The Semiquincentennial Movie Project is an ongoing celebration of the 250th anniversary of the founding of the United States. During the course of this project your humble blogger is choosing a movie a week to represent each of the 50 states in the Union, as well as a movie scheduled for 4th of July weekend that will represent the nation's capitol, Washington D.C. The order of the weekly entries will coincide with the order of each state's entry into the fold (although, not necessarily coinciding with the date of their entry into said fold).
Week #23: Maine-
Details about Maine:
State bird: chickadee
State flower: white pine cone
State tree: white pine tree
Additional historical trivia:
Maine came into the U.S. as a part of the Missouri Compromise, which established both Maine and Missouri as states to keep a delicate balance of free states (Maine) and slave states (Missouri). Note: See next week's entry which is when Missouri will become the focal state.
Machias was the site of the first naval battle of the American Revolution.
Campobello Island, a part of Nova Scotia in Canada, is only accessible by going through Maine. (Which means the island would be on it's own if the US and Canada ever went to war...)
Some Maine residents prefer "Mainiacs" over "Mainers" as a designation for residents. I know I would...
What we think of as a donut today, with it's iconic hole in the center, was invented in Maine. Before that donuts were more like the cream-filled variety (but without the cream filling...)
Your blueberries probably come from Maine. 90% of the world's supply is grown there.
Famous people born in Maine: Well, this list HAS to start out with Stephen King, of course. Also film director John Ford, poet Henry Wadsworth Longfellow, actor Patrick Dempsey, vice Presidents Nelson Rockefeller (under Ford) and Hannibal Hamlin (under Lincoln) and athlete Cooper Flagg (who is just now becoming famous).
Forenote:I have been a Stephen King fan since first discovering him in high school (see the link for my history with him). Was The Dead Zone the first Stephen King movie adaptation of one of his novels that I ever saw in the theater? I claim a technicality on that. Admittedly I was still too young to go to movies without my father's permission when Carrie came out, and in truth, I hadn't even heard of him when it came out. I had, however, come to know his work by the time Salem's Lot was produced as a TV miniseries, and I watched that one. But The Shining, which came out in theaters after my turning to the age of accountability, I have to admit, was garnering such a negative reception in my group of like minded friends that I avoided it, and didn't watch it until years later. And Creepshow, while I did see it in a theater, was based on ideas from King, but not based on anything he had published in print at the time. So, yes, I guess The Dead Zone could probably count as my first in theater experience for his novels.
The Dead Zone (1983):
The film first introduces us to Johnny Smith (Christopher Walken) where he is an English teacher in high school. (Not sure how much of Stephen King is in Johnny Smith, but King did come from a similar background. He was an English teacher prior to becoming an author).
Johnny has a fiancee who is also a teacher in the school, Sarah (Brooke Adams). The two are going to be married soon. Johnny and Sarah have a date, after which Johnny takes Sarah home, but declines to spend the night there. "Some things are worth waiting for" he tells her. (Which, I think, implies that they still have not consummated their relationship by getting physical, which I think is rather quaint, but laudable).
The weather is bad, which is the reason Sarah wants him to stay, but Johnny insists on going, which in retrospect was a bad decision, because he gets involved in an accident with an 18 wheeler. One could reasonably wonder what happened in King's life that caused him to put semis as the cause of disastrous events in some of his stories. It was a semi truck that killed the little boy in Pet Semetary. The main villains of his short story "Trucks" (which was eventually filmed as Maximum Overdrive) were semis. They also crop up often in The Dark Tower series.
Anyway, as a result of his accident, Johnny ends up in a coma for five years. Much of his world before the accident has turned topsy-turvy. Not only has he lost his job during the interim (obviously), but Sarah has moved on herself. She got married and even now has a kid.
The upside (or downside, depending on your perspective) of Johnny's accident and subsequent coma is that he has gained a psychic ability, of sorts. When he touches the hand of someone he can see their, or their closest people's, future. The first indication of this is when he sees a nurse's house on fire and her daughter in danger. The day is saved when the firemen arrive and rescue the daughter.
Johnny becomes a celebrity of sorts as a result. He of course is not altogether happy with the situation, as he would just like to blend into the background and live a normal life. But the public being what it is is not about to let that happen. One thing in particular; during his coma there has been a spate of serial killings and the sheriff (Tom Skerritt) is at his wit's end trying to catch the killer. He thinks Johnny might be of help. And. needless to say he is.
Flash forward a few months. Johnny is still trying his best to fade out of the public eye. He has moved to another town and is working as a tutor. (I guess no high school is willing to hire a psychic célèbre...) A rich guy, Roger Stuart (Anthony Zerbe), hires him to break through his son's distance and get him to be more sociable as well as improve his studies. But once again the boogieman of his psychic abilities causes a rift, as Johnny foresees an accident that would cause the son to die.
Things do work out as the son, Chris (Simon Craig), refuses to go along with his father's desires to start a hockey team. In the mean time, because Roger is rich, Roger has dealings with a political candidate seeking a position in the U.S. Senate. Greg Stillson (Martin Sheen) is a smarmy little nobody, but he is gaining a following due to his adamant platform. He is an independent candidate, not associated with the political "business as usual" norm. (In other words, he is not a Democrat nor a Republican).
Johnny has another psychic interlude when he shakes hands with Stillson and sees a future where Stillson ends up causing the start of World War III. In a conversation with his doctor Johnny asks the doctor (Herbert Lom) what he would do if he had met Hitler before Hitler came to power, knowing how history would play out. The doctor says emphatically that he would have to "kill the S.O.B." What this, of course, leads into is Johnny deciding that he must do whatever he has to do to prevent Stillson from advancing towards that future.
In retrospect, some people have looked at Donald Trump and seen many parallels with the character of Stillson; an egotistical demagogue who rises to power from a relatively obscure status (politically speaking). Unlike King's insistence that he did not predict Covid in The Stand, he has not necessarily shied away from the idea that he may have predicted the rise of Trump in the form of Greg Stillson. You have to take that with a grain of salt, however. King has not been shy about his political leanings. As a Liberal, he has been vocal at times about his dislike for Conservatives.
You can decide for yourself whether there is any merit in that postulation. It's a sure bet if you are on one side of the political fence you will side with King and if you are on the other side of the fence then he is just full of it. But either way, you can't deny that a decent movie came out as a result of a very creative imagination.
Whether or not it qualifies as "horror", however, given that that is King's chosen milieu, is another argument altogether. It's not, in my opinion. It is a great character study, one which admittedly has some horror aspects, but compared to something like 'Salems' Lot or Pet Semetary or Creepshow it is seriously lacking in the scare tactics that would generally accompany a horror movie. It's not a laughable attempt, like some I could name: The Lawnmower Man, for instance, has the title of one of Stephen King's stories, but that's about the ONLY thing it has in common. But The Dead Zone does have many things going for it.
For one thing, it has Christopher Walken. Walken's presence in a film pushes it from being all bad to at least a mediocre level. The 2004 remake of The Stepford Wives is pretty hard to slog through, but without Walken in it, I would postulate it wasn't worth the time. As a side note: Bill Murray was King's choice to play Johnny. Although Murray has since proven that he can sometimes handle dramatic roles (The Razor's Edge is not as bad as the critics suggest, in my opinion), I can't help but think that the reception of the news that Murray had been cast as Johnny would be received, pre-viewing, as somewhat similar to the way the news that Michael Keaton had been cast as Batman. Maybe he could have pulled it off, but I think it would probably have altered the dynamic.
An interesting little tidbit: You notice the startled look on Walken's face whenever he starts to get these premonitions? According to a "how it was made" documentary on my DVD, Walken told Cronenberg to fire off a pistol off screen, without warning Walken when he was going to do it. It got the effect it needed.
The music was another factor that helped make the film work. Michael Kamen, whose output included all four Lethal Weapon films, the first 3 Die Hard films and the first X-Men had a knack for scoring films. Kamen won 4 Grammys and was twice nominated for Best Song Oscars.
The Dead Zone was very well received, critically On Rotten Tomatoes it currently holds a rating of 89% Fresh. Rogert Ebert gave it 3 ½ stars, saying that it "does what only a good supernatural thriller can do: It makes us forget it is supernatural." It was a financial success, too. On a budget of only about $7 million it pulled in $20 million in the US alone, and another $17 million in sales outside the US.
In the early 200's there was a TV series based on the novel which featured Anthony Michael Hall in the Johnny Smith role. I have to admit I have never watched even one episode and, although it lasted 6 seasons, I really don't see how they could have stretched it out to last that long. One of these days I have to give it a shot, though.
That wraps it up for this week. See you next time. Drive safely, folks.
Quiggy
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