The premise of “Maximum Overdrive” is pretty simple: when Earth crosses the tail of a comet, machines suddenly start coming to life — ready to kill. Soda machines spit cans at people, ATMs call folks a*sholes, and cars and trucks start mowing people down. King, to his credit, had no preconceived notions about this material. He knew it was trash, and trash was exactly what he wanted. “I wanted it to move fast,” he told American Film magazine. “It’s a wonderfully moronic picture in that sense. It’s a really illiterate picture in a lot of ways. There isn’t a lot of dialogue in it. It’s fast. A lot of things explode. It’s very profane, very vulgar, quite violent in some places. We’re going to have trouble with the ratings board, I guess.”
The ratings board was the least of King’s worries. After pre-production, the author-turned-filmmaker arrived on set in the summer of 1985 and quickly realized he didn’t know anything about making movies. “I was surprised by how little I actually knew,” the author told Cinefantastique (via the book “Creepshows: The Illustrated Stephen King Movie Guide”). It didn’t help that King was also battling a serious drug problem. In the book “Hollywood’s Stephen King,” King is quoted as saying: “The problem with that film is that I was coked out of my mind all through its production, and I really didn’t know what I was doing.”
Just to make things extra complicated, King also found himself working with a crew that mostly spoke Italian — a language he did not understand. As “Creepshows: The Illustrated Stephen King Movie Guide” puts it, conversations that “should have taken only a few minutes invariably lasted for twenty or more.” Still, King pushed through and got the picture made. But the problems weren’t over.
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