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 4
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 conies 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.* 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.1
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, I thought, what the hell if Storm is never made because it budgets out at too high a number, I'll do it as a book after all. I found the idea of novelizing my own unproduced screenplay quite amusing.
1 ln the end, S & P were reduced to screaming about some fairly petty shit. In Part One, for instance, a fisherman says that the approaching bad weather is apt to be 'one mother of a storm.' S
& P insisted the line be changed, perhaps believing this was my sly way of implying 'one motherfucker of a storm,' thus further corrupting American morals, causing more schoolyard shootings, etc. I immediately made one of my whining calls, pointing out the phrase 'the mother of all . . .' had been originated by Saddam Hussein and had since passed into popular usage. After some consideration, Standards and Practices allowed the phrase, only insisting 'the dialogue not be delivered in a salacious way.' Absolutely not. Salacious dialogue on network TV is reserved for shows like 3rd Rock from the Sun and Dharma and Greg.
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, / 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
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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
