic
Weird
Welcome to Streamin’ King, a series grave-digging through the myriad Stephen King adaptations available on your favorite streaming services. This time we’re watching Maximum Overdrive, the 1986 original film written and directed by King, inspired by his story “Trucks,” written pre-fame and collected in 1978’s Night Shift.
THE GIST: Because of a comet (apparently), machines become at once sentient and hell-bent on killing people. Driverless big rigs terrorize a North Carolina gas station where an odd group of character archetypes are holed up.
PEDIGREE: King’s first and only time as writer/director. AC/DC were fellow first-timers, composing a score at King’s request; it doubled as the LP Who Made Who. Today AC/DC have 172 soundtrack credits and one composer credit. This one.
Stars Emilio Estevez, hot off The Breakfast Club and St. Elmo’s Fire, Pat Hingle (Batman), and Laura Harrington (What’s Eating Gilbert Grape). Co-stars the hilarious Yeardley Smith, voice of Lisa Simpson. Produced by Italian maven Dino De Laurentiis, whose infinitely long list of credits includes Serpico, Halloween II, and a handful of King stuff (more on that in a minute). He stopped King from tapping Bruce Springsteen for the lead; De Laurentiis’ personal translator would later say King “couldn’t give a shit about the movie” after the decision.
WORTH WATCHING FOR CONSTANT READERS? The completists who are really going to finish books like Faithful and Danse Macabre are going to watch it regardless; do it like a Band-Aid and just rip that strip of skin off your brain fast. You’ll feel better when it’s over. And you’ll be able to see King wrestling with the format immediately, when a fat, way-too-big-and-specific five-line paragraph opens the film. (The epilogue paragraph’s amazing, though, containing the words “a large UFO was destroyed in space by a Russian ‘weather satellite,’ which happened to be equipped with a laser cannon and class IV nuclear missiles.”)
But if a more judicious Constant Reader peruses the following and/or any available materials on the Maximum Overdrive travesty, they can imagine exactly what it looks like for mid-’80s Stephen King to have total bumbling control over his own movie with a soundtrack he got AC/DC to make. Don’t ruin your imagined Maximum Overdrive by watching the real one.
WORTH WATCHING FOR KING NEWBIES/AGNOSTICS? Seriously can’t recommend not watching this movie enough. Beyond the thin premise that reeks of inner–little boy smashing toy cars together, it’s got dialogue like, “I’ll tell you one thing. You sure make love like a hero.” Moments later: “You are not only a hero—you ARE…a genius.”
It’s also just gross in a bunch of individual ways—the grimy Bible salesman trying to sexually intimidate a hitchhiker, the wall of Hustler cutouts, the men laughing at the waitress like she’s a ridiculous histrionic after an electric knife comes to life and hacks into her forearm and foot. The tête-à-tête with the flabby dude taking a flabby dump. (Estevez hoists himself above the stall to make sure he and his guy are 100 percent clear.)
And it’s just really, very, awfully stupid and not even convinced of its own entertainment value.
13 STEPHEN KING TIES, REFERENCES, AND MISCELLANY:
- Rob Reiner’s all-time-great King adaptation Stand By Me premiered two weeks later, making $52 million and playing for four months. Maximum Overdrive only lasted a couple weeks in theaters and made $7.4 million on a $10 million budget.
- King gave himself the first speaking role, doing a terrible Southern accent and calling his wife sugarbuns as an ATM calls him an asshole. The now 70-year-old SK has continued his semi-prolific cameo streak right up into 2017 with Mr. Mercedes.
- King told the author of the 2003 book Hollywood’s Stephen King, “The problem with that film is that I was coked out of my mind all through its production, and I really didn’t know what I was doing.” (The book’s also got this quote, from a younger King: “I didn’t know if I could work with actors, but I knew I could choreograph trucks and electric knives and stuff like that.”) He said he wanted to try again and was pondering Gerald’s Game.
- “In terms of the making of the movie, Stephen became the most fascinating part of it,” star Laura Harrington said in Slashfilm’s “How Did This Get Made? Maximum Overdrive,” a truly exemplary oral history. “‘Cause he was such a unique character in every way.” An abundance of early-morning King memories pepper the piece. At 6 a.m. roll call he’d be drinking; “by 8:30, he’s on his 10th beer.” He was writing before work. He ate sardines for breakfast and “was breathing fish all day long.” King’s wife and kids were present and, Harrington said, they’d “start every day in this sort of huddle. They’d just put their arms around each other and get in a family huddle. They were very loving. And it was very sweet to watch.” Camera assistant Silvia Giulietti offered, “with a very thick Italian accent,” this gem: “And he had a kind of a superstition. He had kind of a piece of the underpants of his wife at the belt. It was a kind of mascot. He always say, ‘This bring me luck.'”
- But King might have been as dangerous as he was compelling. Giulietti: “He was like a child in a circus. … He liked very much the extreme danger. Every day, we had a security because the movie was a very dangerous movie. Every day there were explosions. Was very dangerous. I was scared, sometimes. I was scared because I remember Stephen King had a kind of pleasure to see difficult situations.”
And Harrington: “I was certain I was going to get run down [by] a truck. Because they had to come within inches of us, you know? There was always this hint of danger.”
- Harrington was fine; cinematographer Armando Nannuzzi was not, suing King and 17 other defendants for $18 million. The suit, settled out of court, alleged King & Co. were “wanton and reckless” and responsible for injuring Nannuzzi when a lawnmower was modified to go extra fast and sent splinters of wood into Nannuzzi’s face and his eye, which never recovered. (The record has established that the film was made with a tight budget and inexperienced non-union workers; eyewitness accounts of Nannuzzi’s injury are pretty damning as far as King’s own ineptitude.) Filming paused for two weeks while he got surgery; he returned with an eyepatch to finish the job.
- By the time Maximum Overdrive hit in ’86, Dino De Laurentiis had also produced the King flicks The Dead Zone, Firestarter, and—both in ’85 and both written by King—Cat’s Eye and Silver Bullet. (Nannuzzi did the cinematography on those two.) Later, De Laurentiis produced Sometimes They Come Back.
- Emilio Estevez’s dad, Martin Sheen, was in The Dead Zone three years prior.
- King gave a wacky-as-hell personal introduction to the trailer. “A lot of people have directed Stephen King novels and stories, and I finally decided, if you want something done right, you ought to do it yourself.” The irony is he ended up giving final, resounding proof that his own material is for some reason extremely hard to make work onscreen.
- King told the Associated Press he wrote 1,147 file cards for the film, one for every shot. Three weeks into filming he remembered that he never outlines his novels and began “allowing himself to improvise with new ideas.” Should’ve stuck to the cards, my man (or never used them at all).
- That clown on the back of the Happy Toyz truck (“Here comes another load of joy!”) was great early branding: the immortal image of Pennywise would crystallize two months later in It. (The face on the front is indeed the Green Goblin, licensed from Marvel.)
- The early scornful line “You ain’t that obtuse, are ya?” instantly calls to mind The Shawshank Redemption‘s “How can you be so obtuse?”
- 1997 brought another adaptation of “Trucks,” the TV movie Trucks. It’s crazy they only needed a decade to think it was a good idea to try this again.
CRITICAL CONSENSUS: Not great, Bob! And since we all know what it looks like when the entire culture trashes a horror/sci-fi movie at its inception and then onward through the decades, let’s pivot to something from Stephen Spignesi’s Complete Stephen King Encyclopedia: “The characterization is not up to King’s usual standards, the pacing is a bit plodding, and the music is too one-dimensional.” Fair and accurate, and apply it for 98 minutes and you’re screwed. Spignesi goes on to embody the psychosis that afflicts Constant Readers trying to salvage the scraps of a bad King project: “But the story’s good, the performances aren’t bad, and the special effects and gross-out scenes are cool.” There’s also this sentence: “King tried.”
BIBLIOGRAPHICAL CONTEXT FOR MAXIMUM OVERDRIVE: “Trucks” story debuted in Cavalier magazine in 1973, one year before King’s debut novel Carrie. Collected in his first book of short fiction, ’78’s Night Shift. Film immediately preceded by a few years of direly dark novels (Pet Sematary, Thinner), experimentation (Cycle of the Werewolf, The Talisman), and a possessed car (Christine). Screenplay never published.
Less than two months after the film, It was published, followed by an astonishing four novels in 14 months (see “coked out of my mind,” above) including Misery and The Tommyknockers. The latter’s an underrated, weird novel, but it’s a little insulting to consider how immediately it reused Overdrive‘s “any gizmo can kill!” shtick.
Zach Dionne is a North Carolina–based writer; he once abandoned a ‘Salem’s Lot re-read because it was ruining the Christmas spirit.
