Why Warren Beatty Rejected Stephen King’s Classic Film

When Jack Nicholson starred in Stanley Kubrick’s adaptation of “The Shining,” the horror stigma surrounding Stephen King temporarily disappeared in Hollywood. Although he tends to write muddy, gory fiction, if the A-list team of Kubrick and Nicholson deemed his material worthy of a major motion picture, there might be box office glory and awards to be mined from his books others (which the prolific writer had pumping out at an astonishing pace).

This idea would be fiercely contested throughout the 1980s. Although respected directors such as David Cronenberg and Rob Reiner earned favorable reviews for, respectively, “The Dead Zone” and “Stand by Me,” critics had little use for “Cujo,” ” Firestarter,” “Children of the Corn,” “Silver Bullet,” “Pet Sematary,” and the King-directed “Maximum Overdrive.” In fact, if not for Reiner’s “Stand by Me,” the picture potential of King’s legend may have been completely obliterated.

This was the situation in Hollywood for King going into 1990 when Reiner, hot off box office cut “When Harry Met Sally…,” he decided that his next feature would be an adaptation of the author’s 1987 novel “Misery”. A corker-tight, 310-page thriller about a romance novelist held hostage in the middle of a snow-driven nowhere by his leading fan, “Misery” reads like a haunting riff on Frederick Knott’s stage play “Wait Until Dark.” The cat-and-wound-mouse dynamic between the boring Annie Wilkes and the author Paul Sheldon would have moviegoers pinned to their seats if they were shot and, especially, hit right.

Although we know that Reiner knocked it out of the park with James Caan and Kathy Bates (who won the Oscar for Best Actress), there was a point where the project almost went ahead with Warren Beatty, who was on then a star of Nicholson’s stature, in the role. of Paul. But why didn’t this happen?

In a 1990 Los Angeles Times article about the making of “Misery,” Reiner revealed that, while he was working with legendary screenwriter William Goldman on the adaptation, Warren Beatty expressed interest in the project. As the star has been for a while, he started putting notes on the script. Per Reiner:

“He was very interested in the part for a while. He had great ideas for the character of the writer, making him a lot less passive. Warren is very smart, but he’s hard to pin down. So it wasn’t working out. . Either we weren’t far enough or he was a little afraid to make a commitment.”

Beatty can be a surprisingly intuitive artist, but when he’s working for another director, he has a penchant for seizing control of a production if it doesn’t go according to his sometimes vague wishes. As Jeremy Pikser, who won an Oscar nomination for Best Original Screenplay for “Bulworth” (with Beatty as a co-writer), told Peter Biskind in the author’s biography “Star: How Warren Beatty Seduced America,” Beatty “was control, and nobody knows what’s going on but him.”

It was probably for the best for all concerned when Beatty eventually lost interest and turned his attention to the excellent “Dick Tracy.” Beatty’s control-freak nature aside, I have a hard time imagining him crawling towards a hacked loogie like Caan did on the film set. So we got two classics instead of one, and I’ll take that trade-off any day.