Posted on 11/23/2009 5:35:21 AM PST by Dr. Scarpetta
First of all there’s more of King to adapt compared to Austen’s six complete novels. Second of all it’s not just the straight adaptations of Austen but stuff like Clueless, Bridget Jones’s Diary and ‘Bride and Prejudice’ and something currently in rpoduction called “Jane Austen Handheld”. Not to mention literary take offs like the recent “Pride and Prejudice and Zombies”. I would say that in the last 15 years more people have seen stuff based on her work than King’s. There is a veritable Jane Austen industry with tons of supplementary material on prominent display in bookstores.
Understand that some of that stuff, especially P&P&Z is actually making fun of Austen. And volume of available material really is immaterial, this is the cinema world that has twice released 2 movies based on the same book nearly simultaneously (Haunting of Hillhouse by Shirley Jackson). And really if you want to talk about a veritable industry with tons of supplementary material that IS King. The guy is the Kiss of authors, he’ll greenlight any thing. An Amazon search on Dark Tower comes up with 8000 items and almost all of them actually are related in some way to King’s series.
Making fun of her in an affectionate way. Austen was a satirist/comic genius to begin with and would get a kick out of it. She made fun of Gothic novels the same way. There aure actually much more adaptations of King than Austen but a lot of them are obscure short story adaptations made for Tv or straight to video that very few people have heard of.
If you say so. To me Austen wrote about the kind of woman I never liked and never wanted to spend time with and wrote the worst book I’ve ever tried to read. I know others worship it, but P&P bored me in ways I’ve never been bored before or since. I don’t really think the King adaptations are of anything obscure, his books sell way too well to be obscure. Yes a lot of the adaptations are of short stories, but those short stories tend to appear in collections that sky rocket to the top of the best seller list. And about the only stuff that goes direct to video is spinoffs of adaptations, the the Children of the Corn series, only the first and most recent were really based on the story, the 6 in the middle were just franchising. I count 34 theatrical releases based on Kings stuff on the wiki page, skipping remakes and sequels many of which didn’t go theatrical. King is the horror part of our shared culture right now.
I meant that the King adaptations themselves are fairly obscure. Probably the best known from the last 15 years is ‘The Mist’ and that didn’t exactly set the box office on fire. Jane Austen was making gentle fun of those types of women and the culture that shaped their expectations.
1408, the King movie before The Mist, pulled in $130 million. Riding the Bullet, the movie before 1408, $134 million. The Green Mile was 10 years ago and pulled $280 million. Yeah he’s got a lot of movies that pulled in $30 million-ish, but he’s got a few major successes also. As for Austen, again, if you say so. I suffered through 100 pages of P&P and wanted to gouge my eyes out, it was nattering hens blathering inanely, I will never touch another Austen book again, much less actually read one. Maybe she was making fun of them, I don’t know, I don’t care, it was the worst book experience of my life.
I forgot about ‘The Green Mile’.
Mark Twain defined a good library as a ‘building with no Jane Austen novels in it’. :)
I agree with Twain about a lot of stuff. Unfortunately King is a bigger part of our culture than Twain also.
Part of the culture in the sense of ‘mass’ maybe. But King’s writing is never quoted nor has he created any indelible characters that live apart from the page the way that Tom Sawyer, Huck Finn or Elizabeth Bennett do.
And the King characters that people think of are actually distinct actors’ performances which depart from his arid texts considerably. Jack Nicholson in The Shining and so forth.
I wouldn’t say King’s writing is never quoted. On average how many replies does it take for an H1N1 thread to have somebody mention Captain Trips. I hear a lot of people refer to mean dogs as “cujo”. The Pet Cemetery resurrection trope has become pretty common place both in horror and satire. Since I hang out with authors Annie Wilkes and Richard Bachman are characters frequently referred to. I probably hear references to King books 10 or 20 times more often than Twain.
I meant actual quotes from the texts themselves not titles or factoids about his pen names.
Quotes are only part of the picture though. You also mentioned characters. And you should have mentioned situations. When people mention Captain Trips during discussions of a disease getting a lot of press, or call someone their Annie Wilkes, or refer to something they did under another name as a Bachman book, those are King’s works clearly being a part of our shared culture.
I must admit I have no idea who Captain Trips is.
Captain Trips is the nickname given the super flu which wiped out humanity in The Stand (IMHO still his best book).
Thank you for all that info! I plan on seeing the movie when the crowds have thinned out.
We saw it too and thought it was boring at times, plus way tooo long.
We went Monday at 5:10pm, and 10 minutes before the movie started the theatre was less than 1/3rd full; we got there about 15 minutes early and got our favorite seats.
LOL, whatever. I was 13 at the time, get off your high horse. At least I wasn’t still trying to sound out Dick and Jane books like many children I was in school with. People who get high minded about the books a voracious child reader reads amuse me.
And parents talk about censoring their children’s TV viewing or books or movies. Live TV shows are censored. I used the term loosely. What would you rather have me call it? I can change my vocabulary if you wish.
I think it's using sex to promote chastity. After all, sex sells.
That’s nice of you to take your family.
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