The Stand

Rospo Pallenberg: the fat guy to Romero and King's Hot Girls

Genre: Epic (I’d use Sprawling, but I’ve never seen that used as a genre).

About: Legend goes when King met Romero he handed him copy of The Stand with an inscription that read something like “I hope to work with you one day and maybe we can work on this”. To horror fans, this is like Batman and Superman teaming up. Legendary. The duo, of course, made Creepshow, which is not high art but a pretty enjoyable collection of short horror stories. Basically, The Stand proved too daunting too adapt into a single film. If you ask me, this was a futile challenge from the beginning. The Stand is a modern day epic. A modern day Lord of the Rings, and you saw what happened when they tried to adapt that into a single film. The Stand needs to be three films (The Outbreak, The Journey West, and The Stand). So, King couldn’t adapt it. Rospo Pallenberg was hired. (Apparently because of his Excalibur script, which is pretty forgettable. I remember the crucifixion scene from that film and that’s about it.) I don’t know how, but somehow, King and Romero loved Pallenberg’s script. (This is the equivalent of Batman and Superman letting some sissy ass superhero like Luke Cage into their group.) The studio had a falling out (Cause the script sucked? Cause nobody wanted to play these flat characters? Cause they got smart?) and The Stand was never directed by Romero. Instead, Mick Garris directed the miniseries with a script King rewrote from scratch. And while the miniseries is not a great adaptation, it sure beats the snot out of Pallenberg’s crapolific script.

Writer: Rospo Pallenberg….I really wanted to rip him to pieces, but he looks like my old French teacher so I’m going to take it easy on him. His credits include such illustrious films as “The Exorcist 2”, a thirteen year gap of no credits, and three recent films “Memoris of Hadrian”, “Vercingetorix” and “Sibriskiy tsiryulnik” I can only assume are foreign produced films. Now much fanfare has been made over Excalibur, and I think we can safely say it’s the only potentially worthwhile film Pallenberg wrote. But, the thing is, structurally and character wise it’s a piece of crap. It’s way too ambitious, doesn’t create reasonable story archs, and pretty much veers all over the place. And while I normally don’t agree with him, Ebert called the film “maddeningly arbitrary”. What a good way to describe The Stand script! On a positive note, he wrote The Emerald Forest (which Boorman also directed) which is a favorite of mine. But Excalibur and Emerald Forest are both really shoddy adaptations of novels, which entirely miss the point.

Premise: A super-flu with an insanely high communicability rate is released from a government lab and kills over 99.9 percent of the population. The survivors have dreams which cause them either to flock to either devilish Walking Dude in Las Vegas or the saintly Mother Abigail in Boulder, Colorado. Ultimately, there’s a showdown between the forces of good and evil to decide who will control the world: God or Satan.

I know, I know. I blasted Sam Hamm’s script for Watchmen yesterday, and I’m about to do the same. But, The Stand is my favorite work of literature. Ever. And I know that may place me in the group of 40 something women who light incense candles and read Stephen King to their dozen-some cats….but it’s so great. If I had been born a few decades earlier, I may have felt the same way about Tolkein’s stuff. But, this is the film that made me want to be a writer. I remember watching it secretly against my mother’s wishes when I was in third grade (wasn’t allowed to read King until I was fourteen years old). And I was blown away. I remember making a pact with God one night while taking out the trash that all I really wanted was to be a survivor in a Stand-like world. Weird, I know.
How the hell did Rospo Pallenberg get this job? I mean, really? Excalibur is not that great film. Pallenberg didn’t have that many credits. He doesn’t seem to get character development, the point of King’s novel, or even how to structure things with any talent. He’s not nearly as big a hack as Sam Hamm, though. (If Sam Hamm’s crap factor was an 8, Pallenberg’s is a 6) but he’s writing an adaptation of the master of horror for Romero, who directed several of the best horror films ever. This guy is playing in the big league. I mean, if Spielberg can get the best writing talent on the market, it only follows through that these guys can at least can mediocre writers.
I once tried to summarize The Stand to a friend of mine. And I failed massively. This story is so jam packed with details and plot events, it’s impossible to do it justice without writing several thousand words. Furthermore, I’m not quite sure if I should encapsulate Pallenberg’s mess of a story or King’s novel. Also, I don’t want to potentially ruin the novel for anybody who has yet to read the novel. (If you haven’t, let me do you a favor right now….http://www.amazon.com/Stand-Expanded-First-Complete-Signet/dp/0451169530) What I want to talk about instead is places in this script where Pallenberg fails massively. Like stumbles over his own feet fails. How King and Romero loved this script I have no idea (unless they were lying, which I would highly suspect cause this script blows donkey balls).
First off, The Stand is a surreal piece of fiction because it works on this idea that a flu could actually break out and kill off most of the population. This is creepy because he sets it up in a believable way and then goes full tilt boogie as he shows the population dying off. What Rospo Pallenberg does is gloss over the lethalness and the deadliness of this disease. He doesn’t even include scenes with people dying off. Without this, The Stand doesn’t really have an Act One. It has a set up. But it doesn’t make good on it’s promise of showing the entire country wiped out. And resultantly, it’s a whole lot less scary. Now, why couldn’t Pallenberg have included a few haunting scenes like this (from Excalibur):
“Dangling from the branches of a dead tree are a dozen dead knights of the Round Table, crows pecking at the rotting flesh in the chinks of armor. Perceval rides up, cries out in horror, and spurs his horse away.”
He kind of does similar things with the character’s nightmares. (There’s a really creepy scene with Fanny dreaming about the Walking Dude performing an abortion with an iron hanger). But we’d be just as petrified for these characters if he described the surrounding world in such scary terms.
And, how does Pallenberg reveal the super-flu outbreak and what cause it. At the end of the first act, Stu Redman holds a government agent at gun point until the guy through a series of ridiculous exposition tells all about the outbreak and what happened. (In doing this, Pallenberg loses two things….the perfect set up to the story, one sick guy explodes into a whole sick nation, and the tension of the government trying cover up the issue. For that matter, Pallenberg has characters talk and explain backstory through exposition in scenes which obviously would never fly (Redman basically tells Franny she’s a “gift from heaven”, there’s this goofy ass sequence inspired by the novel where Nadie talks about her first contact with the Walking Dude on a Ouija board which culminates in holding a message backwards up to a mirror…really Rospo? Really? Kubrick didn’t even get this right and you think you can?. And, the Walking Dude rambles on about what a bad ass he is which ruins the character’s intrigue ENTIRELY, he’s mysterious and people are always kind of guess these things about him.)
Also, Redman’s entire tension to go west is that he’s late and the group is already starting to move without them. Pallenberg glosses over this completely. For that matter, I don’t really think Pallenberg gets any of the characters. Pallenberg tries to make Larry Underwood both an asshole (which he isn’t at all, he’s just somebody caught up in stuff, his dialogue is excessively strong in the swearing) and has him pour his heart out to his dying mother 30 pages in (this ruins Larry’s entire character development, he NEVER has a chance to say goodbye to people which is what his central pain is as a person). Pallenberg misinterprets Tom Cullen (he’s simple hearted which is the whole reason he makes it as a spy in Las Vegas, see Melville’s The Good Confidence Man Rospo, he wouldn’t be having sexual innuendo laden conversations with Julie Lawry). Nick Andros is entirely skipped over as the Christ-like figure as the group. (So he becomes entirely forgettable, and Rospo gives Leo, the ferile kid Larry picks up, as having Nick’s telepathy gifts…we’re supposed to be condensing a plot not expanding). There’s absolutely no Glen Batemen or Ralph (who are two of my favorite characters in the entire novel) and the trip west….don’t even let me get started. It elevates the whole thing right into terrible. (I may have given it an Atilla rating, but not after the last twenty pages).
On her death bed, naming the people to send west, Mother Abigail includes one of the miscellaneous women, Stu, Larry and Tom Cullen (that’s right Tom Cullen, the mentally retarded guy, and Pallenberg passed on having one of the well developed characters for a bit player….yeah, cause that makes sense). Furthermore, when Stu falls he fights with Larry (who has no problem leaving Stu) and says he’ll kill him which skips over Larry’s character development ENTIRELY and turns Stu (who is supposed to be the central HERO of the group into a dick). Furthermore, Pallenberg explains through Mother Abigail earlier on that so many bad people ended up with the devil in Las Vegas because they weren’t smart enough (this skips over the point of The Stand entirely and what makes it frightening and politically relevant where people end up…..the point is not that people are either, but rather people flocked to whatever was most convenient and didn’t have the ability or wherewithal to see why the Walking Dude was evil….this is the whole brainwashed thing about the Patty Hearst thing and also Nazi Germany (remember all the swastika reminiscent patterns in the miniseries?) that influenced King in the first place. And Lloyd Henreid (whose whole point is he’s loyal to the Walking Dude to the end, which is kind of redeemable in a weird way, ends up speaking out about people being crucified and is punished by Flagg…not sure why Pallenberg needed to blend these characters either). Rospo is not nearly as incompetent as Samm Hamm (who makes me wonder how anybody could pay him money to write in the first place) and he does a decent job of combining characters, but he totally misses a lot of the more sophisticated points to The Stand and resultantly drops the ball with the film. Thank God Romero, or anybody else, didn’t direct a film off of this script because it would have sucked terribly and potentially ruined The Stand for generations to come. Thank God for that.

[ X ] - Scooby Doo (Complete Crap)

Atilla (Poor, Few Redeeming Qualities)

Wedding Crashers (Mediocre)

Hot Rod (Good)

Definitely Maybe (Pretty Darn Good)

Isla Prospects: Is it just me, or would Isla do a kick ass Nadine? Certainly not in this script, but if there’s a remake of the Stand in the next decade before Isla gets too old she could knock this role out of the park.

What I Learned: This is something I’m yet to master as a writer, and Rospo only really did well because King is the supreme master of it. Characters should each talk differently. Each with different dialects and euphamisms and manners of speech. I was taken aback by how this was pulled off during The Stand. (Although, Rospo can’t really do dialogue or at least he can’t in this script. When people aren’t exploding with exposition they’re relating to themselves with dialogue that doesn’t really feel nature and seems more like an attempt to ping pong through all the central points of the novel). Good dialogue with a lackbluster plot can be pretty good, good dialogue with a plot like the Stand can be killer. In places, this script approaches cruising level but stumbles after a page or two.