Stephen King’s The Regulators Movie Was Almost Directed By Sam Peckinpah

The majority of Stephen King’s novels (and many of his short stories) have been adapted into films or TV projects over the years, but there a few outliers that have yet to make the leap from page to screen. While it seems inevitable that sooner or later, every King work (with one notable exception) will be adapted, you have to wonder why some books have yet to materialize as movies. In 2016, King was asked by Deadline if there were any books he was surprised hadn’t been adapted yet, and he had an answer: “The Regulators.” If you came of age in the 1990s, as I did, and were a Stephen King nerd, as I was (and still am), you know all about “The Regulators,” because it wasn’t a normal Stephen King release. In fact, it technically wasn’t even a Stephen King book — it was attributed to King’s pseudonym, Richard Bachman.

When King was just getting started, publishers had a rule that they didn’t want to publish more than one book from an author a year. That wasn’t good enough for King, who has always been a prolific writer. He struck on a solution: he would publish additional books under a pen name. That name was Richard Bachman, and King published “Rage,” “The Long Walk,” “Roadwork,” “The Running Man,” and “Thinner” under the Bachman monicker. However, by the time “Thinner” arrived in 1984, King’s cover was blown by a bookseller who did some detective work and confirmed King and Bachman were one and the same (you can read more about that here). King then “killed off” Bachman, but Bachman didn’t quite stay quiet in his fictional grave. 

Because Richard Bachman would return in the 1990s. 

In 1996, King released two books on the same day: “Desperation” and “The Regulators.” “Desperation” was credited to King, while “The Regulators” was credited to Bachman, with an introduction claiming that “The Regulators” was a previously unpublished work discovered by Bachman’s widow. While the two books tell different stories, they share the same characters. However, they characters in “The Regulators” have no knowledge of the events in “Desperation,” and vice versa.

It was a neat experiment, and a great bit of marketing — if you were a Stephen King fan, you had to buy both books. To add to the fun, the covers of the hardcover publications of “The Regulators” and “Desperation” could be placed next to each other to form one big image (see above). 

“Desperation” follows a group of unlucky characters who find themselves trapped in a cursed mining town in Nevada, tormented by a demonic presence known as Tak. It’s ultimately a story about faith, and the overall message of the book seems to be “God exists, but He’s really, really cruel.”

“The Regulators” drops these same characters into a suburban neighborhood in Ohio. Once again, Tak is the antagonist, only here he’s possessing the body of a young boy. One day, seemingly at random, Tak materializes some superhero aliens from a children’s TV show along with a group of cowboys from an old (fictional) Western called “The Regulators” and has them start targeting members of the neighborhood, killing off people in brutal fashion. If that sounds pretty silly, that’s because it is — between the two books, “Desperation” is the superior story. However, “The Regulators,” with its supernatural aliens and cowboys blowing people away with shotguns, is loaded with plenty of action, so you can understand why King thinks it would make a neat movie. “Desperation” was previously adapted into TV movie helmed by frequent King collaborator Mick Garris, while “The Regulators” remains untouched. But as it turns out, it came very close to being a movie … before it was even a book. And a legendary director would’ve been at the helm. 

While speaking with Deadline, King revealed that “The Regulators” was almost a movie directed by none other than the late, great Sam Peckinpah. “I had a meeting with Sam Peckinpah a few months before he died, and he was really interested in turning that into a movie called ‘The Shotgunners,’ and I wanted to write a screenplay for it,” King said. “I thought it would make a terrific R-rated action-adventure, the kind of thing Sam was terrific at. It just didn’t happen and never went any further than that.”

Peckinpah helmed brutal, nihilistic movies — titles like “The Wild Bunch,” “Straw Dogs,” “The Getaway,” and, my personal favorite, “Bring Me the Head of Alfredo Garcia.” He was also a troubled man who suffered under a mountain of inner turmoil and lived a hard, fast life. He grappled with alcoholism and drug use, and died in 1984 at the age of 59. Roger Ebert called Peckinpah a “tragic drunk” but also stated that he was “a great director who endured despite, or perhaps because of, the demons that haunted him.” 

In the book “If They Move . . . Kill ‘Em!: The Life and TImes of Sam Peckinpah,” author David Weddle writes, “Peckinpah made his films not with the cool detachment of an intellectual commentator observing events from up high, but as one of the writhing sufferers trying to clamber out of the pit,” and adds: “Peckinpah’s films are filled with jagged edges, abrupt shifts in tone, and embarrassing moments of self-revelation in which the director lays naked some of his most neurotic and misguided obsessions for all to see.”

Now, you might be wondering: if Peckinpah died in 1984, how could he have adapted “The Regulators,” which came out in 1996? As it turns out, the screenplay for “The Shotgunners” was actually written years before “The Regulators.” In an interview with Joseph B. Mauceri, King revealed, “The truth is I had a screenplay long before I met Sam, which was towards the end of his life.” King continued:

“Sam was looking for a picture to make and I had this screenplay that was called ‘The Shotgunners’ which I had for a long time and went back something like five years. It was one of these feverous things that I’d written in about a week. I really like it but there was not interest in it. Sam read it, liked it a lot and suggested some things for the script that were really interesting. I thought that I could go back and do a second draft. Unfortunately, Sam died about three months later and I never worked on the script.”

King put the script away, but later reworked it into the book that would become “The Regulators.” “That’s sometimes what I think writing a novel is all about,” the author said. “It’s this synthesis of these ideas where you see how everything links together and you say to yourself, ‘Yeah, I can do that.'”

A Sam Peckinpah-directed Stephen King movie is one of those concepts that sounds absolutely wild, and it’s a genuine shame that it never materialized. Still, the question lingers: why hasn’t anyone turned “The Regulators” into a movie by now? Someone should get on that.