One of the best parts of Steven Spielberg's new movie, Ready Player One, is a sequence set inside of Stanley Kubrick's movie of The Shining. As acknowledged on screen, Stephen King is not a fan of that adaptation of his book. But hopefully King isn't upset with the tribute to Kubrick over himself there, because Spielberg is still interested in someday making a movie out of King and Peter Straub's fantasy novel The Talisman.
According to an interview in Entertainment Weekly with both Spielberg and King, the former has been interested in the material since 1982, before it was even published. He tried a decade ago to turn the story into a miniseries, but it didn't work out. “At that time it was just too rich for TNT’s blood," he told EW. "Then I pulled it back and decided to try to reconfigure it once again as a feature film."
“Several times he came very close to making it, and there were a lot of discussions about that," King added of The Talisman, which is about a 12-year-old boy who travels to a parallel universe to find the titular object, which can cure his mother's cancer.
Don't expect Spielberg to direct the adaptation, though. He's got enough other projects going on (Indiana Jones 5 and West Side Story are his next two). He would probably produce the project, which could still work better as a miniseries, especially now that there are so many more outlets for the medium, and with richer blood. Spielberg said of his longtime interest:
Universal bought the book for me, so it wasn’t optioned. It was an outright sale of the book...I’m hoping to get this movie made in the next couple of years. I’m not committing to the project as a director, I’m just saying that it’s something that I’ve wanted to see come to theaters for the last 35 years.
It's not exactly news that The Talisman could finally happen very soon. Last fall, after King became even more fashionable following the success of It, we learned that Universal and Spielberg's Amblin Entertainment was moving ahead with Josh Boone (The Fault in Our Stars) writing the screenplay.
Spielberg and King also told EW about all the times they nearly collaborated in the past. Spielberg tried to get King to co-write the script for Poltergeist, but communication was slower back then and King got the message too late. "I was on a ship going across the Atlantic to England," King explained.
A decade later, they started to work together on an idea, which evolved into King's miniseries Rose Red without Spielberg involved. Finally, five years ago, Spielberg and King found themselves credited on the same thing when the former served as an executive producer on the King-based series Under the Dome.
As for Spielberg properly paying King respectful homage, he included a nod to King's Christine in Ready Player One, too.
