The story goes that King actually wrote the first draft of the “Children of the Corn” screenplay, just as he had done for earlier adaptations of his work like “Cujo,” and “The Dead Zone,” both from 1983. In all cases, King’s screenplays were rejected in favor of more cinematic alterations. King’s screenplay for “Children of the Corn” was, according to Goldsmith, “not cinematic at all.” In King’s draft, an inordinate amount of time was spent with Burt and Vicky (Peter Horton and Linda Hamilton), the itinerant Californians. Over a half hour of the movie was meant to be scenes of them conversing and bickering in the car. Goldsmith understood that bloodthirsty film audiences would want to get to the mayhem a little more quickly than that.
Goldsmith was brought in to write a better script, and transformed “Corn” into an actual movie. One can argue as to the quality of the finished product, but one can at least admit that it functions perfectly well as a feature film, with a typically cinematic beginning-middle-and-end. When King read Goldman’s draft, however, he needed to make an angry phone call. Goldman remembered the phone call well, saying:
“[The story editor] liked my ideas, but Stephen King was Stephen King. And so we had a conference call, the three of us, which Stephen opened up by informing me I did not understand horror. And I countered that he did not understand cinema: horror and fiction are internalized, just like his script. Cinema is external: visual, auditory, a more sensory experience.”
It’s a fair point, especially if King’s original script was meant to have 30 minutes of buildup before any horror took place.
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