can purchase books and magazines depicting bondage, rape, sexual relations with children...Is this
stuff good for anyone? Probably not. / But you have to ask yourself a question before voting on
Maine’s obscenity initiative on June 10. The question is just this: Whose responsibility is it to
regulate this crud—the citizens or the police? / In 1936 the Germans opted for the police. / It didn’t
work out so great.’ He argues that once such a law is passed, ‘the question of what’s obscene passes
out of your hands once and for all; you’ve given up your freedom to judge for yourself...’ and points
out that Easy Rider had been banned in North Carolina, as had Huckleberry Finn.
On the subject of North Carolina King related his experiences in that State the previous July,
while making Maximum Overdrive. After an anti-obscenity law went into effect girlie magazines
disappeared ‘as if the Porn Fairy had visited in the middle of the night.’ King was ‘scared’ to find a
cop on duty perusing calendars in a bookshop for ‘topless’ photographs! He tells of seeing a sign
‘taped to the glass door of a shabby downtown drugstore’ in Wilmington: ‘PENTHOUSE ON SALE
HERE / TO PEOPLE OVER 21 / I THINK PENTHOUSE IS A DIRTY / MAGAZINE BUT I WILL
SELL IT / UNLESS THEY ARREST ME / I AM NOT A NAZI’. King not only bought a Penthouse
there but his entire drugstore needs for the balance of his stay: ‘No one arrested him, at least while I
was there, and no one confiscated the magazines. / Maybe they were too ashamed. / I hope they were.
Because they damn straight deserve to be.’
In Banned Books and Other Concerns: The Virginia Beach Lecture (see below) King relates
the Maine referendum was defeated. Copies of the Maine Sunday Telegram article may be copied
from microfiche at the Raymond H. Fogler Library of the University of Maine’s Orono campus. The
newspaper is also archived in other locations, including the Maine State Library in Augusta. Copies
of Castle Rock appear regularly on eBay and at King resellers.
The Dreaded X (December 1986)
The Dreaded X, a lengthy anti-censorship essay first appeared in Castle Rock: The Stephen
King Newsletter for December 1986/January 1987. Unusually for a King non-fiction piece (but
certainly not for his fiction177), he revised it in 1990 for a 1991 appearance in Gauntlet (see below).
This is an important, if slightly dated article, and would be worthy of reprint and further wide
circulation.
Starting with a deleted scene from the one movie he directed, Maximum Overdrive, King
compares the American and British movie ratings systems and comments on the effect ratings can
have on ticket sales—in America a ‘Dreaded X’ would keep a movie from widespread distribution,
an R gains the right level of interest and sales for a horror movie, but a PG-13 rating for a King movie
would cause the audience to decide ‘it wasn’t scary and stay away’. In Britain, King says, they ‘rate
according to quality and effect. / We Americans, on the other hand, count. / What do we count? Heads
(if they roll, that is); breasts; nipples; pubic thatches; blood-bags; profanity; mutilation; acts of
violence.’ And while many think the system works well King doesn’t—not if it leads to an X-rating,
anyhow (he even points out the ratings board counted 123.5 ‘fucks’ uttered in Scarface, the half
representing Pacino being interrupted by another character!) He then points out that even the counting
system can be cheated—through an appeals system that seems to give credit to intellectual directors
(Woody Allen) or moneymakers such as Stephen Spielberg who had, to that time, not one mega-hit R
rating (‘let alone the Dreaded X’) despite some very violent and confronting content.
Moving to the subject of the X-rating King notes that it had become the preserve of ‘Fucking. /
Sucking. / Humping. / Stiff dicks and hot licks. / That’s the problem, you see. It was never—at least in
the beginning—meant to be that way.../ The push for a ratings code was always tangled up in movie
depictions of what society views as aberrant behavior, and that means both sex and violence.’ After
the introduction of ratings in 1968 King says, ‘X meant “for adults only,” and “for adults only” did not
necessarily mean porn; it meant exactly what the term says: content not easily understandable to young
people.’ He recalls that X ‘became The Dreaded X because scuzzy (but far-sighted) little film
entrepreneurs...saw beyond the worded meaning of the rating to its real meaning: you could show
most anything.’ Quickly, the X that had applied to largely non-pornographic material as Midnight
Cowboy and Last Tango in Paris was appropriated by the porn industry. Almost instantly mainstream
producers would cut and cut just to get an R—as was the case for Scarface, a movie by Brian
DePalma, director of King adaptation, Carrie.
Continuing his review of the development of the ratings system King relates that in George
Romero’s178 Night of the Living Dead, ‘… the violence was, for the time, unbelievable....’; it was released ‘unrated even after the advent of the ratings code, and it was the first time that graphic
violence rather than graphic sex became the focus of the evolving frankness in motion pictures.’ Why
was it unrated? To avoid ‘the Dreaded X’: the implication that a movie is pornography. King points
out that most Americans think the ratings system is compulsory (as it is in many countries) but that the
system is only a ‘code’ agreed uponby the major studios. Why? ‘My god, how could such a law ever
be passed? It would be like taking a shit on the first amendment!’ Even more interesting, as producers
must pay a ‘substantial rating fee each time the board looks at a specific picture’ almost all X-rated
movies are actually unrated (to avoid the fee) but ‘simply appropriate’ the X. The result, of course, is
that major studios and distributors will not touch an unrated picture as ‘X-rated and unrated mean
exactly the same thing’ in their minds. As an inevitable consequence officially unrated movies that are
not pornographic get no mass release.
At this point King moves to the difference between censorship of books and movies, where such
restrictions do not apply (or at least not as baldly): ‘The result has been part of the secret of my
success as a writer of novels and part of the reason for my failure—at least in terms of box-office—in
the cinema. Readers who pick up one of my novels are uneasily aware of one principal fact: This
crazy fucker might do anything. Anything at all. ’ Closing, King pitches for his own recommended
ratings system, which would be mandatory. He wants to eliminate unrated pictures and argues for a
Government mandated system (which appears to be at odds with his broader non-Government
interference arguments published elsewhere—see for instance Say ‘No’ to the Enforcers above), and
even proposes making outright pornography ‘uneconomic’ by imposing huge ratings fees on these
low-budget creations (he does not address the key issue against that argument— who determines what
is pornography in a free society?)
A revised version of the article (written on April 17, 1990) appeared in Gauntlet: Exploring
the Limits of Free Expression (Number 2, April 1991). In this piece King adds a new closing section
(numbered ‘17’ in the magazine; the original sections ‘16’ and ‘17’ from Castle Rock having been
combined) of six paragraphs. He notes the ‘video revolution’ (now long since displaced by the DVD
revolution) had allowed some films to be released with the inclusion of scenes cut from theatre
release versions but that ‘the prudes and the blue-noses’ had caught up, severely restricting the
‘availability of X-rated and unrated videotapes’ in several states. King still argues for a revised
rating system although now he clarifies, ‘Legislating art has never been a very good idea, and one can
only salute the courage of those who made The Cook [, The Thief, His Wife, and Her Lover] and
Henry [: Portrait of a Serial Killer]...and also the courage of those who have shepherded these films
through to some sort of public recognition, limited as it may be.’ The American rating system has
since been revised and King’s current take would make interesting reading.
There were significant problems placing this essay, as King records in a follow up piece
reviewed in the next section of this chapter. There, he notes The Dreaded X ‘had been bounced
everywhere my agent tried to place it, from Film Comment to The Atlantic Monthly.’ King’s
secretary of the time, Stephanie Leonard, on discovering it had never been published, had secured
King’s permission to include it in the Castle Rock newsletter she also edited. King considered the
follow-up piece, A Postscript to ‘Overdrive’, might interest readers in how the story of the particular
deleted scene (of a child being run down by a rogue steamroller) and the movie itself came out. He
was right; these two pieces should be read consecutively to achieve the full effect.
Gauntlet magazine was actually published in an edition more like a paperback book, at 402
pages and of trade paperback size; and was later reprinted by Borderlands Press as Gauntlet 2 in a
hardback limited edition of 500, signed by 33 contributors, including King. Both included articles
about King by Michael Collings, George Beahm and Stephen Spignesi, among others (an editorial
note reads, ‘GAUNTLET’s Stephen King section is dedicated to readers of Castle Rock: The
Stephen King Newsletter, which published from 1985-1989. Readers of Castle Rock were the core
of GAUNTLET’s subscribers last year, and if not for them there would be no second issue.’ The
‘magazine’ appears regularly at King resellers but the hardback is more difficult to secure. Copies of
Castle Rock appear regularly on eBay and at King resellers.
A Postscript to Overdrive (February 1987)
This piece is King’s update for the readers of Castle Rock: The Stephen King Newsletter of The
Dreaded X (see the section directly above). After his secretary (also the editor of Castle Rock,
Stephanie Leonard) asked if she could run The Dreaded X in that newspaper King ‘read it over with
some interest and a lot of perspective—the kind which time alone can lend (and which is so often
rueful as a result; show me a man or woman who responds “Nothing” in answer to the question “If
you had your life to live over again, what would you change?”, and I will show you a goddamned
outrageous liar).’
King says Angus Young of band AC/DC (who scored King’s movie, Maximum Overdrive)
reacted viscerally to the scene cut from the movie (of a boy being run down by a steamroller) because
he had not expected to see it. ‘Angus, nobody’s fool, had unknowingly stated the thesis of my
essay...without reading it and with all the excessive verbiage cut away. He was talking about the
curse of X-pectation.’ He relates that even George Romero (of the Living Dead movie series fame
and a master of the gory) had gasped at the scene ‘and turned aside. / My only shining moment as a
director, I think.’
He says that of thirty-one areas of concern the ratings board had with Maximum Overdrive they
were finally satisfied with ‘three cuts to avoid The Dreaded X. They totaled fifteen seconds...but
changed the movie significantly.’ The three sections were ‘six seconds of the Dixie-Boy shoot-out.
Too many blood-bags. I told you the board does a lot of counting. / Second, a six-second close-up in
which a traveling salesman who has earlier been hit by a truck abruptly sits up, grabs a kid by the
ankle...and then half his face sort of falls off into his lap. / Third—the last three seconds of the
steamroller scene—the three seconds that make George Romero look away....” The removal of these
scenes left the movie with no scenes viewers had not expected and King feels this alone killed it.
Copies of Castle Rock appear regularly on eBay and at King resellers. This edition also
includes King’s Why I Wrote The Eyes of the Dragon (reviewed in our Miscellany chapter).
What’s Scaring Stephen King (February 1987)
As we saw in the previous two pieces censorship was much on King’s mind in this period. In
February 1987 Omni magazine published another of his anti-censorship articles, What’s Scaring
Stephen King, in its Forum section. This one-page piece opens, ‘Every book that I’ve ever published,
with the exception of two, has been banned from one public-high-school library or another. Cujo has
been banned so often now that it is on the ACLU’s list of top ten banned books. And I’m very proud
of that, because I’m never going to win a Nobel Prize or a National Book Award. But being on that
list of banned books, I’m in the company of greats: Flannery O’Connor, Harper Lee, J.D. Salinger,
and John Updike.’ In fact, while King has still yet to win a National Book Award (or a Nobel or
Pulitzer Prize) he was awarded the 2003 Medal for Distinguished Contribution to American Letters
by the National Book Foundation, the organization that gives out the National Book Award.
King repeats the line he uses often about books banned from school libraries: ‘“...let them jerk it.
Just make sure to tell the kids that whatever is taken off the shelves is probably what they need to
know the most.” That will get their asses running to a public library or bookstore. When a book gets
banned, kids will read it.’ But outside the school system he is adamant: ‘I’m not going to let them take
my books out of public libraries or bookstores...I’d like to have one [a bumper sticker] that says,
“YOU’LL TAKE MY BOOK WHEN YOU PRY IT FROM MY COLD, DEAD HANDS.” Nobody
tells me what to read; nobody tells me what I can look at.’ He ‘resents people who take the attitude
that says, “I know more about this than you do, sonnybuns. I’ll tell you what you can read and what
you can’t read.” That’s fascism.’
Turning to his own books King argues that Hansel and Gretel contains far more child abuse than
The Shining—‘a stepmother orders her husband to disembowel his own children and bring her their
hearts...The children arrive at a witch’s house, and it’s stated she’s going to fucking eat them! That’s
cannibalism! The Shining is not all right for kids, but “Hansel and Gretel” is—it’s staple reading.’
Opposing the path to censorship King concludes, ‘If we start censoring...What’s down the road
for us? On “Crystal Night” in 1939, when people started getting rid of the decadent literature in
Berlin, they ended up burning all the philosophy books and then went on to destroy all the bookshops
run by Jews...That’s what’s always down the road when you begin to censor: Crystal Night.’179
Omni magazines were collectable and copies of this edition appear regularly at King resellers
and Internet outlets.
Banned Books and Other Concerns: The Virginia Beach Lecture (1989)
King’s concern with censorship was such that on September 22, 1986 he gave a speech
addressing the issue at the Virginia Beach Public Library in Virginia Beach, Virginia for a Friends of
the Library benefit. The speech was ‘recorded and transcribed’ by King expert George Beahm and
reproduced in his The Stephen King Companion180.
It was also published in the Book-of-the-Month Club collection of King pieces, Secret
Windows: Essays and Fiction on the Craft of Writing (2000). This version is different from
Beahm’s—for instance Secret Windows does not include a section about King playing the part of
Jordy Verrill in Creepshow, nor a later reference to Peyton Place. There are a number of other minor
differences.
King says he is ‘bored with Banned Books and the whole discussion on Banned Books’.
Illustrating a point he’s made that fiction should reflect real life, even when that offends some readers
he notes: ‘Frank Norris, who wrote The Pit, McTeague, and other naturalistic novels that were
banned, said: “I don’t fear: I don’t apologize because I know in my heart that I never lied; I never
truckled. I told the truth.” And I think that the real truth of fiction is that fiction is the truth; moral
fiction is the truth inside the lie. And if you lie in your fiction, you are immoral and have no business
writing at all.’ King relates that the mother of a Pittsburgh student was horrified to find her son
reading Studs Terkel’s Working, which includes ‘words that rhymed with shuck’ and demanded its
banning from high-school libraries. By the time the book was temporarily banned another 62 students
had taken it out, even though the original student had been the first to do so in three years!
He also relates he had campaigned against an anti-obscenity referendum in Maine, which was
ultimately ‘voted down, 70 percent to 30 percent’ because voters ‘realized that obscene is one of
those words that exists in the eye of the beholder’ (see Say ‘No’ to the Enforcers above). Relating
that democracy is a ‘two-edged sword’ King says he loves the no motorcycle helmet law in Maine:
‘... as far as I’m concerned it gets a lot of dreck out of the gene pool, because these guys hit the wall
and they’re gone, baby. If they’re not smart enough to wear a helmet, screw them....” (it seems this
point was delivered with some irony and yet with a degree of seriousness; King would come back to
the subject in Helmetless Bikers Have Fallen in Love with an Image, see below). His concern lies
with those who want to turn the double-edged sword of freedom and democracy to a single-edge at a
point—‘and that point occurs when their own personal sensibilities are offended’, using
fundamentalist preachers such as Jimmy Swaggart and Pat Robertson as examples.
King’s conclusion deals with the concept of in loco parentis: ‘And if there’s a consensus that
decides a book should be taken out of a [school] library, I believe they should take that book out. / I
have no problem...if they take Cujo or Salem’s Lot out of a public school...I would just say to you as
students who are supposed to be learning, that as soon as the book is gone from the library, do not
walk— run to your nearestpublic library or bookseller and find out what your elders don’t want
you to know, because that’s what you need to know! / Don’t let them bullshit you and don’t let them
guide your mind, because once it starts, it never stops. Some of our most famous leaders have been
book-banners, like Hitler, Stalin, Idi Amin.’
Copies of The Stephen King Companion and Secret Windows are easily acquired from King
resellers and other sources such as eBay and online booksellers.
Helmetless Bikers Have Fallen in Love with an Image (October 16, 1991)
Having served it up to those who believe the right to ride a motorbike without a helmet is more
important than the need to avoid serious injury in a 1986 lecture (see Banned Books and Other
Concerns: The Virginia Beach Lecture above) King returns to the subject in a guest column for the
October 16, 1991 issue of the Bangor Daily News.
He opens his position on the debate over Maine’s no-helmet motorcycle law by admitting he
will be seen as a hypocrite. ‘Why do I fear a charge of hypocrisy? Because there will be people—
plenty of them—reading this who have seen me tooling around town or buzzing down the turnpike
without a helmet. The fact is, I hate the damned things...but I can tell you this: You won’t see me
riding without one next year. I’m 44 now and my reflexes are a lot slower than they were at eighteen,
but that isn’t the major deal. The major deal is that 44 is just too old to behave in such a consistently
stupid way.’
He argues that most who won’t wear helmets feel the way they do because ‘if their buddies see
them wearing a helmet (“brain-bucket” is the usual term of contempt), they’ll look like wimps. Like
scaredy-cats...And don’t tell me it’s not true...I know it is, because I feel that way myself, every time I
look at the red Bell helmet on the wall of my garage.’ King dismisses other arguments for not wanting
to wear helmets with what he sees as the core issue: ‘Bikers who ride without helmets are in love
with an image.’
He reveals that ‘when it comes to such laws, I am a complete conservative, believing in
America, people who are willing to die in order to look cool have the absolute right to do so.’ So,
what’s his solution? ‘Since the majority of accidents occur during the first year of riding...why not
make it illegal for anyone to operate a motorcycle without a helmet until he or she has had [a] license
for a year? Maybe even two years to be safe?’
See The Land of Lunacy (above) for detail on securing Bangor Daily News articles.
Houston: So Normal It Was Weird (August 23, 1992)
This short piece appeared on the ‘Op-Ed’ page of The New York Times for August 23, 1992.
Ironically the headline for an adjacent piece reads Bush Gets Tough on Iraq, referring of course to
the first President Bush, at that time seeking re-election. King refers to Republican Senator Bob
Dole’s joking reference at the Houston Republican National Convention that King must have crafted
the Democratic Party’s platform—“a real horror story.”
The key to King’s criticism in this piece is not so much his dislike for Republican policies but
what he sees as ‘ceaseless and almost instinctive search for what I would call “normative behavior”’
by delegates. He says, ‘Houston was once again normality—the Republican version of it, at any rate
—on a pedestal, normality as the Holy Grail.’ This is perhaps one of the least important of King’s
non-fiction efforts, little more than a frivolous jab at his political foes.
As most major libraries archive copies of The New York Times copies are easily accessed.
Stephen King on Censorship (1993)
This ‘article’ is unusual in that King did not actually ‘write’ it and it almost certainly was not
intended for publication. Noted King expert George Beahm included it in his book, War of Words:
The Censorship Debate, although the text is ‘From a videotaped interview conducted by New
American Library for its sales force, 1989.’ Consisting of only three paragraphs the piece opens, ‘As
far as censorship goes, with my books or with anyone else’s books, I think that censorship is always a
power trip.’ King argues the power trip is about people who believe their ‘point of view is more
valid than your point of view’. He refers to ‘the censorship initiative’ and it may therefore be
presumed King was answering a specific question about an initiative or referendum of the time. The
last two paragraphs are a close duplicate of the concluding paragraphs to the Secret Windows version
of Banned Books and Other Concerns: The Virginia Beach Lecture (see above). Overall this piece
may be regarded as one of the least important of those reviewed in this book.
Beahm’s book is obscure and appears only rarely at King resellers and other sources. Copies
may be available via interlibrary loan.
To date, King’s latest word on censorship (or at least movie censorship) is 2004’s The Pop of
King: The Rating Game (see the Later Columns—The Pop of King chapter).
That is the Question (November 3, 1995)
This brief letter to the editor, published in the November 3, 1995 issue of King’s hometown
newspaper, the Bangor Daily News, urges Maine residents to vote ‘no’ on Question 1 in an upcoming
election.
State Referendum Question 1 ‘…doesn’t mention gay rights per se, but rather limits protected
special groups to the categories already listed in the Maine Human Rights Act: race, color, sex,
physical or mental disability, religion, age, ancestry, national origin, familial status and marital
status.’ King asserts that ‘no one deserves to be treated badly because they think a certain way or live
a certain way. A “yes” vote on Question 1 would go against everything I believe in, and that includes
sticking my nose into the way other people live.’
See The Land of Lunacy (above) for detail on securing Bangor Daily News articles.
Sloudge (2004)
This unusual piece consists of a humorous definition King contributed to a highly political
‘dictionary’. Many authors and other high-profile people, mostly of a ‘liberal’ bent contributed
definitions of newly invented words. King’s was ‘sloudge’: ‘the hours of analysis, usually on high-
cable news networks, which follows breaking news, i.e. events which have just happened and which
usually (but not always) follow the high-cable news dictum “if it bleeds, it leads.”’ His example of
usage: ‘The President’s press conference was followed by over three hours of sloudge on MSNBC
and an hour of sloudge on Fox-TV.’
It appeared in The Future Dictionary of America, edited by Jonathan Safran Foer, Dave Eggers,
Nicole Krauss and Eli Horowitz, a 2004 hardcover from McSweeney’s Books181. At the time of
writing it is readily available both in bookstores and online.
A Special Message from Stephen (January 18, 2005)
This brief message urged readers to join in supporting ‘Not One Damn Dime Day’, a political
boycott on spending to protest ‘the bloated cost of President Bush’s Inauguration ceremonies, which
are now estimated in the $40 million range.’
It was posted on Stephen King’s official web site on January 18, 2005 and lead to some minor
negative reaction from the King fans who supported Bush or voted for the President the previous
November. Older posts are no longer accessible online but copies circulate in the King community.
Although the author’s views of politics are strongly held and supported King has not overdone
the use of his influence, in the way certain Hollywood celebrities have been accused of doing in
recent years. He seems to step in only when he feels very strongly about a particular issue, or
candidate. Even then he has limited his diatribes on these matters in recent years.
For a country that has perhaps the strongest constitutional (and therefore, legal) defenses to
freedom of speech of any in the world, America is home to large numbers of people and organizations
(on all sides of varying political divides) that have scant respect for those freedoms when exercised
by those they oppose. This ensures that stepping into the minefield of political opinion is doubly
dangerous. It is, perhaps, the strength of King’s work, and his strong connection with his readers, both
Constant and casual, that has allowed him to carefully step around these dangers.
We can expect more political opinion, if perhaps not totally dedicated articles, as time passes.
Politics is part of the human experience and, as we know, King remains fully engaged in American
life and culture.
MISCELLANY
Romantics compare the cycle of the seasons to the cycle of human life, a comparison I have
never really trusted. And yet now, at the age of fifty-one, I find something in it, after all. Sooner or
later, life takes in its breath, pauses, and then tilts toward winter. I sense that tilt approaching.
When the idea threatens to become oppressive, I think of the woods in New England tilting into
winter—how you can see the whole expanse of the lake, not just the occasional wink through the
trees, and hear every movement on the land that slopes down to the water. You can hear every
living thing, no matter how cunning, before snow comes to muffle the world.
—From Leaf-Peepers.
This chapter covers King’s non-fiction pieces that do not fit into the broader categories covered
so far in this book. Many of these pieces are just as important, if not more so, than the ones we have
already covered. A short section on King’s ‘juvenilia’ opens the chapter, discussing in detail the
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