In Honor of Tim Curry: A Fan Edit Idea for Stephen King's It Miniseries (1990).

I think of him as my generation's Vincent Price.  That seems to have been the ultimate reputation he's wound up with, and it seems like a comparison between the two is more apt once you spot and realize the similarities that Timothy Curry shares with the grand old Hollywood Horror icon.  Both came from theater backgrounds, and used it as a springboard into the world of cinema.  Both found their greatest success in the Horror genre, where each actor tended to find themselves cast as the villain.  For whatever reason, this was a role where their own theatrical talents found their greatest outlet, and hence their best creative expression.  Also note, that while the Horror genre seems to be what ultimately defined them, it's still unfair to overlook the successes that Curry and Price both found outside the genre.  In addition to giving us a good scare, the two actors both found acclaim in the realms of comedy and children's media.  The first time I ever became aware of Curry was the same way most kids in the 90s did.  I saw him as the Concierge of the Plaza Hotel in John Hughes Home Alone 2: Lost in New York.  In a way, it was the best possible introduction for those of us who were born in the mid-80s, and came of age in the 90s, as from then on it was like the man was just this constant recurring presence of our Saturday Morning routines.  He was either this familiar face or unforgettable voice that would crop up time and again in in the course of your favorite animated TV shows, and it was always a pleasant surprise, because you knew this guy was going to take things somewhere over the top, no matter the setting or source material.  That was how we met Tim Curry.

Now compare this to the fortunes that Vincent Price experienced as his career took off, and the parallels between his career and Curry's becomes all the more noticeable.  After cementing his name as a Horror icon, Price then used that fame to parley his way into television, where he proved that his gifts for the macabre could be turned with ease to the realm of the sitcom, where the grand old thespian was able poke fun at his own image while still maintaining a wonderfully macabre sense of humor about it.  Some notable examples of this latter vein are Dr. Goldfoot (a James Bond parody which has been cited as an influence on the Austin Powers series), and guest appearances on shows like F-Troop, the Adam West Batman TV series, and Get Smart.  While everyone likes to remember his role as the creator of Edward Scissorhands as his last, great, final bow, I'd argue that it's telling that Price's final role was on an episode of Steven Spielberg's Tiny Toon Adventures, where he seems to be paying a bit of final respects to his own legacy, by reciting a humorous version of Edgar Allan Poe's The Raven where his character finds himself at the mercy of a Saturday Morning riff of Tweety-bird.  It's as if Price knew he didn't have much longer left, and so he wanted to bow out with something that honored his legacy.

Curry never got that chance, unfortunately, and its a shame in several ways, as a stroke in his later years robbed him the chance to go wherever he might have liked in his career.  The point is that it's amazing to consider all the ways that the careers of these two great talents end up as mirror images of one another.  Each of them was a pair of classically trained thespians whose skills with taking performances over the top is what made them perfect fits for the Horror genre, even as it created a legacy that both of them would struggle to distance themselves with.  In the end though, each of them seemed to come to an understanding that it was this same legacy which would allow them to leave their greatest mark on the world, and it's a welcome sign to know that both Price and Curry are still revered today as some of the best entertainers of all time.  Like everybody else, it was gut-punch to learn that we'd lost one of the greatest performers of several generations recently after a long battle with ill health.  It's not something that wasn't unexpected, yet we all still thought he might have a bit longer, with maybe a chance to make one final comeback.  As it is, he's left us all a lifetime of great memories to cherish.  That's what I plan to do now, by taking a look at one of his most iconic roles, and offering an idea of how to watch it.

Stephen King's Brand of Horror, and it's Reputation.

There are some things I should make clear here.  This article is not going to be a regular review.  In the strictest sense, and like a lot of others out there, this is the sort of thing no one was expecting to have to talk about so soon.  When a legend enters the clearing at the end of the path, however, there's no way you can remain silent about it without seeming disrespectful.  And for an artist of Curry's talent, that just won't do.  So instead of the usual deep dive analysis for one of his most memorable roles, I'm going to hand over a suggestion for a good way to watch the great man in the ABC miniseries version of Stephen King's It.  It won't serve as just a eulogistic tribute of a genuine talent.  Instead, I'd like to celebrate his legacy by crafting an entirely different lens for his efforts in this Movie-of-the-Week.  I'd argue that there's a better way to watch this early 90s Made-for-TV Film.  One that not only enhances the story it's trying to tell, but that also lives up to Curry's performance in it.  I think I may have found a way to address a lot of the flack a film like this tends to get.  While a miniseries like this has been able to gain several generations of fans, it's also true that it's come in for its fair share of critical lambasting.

This is something that happens with a lot of adaptations of Stephen King works.  Most of these efforts tend to be polarizing, and what I've discovered as I go on is that it's not really limited to the production quality (or lack thereof) for any one of these movies alone.  It also seems to stem from the kind of Horror stories King likes to tell.  When you step back and look at the author's body of work in comparison with the rest of the Horror genre, it doesn't take long to realize that King is always kind of out of step with trends that audiences find most popular at the moment.  His career got a huge boost thanks to the Horror Boom of the 1980s.  That was the decade when Freddy and Jason were the reigning Monarchs of Fear at the box-office, and King seems to have been an unintended beneficiary of that trend.  Though perhaps that was something of a mistake when you look back at it from the perspective of hindsight.  What I mean is that the popularity of the Nightmare on Elm Street films, and other franchises like it meant that Horror has since become defined by a particular type of style and visual approach that still lingers to this day in the mind of pop culture.  Fred and Jay have long since become part of the genre's zeitgeist, to the point where they're what most viewers think of as the very nature of modern day Gothic fiction.  The trouble is they're not the whole story at all, and that's a real problem.

The modern work of Horror is something that's rich and varied.  It's a realm full of endless possibilities if you know how to tap into its full creative potential.  It's not limited to the simplistic hack-and-slash school that Freddy and Jason are known for.  Instead, there are all different kinds of vistas to explore in a genre like this, and some of it is even capable of reaching genuine levels of artistic sophistication, even when it comes time to bring in the buckets full of stage blood and plastic guts.  I know I'm harping on an old topic here, yet it bears repeating.  The simple fact is that the success of director's like Wes Craven meant that audiences sort of had their ideas of the genre shrunk.  All that creativity got whittled down to just the question of who next could make the audience blow their chunks in the aisle with the grossest sort of visuals they could imagine.  The irony is that this is exactly the sort of story King has never told a day in his life.  By his own admission, he's differentiated himself from the kind of gore-hound/splatter punk approach that most audiences still expect when they head into this kind of movie.  King has even gone so far as to outline where he stands in relation to the 80s splatter fests.

In the pages of Danse Macabre, he claims that, "I recognize terror as the finest emotion  (used to almost quintessential effect in Robert Wise’s film The Haunting, where, as in “The Monkey’s Paw,” we are never allowed to see what is behind the door), and so I will try to terrorize the reader. But if I find I cannot terrify him/her, I will try to horrify; and if I find I cannot horrify, I’ll go for the gross-out. I’m not proud (25-6)".  It sounds like a pretty tolerant, perhaps even indulgent stance for the author to take on the matter.  However, that's to look at the statement divorced from its full context.  King adds a qualifier to that statement, which reads: "So: terror on top, horror below it, and lowest of all, the gag reflex of revulsion (25)".  While he tries to not show any particular favoritism, the real proof of an artist's sentiments are in the practice, more often than not.  A careful look at King's fiction reveals an artist who is always a move or two out of step with the mainstream tastes when it comes to the Horror genre.  The perfect irony about that is it's not due to him being too over-indulgent with the buckets of blood and guts.  On the contrary, his own constant practice has always been to veer away from treating the principle of excess as an inherent storytelling virtue.  There's a lot to commend the writer for sticking to a sense of artistic discipline, yet it does help explain why King may never be as popular with most Horror audiences compared to others who prefer to dowse us all in rivers of stage blood and gore.

That's because King belongs less to the 80s Splatter Punk tribe, and more toward an older tradition of Gothic Horror.  This is a writer's collective that includes such names as Washington Irving, Hawthorne and Poe, Ray Bradbury, Vincent Price, Richard Matheson, and Rod Serling.  All of these guys deserve to be called great artists, yet none of them has ever really bothered with the idea of a monster in a hockey mask lugging a machete or chainsaw around.  There's even the deliberate implication that King sees all that sort of thing as beneath him.  The best proof of that comes from some rather uncharitable comments he reserved for the director of Scream and Nightmare on Elm Street.  "It is, perhaps, too easy to become enamored of bad films...It might be well to go back to the basics and remember that the difference between bad movies and good (or between bad art—or nonart—and good or great art) is talent, and the inventive utilization of that talent. The worst movie sends its own message, which is simply to stay away from other movies done by these people; if you have seen one film by Wes Craven, for instance, it is safe enough, I think, to skip the others (229)."  King then doubles down on his own sentiments.

"The genre labors under enough critical disapproval and outright dislike; one need not make a bad situation worse by underwriting films of porno-violence and those which want to plunder our pocketbooks and no more. And there is no need to do it, because even in the movies there is no real price tag on quality... not when Brian De Palma found it possible to make a fine, scary film like Sisters for something like $800,000 (ibid)."  It's pretty clear we're dealing with the kind of guy who's content to live and watch films, and read books according to his own personal lights.  There's nothing wrong with what King says there in the strictest sense, it just probably leaves him out of sympathy with most of the folks who go to the theaters in order to enjoy a Horror movie.  It's never really fit in the with the ruling definition  of the genre at any given point in the 80s, 90s, or the New 10s and 20s.  In that sense King reveals himself as something of a throwback, an accidental generic Gothic dinosaur, for lack of a better word.  He's an artist who forever finds himself locked out of the two reigning schools of thought when it comes to Horror.  He's perhaps too literate for the gore hounds, and he's somehow still too popular for the Ivory Tower.  Thus he's always a writer left in the cold, on some level.  That's not the most envious station to find yourself in.  For what it's worth, though, I count myself a fan not just of King's writings, but also the deeper level of skill and theme that's to be found in his work, and champion most of it.

The Structure of It. 

When it comes to championing the miniseries adaptation of It, the task is somewhat easier than you might expect.  That's because it's one of the handful of stories the author has told that comes the closest to the kind of Horror film that reigned supreme at the box office during the 80s and 90s.  The plot centers around a monster (who is given a tour-de-force performance by Tim Curry) that hides under the sewers of a prototypical King setting, a small town set somewhere in Maine.  The story follows the exploits of seven friends dubbed the Loser's Club who are all brought together in their struggles with being stalked and terrorized by this monster, and of how they must learn to ban together to defeat It.  The plot has all the simplicity of a fairy tale, and it's this narrative simplicity that allows King's Imagination to run wild with the tropes of Horror fiction in a way that lets him stand back and take a good long look at the nature of genre itself, and what makes it valuable as a mode of storytelling.  Granted, it's an open question of whether or not all of this matters most to the viewers watching at home, yet there is a richness to It that marks it out as perhaps the best thing King has ever done.  None of this has kept a number of complaints from being lobbed at the miniseries, however.

The two most common I've heard time and again circle around two aspects of the show.  The first is that the second half of the program centering around the adults seems to be more subdued than the first part with the Loser's as kids.  The second is to gripe about the quality of the special effects.  I'll have to take some time to address the later criticism at some point later on.  For now, though, I want to pay special attention to the complaints made about the way the miniseries is structured.  That's because when you stop and pay close attention to how John Carpenter protege and collaborator Tommy Lee Wallace and his crew arrange the source material, what jumps out the most is how you kind of get a sense of the format constraints they were under at the time.  The It miniseries exists at all thanks to the graces of the ABC television network.  This was back during the days before it was acquired by Disney, yet it's already possible to tell that even then a more family-oriented mindset was starting to set in, even if deals weren't finalized until six or seven years down the road at the time.  What's funny about that is it doesn't seem to have affected the film's major frightening moments, or at least not in the way you might think.

The reason the structure of the first It is so important is because it was having to ensure the final product adhered to network formatting which explains why so many people complain about the back half having too many dead spots.  Now, to be clear, this was a complaint I never had myself.  However, it was a growing awareness of the differences between the original novel and its TV adaptation that made me realize how it's possible to address the issues of plotting and pacing that a lot of viewers tend to complain about.  Here's where we have to point out an important element of the original source material that Wallace was tasked with adapting.  The original book doesn't have this problem of dead air or drag spots in its pacing.  Every chapter is filled with incidents, and things are always happening, and most of it is of a ghoulish nature.  The reason all of the same stuff in the text works so well on TV is because King has hit upon a very specific structure, which in retrospect appears to have been a vital yet overlooked component of the story's success as a literary artifact.  For one thing, the adventures of the Losers as kids keeps breaking up the moments of action set among the cast as adults.  King knows by instinct that this is a strategy that works in the novel's favor, as it helps avoid any possible moment of dead air.  It helps to foreground certain aspects of the plot in a way that doesn't hinder the final plot.

This is an element of the novel I'll explain in greater detail later.  For now it's enough to say that the source material relies on creating a seamless blend between past and present.  So that either none of the story's two timelines overshadows the other, or else there's such a careful blending going on that you can't tell which segment of the narrative is more important than the other, or else it just doesn't matter.  The point is that it's the structure of King's original pages that easily sidesteps the issue that the network saddled Curry and Wallace with when it came time to translate It to the small screen. What's interesting to note about the pattern or plot layout of the original novel is that it contains five acts and an epilogue, along with five interlude segments that break up the action and more or less function as a biography of the story's main villain and title character.  Each segment plays its necessary part, and what's remarkable about it from an almost architectural-numeric point of view is how close King comes to creating a near perfect seven act structure.  It creates the sense of a story in seven acts that somehow corresponds to each member of the cast, and the plot is spaced out in a way that corresponds to each of them on several levels.  It's a fascinating aspect of the book, and one with a great deal of architectural significance.

According to Bev Vincent, that peculiar sense of patterned narrative arrangement was all part of the author's initial moment of Inspiration.  "Not the characters, but the split time-frame, the accelerated bounces that would end with a complete breakdown, which might result in a feeling of ‘no time,’ all the monsters that were one monster...the troll under the bridge, of course (80)."  Vincent also notes that the idea of a Bridge became an important component of the novel as King started work on it.  Part of it's because he was walking across one when the Creative Idea occurred to him, and it put him in mind the the folktale known as The Three Billy Goats Gruff, and of the wicked troll at the center of the narrative.  In addition to this, however, there was a greater thematic importance to the idea or poetic image.  "He saw the bridge as a symbol for transition—though the idea of writing with symbolism in mind troubled him, as did the possibility that some sort of theme was attached (ibid)."  I think it's worth elaborating on this idea a little, because it seems to be important to the way It is structured as a story.  King goes into greater detail about the importance of the bridge image in a later essay he wrote about the book.

"I decided that the bridge could be some sort of symbol - a point of passing.  The idea of any sort of symbol scared me; made me feel that I was getting above my station.  Then I decided that what I was really looking for was some way to change the bridge, unsymbolize it, so that I could create a real troll in a real garden.  That would keep me safe from pretension."  Another part of the novel's Inspiration came from "Stratford, Connecticut, where I had lived as as a kid.  In Stratford there was a library where the adult section and the children's section was connected by a short corridor.  The architecture of the adult section was Victorian; that of the children's library was 1950s modern.  I decided that the corridor was also a bridge, one across which every goat of a child must risk trip-trapping to become an adult.  In this second idea I sensed something worse than a symbol; I sensed a theme (323)."  While the idea of working with such a concept might have made him nervous, it's to King's credit that he realized it was this symbol and theme that form the crux of the story.  At it's heart, It tells the tale of how sometimes its not just important, but often imperative to one's sanity to confront that things that scared you, or left you with a sense of crippling psychological inadequacy as a kid.  Sometimes that becomes the only chance you have left of sustaining a normal, healthy life.  That's the main theme of the novel, and the poetic image of the bridge acts as a vital piece of connective thread for the way the main cast must all learn to live their lives if they want to move on.

The function of the bridge is best summed up by scholar and critic Conny Lippert, in her essay on Derry's Subterranean Carnival in Stephen King's It.  It can be found in Ron Reikki's collection, The Many Lives of It.  It's there that Lippert states, "The aforementioned fairy tale "The Three Billy-Goats Gruff," which is so central to It, is a coming-of-age tale. The fabled and frequently-referenced troll under the bridge was, according to King's official website, the core idea for the story. Beneath the figurative bridge, Derry, are the sewers and tunnels housing the monster— King's equivalent of the troll. While most of Pennywise's activities are closely related to the Derry Canal and its waters, the murder initiating the final sacrificial cycle also takes place under a bridge. In the fairy tale, the bridge symbolizes a rite of passage—a journey over troubled waters from home to a better place, where the pastures are greener. The Losers' Club, consisting of the fairy-tale-number of seven children, does indeed manage to reach the other end of the bridge. However, they do so, not by crossing it, but by walking underneath, in order to confront the troll, and make normal passage possible again for future generations. The Losers undergo their trials in a locale closed off from the upper world and separate from the dwellings of humanity. The liminal underground space in which the children must make their stand is a cousin of the mythological under- worlds of old (129)".  It also affect's the novel's structure.

The entire story consists of one giant act of collective recollection on the Loser's part.  They've forgotten so much of not just their own past, but what it was like to even be a child, that their path to defeating the boogeyman is to take part in what the Classical Greeks would have referred to as an act of communal anamnesis, or the art of self-remembrance.  This is yet another way in which the bridge image functions as a recurring thematic motif throughout the novel.  Each Loser contains a bridge to their own past selves in their minds, and yet these bridges require a bit of repair in order for the crossing from child to adult to be a complete and smooth transition.  The bricks and mortar needed to make the necessary repairs consists of all those bits and pieces from a shared Summer of terror and wonder that happened way back in 1958, when the Loser's where all just a bunch of rag-tag, misfit kids facing down the monster that was always hiding in the closet, or under the bed.  Each piece of memory recalled amounts to another brick or wooden plank and support put back in place, and each bit of reconstruction brings their minds closer to completion.  The entire novel thus functions as an act of bridge building.

It's an entire story with an underlying narrative thread that most readers seem to overlook, even as it's staring them right in the face.  A good way to explain it would be to say that a good thematic title for King's book would be something like The Art of Memory, because that what the success of the Loser's as a gang of monster hunters relies on.  This need for recall is also what explains the plot's constant circular nature.  As King explains, the novel relies on a split time frame.  It means the narrative has to jump back and forth between past and present in order for the story to tell itself.  It's what accounts for the way various scenes can skip from one moment with the Losers as adults, to that same cast as children at the click of a keyboard.  This seems to have been a purposeful, built-in part of the narrative's strategy, and it serves to create an ultimately hallucinatory quality to the plot's action, as it seems as if the very barriers of time and space are starting to breakdown as the confrontation between the Losers and It kicks into overdrive.  It's perhaps the greatest tour-de-force King has ever created, and it means there was always going to be a challenge for any filmmaker to try and capture any of that on camera.

Now, to be fair, King himself admits this isn't something that's always possible.  He also claims that it's nothing to be ashamed of, and there's no need to call a film bad if it can't stuff the entire book into the picture frame.  What matters most, according to the author of It, is whether or not the filmmaker can say at the end of the shoot that he was able to capture the spirit of the story.  Even if that's an odd thing to say, or a strange way of looking at things, it seems to be King's explanation for why he still has a fondness to for Tommy Wallace's adaptation of Derry, and why he even described Tim Curry's performance as superlative.  So is it possible to claim the 1990 miniseries can still hold up?  Yes, I think it does.  I'm even willing to go a bit farther and say it's possible to edit the whole thing in a way that makes it run in a smoother way that might be able to grant unfamiliar viewers a better understanding of what the real spirit the story is about.  It all comes down to the way the narrative is structured around the idea of memory as a necessary bridge to the past, one that's needed to help you move forward.

Since the entire story is built around the art of remembering forgotten things, this means the narrative must have that circular doubling effect as the key component of its plot structure.  It's how the original source material is able to achieve all of its greatest dramatic effects.  Bev Vincent is the one who provides the best description for how this strategy causes the plot to unfold.  "The book moves smoothly back and forth between two eras—the 1950s of King’s youth, and the 1980s, when he was reflecting on that time as an adult. The stories of the seven friends, outsiders who make up the self-anointed Losers’ Club, move in parallel, alternating faster as they reach individual climaxes that are almost exact copies of one another except for the ages of the characters (83)."  It's a method of narration that bears a surprising amount of resemblance to a similar technique that Orson Welles utilized to tell Citizen Kane, and even then the technique has a genuine literary pedigree, in that Welles later admitted he cribbed the technique from the plays of Thornton Wilder.  In King's book, all this legacy amounts to the sense of people trapped in the past to such an extent that they find themselves having to retrace the same steps they took as a child in order to remember how to defeat the boogeyman, and become a real adult.

It means the most effective way to adapt this work would be to remember that it's this eerie sense of repetition that accounts for a great deal the story's uneasy sense of Gothic atmosphere.  It's to Lee Wallace's credit that enough of that inherent spirit somehow managed to make it up onto the small screen, and I think it's this often overlooked factor that explains why the miniseries works as well as it does.  I keep getting the impression that this story was in the hands of a director and a star who wanted to do right by King's words.  The trick was they had to appease the demands of network television at the same time.  The good news about that is that Curry and Wallace were given just enough of the necessary amount of space needed to tell this story.  The bad news was that I also get the impression that one thing the production couldn't negotiate on was ABC's demands that the story be as linear as possible, so that the average Nielson Family watching at home wouldn't be confused by what they were seeing.  I think this might have been the biggest unnoticed mistake the network ever made.  It points to them having a lack of trust in the audience's willingness, and hence their ability to be challenged by good writing.

The result was that Wallace was forced to re-edit King's plot into a more straightforward sequence of events.  It may have satisfied the network, yet it created a situation where the original structural integrity of the narrative was fractured, and so a lot of the film's potential dramatic impact was compromised.  Any possible imaginative sequencing of events was broken, and so hopes for a good payoff were scattered to a large degree.  Note, I say they were scattered.  I do not say that the final results were ruined entirely.  If that were the case, then it's doubtful anyone would even be talking about this miniseries with such fondness and unironic enjoyment right up to the present moment.  It all points to an adaptation that succeeds despite the handicaps placed on it.  The structural integrity of the story may have been dented, yet it hasn't been damaged beyond repair.  There was enough structural integrity left behind for the story's framework to hold as more or less solid, just not with level of durability as in its original blueprint.  The reason the miniseries still works as well as it does is down to two things.  The first and most important is because Wallace believed in the material enough to recognize that there was at least something important in the way the book was structured, to the point where the story couldn't function without that doubling circular effect.  The other was thanks to Curry's inimitable performance in the role of Pennywise.  Yet even the great Tim wouldn't have been able to salvage anything without Wallace's instinctive understanding of why the narrative worked. Say sorry, that's just the nature of it.

If you don't understand how it's the narrative that comes first, last, and always when it comes to making a good book or a film, then not only do you not understand what it is to be an artist, it's also an open question if you're capable of getting a proper read on any and all possible Art.  It was Wallace's intrinsic ability to understand just that point which allowed him to figure out a way of maintaining as much of the source material's integrity in terms not just of crucial plot elements, but also to salvage what he could of the importance of the book's structure.  He did such as good job of it, in fact, that the real amazing thing to discover all these years later is that the director did both fans and his main star an unexpected yet possibly welcome favor.  Tom Wallace has left us 90s It fans with enough materials to edit and recobble the whole miniseries back into a format which more closely resembles the plot beats of the original book.  It's now possible to make a Novel fan edit out of Tim Curry's King adaptation.

One "Possible" Fan Edit Suggestion.

Here's where we reach the main crux of this article, and before we start with that, there's other thing I've got to make clear.  I am not qualified as a professional editor.  I took a class on it in College, and I flunked with flying colors.  Which means what I'm about to say next is going to have a certain amount of incompleteness to it.  I can give you a fairly good descriptive idea of how I think certain scenes in the miniseries can be reshuffled to make a more engaging experience, if that's what some viewers require.  However, I won't be able to do so in all the proficient technical language that some might prefer.  So I guess this means I'll have to ask you to bear with my technical limitations on that score, whatever they may be.  With that in mind, here we go.  These are my fan edit ideas for Stephen King's It (1990), The Novel Cut.  The first thing to note is that this fan edit tries to stick as close as possible to the way the plot unfolds in King's original book.  It's not possible to be one hundred percent accurate, of course, ABC forced Wallace to cut out too much material for that.  However, he did manage to salvage enough of the plot so that it's possible to arrive at an approximate structure of the original source material.

Part of what I mean is in the way the miniseries leaves us with enough footage to reconstruct and format the beginning in so that it matches the start of the book.  The first edit I'd make goes as follows.  Don't spoil Tim Curry's big reveal all at once.  Instead, let's build up to his appearance in the storm drain one bit at a time.  We keep the opening death of Laurie Anne Winterbarger, yet I'd cut out all the shots of Curry standing behind a cloths line, mugging for the camera.  Instead, we keep the threat unseen for the moment.  It should be played low-key, yet menacing.  In fact, the initial impression the audience should get is that we are watching the unnatural and tragic death of a child through a stalker cam lens.  We'd see the girl look up and see someone, but we never get a good look at who she's gazing at.  We just get her reactions as at first she seems delighted, and then worried as its clear something is wrong.  Then the camera moves toward her and cut to black.  I'd also take out Richard Bellis's carnival calliope soundtrack, and keep things almost silent, so that we're left with a horrifying mystery to start off with.

Things would play out as normal for a few seconds, with the introduction of Mike Hanlon, the photo of Georgie Denbrough, and Mike's preparation to make six fateful phone calls.  Now here's where the second major series of edits come in, and where the comments of King fan Steve Spignesi come in real handy.  As he says in his Complete Stephen King Encyclopedia, "The next series of sequences (and almost the entire first half of the film), is basically a reconstruction of “Part 1: The Shadow Before,” “Part 2: June of 1958,” and “Part 4: July of 1958” of the novel. The segments follow the “Six Phone Calls” chapter structure, except all of the stories of the Losers’ 1990 life is drastically compressed into brief vignettes that lead into the flashbacks that are essentially the stories told in the “June of 1958” section (615)."  My editorial suggestions would re-structure it as close as possible to how those same segments play out in the novel.  Spignesi provides some further help with this fan edit by providing us with a good diagram of how these next edits should play out.  "In the novel, the six phone calls were in this order: 1. Stan 2. Richie 3. Ben 4. Eddie 5. Bev 6. Bill.  In the film, the six phone calls were in this order: 1. Bill 2. Ben 3. Bev 4. Eddie 5. Richie 6. Stan (ibid)".  These next edits would not only restore the first order from the original plot outline that Spignesi provides, I'd also make it truer to the book by cutting out the flashbacks from these moments.  Instead, we'd be introduced to Stan, Rich, Ben, Eddie, Bev, and Bill as they receive their phone calls from Mike.  We'd then see the effect this has on each one.

The key point is this, we wouldn't lead into the first flashback until the phone call sequence reaches its climax with Bill's notification.  Up until that point, we'd just be left with the psychological body-blow this leaves the Losers with.  This would serve to slowly build up tension as it becomes clear that all of these grown adults are carrying some serious shared trauma around with them, and how it continues to freak them all out leaves us on edge, and makes us ask, "what could make someone react like this?  How bad is it, do you suppose?  What the hell's going on here?"  That question would be answered by the first flash back to the death of Georgie Denbrough.  This scene would contain no edits, and be allowed to playout as is from the miniseries.  The key difference comes from moving it away from the start of the show's opening, and placing just a bit further on.  Restructuring this sequence according to the novel helps to build up a solid sense of suspense and dread as the audience gets introduced to each member of the Loser's Club.  Each intro gives us a sense of stakes and viewer anxieties being raised until we're subconsciously at the edge of our seats with anticipation.  We know all these scenes are building up to some big reveal, and we're anxious to know what that is.  It all culminates in a restructured edit of Richard Thomas's sequence, which is were we see Tim Curry for the first time.

Here, the introduction of Pennywise is something that's had a proper build up of anticipation behind it, so that when he first emerges in the storm drain, the audience has already been well prepped for something creepy to happen.  When it does, the viewer's first reaction should be either an unexpected yet welcome jump scare, or else a slow sinking feeling of dread, followed by the question of "....What the fuuuck?, and/or, Oh dear God... or quite possibly...You gotta be fucking kidding."  The whole point is to create anticipation for the arrival of the villain by carefully crafting the right amount of dread around him.  That way when Curry makes his first proper appearance on-screen, even if it doesn't make every audience member have a jump scare reaction, it still causes you to grow suddenly tense with a different kind of fear, namely the expectation that something very bad is about to happen.  It gives the already memorable scene between Georgie and Pennywise an extra added weight that some might see as lacking in the product Wallace and Curry were forced to give us by the network suits.  Here begins the task to recobble and edit the sequence of events into at least something as close to the events of the novel as possible.  What follows is just my own choice of edits, there are other possibilities out there.

For my part, I would then recut at least three specific segments of the miniseries together to try recreate as much of the action and feel of the first half of King's novel as possible.  My own way of doing this at the moment is to focus on the segments featuring Ben, Bev, and Eddie as kids.  We'd start with Ben, and then do a quick cutaway at a certain point in their first meetings with It.  These three big sequences would be spliced together to create one big flashback sequence.  It would start with Ben's first run-in with Henry Bowers, followed by his becoming a Loser by meeting Bill and Eddie.  We'd then cut immediately to Beverly being bullied by, and running away from her father, and meeting up with Ben and the rest of the Losers, including Riche and Stan.  We'd keep the scene with the blood welling up from the sink, yet cut away right before the ending to the scene of the Losers watching I Was a Teenage Werewolf together at their local movie theater.  It's even possible to use a little bit of audio editing to make the screams from the Teenage Werewolf's victims in the film within a film sound like they're coming from Bevvie, only for the jump cut to reveal the truth, and take us to the next segment.

That creates a narrative gap, yet this is a deliberate choice on my part.  I'll explain the logic in a second.  First, though, Eddie's sequence would play out more or less complete, except I would then cap off this whole re-edited sequence with intercutting shots of the now adult Eddie and Bev and they start their way back toward Derry with fear in their eyes.  As these brief moments are playing out, the scene's of Bev and Ben as children being taunted tormented by Pennywise (You'll DIE if ya try to fight us, Beverly.  You'll DIE, if ya TRY - We float, we all float, and when you're down here with ME, Fat Boy, you'll float too!) would be spliced in to suggest the logic of bits and pieces of fragmented, traumatic memories being barely recalled in an unexpected moment of PTSD.  The spliced-in imagery would be there to create the sense that all of what we've just seen is an example of an incomplete memory of what happened.  That the events of the Loser's past are still fractured and fragmented, even when what we do see is enough to give us a bare bones beginner's idea of what's going on, i.e. a bunch of local small town kids terrorized by the boogeyman.  The entire segment would end with Ben cowering at the top of one of his own architectural projects, a grown man lapsing back into a literal childlike mindset of fear.

These editing choices are all meant to follow the logic of the novel, in which each major plot sequence is like it's own little series of rising and falling action pieces placed together to culminate in Curry's second big performance in the school locker room set.  It's another example of crafting anticipation for the antagonist's next big appearance, and then leaving the audience wanting to know what happens next.  In this case, it's here that we'd jump straight into the Grownups section of the miniseries, with one key difference.  We're still not done with all of the kid's segments.  There's still plenty more to come on that score.  This is key, because in this edit, while audience expectations are being built up, it avoids the mistake of the miniseries in giving us too much of a premature resolution.  We've had several encounters with Tim Curry's monster character, but none of its amounts to any kind final showdown.  The audience should be anticipating that this is something that's got to happen in some form or another, yet it hasn't happened yet.  It's this nascent sense of anticipation that fundamentally helps to reshape how we view the Losers returning to their hometown as adults.  Rather than being a bit of tired business to get through after the fun stuff has come and gone, it's now a sequence filled with tense expectation.

It becomes a welcome breather period before the action starts to pick up again.  It also does something else that might sound counterintuitive from a dramatic angle, but it's really not.  One of the side effects of these edits is that, in an odd yet effective way, it serves to foreground the adult versions of the Losers in a way that doesn't seem like an intrusive and pointless tack-on from the original miniseries.  Instead, it does what any good story should do.  It sets these adults up as interesting characters that you're starting to like and want to root for.  The reunion scenes no longer feel empty after a first half that was too front-loaded for the story's own good.  Instead, it seems like a natural development in getting to know the narrative's main fellowship before they get back to their quest of monster slaying.  As such, this is ironically the one segment that I can leave mostly intact, or at least this is the happy effect that can result if you edit what comes before and after it correctly.  In the book, the adult Losers matching up functions as sort of a midway point centerpiece, rather than the prolonged addendum that it's treated as in the miniseries.  Instead, a careful re-edit of the sequence will make it serve two functions.  It allows the audience to catch it's breath before moving back into the main action, and it will also help to provide a neat and concise transition to the third and final act with the culmination of the dinner from hell.

From here, we would follow the trajectory of the miniseries a bit of the way by allowing the scene with Stan's ghost in the public library to play out as is.  After that, however, we'd jump back to another kid Loser centered flashback with Richie's encounter with the It as the Teenage Werewolf.  From there, we would return to the "present" of the miniseries as the remaining Losers regroup at the Derry Townhouse.  It's as Mike starts to exposition on the history of Derry, however, that we would then edit in a flashback to his own memory segment, complete with almost getting killed by Henry, and joining in with the Losers to stand up against him the in Apocalyptic Rock Fight, along with Pennywise making the photo album coming to life and Bill deciding to try and fight It.  From there, we'd edit back to Stan holding court in the Townhouse, and everybody realizing that Derry is something of It's lifelong helper.  The logic for editing the two scenes together into one extended sequence is twofold.  On the one hand, it shows instead of tells.  It's not just Mike's words, but also his actions and the trials he's been able to face down as a kid that presents the actual weight of events that he's endured which helps to drive home a better sense of both scope of the problem the Losers face in general, and of how Derry's sick heart has effected someone like Mike as an African-American growing up in a fundamentally poisoned society.

It's serves to give not just Mike's words, but also the actions he resorts to back them up an extra dimension of characterization and believability that makes us sympathize with him after all this time of him being something of the group narrator.  He's no longer just a background character, but someone with a personality and history that is allowed to come into his own at last.  It also helps to set up a great deal of dramatic tension when, right after seeing Mike's moment of greatest triumph, it's all answered back with a shattering sense of near total tragedy as the adult Henry Bowers bursts in on the Loser's gathering and almost kills Mike for real this time.  Like everything else about King's novel, it's a neat moment of rising and falling action that all good narratives are supposed to have.  In this case, the falling action is one that serves as a spur that drives the story into it's fourth and final act, where the Loser's head back into the Barrens, and underground into the sewers of Derry to confront Pennywise in It's lair.  Here comes the part where things get sort of tricksy, yet not impossible to create a great payoff.

The perfect irony for some is that I'm not talking about the Spider, but rather how to describe the way this payoff should be structured for maximum effect.  In other words, I think I've found a way to make the ending a bit more exciting, and it helps to bring Tim Curry's performance a bit more into the spotlight.  Now assuming that gets your attention, here's my idea.  It involves taking scenes of the Losers fighting It as both kids and adults, and then finding the right way of splicing all of these final showdown moments together in a way that creates a greater sense of thrill and excitement.  In doing this, I'm once more drawing from the way King structure's the denouement in his novel.  The big confrontation between the Losers and It marks the culmination of the story's circular doubling effect.  It's the moment where the "accelerated bounces" between the narrative's "split time-frame" all start to "breakdown, resulting in a feeling of No Time", or rather the sense that we've reached a point where past and present have begun a weird yet effective collapse into one another, with both the Losers, and perhaps even Pennywise unable to tell the difference between adults and children, or if it's the 50s or the 80s.  What this means in practical terms is a finale that has to be edited together with a lot of care.

It's also the point where I'm willing to offer a bit of open-ended leeway here.  Not everything I say about how to edit the ending has to be taken as ironclad.  There may be other ways of re-cobbling the confrontation scenes together.  What works for me, at the moment, however, is that we start with the scene where Bill may or might not see a ghost of George in the Derry Townhouse, followed by him convincing the rest of the Club to take a stand.  We'd follow the adults back into the Barrens, and after Richie complains that they should have brought a machine gun, we'd hear child Beverly on the soundtrack seeming to ask Trashmouth if he's okay, only for the edit to jump in and reveal she's asking the question of Stan the Man as a kid in 1958.  We'd then see the Losers as they test their skills with a slingshot, and Bev becoming the Club's designated gunslinger.  Then we'd edit back to a shot of the adults as they make their way towards the entrance to It's sewer, followed by an edit back to them as kids planning their strategy and being watched by a much younger Henry Bowers and his gang. 

It sort of goes onward like that.  There will be a scene of the Losers as kids descending into It's lair, followed by one of them as adults years later, with the quick-cut editing making it all seem to happen in and out of sequence at once.  The biggest suggestion I can give amidst this part of the proceedings is to start with Henry grabbing and almost about to kill Stan until It uses it's Deadlights to intervene.  We'd leave this sequence intact all the way up until the fog begins to role in, surrounding the Losers on all sides, and they have to face off against various illusions and glamours that Curry tries to throw their way.  We'd follow this sequence until the point where Stan hears a voice calling his name, and realizes someone else is holding his hand.  Then a scene of the adult Losers entering the same rotunda would be shown.  From here, we'd follow the grownups for a good stretch, right up to the emergence of It's Spider form.  Now while I'm not really here to address any complaints or grievances people may have about this aspect of the miniseries, I will at least point out that technology has reached a point where you can sort of improve the visual element there if that's what you feel like.  For instance, I think it's now possible to turn the thing's visage into like this sort of animated Don Bluth nightmare, with features that keep dripping and shifting like a wet piece of gibbous candle wax with deadly fire burning inside of it.

Imagine if that was the face crowning this eldritch abomination version of Shelob?  That could at least look cool if done right.  With that said, I'll have to admit, when I went back to watch the miniseries for this review, even the Spider looked alright to me as is.  There's some sort of logic for why this choice of final appearance works, and I have some ideas on that score, and a lot of it is because of the way that the arachnid symbolism ties into the over-arching themes of King's works.  This is stuff that deserves a proper review, however.  We're here to focus on a fan edit purely for fun, and not profit.  Anyway, the confrontation with Spider It would be allowed to play out right up until the moment that the monster grabs Eddie and starts to crush his ribs and otherwise tearing him apart.  Once that starts, then it's time for the Man of the Hour himself to be given one final, tour-de-force jump-scare style final bow.  As Eddie is writhing in pain, we'd do an immediate jump cut to none other than Tim Curry himself growling and lunging at the camera, followed by the scene of Pennywise declaring himself the "Eater of Worlds, and of Children", and getting ready to serve Stan as the next course of what seems to be a deliberately brought together seven course meal, with a few hor dourves on the side for extra spice.

Eddie and Bev would then bring all these plans to a grinding halt.  First with a squirt from Ed's inhaler, and then a good knock to the head courtesy of a silver slug from Bev's slingshot.  What happens next will have to be the most complicated bit of fan editing in the entire film.  It requires a series of quick jump cuts back and forth between the confrontation with the Losers as kids and adults.  After Curry gets a bit of the Deadlights knocked out of him thanks to Bev as a little girl, we then cut to her as a grown woman searching for and retrieving the remaining silver slug.  There would have to be some audio as well as visual editing for this crucial moment, as we would need to hear the kid Losers egging Bev on to go in for the kill as their child voices play over footage of Bev as an adult intermixed with the same character as a little girl.  The big finale shot would consist of adult Bev leaping into frame, followed by a shot of Curry looking his most monstrous and deranged (and for which he will forever have several generation of grateful fans), with the sounds of the child Losers playing on the re-edited soundtrack. 

We'd see adult Beverley take aim, then cut to Curry as Pennywise taking a giant backflip leap into the air.  A certain amount of not just editorial, but also good old fashioned special effects wizardry would be needed at this exact moment in the runtime.  Because it involves the images of the past and the present coming together in a single moment of All-Present Time, for lack of a better word.  What all that word salad means in practical terms is that it sort of makes sense for me to take that F/X shot of the somersaulting model of Pennywise, and to use whatever visual technique is necessary to first make the stop-motion puppet take on a bright, silvery glow, and then overlay some animation on that same visual to make it look like monster is being hit by Bev's silver slug, as her final shot hits home.  You would have to take the animated light figure drawing of the Pennywise model, and draw it uncoiling from it's leap in mid-air, so that it looks as if the slug has hit home, right in It's chest, before having this light effect version of It explode apart, with some final editing wizardry pulling back from this spectacle to show that it's the Deadlights sparking and going out in the chest cavity of It's Spider Monster form.

The whole effects shot should be there to provide the confrontation with what I'm guessing is the closest thing to an epic, dragon-slaying shot as you can give this sort of story.  If done right, then it can pull off those sort of weird, yet often gnarly and cool F/X shots that a lot of the best Sci-Fi, Fantasy, and Horror movies of the 80s were capable of achieving.  It would also perhaps help give some viewers the sense of punch they might feel the scene needs.  On a storytelling level, it would make the final product ring more true to King's notion of the barriers between past and present somehow breaking down and becoming one in the moment of Pennywise's ultimate defeat.  The rest of the miniseries can be allowed to play out as is.  If you want, or if anyone else feels that a little parting bit of something extra is needed, then you might try animating a final shot of It as it struggles for life while the Losers are tearing its heart apart.  Like have the Spider morph into the Classic round of monsters from cinema's Golden Age.  In other words, you could have the creature meld and morph into into first Dracula, then the Frankenstein Monster, then the Wolfman, then the Mummy, then the Creature from the Black Lagoon, that sort of thing.  Consider it an extra option if you feel it's needed, the rest can play out like normal.

Conclusion: Saying Goodbye to a Legend.

 

There's one thing to bear in mind about all I just said above.  While I'm willing to defend the editorial choices I've made, I'm also aware that there are always going to be other options for how to recut the whole thing, in the hopes of making a more exciting film for some viewers.  Even if most buy into the idea of creating a fan edit of Stephen King's It miniseries, there are still going to be competing views about the best way to go about doing so, and some of them might have better ideas than mine.  It's even possible to guess at what some of these alternate re-edits might contain.  For instance, I can see the logic of editing the clips so that we flashback to the Losers as kids as the main cast makes their way back to and around Derry as adults.  For instance, you can have Annette O'Toole be standing outside Beverly's old house from Part Two of the show, and then use an edit to segue back to Bev's childhood memories from there, and do the same with Ben, Eddie, and Richie.  That's just a sample of what other ideas that many are bound to have once anyone suggests an idea like this, even if only as a fan thing.  That's because an unexpected bonus of a film like this is that it really does offer itself up to alternate cuts, some of which very well could help enhance its dramatic impact.  In that case, I have just three stipulations to anyone else who wants to try their hands at making a better version of the miniseries.

The first is going to sound strange, yet it's something I think needs to be said.  The adult actors aren't your enemy here.  Richard Thomas, Harry Anderson, and John Ritter tend to get a lot of undeserved flack because of the common complaint that their segments aren't as fun as the kids.  However, one of the major points of this article has been to demonstrate that this was never meant to be the case.  The source material was written to foreground the adult Losers in such a way as to not be a drag on the momentum and pacing of the narrative.  Instead, King's original plot is structured in such a way as to make the entire story a puzzle that makes the audience actively curious about this group of traumatized grownups, and what happened to them as kids to make them this way.  Every sequence in the plot unfolds in a manner the keeps teasing the audience with a richness of detail that leaves us wanting to know more, and part of the genius of the original book is that the adult Losers always serves as the initial starting point that's meant to lead in to all of these mysteries in the past.  It's a narrative strategy that works because the adults Losers are never left hanging in the air with nothing to support their actions.  Instead, every choice or line of dialogue from the grownups serves to lead the viewer back into the world of the children they all once were, and it's a process that continues right up to the end credits.

This is how the original story of It keeps itself interesting, and any fan edit that forgets this vital aspect of the plot hasn't been paying attention to the full scope and nature of the story.  It's possible to allow the adults to take center stage in a way that doesn't diminish either them, or their childhood counterparts.  You just need to make sure to find all the right editing choices that help maintain this fine balance that the novel always has going for it.  You have to keep in mind that the adults are always there to lead the viewers into their memories, and that those memories in turn are meant to shape the eventually choices each Loser makes during the climax.  The second suggestion that I ask any potential fan editor to keep in mind is that you'll be able to tell when you've made the wrong choice when it becomes clear the edits have managed to get in the way of the story's pacing.  This was something I found out when I realized that, believe it or not, the adult scenes do have a forward momentum of their own, and the desire to insert the kid segments into the wrong setting will interrupt that flow, and this creates both a pacing problem along with a needless tonal clash into the bargain.  Which probably means another bit of advice is to not let impatience get the better of you with a story like this.  It's not meant to be a Freddy or Jason style hack and slash fest.  King makes clear he's writing a different kind of story with his novel.

The last bit of advice is going to sound very counterintuitive to several generations raised on color TV, yet it could be an unnoticed blessing in disguise, so bear with me here.  I want to suggest that you do one other thing as you recobble the plot and pacing of the miniseries in something that resembles the novel.  Turn the the color settings down until you are left with a black and white image.  I'm serious, this is something you should try.  Turn the the color off on the image, and see how it totally transforms the nature of the picture you're watching.  One of the other complaints I've heard about this TV show is that all other matters aside, the production value in general just looks like it as made for TV.  I'd argue it's actually a cut above the actual standard idiot box fair of the time, yet I also know its easy to let that color the audience's perception of stuff that's of way higher quality than normal for the old analog format.  What taking away the color does is to help remove this artificial filter, and force the viewer to take in a different experience of the miniseries than the one we've all grown up with.  It transforms the entire story into a completely different experience.  We're not watching a simple TV movie of the Week.

Now we're viewing an affectionate throwback to those old Black and White Creature Features that guys like King grew up on back in the 1950s and 60s.  The lack of color helps make the entire purpose of the show's aesthetics stand out in greater clarity.  The monochrome presentation transforms the exterior shots of Derry from a simple an obvious TV production into a grey world with a brooding atmosphere over everything.  It helps to suggest the idea from the novel that the town itself is just as much a character and a threat in its own right.  That Derry is both a prison and a feeding ground where the children of the community are routinely fed to various animals and predators as a matter of warped public policy.  Removing the color from Wallace's production helps create just the right sense of the older 50 Drive-In Movie level of Gothic atmosphere.  You can believe a monster lives in this town.  It also serves to turn the entire show into a B Movie Creature Feature in its own right, creating brilliant contrasts of light and shadow that creates a spectrum from eerie menace to quiet bits of enchantment.  The latter case can be seen in the way the lack of color creates a beautiful series of light patterns in ripple from simple puddle of water.  Thus making the scene into something out of a fairy story.  There's plenty of good reasons why a film like this can benefit from what I'll call the Black and White Test.

If you can keep these three suggestions in mind, then by all means, see what you can do with a miniseries like this.  Just remember this is for fun, and not infringement.  Beyond all of this, there's one final and obvious element we've still to address, and the best way for me to do that is to tell about what happened when I sat down to watch the show with recent events in mind.  I went into that viewing with a clear objective in mind.  I wanted to go over the film and see how various spots could be re-cut to reflect the structure of the source material.  The point that has to be stressed there is that was almost my sole purpose for the viewing.  Yes, I knew it was all in part of a tribute to a fallen star, yet it has to be stressed that I headed into this project with the professional critic's outlook foremost in my mind.  I was there to take notes, and see what a detached viewing of the material could tell me.  What happened along the way was that I got to the big dinner reunion scene between the gang, and as I was watching that particular moment, it's like something about it clicked to me for the first time.  It's one of those moments that people like to claim drags the film down, however watching it this time brought the subtext of that reunion home in a way that wasn't there before, and it's all down to Tim Curry himself.

Going back and watching the Losers all regroup and have moment just to reminisce together hits way way different with the knowledge that Pennywise himself is no longer with us.  For better or worse, that whole sequence became an unintended, yet very genuine moment in which it was possible to find a way to celebrate and recall one of the greatest, yet somehow always overlooked talents of his generation.  Curry was part of the New Wave of actors that emerged in the aftermath of Cinema's Silver Age.  It may sound strange, because it's so easy to overlook, yet he really does count as one of the talents that helped to re-shape what types of stories could be told in movies, and whose efforts went on to define the way films could made on the movie or TV screens.  It is just possible to make the case that Curry did as much to shape the nature of modern viewing to the same extent as that of, say, Robert De Niro.  It's a statement that I'd argue is true, yet I'm also aware that it's not the sort of one-plus-one equation even his fans would be quick to realize, and a lot of the reason for that is because Tim was never content to do the whole New Wave Genius thing and remain aloof from the fans.  He never maintained the same level of professional distance that actors like De Niro still does, or Tom Hanks used to do until recently.

Instead, Curry was the kind of actor who, much like Vincent Price, was always willing to recognize how much he owed to the fans, and so did the same thing as Price by willingly immersing himself in, and even allowing himself to become, a crucial part of the pop culture landscape that in he helped to craft and create in a myriad number of ways.  It's what's allowed him to be an endearing pop cultural icon, yet at the same time, it's clear that he had to pay a certain price along the way.  It meant he was looked upon as a mere "entertainer" rather than a legitimate artist like De Niro.  Such a judgement is unfair as hell, and yet it's also one that I think most of us have helped to shape around him, even if none of it was intentional on our part.  What's happened instead is that I think we all got too comfy with allowing others to define us as representing forms of entertainment that are less deserving of consideration as serious Art with a capital A.  It's only in retrospect, when one of the great architects of the film and TV that we love passes into legend that you realize just how unfair we've all been to ourselves.  If anything good can come from a death, then I hope that in Tim's case, his passing will serve as a sort of wake up call to shake off the sort of myopia that's allowed us to view Curry and the films he made or worked on as this kind of disposable talent that doesn't deserve any real consideration.  It's a trap that most of us pop culture junkies and critics have allowed ourselves to be lured into, and perhaps it's gone too far.

Maybe now is the time to realize that the efforts of a genuine talent like Tim Curry can serve as a demonstration that even a simple TV Movie of the Week can have its own claims to being a legitimate work of Art, rather than just a half-remembered piece of nostalgia.  It's for all of these reasons that help explain my reaction to the Loser's reunion scene in the miniseries adaptation of King's book.  As things went on, I found myself surprised that the sequence was making me tear up.  It had never done that to me in the past, yet it didn't take me long to realize why that was the case now.  It's because the passage of time can often re-shape the way we watch certain films, and that was the very much the case here.  The reason I was tearing up now is because it was clear that this was perhaps the closest Tim would ever come to having anything like a genuine celebration in his honor from one of his own works.  It's a case where the subtext of real life bleeds into the finished product of a fictional story, and it enhances the meaning of the narrative in ways it couldn't have before.  The Loser's Club meeting as a bunch of adults now doesn't become just a mere plot point any longer.  Instead, in my mind, at least, it will forever be a moment to celebrate the legacy of Tim Curry, and the contributions he made to providing several generations of fans with not just memories, but also several artistic touchstones that we can all benefit and learn from.  It doesn't hurt that Tim is the figure the scene is circling around, either.

Heck, he technically ends up joining in the festivities in an appropriately ghoulish fashion, and I remember thinking, "Yeah, you know what, Tim probably wouldn't minded if a tribute to him ended with a bit of the macabre.  It would have been in keeping with his style."  That still seems true even now.  It's also what makes the whole thing kind of strange and bittersweet for a number of reasons.  I opened this year in a moment of shock, having to talk about a very unexpected and tragic death.  I now find myself more or less getting ready to close out the year by having to talk about another one.  Both of them, for whatever reasons, wound up centering around artistic collaborations with Stephen King.  The part that really weirds me out about it all looking back is how I know for a fact this is nothing any of us planned, least of all me, and yet there's this kinda messed up impression of having watched an invisible process unfold, in which some things come to a sense of full circle, thus providing an odd level of closure, for me at least.  King has said that one of the purposes of his writings was to see the ways in which fiction and life sometimes manage to balance each other out, and it's as if something very much like that has happened here.  Two deaths, one tragic, the other natural enough, and taken together they sort of provide a sense of closure that I don't think any of us expected to find.  None of it's ideal of course, the world is always a bit more empty when great talent is lost, and that still goes here.

However I get the idea that somehow Tim's passing is able to somehow provide that sense of balance King often talks about.  What goes around comes around, and sometimes Kismet can provide you a certain amount of consolation, even if it is weird as hell.  In a perfect world, I'd have the sort of clout and connections that would allow me to produce an adaptation of Ray Bradbury's The Halloween Tree, and I'd get Tim to sign on to the role of Mr. Moundshroud, a spirit guide who leads a group of Spielbergian youngsters on a dark yet enchanted journey through the history of October's signature Autumn Festival, and I'd also be able to get Rob Reiner to direct it.  That, to my mind, would have been the best fitting tribute I could have come up with for a guy like Curry.  It would have amounted to a project which would have served as a fitting commentary on the kind of legacy Tim built up for himself, and that he's now left behind for all of us who consider ourselves his fans.  Instead, this is the best I'm able to do under short notice, I'm afraid.  I just hope it's not too makeshift for its own good.  What I do hope most reading this take away is that while the tribute might be kind of paltry, it's also one that comes straight from the heart.  I know what it's like to slowly become a fan of the talent and artistry of Tim Curry.  This is just the best reflection of the legacy he's left in my mind and heart.  That's got to amount to something in the end.  So with that in mind, I leave off with the only dedication a post like this can have.  Here's to you, Tim.  Thanks for all the memories, and for what it's worth, God's speed.