There are few authors more enduringly popular than Stephen King – but despite more than 80 film and television adaptations of his work, relatively few have achieved the stature of his best books.
The exception has long been adaptations guided by Rob Reiner, the filmmaker and producer who was found dead alongside his wife at their home on Sunday. In the late 1980s and 1990s, Reiner helped shape what is widely regarded as the gold standard for King adaptations, beginning with two films he directed that remain beloved far beyond King’s core readership: Stand By Me (1986) and Misery (1990).
Stand By Me, adapted from the novella The Body from King’s 1982 collection Different Seasons, earned Reiner a Golden Globe nomination for best director. Four years later, Misery, based on King’s 1987 psychological horror novel, became the only King adaptation to win an Academy Award, with Kathy Bates taking best actress for her ferocious, unsettling turn as Annie Wilkes.
Reiner’s influence on King’s screen legacy, however, extended well beyond the films he directed. Through Castle Rock Entertainment, the production company he co-founded and named after King’s fictional Maine town, Reiner helped shepherd a remarkable run of adaptations, including The Shawshank Redemption, Dolores Claiborne and The Green Mile. In each case, he was far more creatively involved than his producer credit alone might suggest.
Why Reiner succeeded where so many others – including, at times, King himself – struggled was something he articulated clearly. In an unpublished interview from 2017, Reiner explained that filmmakers often misunderstood what lay at the heart of King’s work.
“There's one main thing that gets overlooked,” Reiner said. “When you think about Stephen King, you go right to horror and supernatural. You don't think of the character development and great, wonderful dialogue that, to me, is what I get drawn to.
“That's why I wanted to do Shawshank Redemption, Stand By Me, Misery, Dolores Claiborne or even Green Mile. Those films are more character-driven. I'm drawn to the quality of writing. He's one of the great American writers.”
That philosophy directly shaped Stand By Me, which Reiner took on early in his directing career, still emerging from the shadow of his father, Carl Reiner, and his own success as an actor. The script he first encountered, he later recalled, lacked focus.
Reiner told Variety in 2016: “I spent the next four days riding around Los Angeles, trying to think of a way to make it work. It was giving me headaches trying to figure it out.”
The breakthrough came when Reiner centred the story on Gordie Lachance, framing the film as an adult’s act of remembrance. Richard Dreyfuss appears briefly as the grown-up Gordie, writing about his childhood, before the film settles on Wil Wheaton’s quietly wounded 12-year-old version.
That shift unlocked the film’s emotional core – and produced one of its most enduring lines: “I never had any friends later on like the ones I had when I was 12. Jesus, does anyone?”
Reiner explained that decision to The Telegraph in 2011. “Once I made Gordie the central focus, it made sense to me. This movie was about a kid who didn’t feel good about himself and whose father didn’t love him. Through this experience, he became empowered and went on to become a writer. He basically became Stephen King.”
That insight – that King’s work is often autobiographical at heart – was something Reiner grasped instinctively. It is also where other adaptations famously faltered. King has long criticised Stanley Kubrick’s The Shining (1980) for turning Jack Torrance into a near-mythic embodiment of evil, stripping away the character’s struggle with alcoholism – a struggle King himself was living through when he wrote the novel.
Misery, too, channels King’s personal fears. Written as the author battled addiction, it follows novelist Paul Sheldon, kidnapped by an obsessive fan determined to control his work. As King told the Paris Review in 2006: "Annie was my drug problem, and she was my number-one fan."
In the novel, Annie Wilkes amputates Paul’s foot with an axe; in the film, she shatters his ankles instead. That change came at Reiner’s insistence.
As screenwriter William Goldman wrote in Which Lie Did I Tell? (2000), Reiner believed showing the amputation would turn Annie into a monster the audience could only recoil from, rather than a figure whose madness remained disturbingly intimate. Without that decision, it is difficult to imagine Bates’s performance earning an Oscar.
Reiner did not direct The Shawshank Redemption, though he initially hoped to – with Tom Cruise and Harrison Ford in the roles that later went to Tim Robbins and Morgan Freeman, respectively.
When an untested 33-year-old screenwriter named Frank Darabont insisted on directing the film himself, Reiner backed him rather than replacing him, acting as a mentor throughout the process, according to Vanity Fair. The result – adapted once again from Different Seasons – aligns seamlessly with Reiner’s understanding of King as a writer of human connection rather than spectacle.
Today, The Shawshank Redemption is often described as one of the greatest films ever made, just as Stand By Me remains a defining portrait of childhood friendship. King himself has been unequivocal. In 1986, he called Stand By Me “the best film ever made out of anything I’ve written”, and has repeatedly named it and Shawshank as his two favourite adaptations.
Reiner's legacy is vast – he also made the most enduring romantic comedy in When Harry Met Sally and popularised the phrase “bucket list” with his 2007 film of the same name.
But for King’s readers and viewers, Reiner's achievement is singular. Through a handful of films – and through his work at Castle Rock – Reiner translated King not as a genre brand, but as an eminent writer of memory, fear, guilt and friendship. It is that understanding that ultimately will define both their legacies.
