This is why King’s stories are perfect for the big screen

While others his age were making the leap from Dr. Seuss to Judy Blume, JT Mollner was working his way, page by difficult page, through Stephen King’s “Carrie.” He was 7 years old. The Las Vegas native who wrote and directed last year’s acclaimed “Strange Darling” is now in the King business.

Mollner scripted “The Long Walk,” the ambling nightmare of a movie based on King’s novel, which hits theaters this weekend, and he’s deep into adapting the author’s “The Girl Who Loved Tom Gordon,” which he’ll also direct. “It’s really difficult to put it in words,” Mollner says of what the author means to him. “I’m not just a fan. I’m sort of a product of his influence on many levels.”

Without having consumed most of King’s work over the years, he doubts he’d even be a writer. “He’s one of those key people, and I owe so much to him,” Mollner says. “It’s been a true honor that he’s trusted me with his material.”

Before “Carrie,” there was “The Long Walk.” The tale of 100 teenage boys who volunteer for an annual contest in which they’ll walk nonstop until all but one of them are dead was written when King was roughly the same age as its characters. It was King’s first novel, finished in 1967 while he was studying at the University of Maine. It wasn’t published, though, until 1979, five years after the breakthrough success of his debut work, “Carrie.”

“Carrie” has been adapted multiple times, as have other King stories, including “It,” “The Stand,” “The Shining” and “Salem’s Lot.” Hollywood can’t seem to keep its hands off his 1977 short story “Children of the Corn.” But “The Long Walk” had been considered unfilmable. The reasons behind the titular event are never explained, nor are its entrants’ motivations beyond the contest’s prize: anything the winner wants for the rest of his life.

There’s nothing in the novel to really put a year or even a decade to it. There are no cutaways to what’s going on in the rest of the struggling, militarized country, nor are there flashbacks to show how things got that way.

The only thing readers learn about the contestants is what they reveal to each other as they walk for miles — dozens and hundreds of miles through any sort of weather with zero breaks, not even for the bathroom — until they either drop dead of natural causes or are shot by soldiers for spending too much time below the minimum speed of 4 miles per hour.

Others have tried to adapt “The Long Walk.” Zombie auteur George Romero couldn’t crack it. Frank Darabont, who brought King’s stories to movie screens with “The Shawshank Redemption,” “The Green Mile” and “The Mist,” couldn’t make it happen, either.

Mollner started stripping the story to get to its heart: the fast friendship between the baby-faced Ray Garraty (portrayed by Cooper Hoffman), whose home state of Maine serves as the Long Walk’s launching point, and the hardened Peter McVries (David Jonsson), who should be one of Garraty’s fiercest rivals.

The 100 boys became 50. With input from King, the 4 mph was lowered to a more reasonable 3 mph. Some aspects of the story were fleshed out, and viewers were given an explanation for the Long Walk and its circumstances.

Mollner would run any major changes from the novel past “The Long Walk” director Francis Lawrence, who knows how to put together a movie about deadly contests for teenagers, having helmed three “Hunger Games” sequels and two prequels. Those new ideas ultimately had to be approved by King.

“But he’s very open-minded,” Mollner says of the author. “He’s not precious. And he trusts the people he approves.”

It’s been something of a whirlwind of late for Mollner, who bided his time for more than eight years between movies.

His first feature, the ultraviolent Western “Outlaws and Angels,” debuted at the 2016 Sundance Film Festival. His second film, the messy, nonsequential grindhouse homage “Strange Darling,” hit theaters in August 2024 as one of the better-reviewed movies of the year.

Tribune News Service