Storm of the Century: The Labor Day Hurricane of 1935

Introduction

In most cases—three or four out of every five, let’s say—I know where I was when I got the idea for a certain story, what combination of events (usually mundane) set that story off. The genesis of It, for example, was my crossing a wooden bridge, listening to the hollow thump of my bootheels, and thinking of The Three Billy Goats Gruff. In the case of Cujo it was an actual encounter with an ill-tempered Saint Bernard. Pet Sematary arose from my daughter’s grief when her beloved pet cat, Smucky, was run over on the highway near our house.

Sometimes, however, I just can’t remember how I arrived at a particular novel or story. In these cases the seed of the story seems to be an image rather than an idea, a mental snapshot so powerful it eventually calls characters and incidents the way some ultrasonic whistles supposedly call every dog in the neighborhood. These are, to me, at least, the true creative mysteries: stories that have no real antecedents, that come on their own. The Green Mile began with an image of a huge black man standing in his jail cell and watching the approach of a trusty selling candy and cigarettes from an old metal cart with a squeaky wheel. Storm of the Century also started with a jailhouse image: that of a man (white, not black) sitting on the bunk in his cell, heels drawn up, arms resting on knees, eyes unblinking. This was not a gentle man or a good man, as John Coffey in The Green Mile turned out to be; this was an extremely evil man. Maybe not a man at all. Every time my mind turned back to him—while driving, while sitting in the optometrist’s office and waiting to get my eyes dilated, or worst of all while lying awake in bed at night with the lights out—he looked a little scarier. Still just sitting there on his bunk and not moving, but a little scarier. A little less like a man and a little more like… well, a little more like what was underneath.

Gradually, the story started to spin out from the man… or whatever he was. The man sat on a bunk. The bunk was in a cell. The cell was in the back of the general store on Little Tall Island, which I sometimes think of as Dolores Claiborne’s island. Why in the back of the general store? Because a community as small as the one on Little Tall wouldn’t need a police station, only a part-time constable to take care of the occasional bit of ugliness—an obstreperous drunk, let us say, or a bad-tempered fisherman who sometimes puts his fists on his wife. Who would that constable be? Why, Mike Anderson, of course, owner and operator of the Anderson’s General Store. A nice enough guy, and good with the drunks and the bad-tempered fishermen… but suppose something really bad came along? Something as bad, perhaps, as the malignant demon that invaded Regan in The Exorcist? Something that would just sit there in Mike Anderson’s home-welded cell, looking out, waiting…

Waiting for what?

Why, the storm of course. The storm of the century. A storm big enough to cut Little Tall Island off from the mainland, to throw it entirely upon its own resources. Snow is beautiful; snow is deadly; snow is also a veil, like the one the magician uses to hide his sleight of hand. Cut off from the world, hidden by the snow, my boogeyman in the jail cell (by then I was already thinking of him by his stated name, Andre Linoge) could do great damage. The worst of it, perhaps, without ever leaving that bunk where he sat with his heels up and his arms on his knees.

I had reached this point in my thinking by October or November of 1996; a bad man (or perhaps a monster masquerading as a man) in a jail cell, a storm even bigger than the one that totally paralyzed the northeast corridor in the mid-1970s, a community cast on its own resources. I was daunted by the prospect of creating an entire community (I had done such a thing in two novels, ’Salem’s Lot and Needful Things, and it’s an enormous challenge), but enticed by the possibilities. I also knew I had reached the point where I must write or lose my chance. Ideas that are more complete—the majority of them, in other words—will keep a fair length of time, but a story that rises from a single image, one that exists mostly as potential, seems to be a much more perishable item.

I thought the chances that Storm of the Century would collapse of its own weight were fairly high, but in December of 1996 I began to write, anyway. The final impetus was provided by the realization that if I set my story on Little Tall Island, I had a chance to say some interesting and provocative things about the very nature of community… because there is no community in America as tightly knit as the island communities off the coast of Maine. The people in them are bound together by situation, tradition, common interests, common religious practices, and work that is difficult and sometimes dangerous. They are also blood-bound and clannish, the populations of most islands composed of half a dozen old families that overlap at the cousins and nephews and inlaws like patchwork quilts.I

If you’re a tourist (or one of the summah people), they will be friendly to you, but you mustn’t expect to see inside their lives. You can come back to your cottage on the headland overlooking the reach for sixty years, and you will still be an outsider. Because life on the island is different.

I write about small towns because I’m a small-town boy (although not an island boy, I hasten to add; when I write about Little Tall, I write as an outsider), and most of my small-town tales—those of Jerusalem’s Lot, those of Castle Rock, those of Little Tall Island—owe a debt to Mark Twain (The Man That Corrupted Hadleyburg) and Nathaniel Hawthorne (Young Goodman Brown). Yet all of them, it seemed to me, had a certain unexamined postulate at their center: that a malevolent encroachment must always shatter the community, driving the individuals apart and turning them into enemies. But that has been my experience more as a reader than as a community member; as a community member, I’ve seen towns pull together every time disaster strikes.II

Still the question remains: is the result of pulling together always the common good? Does the idea of community always warm the cockles of the heart, or does it on occasion chill the blood? It was at that point that I imagined Mike Anderson’s wife hugging him, and at the same moment whispering, Make [Linoge] have an accident in his ear. Man, what a chill that gave me! And I knew I would have to at least try to write the story.

The question of form remained to be answered. I don’t worry about it, ever—no more than I worry about the question of voice. The voice of a story (usually third person, sometimes first person) always comes with the package. So does the form an idea will take. I feel most comfortable writing novels, but I also write short stories, screenplays, and the occasional poem. The idea always dictates the form. You can’t make a novel be a short story, you can’t make a short story be a poem, and you can’t stop a short story that decides it wants to be a novel instead (unless you want to kill it, that is).

I assumed that if I wrote Storm of the Century, it would be a novel. Yet as I prepared to sit down to it, the idea kept insisting that it was a movie. Every image of the story seemed to be a movie image rather than a book image: the killer’s yellow gloves, Davey Hopewell’s bloodstained basketball, the kids flying with Mr. Linoge, Molly Anderson whispering Make him have an accident in her husband’s ear, and most of all, Linoge in the cell, heels up, hands dangling, orchestrating it all.

It would be too long for a theatrical movie, but I thought I saw a way around that. I had developed a wonderful working relationship with ABC over the years, providing material (and sometimes teleplays) for half a dozen so-called miniseries that had done quite well in the ratings. I got in touch with Mark Carliner (who produced the new version of The Shining) and Maura Dunbar (who has been my creative contact at ABC since the early nineties). Would either of them, I asked, be interested in a real novel for television, one that existed as its own thing rather than being based on a preexisting novel?

Both of them said yes with hardly a pause, and when I finished the three two-hour scripts that follow, the project went into preproduction and then to film with no creative dithering or executive megrims at all. It is fashionable to shit on television if you’re an intellectual (and for God’s sake, never admit that you watch Frasier, let alone Jerry Springer), but I have worked as a writer in both TV and the movies, and I subscribe to the adage that in Hollywood, TV people want to make shows and movie people want to make lunch reservations. This isn’t sour grapes; the movies have been pretty good to me, by and large (let’s just ignore such films as Graveyard Shift and Silver Bullet). But in television, they let you work… plus if you have a history of some success with multipart dramas, they let you spread a little, too. And I like to spread. It’s a beautiful thing. ABC committed thirty-three million dollars to this project on the basis of three first-draft scripts, which were never significantly changed. That was also a beautiful thing.

I wrote Storm of the Century exactly as I would a novel, keeping a list of characters but no other notes, working a set schedule of three or four hours every day, hauling along my Mac PowerBook and working in hotel rooms when my wife and I went on our regular expeditions to watch the Maine women’s basketball team play their away games in Boston, New York, and Philadelphia. The only real difference was that I used a Final Draft screenwriting program rather than the Word 6 program I use for ordinary prose (and every now and then the damned program would crash and the screen would freeze—the new Final Draft program is blessedly bug-free). And I would argue that what follows (and what you’ll see on your TV screen if you watch Storm when it airs) isn’t really a TV drama or a miniseries at all. It is a genuine novel, one that exists in a different medium.

The work was not without its problems. The main drawback to doing network TV is the censorship question (ABC is the one major network that still maintains an actual Standards and Practices arm; they read scripts and tell you what you absolutely cannot show in the living rooms of America). I had struggled mightily with this issue in the course of developing The Stand (the world’s population strangles to death on its own snot) and The Shining (talented but clearly troubled young writer beats wife within an inch of her life with a croquet mallet, then attempts to bludgeon son to death with the same implement), and it was the absolute worst part of the process, the creative equivalent of Chinese foot-binding.

Happily for me (the self-appointed guardians of America’s morality are probably a lot less happy about it), network television has broadened its spectrum of acceptability quite a bit since the days when the producers of The Dick Van Dyke Show were forbidden to show a double bed in the master bedroom (dear God, what if the youth of America began indulging fantasies of Dick and Mary lying there at night with their legs touching?). In the last ten years the changes have been even more sweeping. A good deal of this has been in response to the cable-TV revolution, but much of it is the result of general viewer attrition, particularly in the coveted eighteen to twenty-five age group.

I have been asked why bother with network TV at all when there are cable outlets like Home Box Office and Showtime, where the censorship issue is negligible. There are two reasons. The first is that, for all the critical sound and fury surrounding such original cable shows as Oz and The Real World, the potential cable-TV audience is still pretty small. Doing a mini on HBO would be like publishing a major novel with a small press. I have nothing at all against either small presses or cable TV, but if I work hard over a long period of time, I’d like a shot at the largest possible audience. Part of that audience may elect to switch away on Thursday night to watch ER, but that’s the chance you take. If I do my job and people want to see how matters turn out, they’ll tape ER and hang in there with me. The exciting part is when you’ve got some competish, my mother used to say.

The second reason to stick with a major network is that a little footbinding can be good for you. When you know your story is going under the gaze of people who are watching for dead folks with open eyes (a no-no on network TV), children who utter bad words (another no-no), or large amounts of spilled blood (a gigantic no-no), you begin to think of alternative ways of getting your point across. In the horror and the suspense genres, laziness almost always translates into some graphic crudity: the popped eyeball, the slashed throat, the decaying zombie. When the TV censor takes those easy scares away it becomes necessary to think of other routes to the same goal. The filmmaker becomes subversive, and sometimes the filmmaker becomes actually elegant, as Val (Cat People) Lewton’s films are often elegant.

The above probably sounds like a justification, but it’s not. I am, after all, the guy who once said I wanted to terrify my audience, but would horrify it if I couldn’t achieve terror… and if I couldn’t achieve horror, I’d go for the gross-out. What the fuck, I’d say, I’m not proud. Network TV has, in a manner of speaking, taken away that ultimate fallback position.

There are some visceral moments in Storm of the Century—Lloyd Wishman with the axe and Peter Godsoe with his rope are just two examples—but we had to fight for every one of them, and some (where five-year-old Pippa scratches her mother’s face and screams Let me go, you bitch! for example) are still under strenuous discussion. I’m not the most popular person at Standards and Practices these days—I keep calling people and whining, threatening to tell my big brother if they don’t stop teasing me (in this case the part of my big brother is most frequently played by Bob Iger, who is ABC’s top guy). Working with Standards and Practices on such a level is okay, I think; to get along really well with them would make me feel like Tokyo Rose. If you want to know who ends up winning most of the battles, compare the original teleplay (which is what I’m publishing here), with the finished TV program (which is in edit as I write this).

And remember, please, that not all the changes which take place between original script and final film are made to satisfy Standards and Practices. Them you can argue with; TV timing is beyond argument. Each finished segment must run ninety-one minutes, give or take a few seconds, and be divided into seven acts, in order to allow all those wonderful commercials which pay the bills. There are tricks that can get you a little extra time in that time—one is a form of electronic compression I don’t understand—but mostly you just whittle your stick until it fits in the hole. It’s a pain in the ass but not a gigantic one; no worse, say, than having to wear a school uniform or a tie to work.

Struggling with network TV’s arbitrary rules was often annoying and sometimes dispiriting with The Stand and The Shining (and what the producers of It must have gone through I shudder to think of, since one stringent Standards and Practices rule is that TV dramas must not be built upon the premise of children in mortal jeopardy, let alone dying), but both of those shows were based on novels that were written with no regard for network TV’s rules of propriety. And that’s the way novels should be written, of course. When people ask me if I write books with the movies in mind, I always feel a little irritated… even insulted. It’s not quite like asking a girl Do you ever do it for money? although I used to think so; it’s the assumption of calculation which is unpleasant. That kind of ledger-sheet thinking has no business in the writing of stories. Writing stories is only about writing stories. Business and ledger-sheet thinking comes after, and is best left to people who understand how to do it.

This was the sort of attitude I adopted while working on Storm of the Century. I wrote it as a TV script because that’s how the story wanted to be written… but with no actual belief that it would ever be on TV. I knew enough about filmmaking by December of 1996 to know I would be writing a special-effects nightmare into my script—a snowstorm bigger than any that had been previously attempted on television. I was also creating an enormous cast of characters—only, once the writing is done and the business of actually making a show begins, the writer’s characters become the casting director’s speaking parts. I went ahead with the script anyway, because you don’t do the budget while you’re writing the book. The budget is someone else’s problem. Plus, if the script is good enough, love will find a way. It always does.III

And because Storm was written as a TV miniseries, I found myself able to push the envelope without tearing it. I think it’s the most frightening story I’ve ever written for film, and in most cases I was able to build in the scares without allowing Standards and Practices cause to scream at me too much.IV

I have worked with director Mick Garris three times—first on the theatrical film Sleepwalkers, then on the miniseries of The Stand and The Shining. I sometimes joke that we’re in danger of becoming the Billy Wilder and I.A.L. Diamond of the horror genre. He was my first choice to direct Storm of the Century, because I like him, respect him, 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, I 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 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 wolf’s 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 Tall’s studio main street went through three carefully designed stages of snow-dressing, from a few inches to total burial.V

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 Shawshank 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 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