Conference ljsrv1::tv_chatter

    I watched it, but not like a hawk (because I'm taping it).  Actually I
    was pleasantly surprised that they seemed to be sticking to the book
    well (for a TV movie).  They've edited out *lots* of gruesome stuff
    (everyone should be losing teeth by now, and they've only shown one
    modest nosebleed) and there are fairly minor differences (Peter, the
    dog, should have been a beagle and his eyes should have "gone green" in
    the vet's office sequence).  What Bobbie is digging up should have been
    just the edge of a (huge) frisbee-shaped object.
    
    I agree about the townsfolk, but I think that's a necessary evil in
    getting it down to 4 hours.  It's been a while since I've read the book
    so I can't remember all the little stuff up front, but there's *lots*
    more to come.  Maybe you should tape the second half *without watching*
    and go grab the book!
    
    Regards,
    Leslie

    I guess I should put my request with details behing a formfeed:
    
    
    
    I only watched the first hour last night and was wondering if someone
    could fill me in on the second hour. I want to watch part 2 tonight, so
    I don't want to be too lost. The last stuff I remember is Bobbie and
    Gar (??) making love and her eyes turning green and the two post office
    people in the car getting "attacked" by the green light and then the
    woman's eyes turning green.
    
    ONe other thing...was it okay to still be lost at this point??? I was
    enjoying the show but was really bothered by the fact that up to that 
    point I had no idea what was going on. I guess that comes later.
    
    Patty

    
    I liked this adaptation of the book, it is far better than most King
    movies made for the big screen. I liked "It", except for the very end.
    The only thing I dislike, is the deletion of most of the horror & gore,
    since there is a lot of it in King novels. But this is understood due
    to the wide audience of tv. 
    
    Dave
    
    
    

    Some second-hour details behind form feed:
    
    The wife (Alyce Beasley) of the philandering "fisherman" questions him
    the morning after; he says he got in too late, didn't want to wake her
    up, blah blah.  She pretends to believe him, but I think we already
    know she's on to his scam.  Hubby's post-office squeeze spontaneously
    invents a machine to sort the mail (more time for naughties in the back
    room).  Later his wife is watching TV and suddenly
    realizes the guy (weatherman?) on the tube is talking to *her*, giving
    her instructions, confirming that her hubby's cheating on her.  Per the
    instructions, she modifies her TV set, waits for hubby to complain
    about it being on all the time, says "shut it off *yourself*"--and when
    he does, it FRIES him.
    
    Not sure how much of the Gard (short for Jim Gardner) stuff you saw. 
    He's shaving upstairs in Bobbi's house and burns his hands with the hot
    water, so he lopes downstairs to check out the water heater.  Bobbi has
    the whole basement rigged out like an electronics lab: banks of
    fluorescent lights and all kinds of batteries and PC boards lying
    around.  He finds the water heater (the outside of it is hot to the
    touch); the electrical connection is *unplugged*, but he looks inside
    and it's powered by *green stuff*....  Gard asks Bobbi how she rigged
    it and she says she doesn't know; she just seemed to figure it out step
    by step.
    
    (Was this in the first hour?) Bobbie shows Gard her "dig"; he's
    suitably impressed and baffled.  "Wait--watch this" she says and
    touches it; it glows green.  He touches it and gets paralyzed by it
    (can't let go); the plate in his head bulges out, and his nose bleeds. 
    Bobbie pries his hand off.
    
    Hilly (older boy) does a semi-successful magic act in his classroom. 
    (In the book he loves magic but isn't very good at it.)  One night his
    little brother Dave sees green light coming out of the closet; he looks
    in and there's a Tommyknocker.  He tells Hilly, but when Hilly looks 
    there's nothing there.  Hilly gets a message (I think he was looking
    out a window at night...?) and you hear him answering "it will work
    like that?  What kind of batteries?"  ... the local hardware store is
    suddenly all sold out of batteries--all kinds.
    
    Hilly does a magic act on his (or Dave's?) birthday, in the backyard. 
    He puts a radio under a cloth and makes it disappear; the cloth falls
    flat on the table.  He makes it reappear, then asks for a volunteer. 
    His classmate (who had been the finger-guillotine volunteer in class)
    refuses, so he gets Dave to be the victim.  He makes Dave disappear
    --permanently.  When everyone realizes that Dave is really gone, and
    not under the tablecloth, Hilly is anguished and lapses into a coma
    [this from the book; not sure if, on TV, it happened immediately or
    after a couple days].  In the book they take him to a hospital a few
    towns away.
    
    The policewoman (Joanna Cassidy)'s dolls come to (green) life as Alyce
    Beasley's character rocks in a padded cell, chanting, with an eerie
    smile, "Tommyknockers, tommyknockers, knocking at my door...."
    
    Leslie

    
    Thanks for the second-hour update. I guess whether I had watched it or
    not I would still be confused. Hopefully things get a little clearer
    tonight.
    
    Patty

I kinda wished Davie had wound up on his back on a cold airless alien planet,
like in the book, instead of inside the spaceship.

;^)

I haven't read the book in quite a while, but I think there were a couple of
fairly major concepts in the book that didn't make it to the movie ... one
being that the aliens basically roamed the universe destroying other races
for the sake of being destructive (a variation on a common S.King theme of
evil for evil's sake ;^) ... another was that the aliens were like "idiot
savants" in that they could do great technical things, but didn't quite
understand the principles behind what they did (for example, instructing
people to use batteries when they could've just used AC power sources etc).
In the movie this applied to the people of the town, but I think in the
book it applied to the aliens as well.

Think I'll start re-reading the book tonight ....

- Dave

    
    Now that it's all over, I think they did a pretty good job. They even
    included some teeth pulling. I sort of cringed when Smits took the
    pliers to his molar.  
    
    Looking forward to the tv version of "The Stand".
    
    
    Dave
    

Of course the ending was completly different from the novel. Probably changed
for both financial and time restrictions. Still, it was well done. The best
of the television versions of King's novels, imho.


Randy

re: .8, Randy

> Of course the ending was completly different from the novel.

How so? I'll admit it's been about six or more years since I read the book,
but I thought the ending met my remembrances pretty well, at least in terms
of "major events".

-Jack

Finally got around to watching this on tape....

The family found the first two hours excellent with a good build up of suspense
and decent anticipation...

spoiler stuff now...


The 2nd two hours were a disappointment...Whoopde-do...another "the aliens
made me do it" story without any background behind the aliens. The ending was 
trite and quite a letdown...The whole town just goes back to what they were
doing after a spaceship flies from the ground (how he flew it is entirely 
another matter) and blows up...

No how,why,what for or any other explanation....

The first two hours deserved better...they could have done a lot more with
the last 2 hours than show people excavating and Gard battling with the bottle
(and not very convincingly mind you...)

Metz