There is, I think, in his works
an element of high tragedy, and I am sure that tonight,
he will be willing to share with us
the movements and gestures of his dance macabre.
I present to you, Stephen King.
Thank you.
You come to experiences in your own life that are frightening,
and you try to make sense of them in what you write.
And I can remember living in Colorado
and we had an old American Motors car
that just simply vomited up it s transmission one day
in the middle of the road.
And a tow truck came along
and took it away to wherever they take
transmissionless Matadors,
and they called around after it had started to get dark
and said, "Your car's ready if you want to come and get it."
And my wife said, "Are you going to take a cab?"
And I said, "No, I'll walk."
And I walked and it got darker and darker,
and this was really on the edge of town, you know.
There's nothing there and you could see the dealership,
but it was a ways away.
And the path went across this bridge, you know,
a little arched humpback wooden bridge.
And I'm walking across it,
and I can hear my heels clacking on the bridge
and I flashed to this story when I was a kid
about these goats that were going across a bridge
and there's this troll underneath and he said...
-"Who's that trip-trapping on my bridge?"
And I thought, "Wouldn't it be a scream
if something just reached up now and grabbed me,
-and pulled me down there, and that was the last
anybody heard of old Stevie King?"
So.
But the incident stayed in my mind,
and over a period of five years,
I would come back to that
and come back to that, and little by little,
I began to evolve a story until now it's developed into
a novel that's about 1,300 pages long.
It's called IT,
and it all came from that one little moment of fear.
And I think that a moment of fear is worth having
if you can get something good out of it.
This is Tim Reid, Richard, in Virginia.
It's back. I found a picture of Georgie.
IT's enduring power
may come from the chords it strikes among all of us.
We're all human beings and we were all children once.
It's amazing to me all these years later
how people are still coming up and talking about
that it has this lasting effect and impact.
You never think that something you've created
will, you know, this will live on forever.
As an actor,
I didn't really pay much attention
to the impact that I was having.
I was just something I was doing as a kid.
-This is battery acid, you slime!
I've done shows in Mexico or in Europe
where the crew that I've worked with there,
they're like, "Oh, my god. You did IT!"
I think the story itself
is kind of timeless...
People going through issues
and having to come together to overcome them.
-We do it.
-Oh yeah. We.
-You know, it's a coming-of-age story.
It always surprises me when people say,
"Oh, my god, I always wanted to be you in IT.
I always wished I was Bev."
And I think, "Oh, you poor thing.
What was your childhood like?"
It's talking some pretty serious talk
about what it's like for each of us to be a child.
- The fun. - Yeah! Yeah!
-And the scary parts.
You know, most TV movies
disappear into oblivion.
I think the fact that IT is consistently played on cable
has opened it to. A much wider audience.
It was one of the first
terrifying mini-series.
People were invested in it. It became an event.
-Something is coming.
And because it was made for TV,
it allowed a younger audience to view it as well.
Little kids, who saw
IT on television, it's still in their minds
as the scariest thing they've ever seen.
Ah!
-That movie scared the beep out of me, like,
I couldn't sleep, I hate clowns, I hate spiders.
Like, couldn't even go near a drain.
People tend to gravitate towards things
that struck them as a kid.
And I think probably a lot of the people who saw IT
as teenagers or younger, it just, it burned themselves.
So as an adult, it becomes a fun memory,
then it takes on this whole other cult level.
-It scared the hell out of millions of people.
-One of the comments is... Is typically
"Tim Curry is the reason why I'm terrified of clowns."
The portrayal of Pennywise probably went from
"Yeah, we're gonna have some clowns over
for little Johnny's birthday party" to,
"Uh, probably not."
Well, a character that manifests itself
in the shape of your fears is terrifying
at any age, in any era.
And so, I think that's why that concept is so indelible.
A lot of people tell me
that IT poisoned their childhood
when they saw it on television.
-And I would always think,
"You shouldn't have been watching it."
I had written Carrie,
and that had put Steve King, Brian de Palma,
the actors and me on the map
in a way that I became a go-to for horror adaptations.
I got a call one day.
.from my agent in Los Angeles who said
he'd been approached by a pair of producers
who'd set up a new Stephen King project at ABC
as a novel for television and was I interested in that?
The next day the doorbell rang,
Federal Express at the door,
and the guy is carrying the most humongous
FedEx package I've ever seen.
I took this unwieldy, bulky piece from him
and was about to close the door and he said, "Hang on a minute."
And he went back to the elevator
and came back with these two giant containers
containing the typed manuscript of IT in its earliest stages.
I sat down and read the opening with young Stuttering Bill.
-Well, we have to seal it first with paraffin.
And baby brother Georgie,
and what turns out to be a horrible demise
at the hands of Pennywise. In the sewer.
I went, "I'll do it."
We went in for a first meeting with the network
and the executive vice president of movies for television
and she looked at me and she said,
"So tell me, what is IT?"
And I said, "Well it's an inter-terrestrial beast...
-"that has come down eons ago
and has the power to screw with kids' minds.
-Beep-beep, Richie.
"And attack their worst fears."
And she looked at me and she nodded, and she said,
"Yes, but what is IT?"
So, I went, "Okay."
And I answered another answer and she asked me,
I don't know, five more times.
And I looked over at the producers and went,
"I'm in hell."
I was coming back home to New York,
and I'm sitting on the plane,
and I see a guy with his back to me
reading what is clearly the cover of my script.
It's Bob Iger, who was the head of
all of the programming at ABC.
And he whipped through night one,
went through his briefcase, pulled out night two,
whipped through night two, stood up, stretched,
sort of smiled,
and it said to me IT had his support,
and I think he decided in that reading,
"Yeah, let's do it."
The producers had a brainstorm and they picked up the phone
and they made an overture toward George Romero.
He loved the book; he was as nuts for it as I was.
He saw the possibilities of what IT could be.
I pitched it to the network as a long novel for television.
I said, "I think it should be eight and ideally ten hours."
We exchanged maybe five times in the course of the process.
I would do what was needed,
which was called a bible in television terms,
which was just a really detailed outline.
And I'd send it to George.
He'd look at the outline, and a week later
I would get a 45-page typed version of mine
interspersed with his thoughts, his notes, and his suggestions.
There was never a question that he thought
it was going to be a gross-out,
lots of blood,
kind of picture.
He understood what television offered
was the chance for you to go right up to the line.
But his radar was out for what would the network allow.
I think the dream of what we had in mind
was absolutely amazing.
I think we were just about 20 years early in having it.
We would have been Game of Thrones.
That would have been the way to do this piece of material
in its fullest possible way.
-The network started to get very nervous.
Nobody had ever gone where this piece had gone,
and they sort of went from it being eight hours,
which became the official running time bible,
to maybe it should be four,
at which point George said, goodbye.
We were looking for a director.
We had an air date.
Stephen King's IT starting tomorrow.
Tommy Lee Wallace came to mind.
Tommy was also a writer.
Part two needed the help and I felt that a director-writer
would probably be the person to do that.
-And action!
I cut my teeth on synopsizing manuscripts for agents
and developed a knack for condensing novels
into a couple of pages of synopsis,
So I just made an attempt to do that with the book.
Larry Cohen wrote this wonderful script,
and I'm referring to night number one
because that's what got me truly excited.
The trick in IT was
in putting on the King hat
and going, "Okay, I've now read this 400 times,
I breathe it with every pore of my body,
and I'm gonna pretend I'm Stephen King
for as long as it takes for me to get this done."
I did three-by-five cards on the wall,
and I went, "Okay, we're missing how you get from here to here.
It's not in what he wrote."
I retained a part of Steve's back-and-forth juggling...
I brought this old photo album from home.
Of the two time periods.
I thought it had a lot of emotional resonance.
That's the only time I've ever seen
the absurdity of a seven-act TV movie structure
actually work because of the seven characters involved.
So, for the first night,
the structural job became really clear
and weirdly the limitation became a tremendous asset.
Each act focused on
one of the characters
and told the story of what happened in childhood
and the alarm being sounded for them.
- Hello? - Beverly,
it's Mike Hanlon.
-I was less enamored with the second night
because it deviated so far away from the novel itself.
I didn't know that in the beginning
because I hadn't read the novel, but I knew something was amiss.
It just didn't deliver the goods.
The husband of Bevy...
-No, I'm not married.
Re-entered the picture
and became kind of the villain of the piece.
- - Being more or less
animated by Pennywise.
In dramatic terms,
it did what it needed to do to bring the movie to an end,
but it had little to do with the book
and I felt like it kind of gypped the viewer.
It was a much more prosaic TV-style climax.
[
-I was candid with Larry about that.
And by this point, the impetus is moving to Vancouver
and Larry couldn't come to Vancouver to work with me
to bring the second night up to the first.
By this time, I'd been working on the project
for about two-and-a-half, three years.
Not quite as long as it took Steve to write it
but the runner-up prize.
We were about to start Carrie
with the Royal Shakespeare Company over in England
and I was owing a draft on something else, and I went,
"I think this is my cue to say, 'Go with God. I'm done.'"
So, the job fell to the best guy
I could find for free, me.
And so, I did the rewrite myself.
And in this case, we simply were up against
a production schedule that was hurtling toward us
and was not going to be pushed back.
So I just went back to the book again and again
until I could find a way to bring the adult story around
to something resembling the book.
It really is a deep challenge to condense a novel
that rich, that deep, that dense,
into just a few hours of television.
I used Mike as a narrative device.
-I'm sure by now you all remember
what was going on in Derry 30 years ago.
There was a rash of killings, maimings, disappearances.
Because you can save a lot of frames of film
if somebody's summing up the story.
-Henry Bowers confessed to everything,
and the killing stopped.
I thought it was poignant for him
and helped his character actually.
But it was going so fast that at night in the hotel
I would just...
as fast as I could go.
I don't think Night Two is the masterpiece
that Night One is,
because I do respect Larry Cohen's script
and didn't feel all that great
about changing it so drastically.
-Tommy Lee did what he needed to do
given what the circumstances were.
This reminds you very much of your childhood,
this neighborhood?
Yes, it does.
It does. Same dirt road.
Same old Grange Hall at the end of the road.
That's you.
That's me when I sold my first story.
I look a little bit surprised about the whole thing.
-Stephen King is such great drama and mystery.
And for as much as his books are about horrific things,
they are mostly about deeply human
psychological thought processes,
so you get a lot of deep character study.
Well, I'd read most of the books
because he's a master of narrative.
He tells a whacking good story.
-People would say you ought to write about what you know.
I grew up in a small town. We had no running water.
I went to a one-room school
with all the grades together and.
Somebody had to go up to a house and bring back water.
And to me, the whole existence
was not pastoral or beautiful or anything.
It was just boring.
I wanted to be in outer space.
I wanted to fight monsters in the swamps of the Amazon.
So those were the things that I wrote about.
And later I found a way to.
Blend those two interests:
My interest in what was strange and... and alien
and the places where I lived and where I grew up.
Most of his works are
difficult to turn into films.
Because if you try to.
Visually show an audience what this.
Incredibly talented writer
that uses the English language in order to have the reader
conjure up their worst fears, it doesn't always work.
-The movie has to capture
some of the spirit of the writer's heart and-and mind.
And if it doesn't, generally speaking,
what the reader went to the book and found and loved,
the movie audience won't.
-It's hard to capture all the little nuances
that he puts in his books.
His stuff was such an influence
on so many filmmakers as well, as far as storytelling.
Steve's got a very particular genius
in creating villains.
They become iconic and come into a level
of the public's consciousness and the viewer's conscious
that's forever.
-You were one of the first people
to have the idea that a clown
could be a scary figure.
Did you find clowns scary when you were a kid?
-Well, you know, as a kid going to the circus,
there would be like, 12 full-grown people
that would all pile out of a little tiny car.
Their faces were dead white.
Their mouths were red as though they were full of blood.
They're all screaming. Their eyes are huge.
What's not to like, you know?
The circus is still the greatest show on earth,
and to have a circus, you have to have clowns.
Well, there's a long tradition of clowns.
When I was a kid and used to go to pantomimes in England,
they used to have a guy whose name I think
was Charlie Cairoli, who wore the classic
kind of pointed hat and was rather a gentleman.
He wasn't threatening at all.
Growing up, my brother was into clowns
and ran away and joined the circus.
If you've ever been backstage at a circus,
it changes your perceptions of clowns.
-Often there's sort of mayhem involved with being a clown.
-They're usually, both silly and scary or playful,
which can all be frightening to a kid.
-I went to the circus in 1974,
when I was a little kid, and I have a photo of me
where the clown's putting his arm around me,
and I'm only about this tall.
And I have this paralyzed look like, you know,
I'm not happy.
I think it's almost archetypal
in the sense that clowns,
like Pagliacci, the opera...
There's always something behind that smile.
-I think prima facie, clowns are fucking scary.
Even when you're enjoying them,
there's something in there in the grotesquery of it all,
and it's really in the eyes, I think.
You know, you can have this very funny thing.
Even if the mouth isn't overtly scary,
which sometimes clown mouths are,
but the minute the eyes get hard,
the minute the eyes aren't, you know...
You know, aren't that, and they go.
Wow!
-I would go to McDonald's when I was a little kid.
I would not go hang out with the Ronald McDonald cutout.
-The fry guy!
-There's something weird about it.
I didn't think he was going to grow teeth and eat my face.
-Not every single clown you see
makes you want to instantly turn around
and run away in horror.
I think adults and kids
understand clowns very differently.
I can't go to circuses.
I can't go somewhere where there's clowns,
even a picture of it.
What's going to happen if you look at it?
It is a phobia, and it is called coulrophobia.
The majority of people that are afraid of clowns are adults.
I think for kids,
clowns are great fun.
There's just not any menace or danger at all.
And Steve's particular spin was to take something
that's much loved and familiar
and ratchet it up as far as it could possibly go.
-Somebody who's got problems
and fears and phobias, they go to a psychiatrist,
and it costs maybe 150 dollars an hour.
And they don't even get a full hour,
they get 50 minutes.
I do what people pay me.
There's lots of things
that feed into what King was doing
with creating a clown as the main antagonist.
At the time, John Wayne Gacy had just happened,
so we're dealing with people being afraid of clowns,
and the guy next door is a threat.
-At one point, I saw a painting of Pennywise
that Gacy had done.
A dark landscape,
a portrait of Elvis,
and a scene with seven dwarfs.
But this is the work of John Wayne Gacy,
an evil man who buried more than 25 of his victims
in the crawl space of his own house.
Arts Factory owner showed us five pieces,
including this Pennywise the Clown
from Stephen King's IT.
-I was like, should I be flattered or offended?
I don't know how I feel about this.
The scary clown is that realization
deep within the child that they can't express, that no,
something's not quite right in the world, you know.
Like, I've seen the homeless guy in the street.
-Any spare change, mister?
-Or, you know, I've seen really sick people,
or I myself have experienced some kind of abuse
or discrimination, right?
But you're not supposed to talk about it as a child.
You feel like you have to smile and be happy.
That's what the evil clown is about.
It's about the fact that there's something rotten.
-at the heart of society.
This whole town is IT in some way. All of them.
-And as a kid, you're not allowed to express it.
Pennywise is really important
because the '50s were considered safe and sweet
and nostalgic and fun.
And at the heart of it, they're not.
So, the clown works on that metaphorical level
that it's saying this is what the decade was like.
On the outside, it's one thing.
Inside, it's something completely different.
The mythology of clowns being scary
has exponentially grown over the last 20 years.
Fuck you!
-I do feel as though this book
and this movie had some influence on that.
-I was about five or six
and I was in a video rental store,
and then all of a sudden, there's this face
just staring back at me, and I just froze.
Like, if you see a spider, you freeze with fear,
and I just froze.
People, I think, perceptions change
because that's what they're being sold.
They're being sold that clowns are scary.
Sightings of a mysterious clown
have been creeping out
some people in Staten Island.
-Media sites have been abuzz with stories
of a mysterious and creepy clown.
-And you know, I'm sure that Pennywise
and John Wayne Gacy didn't do the best job
in creating a positive image of clowns.
And I'm sure it wasn't Tim Curry's goal
to have people hate clowns for the rest of their lives.
But I think it is kind of a hallmark
of a good performance.
He had a tremendous impact on
growing people's fears about clowns.
I can't say that I ever saw clowns
as being threatening,
although I loved being threatening.
That's it! Let go!
Be afraid!
-It was a lot of fun.
There's enough room
in our understanding of clowns
to have some of them be not so scary,
to be sweet and nice,
and maybe some of them just downright awesome.
Beep-beep.
Push this closer to the monster, please.
A little farther, Tim. Find the light.
All right, here we go. Yeah. Thank you.
And clear, please.
And action!
I believe casting has been
as much a contributing factor
to the success of my version of IT
as any other factor at all.
It was beautifully cast. Period.
-They brought me the script and they said,
"You want to do it?" And I'm like, "Well, yeah."
This is an amazing piece.
We knew what we had when we were working on it.
Pennywise was such a brilliant character.
-We were looking for television leads
to promote the picture in our marketing campaign.
Victoria turned her list in,
and we began going after the network-approved actors.
We had approval of Harvey Fierstein
to star as Pennywise. And we were saying,
"We need to continue to look on the list here.
We don't know whether the network will approve him."
I think they'd mentioned it was going to be
either Roddy McDowell or Malcolm McDowell.
-And they explored Alice Cooper at one juncture.
-So, who else have we got?
-I do remember that we had brought up
Rocky Horror Show and said, "Look at that."
-I had to buy the Rocky Horror Picture Show album,
I had to buy the books, I had to buy the scripts.
You're a very expensive date.
-I know.
-Just the freedom of the character,
the intensity that he gave to it,
was so wonderful and you could see
that this would translate brilliantly
into a horror character.
-How 'bout that?!
-We were focused on Tim Curry.
-Me?
I think he's one of the best actors
that's ever come out of England,
and I don't think he gets his due.
Was there any time in your life
when you said, "I want to be an actor"?
Yes, I did, actually.
What is there in it
which appeals to you most?
-A sort of voluntary schizophrenia, really.
It's a high-risk profession and I enjoy risks.
He's created so many iconic characters
that we've known through time,
and they've been so uniquely different.
You said that being British in Hollywood means
that you're usually stuck playing a butler or a villain,
but that's okay with you.
-I think that they probably feel
that we bring some kind of style to the... the job
that... that we might not
necessarily have acquired in the States.
Yeah, but you know what I think it is about you?
I think it's that you're very seductive
and, you know, I thought if you were the devil,
I would pay to go to hell.
His Darkness character has
stood out from any other devil I've ever seen.
Looking at his body of work, I feel like,
there's nothing that he can't do.
Is he available?
-I will kill you all.
-Is he interested?
Can we make a deal?
-I'll kill you all.
-Will the network be okay with it?
-You are priceless!
-Of course, everyone was.
I didn't audition or even do a meeting.
They just asked me if I wanted to do it,
and I said, yes, I did.
Tim Curry just had all those elements
that he would be fearless in the role.
-Kiss me, fat boy!
-He brought more to the character
than what was written on the page.
So, he was approved at the network
and the rest is history.
-You all taste so much better
when you're afraid, really afraid!
Tim brings his considerable intellect
when he does a part.
I sometimes ask myself that question
after I've done a take.
One of the great advantages is that you can whisper.
I mean, that you can do things that are very small
which you couldn't do on... on a stage
and then that's what I'm discovering about that.
We didn't talk at great length
intellectually about it because it was clear to me
that he had the correct instincts.
-It's got to be true,
whatever you're doing, and the camera picks that up
much more cruelly than anything else.
Tim Curry managed to capture the humor
that a clown can bring.
-And then just managed to switch it.
And be this magnificent evil villain
that would kill you and eat you.
Like that.
-I'll kill you all!
-In a funny way, it's a very simple performance.
-Take your pick, B-B-B-Billy boy!
Whenever you see fearlessness in a colleague,
it's always an inspiration.
Some wise person in the movie business
said for directors the key is...
90 percent of it is casting the right actor
and then getting out of their way.
Tim was a director's dream.
A little further, Tim.
Find the light, uh, somewhere in there.
There's not much there.
Okay. There! There's some.
I liked Tommy Lee a lot.
He was very direct, which was nice.
-Tommy Lee Wallace was a brilliantly minimalist director.
Remember in-in the script,
where I talked about,
and I hope we still have it standing by.
-He basically trusts his casting
and just gives the actors their head and lets them do
what they do well.
He was very clear about what he wanted.
Now, his hands come up first,
and then pulls himself up. There. That's it.
Which was great. I really liked that.
Okay, your chin's a little low.
Ah, that's perfect.
-Because then it becomes a pleasure to deliver.
I'll drive you crazy and I'll kill you all!
I'm every nightmare you've ever had.
I am your worst dream come true.
I'm everything you were ever afraid of.
-He did give me a lot of room.
Pennywise was a very dangerous invention.
And I use dangerous in the best sense of the word.
-What I mean by it is that they're pitched at a level
that totally can go very wrong very quickly,
with the wrong casting,
with the wrong direction,
with any number of fill-in-the-blank
mistake possibilities.
Tim was the genius choice that radiated perfection
everywhere every time he appeared.
You guys don't have to do this.
My dad says you have to know when to take a stand.
Let's get out of here!
Yeah, let's go.
We live in dangerous times, boys and girls.
I want you to be careful.
Not just any car. It 's a bicycle.
They always made the best noise.
Come on, Laurie Anne.
It's gonna storm.
No one even thought of
going to Vancouver in those days.
I wish this summer would never end.
It's the best summer of my whole life.
Your hair is winter fire,
January embers. My heart burns there too.
This was poor town.
Yeah, still is.
It's all I need.
The wave of filmmaking in Vancouver
started in 1984.
I think the dollar dropped.
And so more shows started to go,
"Oh, you can get a bigger bang for your buck in Vancouver,
and we're only two hours away from LA."
Hey!
I'm back!
When the time came for us to start producing,
I had Vancouver implanted in my head as a place to go.
You think we're gonna let you have
all the fun there, Billy boy?
-Having such a big production over such a long period of time
created a huge buzz.
-In '89, it was really busy in town.
Okay, here we go. And roll, please.
-The studio that we used was called The Bridges
and it was an abandoned shipyard building that was converted.
I was working at Thomas Special Effects,
which is a local special effects house here in Vancouver,
owned by John Thomas.
He had a great stable of crew people.
He had all these people that he nurtured
and had what we call "real-world" abilities...
Welders, woodworkers, people that work with fiberglass.
They are all the veterans of the film industry
that Vancouver has created.
It put a lot of people to work.
It used a lot of locations
and it also put Vancouver on the map.
- Cut! - Cut! Very nice.
What are you guys anyway?
-We're sort of a club.
I can remember going to the movies
and they used to have Saturday matinees.
We'd all line up, usually with our money
tied in a handkerchief or something
so we wouldn't lose it,
and then we'd get in the theater,
and everybody would turn their popcorn boxes into bugles
and then the giant grasshoppers would come on
and destroy Chicago and London.
I wrote about some of this stuff in a book called IT.
It's funny, I think a lot of us
have only the haziest memories of our childhood.
-I don't remember much of it at all, what we did.
We can access some of the good memories,
and maybe we can access some of the really bad memories
if a bully beat us up on the school yard.
-You're dead!
-But what I discovered in writing IT was that
the more I thought about my childhood,
the more those memories came back.
There's symbolism everywhere
in the writing that Stephen King created
to express the fears of all children
that go through feeling like a loser.
Feeling like an outsider.
You're only here because
Mom says it's our Christian duty.
-That's what the Losers Club was about
and that's the bond that kept these people together,
because they didn't find sanity, peace,
or even really a loving family except with each other.
Their chosen family.
We're seven now.
Lucky seven.
The gold of the book were the kids.
That's where I responded;
I think it's where the audience responded.
That horror was the icing on the cake,
and very particular icing in this case.
We had a casting director in Canada
by the name of Sid Kozak, and Mark and I
did the U.S. casting.
We were looking for three
major things with the kids.
One was a sense of humor.
-Richie Tozier's my name.
One was they always had to do a scene
that was painful and heartfelt.
-You killed my brother George, you bastard.
-And then they also had to be scared.
A lot of times, when you see them right off,
you go, "They're not prepared emotionally to handle this yet."
You're looking for an old soul.
You're looking for people that have a pain
and kids that could truly, truly feel depth,
truly feel the fear.
Without projecting it,
truly feel the camaraderie of the humor of the group.
And when you're coming in alone,
that's hard for those kids.
All these different characters
that seem to come from different backgrounds
all had the same thing in common...
They're misfits, they're outcasts,
they have an undesirable home life.
-What you got there?
They don't feel like they're worth anything.
-It's the Losers Club.
-And yet, when they all work together,
they are literally unstoppable.
-I think the six of us could put you in the hospital.
-Seven.
-We went to the producers to do a mix and match.
We wanted to have three in each roll for the first one
and see how the kids worked together.
-It was challenging having kids...
-Eddie, which way is Derry?
-and adults...
-That way.
-and you had to cast both in the like.
Like Stand by Me,
the challenge was in finding adults
that would both physically match up with them.
This was a case where I think the network
was completely right in its choices.
-You really needed to believe
Seth Green grows up to be Harry.
I feel like every one of those parts,
there's a poignancy involved, because those kids,
I believed that they grew up to be those people.
At that time, what was really popular
was to find the iconic TV actors
that would be ensemble players.
-The ideas kept coming.
Richard Thomas for Bill.
Those were quick decisions in an office.
John Ritter, Harry Anderson,
Annette O'Toole, Richard Masur,
Dennis Christopher, Tim Reid..
Stephen King's IT.
I mean, those were like
a gold mine of actors.
-We were getting TV's best
and then piled Tim Curry on top of that.
Well, we knew we had something.
-They all came together wonderfully.
That's lightning in a bottle.
You just don't always get that.
The adult actors wanted to
spend time with the kids,
wanted to get to know them.
We had a Lucky Seven camp
for the express purpose
of having the children and the adults interact
and work out business.
Bill Denbrough goes like this.
It's no accident.
We brought the group that wasn't being shot right then
in for three days simply to have them develop
little tricks of that sort so that it really would feel
a veracity to the whole thing.
When you see that first part
and those kids who then later become those adults,
the end result was, I think, very successful
because the characters were more in synch.
-I think that paid just untold dividends.
It was really important
for Tommy Lee Wallace
that all the kids were bonded in reality
so that that would come across on screen.
-I mean, are we men or are we mice?
We're mice!
-You feel this trust that he has for you.
And as much as he knows about all the characters
and how all the puzzle pieces fit together,
he knew how much our characters meant to us.
-To the Losers Club!
- All right. - To the Losers Club!
The first kid that was cast
was Jonathan Brandis,
because he just was rich.
And when you look at it, oh, my god.
He can reach points of pain and depth, very simply,
deeply, very quickly.
-It's some kind of monster. And it's right here in Derry.
I had a crush on Jonathan Brandis for sure.
I thought he was pretty cute.
My heart burns there too.
-I remember he was on the cover of every, like,
Teen Beat magazine.
-Brought an awful lot of gravity to that role...
-George.
-that somehow was a good emotional match
for his adult counterpart, Richard Thomas.
-George.
I remember Jonathan because we met,
we talked, you know, to get a feeling of the same person,
but that felt like it was an essential meeting to have.
I don't know if he had to put a mole on his cheek. He did!
They made him put a mole on his cheek.
Oh, the poor kid. That's terrible.
That's right, he had to wear a mole.
Oh god.
They both had something
in their personalities
that's serious, that takes the cruel world
and the hurts and the angers and the angst of it all
and takes it personally and wants to do something about it.
I'm going back in.
This time I'm gonna kill It.
-There's a sense of nobleness about both of those people
and Jonathan had that as a child.
Now, listen.
You guys don't have to do this.
And he was the natural
leader of the kid actors, too.
He didn't do it by making a lot of noise.
He just did it by being who he was.
I felt very close to that character
when I read it.
When a script comes to you or a play text and you read it,
you can feel the proximity of the character,
the affinity that you have, and you can feel the distance.
But with Bill, I just thought, "Oh, no, I know how this feels.
I know who this guy is."
It was the Bill-Georgie-Pennywise sequence
with the observation of what siblings were,
but emotionally I believed in the truth of those brothers
loud and clear, and I thought the scene
was one of Steve's best.
-You made it for me?
Can I go sail it?
-I remember the scene assembling the boat
with Jonathan Brandis,
and giving him the kiss and how awkward that was.
-Yuck!
-But he was a great guy.
I was completely stunned.
I had no idea that he had been suffering
any kind of depression or any other issues.
All I knew is he was working.
I think he had just finished a movie with Bruce Willis,
Hart's War.
He had an incredible run on Sea Quest.
-Hello.
-He'd learned the craft of directing..
-What you do is sit at it and watch '70s television...
- Yeah. - On a channel and...
Just to find out all the ways
you shouldn't direct a television show.
-Um, it's just they're shot kind of cheesy
and I just kind of want to learn how to do something different
with television.
He was doing everything
a resourceful actor could do.
I think he had everything in front of him
and I was excited to see him moving forward.
I was blown away because he's my age.
That was probably one of the first times
I ever even considered my own mortality.
Swear to me.
Swear to me that if It isn't dead,
we'll all come back.
-The kids moved me enormously,
and I think about the scene at the end
when they come together having won the battle
but not the war and hold hands and swear that they'll return.
Swear.
-When you have a project that is such a good story
and has such a good lead actor,
it's really hard to screw it up. musically.
Finding a focus was the first thing.
What's the music going to do?
It could have been the most horrific alien ever
to visit our planet in the form of a clown.
-.but to me, it was kids in jeopardy.
-Hands squeeze.
I focused on the kids.
To a large extent that's because Stephen King and I
are about the same age,
so when he writes about kids, that's my childhood.
In the '50s when we would play outside and build dams
and all of that stuff, we would score our activities ourselves.
If it was an action scene, we would do:
"Nah nah nah nah nah."
When they jump on Silver to get away...
- Go! - Hi-ho Silver, away!
The reference of hi-ho Silver means
that through their minds was going:
badump badump badump badump badump badump.
Now I couldn't do the William Tell
and get away with it with a straight face,
but that was the focus.
We would put the pictures of the adults
up first and as they were cast,
we put the kids that were possible matches for them.
And very early on Sid sent us a tape and photos of Emily,
who was the young Annette O'Toole...
-Daddy, breakfast is ready.
And she set a very high bar.
We kept looking for that role, but she was really an old soul
that just matched what we were looking for.
-The character of Bev was like my mom's childhood.
She grew up in the '50s, her name was Bev, she was poor.
I just felt like I was playing her.
She said, "Those are the exact clothes that I used to wear,"
so it was this really unique opportunity
to express my mother's story.
-Emily was a singularly professional young actress.
She was very mature for her years.
She understood that the relationship
between her film father and herself
was not the relationship between her and me
and that makes life a whole lot easier.
-For me, Beverly Marsh was the 1950s female child
who was oppressed based on her gender.
-Bev wants to help.
I hope it's okay. I mean, she's a girl.
-.and very stringent ideals of how women should behave.
-Let me see that.
-Bev's father is extremely critical
of her developing sexuality.
-Poetry from some boy?
-That's a big theme in the novel.
The domestic and sexual violence against Bev is a major theme.
It's not as much I don't think in the mini-series,
but it's there a little bit.
My agent suggested me for Al Marsh
and the casting director said, "Oh, no.
Frank's too much of a nice guy to play that character. No."
They did three rounds of auditions.
Finally, on the fourth round,
the casting director let me go in and audition.
Casting against type when
you're in that kind of project,
that's part of our being creative
and the agents and managers submitting them and saying,
"Hey, what about this?"
-In the room, the director says,
"Would you shave your beard?"
I said, "You hire me, my beard's gone."
-Daddy, please!
-He felt so guilty having to smack me
and be this intimidating, domineering, abusive father.
-Let me alone, you just let me alone!
-Come here!
-And sometimes you went a little over
the limits in terms of discipline.
-He always apologized at the end of the day
but while he was in the moment...
-You get right the hell back here, Bevvy!
He was just really scary,
so I didn't have to do a lot of acting.
The blood coming out of the sink...
stayed with me because for a while
I was like afraid to take showers,
and there's that sewage, subterranean element to IT.
-Good afternoon, gentlemen. I'm Beverly Marsh.
Annette O'Toole I had worked
with several times,
and I loved Annette and the person that she was
and the actress that she was.
There wasn't a lot that I needed to do
to become the young Annette.
They said that our mannerisms were similar.
Well, I was thinking, being Saturday now,
you could come down with me to the Barrens.
-My grandfather was an actor.
He was in Gone with the Wind.
I think they were having a 40th anniversary party
and there was a lady there who thought I was kind of
precocious and cute,
and put me to work almost right away.
I was four.
The Jonathan Ritter match,
little guy, Brandon,
unbelievable from the moment he came in.
-Ten out of ten.
I remember getting a callback
and it being an audition that I really wanted to get.
And there were probably 20 kids in the room.
-There was a lot of competition in that role.
I looked around and I remember noticing
there weren't any other Bens.
So, I asked the AD, "Where are the other Bens?"
They said, "It's pretty much just you.
We're looking at a kid in Vancouver
and I think one in Texas, but I think it's gonna be you."
Nobody does that, right?
Nobody tells you during the casting process
that it's probably gonna be you.
I had never been asked to read anything like this before.
They wouldn't treat us like this
if Daddy were still alive.
Being a fat kid,
you literally don't have a whole lot of roles that,
I don't want to say have any meaning,
but... but certainly don't have a lot of depth.
A lot of times, they're just about food jokes or fat jokes.
What a porker.
They're crazy of f-the-cuff one-liners.
They're the crazy characters.
Obviously, body image is a real key issue
that a lot of kids are dealing with,
probably more than you even imagine.
-I'd never been given anything to read that wasn't that.
There was a lot of gravitas with this.
I remember, "Wow, I'm gonna have to be a real actor now."
There's a moment where I pull some Sugar Daddies
out of my pocket and eat them because I'm nervous.
It was explained to me that there was some importance
behind that because I protested a little bit.
I was like, "Ah, really?
Do we have to do this right now?
And... and the way Tommy articulated it,
it made perfect sense, so I went along with the ride.
I was willing to do those things
because there was so much more meat with the character
and so many situations
that I'd never been able to portray before.
I did those things willingly,
knowing that there would be a huge payoff in the end.
Knowing that you were going to be
in the same movie with John Ritter and Harry Anderson
and all these other actors who I'd already
seen on TV at this young age was a phenomenal experience.
I was a huge fan of John Ritter.
He was a massive influence of mine.
Not just as the kind of actor that he was
but the kind of comedian that he was.
The type of physical comedian that he was and
how deeply sincere he was in all of his performances
regardless of the character that he was playing.
-How important is being a star?
-Uh, it's not important.
Being thought of as a... As a good actor is.
You have one of the most gifted comedians
of his generation too,
so obviously it's going to be crazy, right?
-He was always full of mischief.
Always up to something.
Here, boy!
That's it. Oh, I can't stand it.
I can't stand it.
I had my two kids come up and visit.
They were big fans of John Ritter
because they watched Three's Company,
so when I told them I was working with him,
my stature went way up.
They have never forgotten it.
Cut!
-We were all stirring up our own fear.
That's what we did at work all day internally,
to be ready to jump into these scenes,
which were kind of hard and kind of dark.
John would always lift us up with humor.
He's always got humor in his back pocket and
I know it served us really well.
Here's a comic actor asked
to play the dramatic role,
and I never doubted for a minute that he could.
-Mike?
Yeah, buddy. Listen, It. It's come back.
-He walked in and made everyone around him better,
like a good team player in a sport,
just by his professionalism, his sense of preparedness,
and his ability to get down to business
while still cracking wise and having fun.
-John had a presence about himself
that interestingly related more to young people.
-Hang tough, champ. You're gonna make it.
-He was adored by young people.
He really appreciated
that we were just kids and
sets should be an enjoyable place to be.
Maybe he was a little bit responsible
for all the boys' antics.
I wouldn't be surprised.
He was, you know,
really interested in meeting me.
I was him. He was... he was one of my idols.
But there was always a running joke that of all the kids,
I looked the least like my counterpart,
and he was quick to sort of notice that as well.
So he pulled me aside and said,
"Hey, let's spend some time together
and think of some things that we can do
that will sort of bridge that gap."
There's that reveal where I'm standing there
in the classroom and then we cut to him
and he's biting his nail as well.
That was what we came up with.
We tossed the football around on set with him
because he was open to coming in and playing with the kids.
And I still remember him saying, you know,
when he was, "Okay, okay, I've had enough,"
and we're like "Oh come on, just a couple more,"
he was like, "When I had no hair on my balls,
I could throw the ball for hours."
Everybody had a Game Boy,
so I was playing my Game Boy. I was playing Tetris,
and he walked up to me and he said,
"What is this?" I said, "It's Tetris."
"Tetris?" I said, "Yeah, Tetris.
It's a game. Everybody knows Tetris.
You live under a rock?"
He grabs it out of my hand and he starts playing.
And... and from then on I realized,
"Okay, well, he's cool.
He's not just John Ritter the actor.
He's John Ritter, my peer.
And maybe if I'm lucky, my buddy."
I got a call to come in
and speak with the directors for this mini-series.
I had not read the book,
so of course I rushed out and spent all night
and part of the day, because Stephen King writes
so many long books.
I took on the role for two reasons.
One, it was a nice gig,
and it was going to be for a long time up in Vancouver.
The other reason was working with some of these actors
that I had admired, worked with one or two of them,
so that was really the... the two main reasons.
I brought this whole photo album from home.
-Marlon was really wonderful
and he did this little monologue at the beginning of the audition
that was simple, deep, and had a lot of thought in it.
-There was an Easter egg hunt here,
but the ironworks exploded and all these people got killed.
The lines that they had me reading
were pretty much the lines from the actual classroom scene.
That role was so hard to audition for.
It has very little material in the group scenes
and takes a lot of negative language.
When you're casting and you're being a bully
to all these kids. wow, it takes a lot out of the day.
Thank god, he looked physically
a lot like what I looked like at his age.
You know, you always wonder, "Oh my god,
he'll get somebody here who looks nothing like me."
You know, like they bring a white guy to play me.
No, it didn't happen!
Mike represents to me a few souls that I have met
in my journey in life,
and they're people who, for whatever reason,
something happened in their childhood or young adulthood
that has affected them for the rest of their life.
I knew of a few people like him,
and some ended in very tragic situations,
some fate just never seemed to bless them
with a good hand, you know?
It's like always throwing snake eyes.
And I think Mike was that kind of guy.
I think that all of them had a sense of that,
that they were on their way,
they were young people full of life, full of wonder,
and all of a sudden, this horrible thing happened to them
for the rest of their life.
They have been hiding in psychological fear of life.
And to me, Mike is the center spoke
that brought it all back together.
-Lucky seven.
-That's how in the series
when they got a phone call from him,
didn't take a whole lot of explanation.
- Yeah? - This is Mike Hanlon, Bill.
-Immediately they know what this is about.
-Bill, It's back.
-Now they have to decide, do they want to participate.
On my honor I will do my best
to do my duty to God and my country.
Stephen King's big secret
is about the wonders and horrors of childhood...
Stanley boy.
And how you get through it
and how important friends are
and bonding with special people, like-minded youngsters.
Those bonds can be as strong as steel
and his story is a demonstration of just how strong,
when they made a promise to each other
to return if It came back.
-I swear it.
They were very solemn about it
and they meant it.
And you see what happens when they have to keep that promise,
especially in the case of Stan,
who couldn't face keeping the promise.
It was that horrible for him, and so he didn't bother
to go back. but he did something else instead.
-I think I'll take a bath.
Stan was most affected by Pennywise
and I suspect that even as an adult,
that memory never was very far from his mind.
-Stan saw It face to face.
Not the clown,
but he saw what was behind the clown.
-When he got the call from Mike Hanlon...
-Who did you say?
Mike Hanlon.
To come back to Derry,
it brought back so much trauma to him
that he just couldn't go on anymore.
He couldn't even fathom the idea of possibly facing It again.
-Goodbye.
Bye, Stan.
-And he chose an easy way out.
-For somebody like me who grew up in the '70s,
It's a Who's Who.
Richard Masur, who I'd literally grown up watching.
He was the classic character actor.
So him coming in, even though it was just for a day
and he had a small part in IT, I was like, "Wow."
I got a call from Jim Green
and he told me they were doing this miniseries.
-We talked about what we could do to tie the character together
between the adult and the child.
He asked what I thought we should do.
And for whatever reason,
I immediately thought of this thing where I was gonna
grab my ear, and he liked it.
I remember just thinking, "I have no idea what I'm doing
and this well-respected actor just said he likes my idea."
I was like, you know, over the moon about it.
My favorite part of the time I was there
was when we set up that beauty shot
of all of us on the staircase.
I thought that was a wonderful shot.
It was a lot of people who were really well known
at that time all standing up there.
To me, Stan Uris was an outsider
like the rest of the Losers Club.
He was very by the book
in that he didn't deviate from his school lessons
or what his parents may have told him,
but he was able to connect with these kids...
Lucky seven, Stanny.
-I said I was in.
-and then explore a different part of himself.
One of the last casts
was a little kid named Adam.
-Some guy killed George.
Pulled one of his arms right off,
just like a wing off a fly.
-He was smaller than most of the other kids
and they were worried about the size match-up and everything.
-My character Eddie Kaspbrak,
I would say that he was kind of the runt of the bunch...
-How you doin', Eddie Spaghetti?
-which was already a fairly runty bunch.
He was the quiet, shy kid
who was also the youngest of the bunch,
which I believe was true in reality.
I think I was the only one who wasn't a teenager yet.
I was still 12 and I think everyone else was 13 or above.
I went in and met with the producers
and we talked with Tommy Lee
and I guess they got the feeling from
the work of mine that they had seen
that I was right to play Eddie.
And of course, after that, I devoured the book
and was wondering how in the hell
they were going to fit all of this beautiful writing
and all of these amazing background stories
of these characters into two nights of television.
On the last mix and match,
Seth Green wasn't going to be able to make it.
And Victoria was like, "Oh, my god,
we have to get him here."
Everybody was confirmed except Seth,
and we were a little nervous about that.
So I actually drove to his house and picked him up.
It was exciting to know
that I was getting close to it.
When you audition, you mostly don't get jobs.
You... you don't get 90 percent of the things you audition for,
so to even get a callback and be in the chemistry
part of it, I was very excited.
Seth was full of piss and vinegar.
A great kid, clever and cracking jokes all the time.
I was a very curious kid,
and then I was also interested in filmmaking very young.
Seth was the most precocious,
but he had this intelligence about him and he would say,
"I'm going to be a filmmaker one day."
Part of what they liked about me
was me doing voices.
-Your voices all sound the same, Richie.
-Thanks a bunch, professor.
-or impressions.
-By George, Martha, it's the river Nile.
-.or being fast-witted or funny.
-Well, hey. Larry, Curly, and Mo.
-Beep-beep, Richie.
-That was the thing that got me that part.
Richie, to me, always seemed both fearless
and also terrified.
Tozier!
-He was willing to keep going forward
even though he was scared.
Richie!
- but he was the first guy to make a joke about it.
And then Harry Anderson,
whom I didn't know, we had an instant rapport.
Harry and I chatted a lot.
And I'd watched him on Cheers and Night Court.
I'd seen him do stand-up and magic.
This is one you probably know.
-So, I was into that guy and excited to get to play him.
Directing kids,
in general, is challenging.
And he takes a powder and jumps. Boom!
Jumps right over you and suddenly you guys see him go,
and that'll be the end of this first piece.
And directing seven, sometimes ten,
12 kids all in one scene...
Don't go way over there.
Is hugely challenging
because they have so much energy.
-Whoa!
-I think Seth was more or less the ringleader.
We got in a lot of trouble.
-Let's get out of here!
-We were kids. Both on set and off.
But I think us getting in trouble together
also made us a lot closer.
-Yeah.
-We also had our little spats, like we got tired of each other.
Jonathan Brandis and I often took out our stresses
by bagging on each other pretty intensely, actually.
But at the end of the day, we were all pretty close.
-If it were filmed now with that same group of kids,
there would be a lot of them who had diagnoses.
Maybe ADHD, oppositional defiance.
Some of them just would not shut up.
We were dropping water balloons off
of our balcony onto people's convertibles.
I think one time we managed to do it with Kool-aid
and the person was fairly upset.
The police came and told us it wasn't a good idea to do that,
especially since we weren't citizens.
We thought we were going to get deported.
-I honestly did not get a lot of their jokes.
All the other boys had read the book, and in the book,
the kids all have sex with Bev.
The boys knew this, but I didn't know,
and so they kept making references to this fact
and they were just going above my head.
So finally, my mom said,
"Why don't you just read the book?"
And so I read it and I was kind of horrified
but in a way it was kind of liberating too.
Because when I was 13, you know, you're going through puberty
and your things are changing and stuff.
So it was just this very sort of odd entry
into adolescence for me.
There were scenes that I
never thought twice about,
meaning the orgy scene with the kids with Bev.
Pennywise and It are the things
that drive the losers to, in the novel,
have this very, very obscure and weird orgy
in the middle of the narrative
where they're all having sex with Beverly.
It's to ward off It, to keep It at bay,
because childhood is what It loves.
I am an eater of worlds and of children.
-And if you want to push away from the thing
that's scary to you, you push into the thing
that it can't feed on, and you do that through sex.
I just thought it was one of
Steve's digressions down a lane that didn't work.
I remember the guy
who played Officer Nell.
He completely lost his shit one day.
There's a scene where we're all
in the Barrens, building the dam.
The policeman comes along and says,
"Hey, what are you kids doing down there?"
and one of the kids said, "Masturbating."
We all started laughing and then also it carried on.
We couldn't get the next
like three or four takes.
We weren't focusing
and I remember getting the "this isn't professional" lecture.
There were times that Jim pulled them aside
and gave them the lecture.
And I sometimes would sort of lose it a little bit on set
and say, "Look, you're actors here.
I know you're having fun. I love you're having fun.
You have to do your job."
Our director came to me and he said,
"Jim, I'm losing it with these kids."
So I said, "I need a meeting with the kids
before we break for lunch
and I don't want their parents there."
They rallied around and I said, "You are making a picture.
If you came here because you want to be an actor,
then I can tell you right now whatever you're doing on the set
will reflect on whether you work again.
I do recommend that you pay attention to your director.
Shape up, guys."
And walked away.
The adults were...
When they got the... All the adults together,
'cause some of them knew each other
and they were all buddies,
they were actually more noisy than the kids.
-We used to try to make each other throw up,
okay, by being as gross as we possibly could, right,
to make the other person gag.
We're adults, you know, sort of.
It just got louder and louder and louder
until the assistant director finally came in and said,
"You guys have to leave.
You have to go outside on the street.
You can't be in here because we can't get any work done."
-I want to make sure you remember my name.
-Oh god, Henry Bowers.
My agent called and said,
"Guess what? We've got an audition for you,"
and I said, "Oh really, for what?"
She said, "Stephen King's IT."
She said, "It's a big production,
it's a miniseries, it's incredible."
She said, "Please work your ass off for this audition."
'Cause, she said, "It's once in a lifetime."
I knew.
Hundreds of kids had probably gone in there.
Big guys were gonna go in there and be the traditional bully...
Which I don't find very threatening,
to be honest with you.
And so I thought, okay, who can I channel?
I always refer to Dennis Hopper because he's a very small man,
but he conveys an intensity that's menacing.
Jarred was an exceptional actor.
You're dead, fat boy.
For someone who was his age.
The level of commitment that he had was frightening.
I went in for the audition
and the casting director grabbed me and he said,
"I've got to get you to the producers right away."
He said, "You're exactly what they're looking for.'"
And I said "Me?"
And again, here I was, this scrawny kid,
and I was being plucked out of that group.
He just had... Something about that guy,
he had some sort of menacing appeal about him.
Ta-ta, girls.
-I could be wrong, but I believe I auditioned for it three times,
and the first one was for Henry Bowers
and I wanted that part very badly.
-I want you to think about that before you die.
As we know,
Jarred Blancard got Henry Bowers.
And what character I played on IT
is actually a little contentious,
because in the script I was Patrick,
and I notice that IMDb,
and depending where you look online I played Victor,
which always confused me
when the fans were like,
"Hey, we loved you playing Victor in Stephen King's IT,"
and I was like, "You mean Patrick,"
and they'd be like, "No, Victor,"
and I'm like, "No, it was Patrick."
The very first thing that I did
was another iconic film called NeverEnding Story
where, ironically, I played a bully.
I managed to get typecast in kind of that bully role...
Not because I was big,
just because I was intense and could beat people up.
Let me show you.
And I could really burp on command.
-Without throwing up, as well, I might add.
In the book, it's-it's obvious
that Henry is badly...
I mean, abuse doesn't begin to cover
what he suffers at the hands of his father
and he has this true fear of his father.
I'm not a method actor
but I did keep that a bit in mind
when I was attempting to torture and ultimately kill
these poor children, right?
He needed to transfer those feelings of helplessness.
He wanted to impose that same fear on other people
that he suffered when he went home at night.
There's one scene in the film,
it's the only scene where my character is vulnerable
and that's in the classroom
and that's when he's being threatened
to be kicked out after a disturbance.
There's a crack in my voice when he says,
"But my father will tan my hide."
and that sort of typifies the fear
that he has of-of his father.
I actually get emotional about this because
my dad's passed.
He, uh, wasn't supportive at all.
He never went to any of my plays,
he sort of scoffed at all of my dreams and aspirations.
But I remember that he came home from work
and I said, "Dad, I got it!"
and his shock and the pride and the sadness
that he hadn't embraced this dream earlier.
And from that point on, though, it was nothing but-but pride
and-and-and it was a wonderful thing.
I apologize for getting emotional.
I wanted to be as sensitive off camera
as I possibly could.
Yelling these racial slurs and these obscenities, you know,
calling him, you know, fat boy and all of that kind of thing,
I wanted to make sure after the take that
he knew that that's not the way I felt.
Or what, boy? Or what?
You know, he always told me
how uncomfortable he was with having to say
some of the things he had to say to me,
which was great.
'Cause it was some harsh words, man!
It was some harsh words said.
I'd always apologize afterwards.
And the Americans were quite
astounded by that; they thought, "Well, you're playing a part."
There's a scene where I get confronted
by Henry Bowers, where he's supposed to carve
the "H" in my belly.
Hey look, it's the fat boy.
Top of the day, fat boy!
-And it was probably the scene that I feared the most.
I thought for a moment
that he could very well lose it
and go ahead and just, you know,
start the artwork on my stomach right then and there.
- Come on. Don't really cut him.
Cut him? Huh?
Cut him?
He made it very easy to be afraid.
But I remember that being probably
the most difficult scene for me to film.
The only source of disappointment for me
was the fact that we couldn't go as raw
and as bold as they did in the book.
The violence is something that I just...
I wanted to go further with it.
I just felt it would have been more effective
if we were able to do that,
knowing fully well that we weren't able to.
Henry Bowers.
There were two adults that were cast later
and Green/Epstein were very sweet
about allowing us to look at so me people that were friends.
-Henry. Hen.
This is scaring me already!
It Needed a special quality person.
And in this case, he was being cast after the boy
who played Henry Bowers, who was also a very special person
and had a strangeness about him.
-I tell you, people will always remember Henry Bowers.
Michael Cole, he was from a show
called Mod Squad that I grew up on.
He wasn't traditionally a badass
but he just showed that side and so he was just kind of
one of these little gem finds,
somebody that had some gravitas.
-After all those years, Michael had attained
a patina of strangeness, which some of us do.
And so when he came in to talk about it,
I felt very positive right there and then
that he could pull that roll off as.
, okay, that strange little boy
grew up to be this strange man.
I'll pay you back,
I'll pay you all back!
-Not many casting directors will do this.
I got down on the floor crawling around,
and I was so shook up and sweat was starting to run down,
and Victoria got down on the floor with me,
sliding sheets of paper in front of me
so I could get the cue.
Boy, what a champion.
I met Michael Cole
and he was perfectly polite
but not very effusive or -or friendly,
and I-I actually backed out of his trailer and I thought,
"I'm just gonna leave you alone to your business."
So, he did a great job obviously.
Pennywise is wonderful.
I mean, he's charming and scary
and both elusive and enthralling, you know.
He's like any good drug.
Like you just want to go to it,
but then you regret it immediately.
Pennywise is much more overtly comic...
Won't do any good to run, girly boy.
- - As a lure for the kids
And as a sort of perverse
set of jokes for the audience.
But when he scares, he scares the crap out of you.
He found the way to really lure you in
like Georgie in the sewer.
My boat!
Exactly!
When Georgie is first taken by Pennywise,
which is a great scene when he follows the boat
down the street in the rain.
S.S. Georgie.
The effects guys had done this
brilliant job to figure out how to get the boat to flow
all in one take.
No, please no.
Tommy Lee Wallace opened the sewer grate,
which was just a manhole cover
which was about four feet away from the sewer,
and had Tim crouch down and speak...
Hiya, Georgie!
Into the sewer.
We Had a strange day to shoot it.
You can almost always count on
overcast in Vancouver,
but this day was sunny and bright,
but "We better go ahead and do it because
here we are and the set is built."
You can see the rays of sunshine
coming through the scaffolding
that they built to create the rain.
I had trepidation about that
but the effect was kind of wonderful.
The light was doing weird things and of course you could see
the rain really well because it was backlit by the sun.
Then you get to the actual sewer.
That was a set. It was done outdoors.
The set was up high and Tim was just standing
with his face up against the opening,
so we were on a riser,
looking down as if we were on the street.
Little Georgie at the beginning of the film
when he's chasing his paper boat and I grab him,
he stopped and said...
-"Tim, you're scaring me, you're scaring me."
-"It'll save you a little acting, won't it?"
That wonderful little boy.
Do they float?
And Tim Curry's performance.
They float, Georgie.
-to me, that's what that scene is.
Not much in the way of special effects.
You'll float too!
-One of the scenes that was left out
of the final showing of IT was that scene where
Sharon comes to the door and is presented with
a fireman holding the body of her son.
Holding me with my arm in my sleeve
and the blood dripping out of the sleeve.
It's pouring rain
and she opens the door and there he is,
and I spent all day screaming
as we did take after take.
I guess since it was made for TV
that that was pushing the envelope a little bit.
We were certainly aware that we were doing
a horror movie for television.
George.
And back then, we were very limited
to what you could show.
We were breaking new ground,
because I don't remember
before any kind of material like this
that I saw on television.
Sci-fi, horror.
Float.
-.blood, and there was a lot of that.
-And we had to work with
the program practice department at all times.
There was a scene where the kids become
blood brothers and sisters and they cut their hand
and they place their palms on palms.
We had to change that
because it was in the early '90s
and it was during the time of AIDS.
So, we wrote the scene to spit in their hand.
-The advertisers were very nervous.
This was a children in jeopardy story
and we had to focus it on
the fact that it was a Stephen King novel,
that it was very popular.
Executives, creatives knew it,
but program practices still had to follow their guidelines
and we were constantly up against them,
pushing it, and fighting
for the creative integrity of the piece.
Broadcast Standards rejected the picture,
and the head of Broadcast Standards at the time
happened to be someone I knew, so it was easy for me
to get on the phone to New York
and ask for help.
The gentleman that was in charge of
censorship at ABC
agreed to come out and look at the picture with me.
His staff had rejected the picture on so many levels
that every note that they had meant re-cutting the picture
and I just simply said,
"We're not cutting a piece of it."
"This is what you bought.
You bought a Stephen King horror.
We'll be able to show it
in a very respectable, responsible way...
is based on subject material
that may be unsuitable for, and unsettling to
younger and impressionable viewers.
-"but we can't deny the audience
what they come to expect."
I had made my argument
that these were recollections of adults.
The blood.
I cleaned the whole thing up that very same night.
And so therefore, we could get away with
children in jeopardy.
The next day we were told,
"No changes. Move forward."
Cue background!
Background!
Eric, go.
The idea of the carnival scene
is straight out of the book...
The hand that reaches right out of the photo album
and grabs at them.
-Come on, it's just a drawing!
The photo book was built by two people,
Mike Steffy, and Bob Comer.
Both of them had this amazing mechanical ability
to build what we call tabletop gags,
really intricate things.
-That was my favorite thing,
that you see a photograph and I come alive.
Such a great idea.
-I have never seen so many cables attached to something
that operated those pages to turn.
It was a complex push me-pull me cable system.
They had to hit their marks,
so they had to have individual cables for individual pages.
It took them weeks to build it.
When they operated it,
it was one of those "How do you hide all that stuff?"
Visual effects just didn't have the money.
All right, here we go. Yeah.
Thank you and clear, please.
What I really, really
wanted to emphasize was that "I think I see Pennywise
back there in the background somewhere
but he's just not bothering anybody."
And I picked up the book
and the first thing we saw was just a big hole in it.
And he's like, "All right, I want you guys to act
like you guys are reading this book,
like Pennywise is dancing down the street.
He jumps on the pole."
Uh, remember the uh,
remember the pull-up.
Don't watch the clown, background.
Keep doing your own stuff.
Remember that, uh,
little lower, and.yeah.
- "And then, here it comes..."
Aah!
-Oh, shit, he's right in your face,
just like that.
-"and I need you guys to react."
It was Tommy's hand that kind of
came up through there.
I remember later seeing the completed scene
and being blown away.
-I thought that was a good powerful moment.
Makeup effects were booming at that time.
Garage shops were popping up everywhere,
and Fantasy II was like an all-encompassing
movie effects house.
We had a makeup effects wing
and Bart Mixon was the lead person in it.
Tommy Lee Wallace
knew him from Fright Night 2
I had set up their creature shop
for Fright Night 2,
so it was just natural for Gene to bring me back in.
I had a crew of about a half a dozen artists on the show,
but I... probably selfishly,
I wanted to do Pennywise myself.
-That was Bart's baby.
Bart sculpted it and did the whole application.
Fozzie Bear does the twist?
Early on, I was doing a fair amount of
clown research and sketching.
-The idea, first of all, was to do a lot of research
on representation of clowns over time
to have a historical perspective.
We have to think of the size of the actor
and how big we want him to be,
how nimble we want him to be.
What we're doing with the costume is
we're serving his face;
everything has to serve the expression.
-The first time I did prosthetics
I was doing Legend for Ridley Scott,
where I played the devil.
-He had mentioned that Rob Botin had literally
casted every inch of his body, so I think he wasn't anxious
to have his life cast done again.
That's all right, I can bear it.
He was absolutely weighted down
with special effects makeup to the point at which he was...
To most people was no longer recognizable as Tim Curry.
I was prosthetic down to my waist
and it was all glued on,
and to get it off they used to sit me in a bath,
tear a hole in my head
and pour in solvent.
And the two guys who were doing it were insane,
probably because they were around solvents so much.
You do get horribly claustrophobic,
particularly if your whole face is covered.
So, his only reservation
was too much makeup.
He wanted to be able to use his face.
We pushed and pulled about how much makeup to do.
I met with him and we had a few conversations
about what he did or didn't want to wear.
He did want to go as light as possible with the prosthetic.
So there was some evolution.
I'll kill you all.
I saw it as a fantasy character.
It was an illusion that It's presenting to these children.
I wanted it to almost be like a living cartoon,
just as harmless and as pleasant looking
as it could be,
and that's why the colors
are pure white and red and blue
and very primary and very clean.
I didn't want there to be cracks.
And at least when he's presenting himself to the kids,
he's casting this illusion,
so why would he have flaws in it?
The usual accoutrement of clownmanship,
it was definitely going to be whiteface.
It was really the classic
Bozo the Clown approach, to begin with.
-He came over to the shop, we took a life cast,
and then we produced copies of busts of his head.
I believe I had three of those that I did clay sketches on
where we did three different concepts.
There was a hobo clown
with jowls and droopy face,
and then there was one in between
that had more prosthetics on his face
but made him a little more angular and meaner.
Once we-we produced the makeup,
then we went up to Canada to test it.
And we did two makeup tests.
When we got to Vancouver,
and were doing our test makeup, I was so looking forward
to that day and that moment
when we would be able to sit with Tim with the makeup on
and see this clown with
bloodshot eyes and fangs and a scary face.
The first test was just the head and the nose
with a paint scheme that was what Tim had wanted.
He dictated the patterns on the face.
The second test, we added the cheeks and the chin
and then I painted something closer to what I had
on my original design,
where he's got like a bigger red mouth and the blue eyes.
They photographed both of those.
The decision was made that he didn't really
need the cheeks and chin,
which at the time I was kind of like,
"Hey, wait a minute!"
But I think he looks great like he is.
The paint scheme evolved a little bit further.
We did at least one more test
where we just painted Tim's face white
and then refined the patterns.
-It's always kind of tough having that stuff stuck on you.
There was a certain line
that I was going past,
and Bart Mixon was in on that conversation,
as was Doug Higgins, the art director.
We were all having discussions about Pennywise's look.
I was excited about adding certain appliance makeup
like a bulbous forehead,
perhaps exaggerated cheekbones, big extended chin,
things to cartoonize his face.
Tim took a stand about that and said he really didn't want
to wear these things.
He agreed to try them on.
-And he said, "If you want me to wear this scary makeup,
then I think you have the wrong actor."
And I thought, "What?"
He had great patience and great forbearance,
because I think that job was a purgatory for him,
I really do.
One more, Tim.
And God love him,
he created a character
that has scared the pants off of generations.
He said, "Look, just make me
as a straight clown and I will scare the audience."
I thought, "Of course. That's why we have Tim Curry."
Go!
Now.
"He will scare us. We don't need all of that."
-In the end, we removed all of them
except the bulbous head, and I'm glad we stuck with that,
but he was totally right that his face is so expressive...
Give us a profile, Tim.
That it was good
to not see it too done up with rubber.
But Tim could act through a manhole cover
if he wanted to,
because he has that kind of charisma and presence.
The look that we ended up with
was based in a large part
on the Lon Chaney Phantom of the Opera.
That's why it's got the upturned nose
and the bulbous head.
I didn't film any of my scenes with Tim Curry
'cause they didn't want to scare me.
I was walking back to go to my trailer to go change
and Tim Curry is in full gear, his clown makeup, everything,
and he walks by me and he goes, "Hi!"
And it scared me so much.
To be honest that's the reason why I...
I still haven't seen the movie,
because I'm terrified of clowns.
-There was quite a good photograph in a magazine of me
heading for the makeup trailer
in a bathrobe with a Marlboro dangling from my face.
Tim kept himself quite aloof from us.
He would basically just hang out in his cast chair,
chain-smoking in full makeup
and whenever he saw us, he would just go
"Grrrrr!"
Those kind of people
always make your job easier.
The kids were actually quite scared of me.
-I'd been playing it really cool
and then we wound up in a van
going back to the hotel together
and I was wearing a Rocky Horror shirt
and I was like trying to cover it up,
and he saw it and he was like, "Oh, you like the movie?"
And I go, "Yeah, I'm... I'm into you, dude!"
I have a picture of him in half a clown costume
with me standing next to him looking slightly scared
that was taken off the set
after shooting this shower scene
and I was too scared to ask him for that picture.
My mom, however, was not.
I Encouraged him to be really big,
because it's almost like a character
who's satirizing himself constantly.
He's being self-referential
when he tells these awful, stupid jokes.
Do you have Prince Albert in a can?
-Then, urrah, urrah, urrah.
Urrah, urrah, urrah,
urrah, urrah,
you know, it's like, "Wait,
he's just demented; that's all there is to that.
But wait, he's not even a clown, he's some other kind of monster,
so, oh, I'm uneasy."
Pennywise is this really strange, queer...
Not in LGBTQ sense,
but like queer as in strange, as in aberrant.
I think that the novel, more so than the miniseries,
is very much grounded in the fact
that Pennywise is on three different levels:
It is in disguise
as Pennywise; Pennywise then
disguises himself as, say,
the Creature from the Black Lagoon,
the mummy, the leper.
Get out of Derry while you still can!
Beverly's dad in a dress,
so it's drag on drag on drag on drag.
It's all about these very queer elements,
which is what horror fiction is always about.
It's always about the thing on the outside.
So, King is really preying on those fears,
those fears of the outsider.
Stan?
My first day of
shooting on the set was with Jonathan Brandis,
where Stan goes to do some bird watching and ends up in
a house...
Hello?
Stanley.
Yeah?
And of course,
It manifests itself as that mummy.
Jim McLaughlin sculpted the mummy for me,
which was basically a makeup that Jim had done
a year or so earlier and I was like,
"That looks cool, you mind if we use that in the movie?"
So he just, you know, made me a copy of that.
There's a werewolf which was really cool
that was done by Norman Cabrera.
- This. This isn't happening.
He's like, "We're doing an homage
to I Was a Teenage Werewolf, the Michael Landon creature,"
and I was like,
"Uh, yeah. This is a no-brainer, man.
I want to do this."
When I saw the stunt guy
in the suit the first time,
all I wanted to do was touch it.
Werewolves was always my favorite monster
in every movie, and I loved I Was a Teenage Werewolf
'cause he had these really cool streaks
and he wore like the school jacket
and he was... kind of was like a greaser.
I basically got my old monster magazines out
so I had the references all there.
I knew exactly what they were going for,
and I liked giving it a slightly updated twist.
-I look at night two
and I think it suffers in part from the problems
of being only a night two.
Steve's narrative as it accelerates
benefits from more time rather than less.
That said,
the fortune cookie scene in the restaurant
and the scene
when Bev goes to her old house
and another woman is living there
who is by no means
what she appears...
If you're wise, you'll run dear, run,
because to stay will mean worse than your death.
Were as good as anything in night one.
I worry about you, Bevvy.
I worry a lot.
Norman Cabrera did the Al Marsh corpse
when Beverly goes back to her home
and the old woman turns into the corpse of her father.
I had to do the whole upper-body cast,
which is one of the most grueling things
that an actor can do.
They tried to Krazy Glue mealy worms to my face,
actually live worms jiggling on my face.
But we couldn't get them to stick.
So, we had to lose the mealy worms.
When you get on some sets,
you can tell that it's done in a way
that's going to make it look good on camera
but it doesn't really look that great up close...
Not the case with this set.
Standby for picture.
Inside that set, you really felt like
you were underground and in some sort of sewer system.
Okay. We're there.
-The set was awesome.
It just kind of transformed you and took you to another place.
Who's missing?
- Stan! - Oh no!
There was a scene where Stan got pulled aside
from the group with Henry and Belch.
- Hi, kid. I uh, guess you're the first.
I got a chance to confront
Ben Heller and you felt like,
"Oh, this is it now. He's a dead man."
I felt that little segment came closest to encapsulating
what Henry Bowers was capable of.
I want you to think about that before you die.
Belch, the guy that gets pulled in the pipe,
the lower half of him is a dummy so that
they can fold, because it's kind of hard to fold yourself over
like he does.
-When they told me how I was going to die
and the dimensions of the pipe, I started stretching,
so I'm just in there
trying to get my head to my knees
so that I could fit in there,
and one of the stunt coordinators said,
"You're not going to be able to do it. I can't do it."
I wanted to do my own stunts but they were like,
"No, no, it's an explosion...
"and you can't do that."
You know, I was 17 years old and being like,
"Yeah, yeah, I did my own stunts!"
As a young effects person,
I got a lot of the crappy jobs.
We're down in the sewer, and there's that pipe
that light goes through,
and there's a bazillion holes in that pipe.
Well, my job was, first,
drill all the holes.
You got to make them look perfect
and then you had to go inside it,
because with the camera sliding in there
and also we had the actor that got sucked into it,
all the holes had to have
all the little sharp edges taken off.
I just spent 12 hours a day
doing that.
Hey, Henry?
-I was lifted off the ground.
I was told to just have, they described it as
dead eyes, right,
so there's no real reaction to the fact
that you're being pulled in by some mysterious force.
Belch!
I love dying on film.
There's a finality to it.
Just the ability to. let go.
This is battery acid, you slime!
My character, Eddie Kaspbrak.
I don't know, I like to think in kind of a way
he was the one who did the most damage to It.
Like, the most protective with, you know,
the battery acid scene.
-He was a warrior on the inside.
When the kids saw him,
I wanted him to be like this cartoon clown,
and when the adults saw him, I wanted him to be
this like a horrific caricature of that previous clown.
The adults know that this isn't really a clown.
They know that it's a monster,
and so there's no reason for It
to necessarily maintain this illusion
other than just to screw with them.
And my original concept art for it had blue eye sockets
which would become eye sockets of the skull;
just the way the mouth was painted
would suggest more of a skullish mouth.
And for various reasons, we didn't go that route.
But when we ended up doing the battery acid look,
the disfigured part is what that makeup would have been,
only on his entire head.
When we shot that sequence in Canada
with the battery acid,
we didn't have time to switch him over
so we just shot the whole thing with the regular clown face.
At that point,
the intention was to not use the disfigured prosthetics
and I went back to LA
kind of a little heartbroken.
And we were building the miniature Pennywise
for when he goes down the drain
and I had it sculpted with the normal face,
and literally
the day I got the front half of the mold done,
Gene Warren comes back and goes,
"Hey, we're doing some reshoots
and we're going to use the disfigured Pennywise."
Now I had to take a life cast of his quarter-scale head
and do like a tiny prosthetic to make it look like
the disfigured Pennywise.
To Tim's credit, the only reason that that makeup,
even though it's a heavier makeup,
is in the movie is because he had seen the prosthetics
and he volunteered to wear it for the day that we shot it.
-I loved the fact that we really got to work
with Tim in that scene.
Stan, no!
Bev, the stones!
Hurry, Bev. Kill It!
Kill me?
Oh, brat!
You are priceless!
-When Pennywise gets hit in the head with
the silver stone and knocks the chunk out of his head.
Bam! He nails him!
Initially, we shot that in Vancouver
with just the regular Pennywise makeup.
Kill it, Bev! Kill it!
Make that happen fast.
As soon as this... as soon as he gets hit. Okay?
So, bam! He gets hit in the head.
-I think it was an interesting choice
by Stephen King to have Bev, the only girl,
be the one who actually has mastered this weapon
and can use the weapon against It.
It's like it's supposed to be Bev.
In the movie, it's a little silver earring
about so big,
but for the shot of it
flying out of the slingshot and hitting him,
Bart sculpted at least twice a duplicate of the earring.
It's flat on the back with... With a little hole
so they could mount it on a... on a rig
and I think it probably rotated.
I remember practicing
with a slingshot at home. Once I fired it
right into the camera
and it ricocheted around the map box.
Took me a while to live that one down with the boys.
They were like, "I'll do it!
I'll do it! She's incompetent!"
I was just like, "Oh, men."
Kill It, Bev!
Filming those scenes
in the sewer and working with Pennywise.
And you. are next.
- Definitely some of the more memorable times.
Action!
It really put you in the mood
and it really gave you the feeling
that you were actually doing these things.
Similar to the shower scene.
It's okay, Eddie.
Hi. I just wanted to say hello.
-The entire thing is built on a sound stage
so you have a bathroom that is seven-eighths complete.
This is a little inconvenient, Eddie.
Just hold on while I make a few adjustments.
-It was a combination of stop-motion
replacement animation.
We sculpted the stretching of the drain in the tiles
and it's sculpted frame by frame and then cast
and then replacement, one frame at a time.
You have all this noise.
The poles blowing the compressed air,
which are loud bursts from 12 to 14 different poles.
The director yelling cues at me.
Have Tim Curry
reciting his lines for me
in Tim Curry Pennywise voice over a loudspeaker system.
So, when you add all those factors together,
me having an asthma attack at the very end of the scene...
it's not really too much acting going on there
because there was a lot of adrenaline,
there was a lot of pressure.
Well, sports fans,
this has been a real hoot.
The Chinese restaurant scene
was sort of our scene out of Alien in that
the director did not let us see what was going to happen.
First of all, you have to remember
you have all these actors
sitting around who have known each other for years.
Ritter and I were very naughty.
Poor Tommy, the director,
I think wanted to really kill both of us.
We were back in that time
so we were always relating to each other in character
as childhood friends.
And Annette, who is so sweet
and such a dear heart
and such a "nice girl,"
has got such a raucous sense of humor.
I mean, we were just outrageous.
You put a bunch of actors around a table for hours,
it's crowd control at a whole other level.
I think it was very hard and I want to apologize
right now to the director and everybody.
And then after that, staying in character
knowing what this meant, that this was again an omen.
This thing is never going to leave us.
The little thing with the eye,
the fortune cookie,
that was my favorite.
Back then, you had to do
everything practically.
And if they had to fix it, it was a lot of work and money.
So, the challenges that IT brought
to the effects department
as a mechanical, practical thing,
was amazing.
I loved that scene
and that's... In my fading memory,
making that scene is one that's always stood out for me.
That and where I'm telling them all
we have to be strong and we have to stay together
and we're going to do this.
And the reason I remember that scene
is that I just wonder how terrible
my performance was at that moment.
I've been afraid to revisit it because I don't want to know.
For years, I've been getting paid
to scare people,
but I'm the one who's been scared.
I was just always afraid, oh god,
was I as hokey as I thought I was?
There was so much love and fun at the table
in the Chinese restaurant.
As difficult as it may have been for them to get it quiet
and do the work, that chemistry and that craziness
is one of the things that makes the picture work.
I was responsible for Stan's head in the fridge.
Sorry I'm late!
We were building the stuff in Burbank
and then flying up to Vancouver.
And so I had a big trunk
that I would carry the Pennywise wigs
and the various prosthetics. You'd go through customs
and typically they would open it up
and uh, you know, "What's all this stuff?"
So, I'm going through this time with the severed head in it,
so I'm like, you know, "Oh, well this ought to be funny!"
-From here to here he built a kind of a false neck,
so it looked like my head was sitting flat on the rack.
Stan's head in the fridge was a combination
of a prosthetic on the actor
to simulate the cut neck.
I'd already slid into this refrigerator,
and you have to picture it's a rack,
and the rack goes into a little notch
on either side of it.
So you have to get it just right,
and it has to go in at just the right angle,
and I'm part of the rack.
They had a shelf with a cutout in it
that slid up against his neck
and then, all that was rodoed out
by my brother Brett.
So it was just a neck prosthetic
and then a death makeup on Richard.
-I slide into this thing...
I just hate everybody and I just want this over with.
So I'm lying there like this.
Then they start putting these little cans and stuff
around my head and I'm just going,
"Can we just shoot this? Can we please just shoot this?"
"Yeah, well, we've gotta just."
I said, "Come on, let's shoot the fucking thing.
I need to get this off," and then it's like,
"Hi, kids! How you doing? Yeah, we all float down here."
You know, and I just... I just wanted to kill somebody.
When I read the novel,
all thousand pages of it, I remember going,
"Wha...? All this, and it's a fuckin' spider?"
Damn me to hell.
-Oh man, come on. You can do better than that rubber spider.
-Aww.
I was a little let down, to be frank,
and you're talking to someone who really loves that novel.
If I'd had one scene that I would have put in
that I think is one of Steve's great sequences,
it was where they build the underground clubhouse
and use it as a smoke hole and hallucinate IT
as this extraterrestrial arrival eons ago,
and I think it would have added to the narrative
and just straight-out storytelling,
and maybe directed the spider.
Into the junk pile.
-The one thing I loathed
was what they did with him at the end.
They made him into this awful plastic spider.
I believe in the Tooth Fairy.
But I don't believe in you!
-Which wasn't scary at all.
Then I got over that and thought,
"Okay, it's a spider.
Why not?"
All right, here we go.
Because it's so much more than that in the end.
And there's this cosmic struggle in space or space-time,
or Bill's mind or somebody's mind, you know?
Come on. Can we have the deadlights out on a cue?
- Yep. - Yes.
It gets into territory
that to me it was unfilmable.
Okay, and the entire creature
is going to breathe a little for me, right?
Here we go.
I think it has to breathe a little heavier than that.
John Thomas, sharper moves!
So, I think we were all a little bit like,
"Okay, now we're in a monster movie.
Now we're going to be fighting this big toy."
Somebody rear back
with their fist. John! That's it!
More of that!
It culminates in a struggle.
Between humans and a giant spider.
All right, fine.
Our challenge of course was to come up with a creature
that looks incredible.
Only we had champagne ideas and a beer budget.
Look at this masterful piece.
Yeah. Look at it, look at it.
- Look at this. Aaron Sims. Aaron Sims.
Joey.
That's a bad sculpture, very bad.
Oh, no it's not.
It's a very cool sculpture.
Aaron's doing his magic.
-It was me and a colleague and friend,
Joey Orosco, which was creating the spider
that would be in the climax of the show.
Look what he's doing.
- It sucks. I'm fucking it up. Look at it.
Hey, this is for family television.
- Hey! No, we got the edit coming now.
-Going into it, I guess subconsciously,
I didn't want people to just go, "Oh, it's just a spider."
-This is like...
I know, but.
I didn't want it to be just a big black widow
or a tarantula.
Yeah, well I got...
-It's spider-like,
but it was never intended to be a spider.
The design evolved,
so there was a lot of different designs that were created.
Some were more spider-like
that felt they were very grounded
to an earthbound spider.
What we ended up going with is
something that felt otherworldly.
If you actually delivered a giant spider...
The two effects guys on the picture,
John and Gene.
Living in a cave.
It took the film from this frightening,
heady picture,
to a Ray Harryhausen action adventure.
But that's what the script called for,
so we did whatever we thought we could do
for the time and money,
and we built a stop-motion spider.
It was Bart who created the model.
Did a masterful job and it was beautiful.
And I'd signed off on that.
-Well, I don't want to point too many fingers.
For some reason, I think the spider
gets a lot of grief that I don't think it deserves.
When the crew came up from Los Angeles
and they got it out to assemble the spider,
there was this kind of, "Oh, by the way,
the spider, as planned,
was unwieldy.
The physics of it were just such that
we couldn't make that happen.
It was just too heavy.
It was collapsing under its own weight."
You're assembling something that doesn't look anything
like we agreed upon.
And now I'm just supposed to shoot it?
Well, the answer was:
"Yeah, that's show business.
You don't have any more time. You've got to do this."
Hold them up there, hold them up. right arm in.
So make it look the best you can.
Drop!
God!
Cut. Aces.
-So I tell people, "Hey, it could have been
fighting a turtle in outer space.
Would you have liked that better?"
-I thought the spider was fantastic,
to tell you the truth.
The way it looked in the shop was really cool.
We had 12 weeks to build it.
Unfortunately, the shooting of the spider
was literally the last two days of filming.
All right, take it up to,
uh, a hundred.
Okay!
I think a lot of times,
for time constraints on set,
or for whatever reason...
Put the hands out slowly!
Cut!
-The director can't get the shots
or doesn't shoot it to its full potential.
-What we built and delivered was capable of
a lot more than what's seen in the film.
And positions, please.
There we go.
The big problem with a lot of these movies
is that you get the set and they're like,
"Okay, put it in front of the camera.
Okay, make it move."
wiggle, wiggle, wiggle. "Okay."
- Cut. - Cut.
Nicely done.
And you're like, "Hold on a second,
this could do much more..." "No, no. We got it. We got it.
We're moving on."
The head had a full range of movement.
The fangs could move,
the mouth, the mandibles.
Get the hands around and then just pinch around.
The fangs dripped poison.
The eyes moved.
- Who's got the eyes? - Mike.
There you go.
Go to town, Brent.
Brent Baker was my main mold maker
and then he also performed inside the spider.
Move the butt, Brent.
Yeah.-.
Move it like a bug would move it, Brent.
He is! That's it! It's a frightening bug.
It's always a challenge when you're
playing inside a creature suit.
How is it in there, Brent?
You gotta speak up, Tommy.
You okay, Brent?
They would insert me through the rear of the spider
and pull off the abdomen, and slide me up into it.
He was also inside the spider
when they flipped it over,
but it had these metal ribs around it
and those we hadn't thought to pad.
When I say, "Action,"
IT will overlap, that is to say,
a few steps back, you'll come in,
Rambo on the creature,
it will do its roll and go down.
It's all fun and games
until they go to push the spider over on its side
and like a fool I was like, "I'll do it.
Yeah, I'll be in it, you know. How bad could it be?"
And, action!
So, yeah, he goes like 90 degrees
and then just slams into these aluminum.
Square stocks.
- Cut! - Cut!
Brent, you all right?
-He had some nice bruises, but he was a trouper.
Show your bruises.
Let's see the bruises.
You're going to be a star.
They're starting to turn
kind of greenish now. There's the other one.
It's turning all kinds of interesting colors.
I was effectively blind inside of there.
Not to complain,
because it's still great fun, you know, playing a monster.
It's like, "Hey, I'm almost like part of the cast."
-It was his idea.
He wanted to be an actor, so there you go.
There's a couple of close-ups of the spider
that for some reason they shot it at like 50,
60 frames a second, maybe even slower,
to where it's barely perceived that it's moving.
I think if we delivered a spider that did as little
as what you see in the show,
I think they would have been pissed off.
-Unfortunately, the timing session after the fact...
After all the photography is done
and you've got your movie and now you're in a session
where you're looking at a scene
and you're making it lighter or darker;
at that point, I was in Tahiti
on this other picture.
And so, the timing session went on without us,
with another member of the organization who...
He and I had not communicated successfully.
So, it was lit up pretty brightly.
You saw everything, and I was dismayed.
And it was out there before I could correct it.
I would go back and correct it now if I could.
Okay and roll.
Five fifty-five, George.
Five fifty-five, Baker.
I kept saying there has to be
a weakness based in fear,
not in physical strength, that's inside Eddie.
What is the secret that he has not been able to tell anyone,
including these people?
We're now crawling through the tunnel
towards what will be the spider,
and that day I'm saying to Tommy,
"What are we going to do about Eddie,
and Eddie's fatal flaw, his big fear?
He hasn't confessed.
We know what's going to happen to him
moments after this."
Push Dennis closer to the monster, please.
Ready? Uh, Dennis' face is blocked.
Yeah, go back up into that.
And then.
Action!
Cut!
Eddie deserves to be completed.
So, I said to him at lunch before we shot the scene,
"What if he's just a virgin? That's it. Finished."
Well, I can't help you with that, pal,
but thanks for sharing.
Richie! Let him talk.
-We all saw how uncomfortable, awkward
and really strange it is to... It's not really strange,
it's not really strange at all, it's a choice.
But how society reacts to people that aren't sexual,
and Eddie was not.
I could never sleep with somebody
that I didn't love.
And I've never really loved anyone.
Except you guys.
And.
One, two, three, go!
There are things I wouldn't have done,
had I had the ability to see in retrospect,
was the revelation of IT as the spider.
Had I been around, I would have come up with something
involving Pennywise.
-Some things you can't know until after the fact.
Who knew that Tim Curry was just going to be such a home run?
It was like, okay, the book says he disappears at this point
and never to return.
But like probably most of the audience
when I watch it, I go, "Oh! There goes Tim."
-Oh, I wish we could have one more scene with him.
Some kind of goodbye scene, some way of.
Well, maybe we should kill him, you know?
Or maybe his face should be the spider's face.
Or... I don't know.
That's a problem we never solved.
You're ducking way down.
You got to look for the rock standing straight up.
- Okay. - It may look...
It may feel a little goofy, but. - I... I didn't realize.
I guess after Beverly wounds the spider
with the slingshot and the rock and it walks away,
when they came upon him in that last bit,
had that been Tim Curry again, mortally wounded,
I think that might have been a more satisfying ending,
because you were just so invested in Tim
as that villain at that point.
-It would have been nice had we been able to solve it,
because I agree that the story drops Pennywise,
and he's such an endearing character,
he deserved a better exit.
All right, bring it to a climax now.
Everybody all at once.
And, cut!
I suppose people will revisit this
and know that it's a puppet,
but it doesn't matter.
The story returns to the world of the psyche
and goes back into very good territory, I think.
It goes back to the heart of what the deep
thematic structure of the piece is.
The hardest part about that for me really
was the fucking bicycle.
Forget the horror and the drama,
it was the bicycle that was the problem, okay?
That's where the fear and the terror was.
I loved Olivia. Great sense of humor,
but a fragility which I thought was wonderful.
And she was terrified that I was going to kill her.
I know she was. I think she said she was.
I just said, "Please god,
let me not kill this actress and myself."
Hold on.
You can see the terror on my face
if you look very carefully.
Behind the veneer of performance,
it's there.
I will forever associate Olivia
with going downhill at speed on a bike.
Alan and I went down to the agency
to meet with Stephen and show him the picture.
They had a screening room all set up.
And I remember he came up to us
and I put my hand out to shake Stephen's hand
and he had a rat in it,
a rubber rat.
It was kind of like a shocking thing, you know,
and it was, I don't know, maybe to break the ice.
We had a few exchanged words
and then he saw it privately.
He didn't want us to be there, but, um, we later heard
that he liked it and he was happy.
I was certain when we got a final cut
that we had a good movie.
At the premiere, I was really just thinking
that I can't believe I'm actually a part of this film.
The results were,
that we got a viewership of 30 million people.
It was huge in the ratings.
It was viewed as a big success.
And the press on it was very positive.
I think the legacy of the original IT
was this brilliant performance
on TV, which you would usually see in film,
in your living rooms.
-It was just an extraordinary event to.
Have this King first piece for TV as a mini-series
come out and stake that kind of territory
and resonate so strongly with people.
It became the proverbial water cooler mini-series.
And I think it then went on to have
the most unexpected afterlife.
I think the reason
that IT was so successful at scaring people
is because these characters don't have the ability
to name what scares them or the forces that oppress them.
The high point was going up
and receiving the Emmy.
I'm told that when they announced my name.
Bam! I was gone.
You know, as if I thought they were going to take it back
if I didn't get up to the podium quickly enough.
-He just made magic with that score.
- Meep, meep. S.S. Georgie underway.
Rocks! Rocks?
Rocks!
It 's a very lonely Emmy
sitting in my house,
but that's all right.
I credit Tim and Stephen King for my Emmy.
It's very difficult to write music
when the story is flawed or when the acting is poor.
When the story is. I mean, that great,
and the performances are that good,
that all adds up to any department's Emmy.
You're elevated by those performances in that story.
-One of the reasons that I think it's a cult favorite
is because of Tim Curry and the clown.
He 's everything.
He is the poster,
he's on T-shirts.
Pop culture has taken
ownership of this miniseries.
-Without the benefit of any CGI,
just balls to the walls talent, Tim nailed it in a way that.
You say "IT" and people say "Tim Curry."
Me?
-I think it's really interesting how
the Pennywise character continues to gain that fan base.
As the internet grew,
I started to really realize
how much of an impact he had,
and the film had on a lot of people.
Now we're in an age where
nostalgic things are being passed down.
We generationally are choosing what icons to perpetuate
to future generations.
Pennywise as an ultimate horror icon,
a demonic infinite that has access to your deepest fears,
I don't think that's gonna dull anytime soon.
I'm just so happy to be part
of what Stephen King created and part of what Tommy Lee
gave to America.
Being familiar with Stephen King's work
and actually being able to help realize this
on any capacity was a thrill for me.
We did it! Yeah!
-I enjoyed the tension.
I mean, not as a person but as an actor.
Throughout the whole process of shooting IT,
I was learning at such an exponential rate.
I was discovering that there was more to acting
than standing on your mark.
Take the outside
instead of the inside, Brandon.
There's a lot of room right there.
Not too far out, squeeze in behind Bill.
-I was loving it.
I think it fits well
amongst some of the great icons of the genre.
There's even a comedic aspect to it that was never intended.
Beep-beep!
I never would have known or thought
that it would have become a cult classic.
I always thought that it was a great story.
But I never realized
that it would go as far as it's gotten.
I'm very proud of it
and I'm used to the idea of cult movies,
so I'm glad that it's having a life.
It's a cracking story.
The popularity of IT
down through the years is multi-layered.
I think first it speaks to really fine performances.
That's first and foremost.
A good story as the foundation.
A great script,
at least in Night One.
Competent directing.
That's a formula for something that will be viewed
more than once among those who consider it a favorite.
They'll watch it again.
-Down here we all float!