Why did Warren Beatty reject a Stephen King classic?

When Jack Nicholson played the lead role Stanley Kubrick based on the novel “The Shining” The horror stigma surrounding Stephen King has temporarily disappeared in Hollywood. Although he tended to write gory novels, if the team of Kubrick and Nicholson deemed his material worthy of a major motion picture, there might have been box office and awards wins to be extracted from his other books (which the prolific author was pumping out at a dizzying pace).

This idea would be challenged with something fierce throughout the 1980s. While respected directors like David Cronenberg and Rob Reiner received positive reviews for “The Dead Zone” and “Stand by Me,” respectively, critics didn’t get much out of “Cujo,” “Firestarter” and “Children of the Corn.” And “Silver”. Bullet, Pet Sematary, and Maximum Overdrive were directed by King. Indeed, if it were not for Reiner’s “Stand by Me,” the high profile of the King’s story might have been completely erased.

This was the state of play in Hollywood for King heading into 1990 when Reiner was hot The box office smash “When Harry Met Sally…” He decided that an adaptation of the author’s 1987 novel “Misery” would be his next film. A taut 310-page thriller about a romance novelist held hostage in snow-driven middle ground by his number one admirer, “Misery” reads like a grisly riff on Frederick Knott’s “Wait Until Dark.” The wounded cat-and-mouse dynamic between the deranged Annie Wilkes and author Paul Sheldon would pin moviegoers to their seats if shot, especially, in the right direction.

While we know that Reiner knocked it out of the park with James Caan and Kathy Bates (who won the Academy Award for Best Actress), there was a point where the project almost moved forward with Warren Beatty, then a star of Nicholson’s magnitude, in the role. From Paul. But why didn’t this happen?

In a 1990 Los Angeles Times article About the making of “Misery,” Reiner revealed that while working with… Legendary screenwriter William Goldman Regarding the adaptation, Warren Beatty has expressed interest in the project. As has long been the norm, the star began offering notes on the script. Per Rainer:

“He had been really interested in the role for a while. He had some great ideas for the writer’s character, which made him a lot less passive. Warren is very intelligent, but it’s hard to pin down who he is. So it didn’t work out.” Either we didn’t get far enough or he had a little fear of commitment.”

Beatty can be a wonderfully intuitive artist, but when working for another director, he has a tendency to take control of the production if it is not going according to his sometimes vague desires. As Jeremy Bexner, who received an Academy Award nomination for Best Original Screenplay for “Bulworth” (with Beatty as co-writer), told Peter Biskind in the author’s biography “Star: How Warren Beatty Seduced America,” Beatty “is spiraling out of control, and no one He knows what’s going on but he does.”

It might have been better for everyone involved when Betty finally lost interest and turned his attention to him The wonderful Dick Tracy. Beatty’s control-freak nature aside, I have a hard time imagining him crawling toward a hacking logie like Cahn did on the film set. So we got two classics instead of one, and I’ll take that trade-off any day.