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What if I told you that Stephen King, one of the bestselling authors of the modern age, once attempted to become a film auteur? One that starred Emilio Estevez at the height of his fame, right after The Breakfast Club came out. A movie that sported a soundtrack written and recorded by AC/DC, King's favorite band. A movie that cast a young Giancarlo Esposito (Breaking Bad) before his work with Spike Lee.
Now, what if I told you that movie was terrible?
It's all true. Despite the fact that King has had more film adaptations than any living author, his one and only attempt at film direction has been widely panned ever since it hit the big screen.
Maximum Overdrive is loosely based on Stephen King's short story "Trucks" and follows a group of people trapped at the Dixie Boy Truck Stop after a comet makes all the machines on Earth sentient and homicidal.
It opens with a cameo from Stephen King as a bank patron using an ATM before the machine curses him out. Which promts King to utter the first hilariously bad line:
"Honey! Come over here, sugar buns! This machine just called me an asshole."
Immediately after, a bascule bridge opens during peak rush hour, turning several vehicles, including a truck full of watermelon.
The film features other legendary pieces of dialogue, such as:
"Where's your sense of loyalty? You pukey things!"
"When we get to that truck stop, we're going to be safe. Oh, right. Oh, yes."
And who could forget:
"You ever seen that much nothing at 10:15 in the morning, hero?"
It should come as no surprise that this movie is chaotic from start to finish. A little league team is terrorized by a vending machine that's firing soda cans, ultimately killing the coach. A horde of trucks–led by a truck with a giant green goblin– circles the Dixie Boy in shark-like fashion. At one point, there's a montage of the survivors refueling trucks set to "Hell's Bells" by AC/DC.
So how did this uneven mess with a bestselling soundtrack and two Golden Raspberry nominations come to be?
Dino De Laurentiis, the biggest Italian producer of all time by the mid-80s, came to America and set up a studio in North Carolina. Shortly after, he signed a 3 picture deal with Stephen King, which led to Firestarter, Cat's Eye, and finally Maximum Overdrive.
Firestarter was a huge success. So much so that De Laurentiis let King take a crack at screenwriting for Cat's Eye and take a more active role in production. By the time Cat's Eye premiered, King decided he wanted to give directing a try.
At the very beginning of production, Stephen King rode a motorcycle from his home in Maine to the studio in North Carolina in order to get a better idea of how scary semi-trucks were up close. Upon his arrival at the studio, he was denied entry because they refused to believe he had anything to do with any production happening on the lot. Why? Well, that's probably best answered with a quote from King himself:
"I was doing a lot of cocaine, and I was drinking a lot. You can tell!"
Stephen King arrived at the lot looking disheveled, coked up, and rambling about how he was directing a movie about evil trucks that came to life because of a comet.
This incident set the tone for the rest of the shoot. It is said that Stephen King would start the morning with a beer at 6 am and be on his tenth by 8:30. The cinematographer, Armando Nannuzzi, was Italian and spoke barely any English. The task of translating largely fell to gaffer Jock Brandis, who was Canadian and spoke barely any Italian.
A proper conversation between King and Nannuzzi was impossible. The little communication they had would be along the lines of Nannuzzi saying, "Do you want to get extra coverage?" and King replying, "Yeah... sure if you think so." At one point, they got into an argument, and Nannuzzi started shouting in Italian, and King just started laughing because he couldn't understand a word of it.
This communication deficit came to a peak when filming a scene of a lawnmower going rogue. King insisted on keeping the blades on the mower for "realism" despite the blades not being visible in the shot. There was a technical malfunction, and King failed to tell the FX team to stop in time. The lawnmower chewed up part of the camera and split the wood of a matte box. A rogue splinter shot off and caught Nannuzzi in the eye. Production stopped for 2 weeks, and Nannuzzi wore an eyepatch for the remainder of the shoot before being fitted for a glass eye.
It goes without saying that the film was a commercial failure and was universally panned. The only reason it didn't win the Golden Raspberry awards for Worst Actor and Worst Director is that Prince had decided to direct and star in Under the Cherry Moon that same year.
Despite all that, most of the cast and crew look back fondly on their time with Maximum Overdrive. Many note the day that Stephen King rented out a whole movie theater so they could all screen Godzilla and Night of the Living Dead with commentary from the master of horror himself. King has a sense of humor about the film's failure, but has disowned the film, referring to it as a "moron movie."
While it didn't succeed by any metric Hollywood cares about, there's something to be said for Maximum Overdrive. For better or for worse, be it through a cult following or longstanding infamy, Maximum Overdrive has stood the test of time. Despite its many weaknesses, we're still talking about it 40 years later, and not many movies can say that.
