Storm of the Century Read online

  1 ln the end, S & P were reduced to screaming about some fairly petty shit. In Part One, for instance, a fisherman says that the approaching bad weather is apt to be "one mother of a storm." S

  & P insisted the line be changed, perhaps believing this was my sly way of implying "one motherfucker of a storm," thus further corrupting American morals, causing more schoolyard shootings, etc. I immediately made one of my whining calls, pointing out the phrase "the mother of all . . ." had been originated by Saddam Hussein and had since passed into popular usage. After some consideration, Standards and Practices allowed the phrase, only insisting "the dialogue not be delivered in a salacious way." Absolutely not. Salacious dialogue on network TV is reserved for shows like 3rd Rock from the Sun and Dharma and Greg.

  and know what he can do. Mick had other fish to fry, however (the world would be a much simpler place if people would just drop everything and come running when I need them), and so Mark Carliner and I went hunting for a director.

  Around this time I had snagged a direct-to-video film called The Twilight Man from the rental place down the street from my house. I'd never heard of it, but it looked atmospheric and starred the always reliable Dean Stockwell. It seemed like the perfect Tuesday evening time-passer, in other words. I also grabbed Rambo, a proven commodity, in case The Twilight Man should prove to be a lemon, but Rambo never got out of the box that night. Twilight Man was low-budget (it was an original made for the Starz cable network, I found out later), but it was nifty as hell just the same.

  Tim Matheson also starred, and he projected some of the qualities I hoped to see in Storm's Mike Anderson: goodness and decency, yes . . . but with a sense of latent violence twisting through the character like a streak of iron. Even better, Dean Stockwell played a wonderfully quirky villain: a soft-spoken, courtly southerner who uses his computer savvy to ruin a stranger's life ... all because the stranger has asked him to put out his cigar!

  The lighting was moody and blue, the computer gimmickry was smartly executed, the pace was deftly maintained, and the performance levels were very high. I reran the credits and made a note of the director's name, Craig R. Baxley. I knew it from two other things: a good cable-TV movie about Brigham Young starring Charlton Heston as Young, and a not-so-good SF movie, / Come in Peace, starring Dolph Lundgren. (The most memorable thing about that film was the protagonist's final line to the cyborg: "You go in pieces.") I talked with Mark Carliner, who looked at The Twilight Man, liked it, and discovered Baxley was available. I followed up with a call of my own and sent Craig the three hundred-page script of Storm. Craig called back, excited and full of ideas. I liked his ideas and I liked his enthusiasm; what I liked most of all was that the sheer size of the project didn't seem to faze him. The three of us met in Portland, Maine, in February of 1997, had dinner at my daughter's restaurant, and pretty much closed the deal.

  Craig Baxley is a tall, broad-shouldered man, handsome, prone to Hawaiian shirts, and probably a few years older than he looks (at a glance you'd guess he was about forty, but his first theatrical work

  5

  was Action Jackson, starring Carl Weathers, and so he's got to be older than that). He has the laid-back, "no problem, man" attitude of a California surfer (which he once was; he has also worked as a Hollywood stunt-player) and a sense of humor drier than an Errol Flynn foreign legion flick. The low-key attitude and the nah, I'm just fuckin' with you sense of humor tend to obscure the real Craig Baxley, who is focused, dedicated, imaginative, and a touch autocratic (show me a director without at least a dash of Stalin and I'll show you a bad director). What impressed me most about the dailies as Storm of the Century began its long march in February of 1998 was where Craig called

  "Cut!" At first it's unsettling, and then you realize he's doing what only the most visually gifted directors are capable of: cutting in the camera. As I write this I have begun to see the first

  "outputs" sequences of cut footage on videotape and thanks to Craig's direction, the show seems almost to be assembling itself. It's risky to assume too much too soon (remember the old newspaper headline "DEWEY DEFEATS TRUMAN"), but based on early returns, I'd say that what you're about to read bears an eerie resemblance to what you will see when ABC telecasts Storm of the Century. My fingers are still crossed, but I think it works. I think it may even be extraordinary. I hope so, but it's best to be realistic. Huge amounts of work go into the making of most films, including those made for television, and very few are extraordinary; given the number of people involved, I suppose it's amazing that any of them work at all. Still, you can't shoot me for hoping, can you?

  The teleplay of Storm was written between December of 1996 and February of 1997. By March of 1997, Mark and Craig and I were sitting at dinner in my daughter Naomi's restaurant (closed now, alas; she's studying for the ministry). By June I was looking at sketches of Andre Linoge's wolfs head cane, and by July I was looking at storyboards. See what I mean about TV people wanting to make shows instead of lunch reservations?

  Exteriors were filmed in Southwest Harbor, Maine, and in San Francisco. Exteriors were also filmed in Canada, about twenty miles north of Toronto, where Little Tall Island's main street was re-created inside an abandoned sugar-refining factory. For a month or two that factory in the town of Oshawa became one of the world's largest soundstages. Little Tail's studio main street went through three

  carefully designed stages of snow-dressing, from a few inches to total burial.* When a group of Southwest Harbor natives on a bus trip visited the Oshawa stage, they were visibly staggered by what they saw when they were escorted through the defunct factory's tall metal doors. It must have been like going home again in the blink of an eye. There are days when making movies has all the glamour of bolting together the rides at a county fair . . . but there are other days when the magic is so rich it dazzles you. The day the people from Southwest Harbor visited the set was one of those days.

  Filming commenced in late February of 1998, on a snowy day in Down East Maine. It finished in San Francisco about eighty shooting days later. As I write this in mid-July, the cutting and editing processes what's known as postproduction has just begun. Optical effects and CGI (computer graphic imaging) effects are being built up one layer at a time. I'm looking at footage with temporary music tracks (many of them lifted from Frank Darabont's film The Shaw-shank Redemption), and so is composer Gary Chang, who will do the show's actual score. Mark Carliner is jousting with ABC in the matter of telecast dates February of 1999, a sweeps period, seems the most probable and I'm watching the cut footage with a contentment that is very rare for me.

  The script that follows makes a complete story, one that's been overlaid with marks we call them "scenes" and "fades" and "inserts" showing the director where to cut the whole into pieces . .

  . because, unless you're Alfred Hitchcock filming Rope, films are always piecework. Between March and June of this year, Craig Baxley filmed the script as scripts are usually filmed out of sequence, often with tired actors working in the middle of the night, always under pressure and finished up with a box of pieces called "the dailies." I can turn from where I'm sitting and look at my own set of those dailies roughly sixty cassettes in red cardboard cases. But here is the odd thing: putting the dailies back together again to create the finished show isn't like putting a jigsaw puzzle back together. It

  *Our snow consisted of potato flakes and shredded plastic blown in front of giant fans. The effect isn't perfect . . . but it's the best I've ever seen during my time in the film business. It should look good, dammit; the total cost of the snow was two million dollars.

  should be, but it isn't . . . because, like most books, most movies are living things with breath and a heartbeat. Usually the putting-together results in something less than the sum of the parts. In rare and wonderful cases it results in more. This time it might be more. I hope it will be.

  One final matter: what about people who say movies (especially TV movies) are a lesser medium than books,
as instantly disposable as Kleenex? Well, that's no longer exactly true, is it? The script, thanks to the good people at Pocket Books, is here anytime you want to take it down and look at it.

  And the show itself, I'd guess, will eventually be available on videotape or videodisc, just as many hardcover books are eventually available in paperback. You'll be able to buy it or rent it when (and if) you choose. And, as with a book, you will be able to leaf back to check on things you may have 6

  missed or to savor something you particularly enjoyed; you will use the REWIND button on your remote control instead of your finger, that's all. (And if you're one of those awful people who have to peek ahead to the end, there is always FAST FORWARD or SEARCH, I suppose . . . although I tell you, you will be damned for doing such a thing).

  I won't argue, either pro or con, that a novel for television is the equal of a novel in a book; I will just say that, once you subtract the distractions (ads for Tampax, ads for Ford cars and trucks, local newsbreaks, and so on), I myself think that is possible. And I would remind you that the man most students of literature believe to be the greatest of English writers worked in an oral and visual medium, and not (at least primarily) in the medium of print. I'm not trying to compare myself to Shakespeare that would be bizarre but I think it entirely possible that he would be writing for the movies or for television as well as for Off Broadway if he were alive today. Even possibly calling up Standards and Practices at ABC to try to persuade them that the violence in Act V of Julius Caesar is necessary . . . not to mention tastefully done.

  In addition to the folks at Pocket Books who undertook to publish this project, I'd like to thank Chuck Verrill, who agented the deal and served as liaison between Pocket Books and ABC-TV. At ABC I'd like to thank Bob Iger, who put such amazing trust in me; also Maura Dunbar, Judd Parkin, and Mark Pedowitz. Also the folks at Standards

  and Practices, who really aren't that bad (in fact I think it would be fair to say they did one mother of a job on this).

  Thanks are due to Craig Baxley for taking on one of the largest film projects ever attempted for network TV; also to Mark Carliner and Tom Brodek, who put it all together. Mark, who won just about all the TV awards there are for Wallace, is a great guy to have on your team. I'd also like to thank my wife, Tabby, who has been so supportive over the years. As a writer herself, she understands my foolishness pretty well.

  Stephen King

  Bangor, Maine 04401 July 18, 1998PART 1 Linoge

  Act 1

  FADE IN ON:

  1 EXTERIOR: MAIN STREET, LITTLE TALL ISLAND LATE AFTERNOON.

  SNOW is flying past the lens of THE CAMERA, at first so fast and so hard we can't see anything at all. THE WIND IS SHRIEKING. THE CAMERA starts to MOVE FORWARD, and we see a STUTTERY

  ORANGE LIGHT. It's the blinker at the corner of Main Street and Atlantic Street Little Tail's only town intersection. The blinker is DANCING WILDLY in the wind. Both streets are deserted, and why not? This is a full-throated blizzard. We can see some dim lights in the buildings, but no human beings. The snow is drifted halfway up the shop windows.

  MIKE ANDERSON speaks with a light Maine accent.

  MIKE ANDERSON (voice-over)

  My name is Michael Anderson, and I'm not what you'd call a Rhodes scholar. I don't have much in the way of philosophy, either, but I know one thing: in this world, you have to pay as you go.

  Usually a lot. Sometimes all you have. That's a lesson I thought I learned nine years ago, during what folks in these parts call the Storm of the Century.

  The BLINKER LIGHT GOES DEAD. So do all the other brave little lights we saw in the storm. Now there's only the WIND and the BLOWING SNOW.

  MIKE

  I was wrong. I only started learning during the big blow. I finished just last week.

  7

  DISSOLVE TO:

  2 EXTERIOR: MAINE WOODS, FROM THE AIR (HELICOPTER) DAY.

  It's the cold season all the trees except the firs are bare, branches reaching up like fingers into the white sky. There's snow on the ground, but only in patches, like bundles of dirty laundry. The ground skims by below us, the woods broken by the occasional twisty line of two-lane blacktop or little New England town.

  MIKE (voice-over)

  I grew up in Maine . . . but in a way, I never really lived in Maine. I think anyone from my part of the world would say the same.

  All at once we hit the seacoast, land's end, and what he's telling us maybe makes sense.

  Suddenly the woods are gone; we get a glimpse of gray-blue water surging and spuming against rocks and headlands . . . and then there's just water beneath us until we: DISSOLVE TO:

  3 EXTERIOR: LITTLE TALL ISLAND (HELICOPTER) DAY.

  There's plenty of bustling activity on the docks as the lobster boats are either secured or boathoused. The smaller craft are being removed by way of the town's landing slip. People pull them away behind their four-wheel drives. On the dock, BOYS AND YOUNG MEN are carrying lobster traps into the long, weather-beaten building with GODSOE FISH AND LOBSTER printed on the side.

  There's laughter and excited talk; a few bottles of something warm are passed around. The storm is coming. It's always exciting when the storm is coming.

  Near Godsoe's is a trim little volunteer fire department firehouse just big enough for two pumpers. LLOYD WISHMAN and FERD ANDREWS are out washing one of the trucks right now.

  Atlantic Street runs uphill from the docks to town. The hill is lined with pretty little New England houses. South of the docks is a wooded headland, with a ramshackle flight of steps leading down, zigzag, to the water. North, along the beach, are the homes of the rich folks. At the far northern point of land is a squatty white lighthouse, maybe forty feet high. The automated light turns constantly, its glow pale but readable in the daylight. On top is a long radio antenna.

  MIKE (voice-over)

  (continues)

  Folks from Little Tall send their taxes to Augusta, same as other folks, and we got either a lobster or a loon on our license plates, same as other folks, and we root for the University of Maine's teams, especially the women's basketball team, same as other folks . . .

  On the fishing boat Escape, SONNY BRAUTIGAN is stuffing nets into a hatch and battening down.

  Nearby, ALEX HABER is making Escape fast with some big-ass ropes.

  JOHNNY HARRIMAN (voice)

  8

  Better double it, Sonny the weather guy says it's coming on.

  JOHNNY comes around the pilothouse, looking at the sky. SONNY turns to him.

  SONNY BRAUTIGAN

  Seen 'em come on every winter, Big John. They howl in, they howl out. July always comes.

  SONNY gives the hatch a test and puts his foot up on the rail, watching ALEX finish. Behind them, LUCIEN FOURNIER joins JOHNNY. LUCIEN goes to the live well, flips it open, and looks in as: ALEX HABER Still . . . they say this one's gonna be somethin' special.

  LUCIEN yanks out a lobster and holds it up.

  LUCIEN FOURNIER Forgot one, Sonny.

  SONNY BRAUTIGAN One for the pot brings good luck.

  LUCIEN FOURNIER

  (to the lobster) Storm of the Century coming, mon frere so the radio say.

  (knocks on the shell) Good t'ing you got your coat on, hey?

  He tosses Bob the lobster back into the live well SPLASH! The four men leave the boat, and THE

  CAMERA CONTINUES TO TRACK.

  MIKE (voice-over)

  (continues)

  But we ain't the same. Life out on the islands is different. We pull together when we have to.

  SONNY, JOHNNY, ALEX, and LUCIEN are on the ramp now, maybe carrying gear.

  SONNY BRAUTIGAN We'll get through her.

  9

  JOHNNY HARRIMAN Ayuh, like always.

  LUCIEN FOURNIER When you mind the swell, you mind the boat.

  ALEX HABER What's a Frenchman like you know?

  LUCIEN takes a mock swing at him. They all laugh and go on. We watch SONNY, LUCIEN, ALEX, and JO
HNNY go into Godsoe's. THE CAMERA starts up Atlantic Street toward the blinker we saw earlier. It then SLIDES RIGHT, showing a piece of the business section and bustling traffic on the street.

  MIKE (voice-over)

  (continues)

  And we can keep a secret when we have to. We kept our share back in 1989. (pause) And the people who live there keep them still.

  We come to ANDERSON'S GENERAL STORE. People hurry in and out. Three WOMEN emerge: ANGELA CARVER, MRS. KINGSBURY, and ROBERTA COIGN.

  MIKE (voice-over)

  (continues) I know.

  ROBERTA COIGN

  All right, I've got my canned goods. Let it come.

  MRS. KINGSBURY

  I just pray we don't lose the power. I can't cook on a woodstove. I'd burn water on that damned thing. A big storm's only good for one thing

  ANGELA Ayuh, and my Jack knows what it is.

  The other two look at her, surprised, and then they all GIGGLE LIKE GIRLS and head for their cars.

  MIKE (voice-over)

  (continues) I stay in touch.

  10

  3A EXTERIOR: THE SIDE OF A FIRE TRUCK.

  A HAND polishes the gleaming red hide with a rag, then pulls away. LLOYD WISHMAN looks at his own face, pleased.

  FERD ANDREWS (off-screen) Radio says it's gonna snow a bitch.