Fogler Follies

This is my birthday week (yesterday was the big day) and I was very well treated. On Monday I bought a new car (a Scion tC, if you’re interested), my first new one in over a decade. My previous car (Honda Accord) was in really good shape, comparatively low mileage (84,000 miles) but it was getting to the point where the small annoyances were starting to add up.

What’s amazing about the Scion is that it cost less than the Accord did 11 years ago, and has all sorts of cool standard features, like a moon roof, which I would never have added as an option. A slick looking little vehicle that should last me another 10 or 11 years!

I was up in Maine for the middle part of the week. It had been raining for 26 consecutive days by the time I arrived (a fact that every Mainer I encountered worked into conversation!) but it was very nice on Wednesday, so they had hopes that better days were ahead. I had the opportunity to visit Stephen King’s radio station and met up with my old buddy, artist Glenn Chadbourne, who illustrated The Illustrated Stephen King Trivia Book and the radio station’s merchandising.

For the first time, too, I got to the special collection room at the Fogler Library at the University of Maine, where King’s archives are located. Spent a couple of hours reading through unpublished stories and screenplays. Of special interest to me was the unproduced screenplay of The Shotgunners, which King wrote in the 1980s intending it to be a Sam Peckinpah production. A decade later, he would take the bones of the story and permute it into The Regulators. Many elements of the story were there in the screenplay, but the Tak plot, as well as the stories of characters like Steve and Cynthia and Collie Entragian are absent. The eponymous shotgunners are scarecrows driving not vans but big sedans and they’ve arrived from the previous century for no obvious reason but to shoot up the small Ohio town. There are implications that this has something to do with a KKK lynching. It’s even more violent than The Regulators — few survivors and the houses are essentially Swiss cheese by the final reel.

I wish I’d had more time — I didn’t even get to the early novels like Blaze. Another time, perhaps.

Upcoming events:

Stephen King’s Gotham Café is an official selection of the deadCENTER Film Festival in Oklahoma City. The film will be screening at the IAO gallery on June 10th. For tickets go to www.deadcenterfilm.org. I’ll also be screening the film at NECON.