Fangoria Article on M.O.

Stephen King admits he was a little nervous when they showed his latest, movie, Maximum Overdrive, to the Film Ratings Board in New York. He not only wrote it, he directed it, and producer Dino De Laurentis had promised to let him make the movie his way. "They ran it by the ratings board," King explains with the hint of a chuckle, "not officially you understand, but in a review capacity, the result we got back was X 10 ways, at that point, there were 10 specific incidents that would have caused an X rating."

King speculates that the scene might have put off the raters where a steamroller runs over a person in a parking lot. On the other hand, maybe the fellow is being mangled by the front bumper of a Peterbilt, or maybe the victim doing the electric bogaloo when he gets 220 volts from a video game. Perhaps it was just the whole notion of Maximum Overdrive: Earth passes through the tail of a comet and our usually obedient servants, the trucks, the cars, the electric games and appliances, everything in our mechanically supported world goes murderously haywire. The mayhem of Maximum Overdrive made the Ratings Board put their collective foot down with a resounding thump— but mayhem was just what King had in mind.

"It’s pretty scary," he maintains. Maximum Overdrive’s source of inspiration was "Trucks," King’s •own short story from the Night Shift collection. When De Laurentis first acquired the property, he asked King to write the screenplay. King originally declined.

De Laurentis and producer Martha (Cat’s Eye) Schumacher approached him again a few weeks later and asked him to write a script. "I really didn’t want to do it. I didn’t have time to do it," King recalls, "but the thing with Dino is that he’s almost telepathic. He knows when the ideas have started to sink in. I had suggested another writer for the treatment and, frankly, neither one of us liked what he had come up with. "I had been kicking around some ideas, this idea about the comet and all the machinery going crazy, not just the trucks like in the original story. Therefore, Dino called a week later and asked me one more time to do the screenplay. I immediately said yes, because by then, I had a very clear picture of the plot and found myself wanting to go ahead with the adaptation."

King’s ideas were so clear that he specified more than a thousand shots within the screenplay. De Laurent’s’ response was to ask him to direct.

Again, King declined. De Laurentis insisted. King accepted—on the condition that, if at any point during filming De Laurentis felt the footage was no good, he would tell King and replace him with another director.

"I did it mostly to find out if it would work," the author elaborates. "People tell me they don’t go to my movies anymore because they don’t find me on screen. I thought, ’Well, just once, let’s go in and find out if it does carry over.’ "King admits that, as a writer, he’s not really concerned if that "something" is missing, but as a moviegoer, he often feels the same disappointment."I was intensely curious to find out if I could translate whatever was in my heart and brain—the stuff that’s between the lines in the books—onto film."

The author approached the project with no pretensions. "I went in with the idea that I was going to make a moron movie," confesses King. A moron movie? "Yeah ... they’re the best kind of movies as far as I’m concerned. Back to the Future is a moron movie, Rambo is a moron movie. I loved them both. I made a picture where people shoot at each other. There is some passable characterization, but I was more interested in pace than I was in character. I wanted to make an entertainment."

The short story "Trucks" was typical King fare, an almost tongue~~ in- cheek exercise in "what IC?" What if all the Peterbilts, Reos, Kenworths and Mack diesel semis rebelled, usurped their drivers and started to threaten the lives of the humans who made them? King expanded on the idea to create a scenario where the rebellion is pervasive: "I made a movie about what happens when bunch of people are in a situation where absolutely everything is inexplicable."

Maximum Overdrive opens Earth passes through the tail Rhea-M, a rogue comet. The first signs that something has gone wrong occur when a man at a bank interstellar (Stephen King in a cameo appearance) is flustered when the display screen calls him an asshole, then instructs him to do something physically impossible. A wind-up toy car attacks a dog; soda pop machines, toasters, and coffee pots all over the community begin an insurrection, and other things start to go wrong, in scenes which may have accounted for the dreaded X.

The machines turn to outfight revolt as King cuts to the chase. People in cars are inexplicably attacked by semis out on the interstate. Newlyweds Kurt and Connie (John Short and Yardley Smith) narrowly escape demolition on the highway and hightail it into the Dixie Boy Truck Stop for sanctuary, as the film settles on the main story.

Behind the counter is parolee Bill Robinson, played by Emilio Estevez (Fangoria 54). He flips burgers and slings hash for the Dixie Boy’s owner, Bubba Hendershot, played by Pat (Sudden Impact) Hingle. The gum-chewing, blowsy waitress, Wanda June (Ellen McElduff), is attacked by an electric knife. A patron is electrocuted by a video game. Soon after, before anyone realizes something is wrong, they look out to see the driveway filled with huge trucks. Lots of trucks—and no drivers.

The big semis start an Indian circle around the diner, picking off the brave (read: incredibly foolish) souls as they try to escape from the building. They are joined by the kingpin—a big "Happy Toyz" truck and trailer sporting an eight-foot leering Green Goblin head on the front end, which lends an air of sentience to the machine. The trucks soon understand that the immediate problem is running out of gas.

A front loader chugs up to the front of the Dixie Boy, waving the big blade menacingly in an attempt to intimidate the prisoners into being their gas pump slaves. This final indignity forces Bill into action. He raids the basement arsenal of a local—now dead—good-old boy-and retrieves a rocket launcher and some ammo, determined to fight his way free. The climax is a confrontation between the Goblin and Bill’s small band of survivors—can a well-placed rocket end the short (but promising) leadership of the Goblin?

"I blew up a lot of things," notes director King. "It was fun. It got a little more purgatorial each week we filmed at the Dixie Boy location. We all cheered when it went up."

A first-time directorial position is no enviable position for anyone, but especially not for a man who is a writer by trade, not a filmmaker. "I wish someone had told me how little I knew and how grueling it was going to be," King acknowledges. "I didn’t know how little I knew about the mechanics and the politics of film-making. People tip toe around the director with this ’Don’t wake the baby’ attitude. Nobody wants to tell you this, that, or the other thing if it is bad news.

"I went in assuming if somebody says, ’We’re going to give you this, or this is what’s going to happen,’ then it is going to happen, because, when I promise somebody something, it happens. But that isn’t always the way it works in the movies."

Filming began July 14 at locations near the De Laurentis facility in Wilmington, North Carolina. One of the first major FX shots involved a massive collision of cars when a drawbridge lifts on its own. A small-scale model was built near an existing bridge and, by angling the camera over the foreground model, an illusion of perspective made the miniature appear in the same location as the existing bridge, complete with tiny wrecks and itty-bitty mangled bodies.

At a location 10 miles outside of town at the edge of a highway, the company constructed the Dixie Boy as a facsimile of a working truck stop. It was convincing enough that more than one trucker stopped in. Eventually, the producers were forced to place an announcement in the local papers advising residents that the DixieBoy was a prop. Of the $10 million allotted for Maximum Overdrive, most was spent on location shooting, the Dixie Boy set, and the hardware, big diesel semi-trailer tractors, vans, frontloaders, a bus or two, and assorted other vehicles.

"I argued very hard to get $100,000 for a truck ’hospital fund," explains King. "The vehicles were taking such a beating. I never got it, though, and I think it hurt us little bit in the end. I had to make some compromises there." King noted earlier, he blew up many things. He celebrated his birthday on location and part of his present was an explosive surprise. All tbe crewmembers wore fangs at the celebration and one FX technician handed King a button near twilight and said, "Press this." King did so and triggered a massive fireworks display rigged by the crew. The party was one of the few times that King was able to relax. Before principal photography wrapped on October 2 he got an intense "how-to" course in filmmaking.

"I had to make my share of compromises, but I think that if anything astonished me, it was how much more I could get then I thought I could. I got more from my actors than I thought I could, more from special effects, from film editing, from the camera department, everything. I guess I didn’t realize how good they were."

King did get some unexpected allowances—he’s a rock and roll fan and radio station owner, and one of his first choices for Maximum Overdrive’s score was the popular band AC/DC. "We got ’em," he cheers, "And they’re real loud." King also seized his first choice actor in Emilio Estevez who jumped at the chance to work with one of his favorite authors. "I read The Shining when I was 17," relates Estevez. "I had trouble sleeping for a few nights after that." Estevez’s girlfriend is portrayed by Buckaroo Banzai’s Laura Harrington. The balance of the casting was with an eye toward character types. King and producer Martha Schumacher called on veteran character actors Pat Hingle, Christopher Murney, Frankie Faison and Pat Miller to fill the roles of Wilmington locals with names like Bubba, Camp, Handy and Joe.

The terror specialist also acted as second unit director—picking up shots that did not require the featured actors’ presence. Many of the secondary shots involved the apparently driverless trucks and it soon became a matter of logistics. A difficult staging problem was disguising Glenn Randall’s stunt drivers. One solution was to drape the cabs in black felt and suit up the drivers in Ninja-like costumes to hide them. Special compartments were built in some trucks and one driver was disguised as a seat cushion.

Despite some stumbles and the awkwardness of his new role, King summarizes his experience succinctly: "I had a good crew, and we worked really hard, and we came in under budget, ahead of schedule, and I’m happy with the picture. I was all right when I trusted my instincts."

Maximum Overdrive is now slated for release this month, though there has been some delay over the film’s rating. King feels confident that they will be able to make the movie conform to R standards, but does not hesitate to make a firm stand about what is clearly his movie: "We should get an R. That is where it is, unless they prove to be very intractable. If push came to shove, I would try to persuade Dino to go unrated, but I do not think that I could. Technically speaking, he has final cut by contract. In addition, although he promised me he would not exercise that option, and I know he is a man of his word, if we really get down to that, I will say to him, ’You cut this film, Dino, I’m walking away and I’m washing my hands of it.’ But I don’t think it will come to that."

Although he’s quite firm about not wanting to direct again any time soon, King admits this first outing didn’t entirely eliminate the urge to direct.

"My curiosity isn’t satisfied yet," King explains. "I did the job. Now, I am in a position to satisfy my curiosity, and I will see what happens. For example, the first time you get laid, you don’t get laid because you want to get laid, you get laid so that you can say to yourself, ’Well, I don’t have to go through that again.’ That part of it is over. Then, you say to yourself at some point, ’I would like to get laid again because that was fun, or because now I could do it better.’ In addition, that is certainly true of the movie. If I did it again, I would know what to do. And I would know who to ask."