For more than four decades, writings under the most famous byline the Daily Camera never published have languished in the newspaper’s archives: a pair of reviews by a young would-be film critic named Stephen King.
Yes, that Stephen King.
In September 1974, while living with his family in south Boulder’s Martin Acres neighborhood, the 26-year-old writer and future master of horror mailed a typewritten letter to the Camera’s features editor.
It was an unsolicited — and notoriously unaccepted — offer to review a film or two a week for Boulder’s daily newspaper.
Read Stephen King’s letters, unpublished reviews
In 1974, Stephen King wrote a letter to the Daily Camera offering to review films for the newspaper, and enclosed two reviews. You can read those documents, as well as another letter King sent to the Camera in 1988, at the links below.
Stephen King’s letter to the Daily Camera (1974)
Stephen King’s review of “Bring Me the Head of Alfredo Garcia”
Stephen King’s review of “California Split”
Stephen King’s letter to the Daily Camera (1988)
Source: Daily Camera archives
King enclosed critical appraisals of Sam Peckinpah’s “Bring Me the Head of Alfredo Garcia” (“a merciless dissection of human greed”) and Robert Altman’s “California Split” (“a stupid gambling picture”), one of which already was screening in Boulder, the other expected shortly.
“I’m offering them for publication, but also as a sort of advertisement,” King wrote. “I think the city paper could use occasional movie reviews, both for the amusement of the paper’s readers and a thumbnail guide for area moviegoers — not that any of them are obligated to accept what I write, and most won’t.”
Noting that criticism should have a “local touch” and, above all else, be entertaining, King promised that, if hired, he’d “hope to review lightly, sometimes with my tongue tucked firmly into my cheek, and provide that entertainment.”
“I don’t want to write snotty avant-garde reviews of obscure foreign films,” he continued, “but I would like the chance to shake down what’s playing at the Boulder or the Fox or the Basemar Twin Cinemas once or twice a week.”
‘Succession of stupid movies’
King’s review of “Alfredo Garcia” — which runs just over a page, and includes one small, handwritten edit — praises Peckinpah as one of America’s great directors, and compliments star Warren Oates.
After reeling off the wide variety of violence featured in what’s now a cult classic, King observes it all “might have amounted to so much cheap exploitation in the hands of a lesser director, but under Peckinpah’s sure hand, ‘Alfredo Garcia’ becomes a merciless dissection of human greed, a black comedy where Oates ends up stuffing dry ice into the bag which contains Garcia’s head and plonking it in his shower to keep it fresh.”
The young novelist was less kind to Altman, calling him “a smart director who has made an amazing succession of stupid movies since ‘M*A*S*H,’ his masterpiece.” King didn’t like the gambling comedy “California Split,” either.
“It would really be more exciting to stay home and get up a penny-ante game of your own,” he concluded in his three-paragraph review.
King closed his letter to the Camera with a final plea.
“And by the way,” he wrote, “I work cheap.”
Newsroom lore
The pitch failed to land.
“He applied and we turned him down,” Laurence “Laurie” Paddock, who served as the Camera’s editor from 1960 until his retirement in 1992, recalled recently. “We didn’t have a job for him.”
Looking back on the episode decades later, Paddock conceded it was just as well the newspaper didn’t hire the soon-to-be-superstar horror writer.
“He couldn’t have gone on like that,” Paddock said. “He’s a novelist making millions of dollars and he wouldn’t have made that as a newspaper reporter. But it would have been nice to have him among our alumni.”
King, of course, was far from a household name at the time he lived in Boulder and offered his services to the Camera.
As noted in his letter, King’s first published novel, “Carrie,” was out in hardback at the time (it wouldn’t be a smash until its paperback release in 1975), and a second book — “Jerusalem’s Lot,” eventually retitled “‘Salem’s Lot” — was due the following summer.
By the 1980s, with King having become a literary and cinematic celebrity, the newspaper’s failure to hire the writer had become newsroom lore.
“The story was well known at the Camera when I got there in ’85,” said John Lehndorff, who worked as the paper’s food editor and columnist until 2000.
Sue Deans, a journalist at the Camera from 1977 to 1987 who returned to serve as the paper’s editor for four years beginning in 2003, knows it well.
“I ran across (King’s letter) once when I was looking for something in the early ’80s,” Dean said, recalling a trip to the newsroom library, where old clippings, photographs and other historic material were archived.
“I was looking in some files, and there was this letter from Stephen King, saying he’d like to write reviews for the paper,” she said. “What I didn’t know was whether it was the same Stephen King who’d gone on to become very famous.
“I asked Laurie,” Deans said, referring to Paddock, “and he said, ‘Yeah.'”
(Attempts to query King through his agent and book publicists, and even directly via Twitter, were unsuccessful.)
‘A happy year living on 42nd Street’
King and his family lived in a house on South 42nd Street for about a year, during which time he wrote “The Shining,” with its iconic Overlook Hotel famously based on the Stanley Hotel in Estes Park.
“We came very close to living here the rest of our lives rather than going back to Maine,” King told the audience at Chautauqua Auditorium during a 2013 event to promote “Doctor Sleep,” his sequel to “The Shining.”
“… (But) it seemed like there were a lot of people from IBM, and we didn’t fit with them; a lot of people from CU, and we didn’t fit with them. And a lot of Republicans, and we didn’t fit with them.”
Boulder would figure into several of King’s bestsellers, from “The Shining” and its sequel to the author’s post-apocalyptic magnum opus, “The Stand,” in which the book’s heroes converge under the Flatirons while the forces of evil settle in Las Vegas.
In 1987’s “Misery,” author Paul Sheldon — played by James Caan in the hit film adaptation — finishes his latest novel, as is his tradition, at the Hotel Boulderado.
A Camera reporter wrote to King about this detail, and received a belated response in August 1988, a letter that also remains in the newspaper’s archives, now housed at Boulder’s Carnegie Branch Library for Local History.
“I know the Boulder area, because my wife and family and I spent a happy year living on 42nd Street, in the Table Mesa area,” King wrote. “The reason Paul Sheldon chose to finish all his books at the Boulderado is because that’s the place I’d go to finish mine, if I were a man in his position (divorced, no kids)… or maybe the Stanley, in Estes Park, although the views from the Stanley are maybe a little too spectacular for complete concentration.”
A second stab at ‘Alfredo Garcia’
Getting snubbed by the Daily Camera, of course, did absolutely nothing to hinder King’s writing career.
He’s gone on to pen more than 50 novels spanning genres from horror and fantasy to suspense, mystery and crime fiction — a bibliography boasting collective sales that exceed 300 million.
Additionally, dozens of his books and short stories have made it to the big screen, most notably the acclaimed films “The Shining,” “Stand By Me” and “The Shawshank Redemption.”
And, almost exactly 35 years after sending his sample review to the Camera, King got his chance to laud “Bring Me the Head of Alfredo Garcia” in print.
In a 2009 column in Entertainment Weekly devoted to his Top 20 video-store rentals “that never disappoint,” King slotted “Alfredo Garcia” at No. 9.
His review the second time around?
“Warren Oates as the grimmest, grittiest small-time bad guy ever. This is the cinematic equivalent of Cormac McCarthy’s ‘Blood Meridian.'”
Staff Writer Alex Burness contributed to this report.
Matt Sebastian: 303-473-1350, [email protected] or twitter.com/mattsebastian
