With the boldness that comes from age, success, and a whole shitload of projects in development, Stephen King is now free to shoot his mouth off any way he likes, thank you very much. He exercised this privilege in a recent interview with Rolling Stone, where King said he thinks Ernest Hemingway “sucks” (not enough words, probably), The Tommyknockers is “awful” (too much cocaine, he says, and he’s sorry), and he “doesn’t get” the cult that’s grown up around The Shining (no great revelation there, considering King has frequently expressed his disappointment with Kubrick’s film over the years). Speaking of, King is also not a fan of the recent documentary Room 237, a double strike against the film considering Stanley Kubrick’s former assistant also thought it was full of shit. Anyway:
Did you see that new documentary Room 237 about obsessive fans of Stanley Kubrick’s The Shining?
Yeah. Well, let me put it this way – I watched about half of it and got sort of impatient with it and turned it off.
Why?
These guys were reaching. I’ve never had much patience for academic bullshit. It’s like Dylan says, “You give people a lot of knives and forks, they’ve gotta cut something.” And that was what was going on in that movie.
You’ve been extremely critical of Kubrick’s film over the years. Is it possible he made a great movie that just so happens to be a horrible adaptation of your book?
No. I never saw it that way at all. And I never see any of the movies that way. The movies have never been a big deal to me. The movies are the movies. They just make them. If they’re good, that’s terrific. If they’re not, they’re not. But I see them as a lesser medium than fiction, than literature, and a more ephemeral medium.
King, presumably, likes the miniseries of Room 237 much better.
[Story via Uproxx]