TELEVISION : They Keep Coming Back for More : Stephen King books rarely make great movies, but Hollywood can’t resist: The miniseries ‘It’ and movie ‘Misery’ are on their way

If Hollywood moviemakers could get inside Stephen King’s head to film his brain, then put it up there on the big screen in all its pulsing glory, they probably would. In a sense, they’ve been trying to do that for years.

Brian DePalma was the first to take a stab at it in 1976. The director caused a sensation and stirred a Hollywood feeding frenzy when audiences responded to his dumping buckets of pig blood on Sissy Spacek’s head in the adaptation of King’s “Carrie.” Studios clamored to plug into the masses who devour King’s books, of which Viking Press estimates there to be 90 million copies in print worldwide.

In the years since, there have been two TV projects and 17 feature films, grossing more than $400 million at the box office. They range from psychological thriller (“The Dead Zone” in 1983), to schlock horror (“Children of the Corn” in 1984) to science fiction (“The Running Man” in 1987).

But most of the films have one thing in common: They have overwhelmingly disappointed critics and audiences. The problem for most filmmakers is that King’s wild imagination, so salient on the written page, can be plain silly on screen. (What does King think of them? See story, page 82.)

“Things that are impossible to do cinematically Stephen King does with effortless grace on the page,” says director John Carpenter, best known for “Halloween,” who adroitly brought King’s imagination to life in the 1983 film “Christine.” “After a while, the movies really pale next to the original work of the author.”

“To be totally honest with you, I haven’t really liked any of them,” said Rob Reiner, who directed the 1986 movie version of the King novella “The Body.” “I changed the title to ‘Stand By Me’ because of the reputation Stephen had at the time, and the kinds of films he was associated with.” There had been a string of King bombs before “Stand By Me”: “Cat’s Eye,” “Silver Bullet” and “Maximum Overdrive.”

Despite the checkered history of translating King to the screen, another wave of projects is washing to shore. And this time filmmakers have taken care to avoid the traps into which others have fallen.

Tonight at 9, ABC presents the opening installment of the two-part miniseries “It,” about a malevolent being manifested as a leering, razor-tooth clown (“The Rocky Horror Picture Show’s” Tim Curry in different, chilling drag this time) who lures children to their death with balloons. Opening in theaters next week is Reiner’s “Misery,” starring James Caan as an injured novelist held captive by a rabid fan, played by Kathy Bates.

These come on top of “Graveyard Shift,” which last month led the box office on its opening weekend, and precede “The Dark Half,” now filming in Pittsburgh with Timothy Hutton and Amy Madigan being directed by George Romero (“Night of the Living Dead”). Tim Matheson is starring in “Sometimes They Come Back” for CBS. And Michael McDowell (“Beetlejuice”) just finished a script for “Thinner,” from King’s 1984 book written under his Richard Bachman pseudonym.

“Your stock rises and falls,” Romero observed. “There was a period where finance companies were looking for Stephen King material. But they did too much, too many bad movies, and overexposed the name. In Hollywood terms, Stephen’s stock fell.

“Then it got a big boost with ‘Stand By Me’ and ‘Pet Sematary.’ Now it’s time for another try.”

“Graveyard Shift,” loosely based on King’s short story about a gargantuan rat, was exterminated by critics and faded fast in the box office. But some insiders predict that ABC’s “It,” budgeted at an extravagant $12 million, and “Misery,” with help from Reiner and screenwriter William Goldman (who previously collaborated on “The Princess Bride”), will improve King’s screen image.

Cinemascore, a research firm that conducts opening-night exit polls at theaters, reports that King-based films have received average grades of B- or C+ from audiences over the years. “Children of the Corn” and “Maximum Overdrive,” which King wrote and directed, dipped down to D+.

“That’s real unusual,” said Cinemascore research analyst Harold Mintz. “To get into that range, you’ve basically gone beyond the odds. You have to remember, the real Stephen King fans come to theaters on opening night, and they tend to be more forgiving. I mean, these are not good grades.”

Lawrence D. Cohen, who adapted “Carrie” and also wrote the teleplay for “It,” suggested that bad King films usually lack heart.

“You have to translate Stephen’s emotional directness, which is part of the reading experience, to the screen,” Cohen explained. “There was a Village Voice review of ‘It’ calling the book ‘Id,’ and I think there’s a lot of truth to that pun. Stephen’s at his best when one really cares about the characters he creates.”

Reiner pulled off the trick before. “Stand By Me” is the only unqualified hit--with critics and audiences--based on the author’s work. The warm ode to childhood friends, a departure from King’s darker stories, grossed $52 million in 1986 and earned King his only A in Cinemascore polls.

“First of all, you have to find a story that has human qualities to begin with,” Reiner said. “I mean, the two pieces that I picked to adapt were both very reality-oriented and character-driven. What happens, since Stephen King’s books take place in supernatural worlds, is (that) the people who adapt them to films tend to strip away the character aspects and leave only the gore and horror.”

Horror novelist Clive Barker, who adapts and directs his own material for the screen, such as “Hellraiser” and “Night Breed,” agreed that that is a pitfall with King: “Steve is underrated as a master psychologist. His writing constantly reveals psychological insights, which are part of what makes his fiction so successful. If you remove those, you’re just left with the horror, and the horrors Steve deals with are significantly less frightening than the psychological insights he brings to bear.”

Many directors and writers simply have a hard time sifting through King’s prolific novels to find a story thread. Doubleday’s recent uncut version of “The Stand” runs 1,153 pages. The author confesses that he just can’t write in “shorthand.” As a result, his stories always get compressed on film and his multilayered characters often are squashed flat.

Romero, who also wrote the script for “The Dark Half,” compared adapting King’s work to “moving out of a big house and fitting all of your things into a studio apartment.”

Perhaps it’s not surprising, then, that “Salem’s Lot,” a four-hour miniseries that aired on CBS in 1979, was applauded by TV critics. Director Tobe Hooper, who also directed “The Texas Chainsaw Massacre” (1974) and “Poltergeist” (1982), said that the miniseries format allowed for more extensive character development in King’s tale of vampires in modern-day New England.

“Stephen King’s lengthy works present a problem,” Hooper said. “When producers and directors start adapting a massive work like that, one of the first questions they ask is, ‘What can we lose?’ I could have used another two hours with ‘Salem’s Lot.’ When you start dropping characters, or altering King’s story structurally, you depower the strength of his work. You homogenize the horror.”

“I think it has to be accepted that a movie and a book or TV series are completely different items,” Barker said. “And it’s naive going into the process expecting to keep intact the things that you like in the book you are adapting. I’ve never really understood people who walk out of the movie theater and say, ‘It’s not like the book.’ Of course it’s not like the book! It’s a movie .”

Barker said that what King’s books lose in psychological insight on the screen, they have the potential to gain in spectacle and momentum. That can become a problem, however, for the poor filmmaker whose job is to re-create and photograph the fantastic images inside King’s skull.

“The Dark Half,” scheduled for release next year, casts Hutton as a horror writer whose murderous literary creation comes to life with straight razor flashing. In one foreboding passage, King blankets the entire landscape with enough sparrows--mythical harbingers of death--to make Alfred Hitchcock’s “The Birds” look as dense as a canary cage.

“We have to scale that down,” Romero said. “There would be no way really to create some of those scenes with millions of birds covering the town. As it is we have 5,000 birds living here (on the set). The rest will be done with optical effects and mechanical birds.”

In the climax of the novel “It,” five childhood friends, reunited as adults, confront an ancient, evil adversary.

“The greatest challenge (in the ABC miniseries) was just creating a meaningful climax,” director Tommy Lee Wallace said. “If you try to translate the book literally, it defies a visualist.”