When Jack Nicholson starred in Stanley Kubrick's adaptation of The Shining, the horror stigma surrounding Stephen King has temporarily disappeared in Hollywood. Although he tended to write dark, gritty fiction, if the A-list team of Kubrick and Nicholson had deemed his material worthy of a major motion picture, perhaps box office and award-winning glory could have been derived from his other books (which the prolific author is was pumping at an incredible pace).

This notion would be contested somewhat fiercely during the 1980s. While acclaimed directors like David Cronenberg and Rob Reiner received favorable reviews for The Dead Zone and Stand By Me, respectively, critics didn't have much use for Kuyo, Firestarter, Children of the Corn, Silver Bullet ", "Pet Sematary" and "Maximum Overdrive" directed by the king. Indeed, if not for Reiner's Stand By Me, the prestige picture potential of the King story might have been completely obliterated.

This was the Hollywood state of play for King in 1990 when Reiner was hot "When Harry met Sally . . ." decided that an adaptation of the author's 1987 novel Misery would be his next feature. A taut, 310-page thriller about a novelist held hostage in the snowy middle of nowhere by his number one fan, Misery read like a grim riff on Frederick Knott's stage play Wait Till Dark. The cat-and-wounded-mouse dynamic between the feisty Annie Wilkes and author Paul Sheldon will have moviegoers glued to their seats if shot and, especially, thrown straight.

While we know Reiner knocked it out of the park with James Caan and Kathy Bates (who won the Oscar for Best Actress), there was a point when the project almost moved forward with Warren Beatty, then a star of Nicholson's stature, in the role. of Paul. But why didn't this happen?

In a 1990 Los Angeles Times article about the making of "Misery," Reiner discovered that while working with legendary screenwriter William Goldman of the adaptation, Warren Beatty expressed interest in the project. As has long been the habit of the star, he began to give notes on the script. According to Reiner:

“He was really interested in the part for a while. He had great ideas for the writer's character, making him much less passive. Warren is very smart, but hard to pin down. "Either we weren't far enough or he was a little afraid to commit."

Beatty can be a remarkably intuitive artist, but when working for another director, he has a tendency to take control of the production if it doesn't go according to his sometimes vague wishes. As Jeremy Pixer, who received an Academy Award nomination for best original screenplay for Bullworth (with Beatty as co-writer), told Peter Biskind in his biography of the author, The Star: How Warren Beatty Seduced America, Beatty "gets off the control, and nobody knows what's going on but him."

It probably worked out for the best for everyone involved when Beatty eventually lost interest and turned his attention to the extraordinary "Dick Tracy". Beatty's controlling nature aside, I have a hard time imagining him crawling towards a hacked wardrobe like Kaan on a film set. So we got two classics instead of one, and I'll take that trade-off any day.