Streamin’ King: ‘The Running Man,’ A Richard Bachman Book Pretzeled Into a Big Loud Schwarzenegger Action Flick

Streamin’ King is grave-digging through the myriad Stephen King adaptations available on streaming. This time we’re watching The Running Man, the 1987 movie based on the ’82 novel published under his pen name, Richard Bachman.

STREAMIN’ KING: THE RUNNING MAN

THE GIST: In the techy semi-dystopia that is 2017-19 (lol), criminals and other unfortunate souls are ritualistically thrown into a patch of Los Angeles designated for The Running Man, the world’s most popular TV show, and hunted by theatrical, thematical “Stalkers.” Only adaptation credited solely to King’s pseudonym.

PEDIGREE: Stars Arnold Schwarzenegger (plus fellow muscleman-turned-governor Jesse “The Body” Ventura) just months after Predator, in the middle of a decade-long streak including two Terminators and Conans, Total Recall, Commando, Kindergarten Cop, and Twins. Also features inveterate game show host Richard Dawson (Family Feud), Maria Conchita Alonso (Predator 2), Yaphet Kotto (Alien), Kurt Fuller (Wayne’s World), Jim Brown (The Dirty Dozen), and Edward Bunker (Reservoir Dogs), with appearances from musicians Mick Fleetwood (possibly as an older version of himself) and Dweezil Zappa. Helmed by Paul Michael Glaser (Starsky & Hutch star, eventual director of Shaq’s Kazaam), written by Steven E. de Souza (Judge Dredd, Street Fighter), coming off Commando, eight months before sealing his spot in history with Die Hard. Cinematography by two-time Emmy-winner/seven-time nominee Thomas Del Ruth (The West Wing), score by Oscar nominee (for…Beverly Hills Cop II) Harold Faltermeyer (Top Gun), dance interludes choreographed by Paula Abdul.

WORTH WATCHING FOR CONSTANT READERS? It can be interesting to academically peruse what it means for a King story to be at least four-times removed from the source—drastically different script, credited to his alter ego, desperate and oily protagonist swapped out for Arnold, everything around him pretzeled into a Big Loud Schwarzenegger Action Flick. Checking all vestiges of Constant Readerdom at the door is best. Right away, shifting the year from 2025 to 2017/19 is an SK adaptation red flag: the blatantly unnecessary change. If you’re squashing his clay into different shapes, the purpose ought to be clear and compelling. The novel thoroughly walks/runs you through the frightening, dreary society so obsessed with this twisted game show, which on the page takes place on a scale spanning days and state lines. (Top prize: $1 billion for surviving 30 days.) The movie opts to frantically condense and remix those ingredients, slap gladiatorial spandex on everything, then cut to crowd shots every few minutes.

WORTH WATCHING FOR KING NEWBIES/AGNOSTICS? At least five killin’-n-explosions-n-chases-n-punchlines Schwarzenegger joints are worth rewatching before trying this one, and throwing a dart at the ones you’ve never gotten around to will probably land you somewhere better. It’s not terrible or annoyingly unentertaining, but Arnold’s deep in his “just memorize these words real good and say them in this order” acting mode, the score sounds like a TV show from a couple decades prior never got the memo it’d be soundtracking a sci-fi actioner, and the premise forces the aforementioned, truly unfortunate amount of crowd shots. It painfully wraps on the power ballad “Restless Heart,” which initially shared The Running Man‘s title and themes before misguidedly becoming “the story of what happens when the film finishes.”

It’s troubling how much this goofy story from 35 years ago actually understands about our culture today, though. A handful of fun, exaggerated performances liven things up, like Dawson shedding his affable image to embody a scathing, cynical dick. Some creative direction and concepts pop up, like the vacuum sleds (luge by way of coke and post-production tricks) and the whole “guy gets chainsawed from the nuts up” thing. It’s not every day you see Arnold and his romantic interest get viciously “killed” in the same breath (sans consequences since it’s via some deepfake-predicting tech), and how about that Dynamo, who *checks notes* sings opera, cannibalized a bunch of Lite Brites for his costume, and works in tighty-whiteys?

Mention-worthy Arnold punchlines, besides a conspicuous “I’ll be back” three years after Terminator: “I’m not into paahlitics, I’m into survival,” and, “Uplinks, underground, uplinks, underground! You guys don’t shut up, I’m going to uplink your ass, and you’ll be underground!”

8 STEPHEN KING TIES, REFERENCES, AND MISCELLANY:

1. SK penned the book in “72 hours” and got it “published with virtually no changes,” he wrote in the 1985 intro to the Bachman Books collection. (In ’99’s On Writing the feat was recounted as “a single week.” Either way, it’s fucking bananas.) He said the novel “may be the best of [Bachman’s first four] because it’s nothing but story—it moves with the goofy speed of a silent movie, and anything which is not story is cheerfully thrown over the side.”

2. The book’s got the first-ever mention of—and subsequent visit to—ye olde Derry, Maine, mere months before the town debuted under King’s name via a mention in the beloved Different Seasons novella “The Body.”
3. News hit in February 2021 that Edgar Wright (Baby Driver, the Cornetto trilogy, Last Night in Soho) is making a new Running Man being treated as “a top priority pic for Paramount.” Wright is re-teaming with his Scott Pilgrim vs. the World co-writer Michael Bacall (21 and 22 Jump Street) on the script, which Deadline noted “won’t be a remake” of Glaser’s film and “will be much more faithful” to the text. Wright said in 2017 The Running Man would hypothetically be the project he’d choose to remake.
4. Multi-time King adapters here: Thomas Del Ruth also shot Stand by Me, producer Tim Zinnemann was an EP on Pet Sematary.
5. Reasons SK has given for his assumption of the Bachman persona (via Bachman Books intros “Why I Was Bachman” and “On the Importance of Being Bachman,” plus his site’s FAQ):–”…I did it to turn the heat down a little bit; to do something as someone other than Stephen King.”

   –”…I love what I do too much to want to go stale if I can help it. Bachman has been one way in which I have tried to refresh my craft, and to keep from being too comfy and well-padded.”

   –”…Bachman had become a kind of id for me; he said the things I couldn’t, and the thought of him out there on his New Hampshire dairy farm—not a best-selling writer who gets his name in some stupid Forbes list of entertainers too rich for their own good, or his face on the Today show or doing cameos in movies—quietly writing his books, gave him leave to think in ways I could not think and speak in ways I could not speak.”

6. Richard got a full-on fakeout author photo just once, for 1984’s Thinner, the one that wrecked his secret:
   
7. Things King has said about the demise of Bachman (who, by the by, was almost named Gus Pillsbury):

   –”Bachman was the vampirish side of my existence, killed by the sunlight of disclosure.”

   –”Bachman was never created as a short-term alias; he was supposed to be there for the long haul, and when my name came out in connection with his, I was surprised, upset, and pissed off.”

   –”…He died suddenly in February 1985 when the Bangor Daily News, my hometown paper, published the story that I was Bachman…”

   –”…Thinner did 28,000 copies when Bachman was the author and 280,000 copies when Steve King became the author…” (prior four books “did not sell well at all”)

   –”I had intended Bachman to follow Thinner with a rather gruesome suspense novel called Misery, and I think that one might have taken ‘Dicky’ onto the best-seller lists.”

BOOK SPOILER BELOW

8. Running Man forecasted a 2005 polio outbreak, the advent of the “3-D Pervert Mag,” and, in a way, 9/11. The chapters ominously count down from 100 to a climax—which he called “the Richard Bachman version of a happy ending”—that goes like so:

   “I do have some predictive powers—I mean, I’m the guy who wrote The Running Man, where the guy ends up crashing a jetliner into a New York skyscraper at the end of the book,” he told GQ in 2009 while speaking to Alex Pappademas specifically about—and stop me if you’ve heard this one before—an active flu pandemic and The Stand.

CRITICAL CONSENSUS: Not terribly kind. USA Today said it “does have a sense of humor (are you listening, Sly and Chuck?), and some apt subtext about the dangers of edited TV footage passing for truth.” The Washington Post used the hilarious phrase “big boys banging biceps” and recommended viewers “stay at home and watch professional wrestling. Or Miami Vice.” The New York Post made sure to point out “Arnold lets his trademark one-liners thud to the ground,” and Roger Ebert noted “all of the action scenes are versions of the same scenario.” And after conceding “you could almost say that The Running Man makes you stop and think,” the New York Times fascinatingly scratched its head about the film’s “supposition” that “we could advance from this era of blissful, government-approved deregulation to a police state within the professional lifetime of one Johnny Carson.”

BIBLIOGRAPHICAL CONTEXT FOR THE RUNNING MAN (1982): Published the year after Roadwork (Bachman), Cujo, and Danse Macabre, placing it a month before King’s Roland Deschain stories were first collected as The Dark Tower I: The Gunslinger and three months before his classic debut collection of four novellas, Different Seasons. Fourth book by Bachman, who was most active from 1977 to ’84, with reappearances for ’96’s The Regulators (mirrored and dropped the same day as SK’s Desperation) and 2007’s Blaze. Based on hundreds of thousands of Goodreads reviews, The Running Man is the second-most-loved Bachman entry after ’79’s legendary The Long Walk.

Zach Dionne rambles and records Stephen King things regularly at SKzd on Patreon.