s Stephen King's favorite executive producer, Mark Carliner brings the things the master of horror sees in his head to life on the small screen. It's a job he's embraced with passion, and never more so than in King's latest project, Kingdom Hospital, which is based on Lars von Trier's Danish miniseries The Kingdom. The series will premiere on ABC on Wednesday, March 3, at 9 p.m. ET.
Carliner has been a producer for more than 30 years in film and television. Early work included Crossroads, Heaven Help Us and the TV series The Phoenix. His historical television films garnered critical attention with Stalin and George Wallace. Lately, his focus has been working with King on his television miniseries, including the Emmy-nominated The Shining, Storm of the Century and Rose Red.
Carliner chatted with Science Fiction Weekly about Stephen King, executive producing and what scares him.
Tell me how Kingdom Hospital came to be.
Carliner: Steve and I were doing The Shining in Colorado in 1996. Steve never liked what Kubrick did with the movie, so we made a six-hour miniseries for ABC. Toward the end of the shoot, Steve would come out there, because that was where it all started for him.
He was teaching at the University of Colorado in Boulder. One night he was sitting in this empty dining room in Estes Park at the Stanley Hotel. He got the whole story of The Shining in a blinding flash and he wrote it. So I went back to shoot his version where he had originally conceived the story. He came out and was spending time with us. He went into a video store, I guess it was May of '96, and in one of the bins of obscure videos was The Kingdom, which was in Danish with English subtitles. Steve, who absolutely is voracious when it comes to worldwide pop culture, sees and knows everything. He scooped it up and took it home and popped it in and couldn't stop watching for the whole five, six hours.
He brought it in the next morning. He said to me it was the most terrifying thing and hysterically funny at the same time, which is perfect. So he said, "What do you think if we do this for American television? Would it work for us here?" And I looked at it that night and came in equally excited the next morning.
A week later I was on a plane to Copenhagen and I met Lars. And Lars was starting the second wave of The Kingdom. He did another five hours, I think. He was starting to shoot that, so we spent three days together. Lars was extremely excited that Stephen King was interested. He is a huge fan of Steve King. So the idea that his love child will be entrusted to Steve was very exciting to him.
The only problem was in '96 his agent was hot to sell this because it was such a big property to make it into a theatrical feature, which neither Steve nor I thought would be the appropriate way to go, because it was conceived originally as a miniseries for Danish television. Now it became this tremendous hit. I mean, everybody in Denmark was watching it. And then released it theatrically, so it became a big cult film. We thought that it was ideally suited to the multi-episode form in as much as that's the way it unfolded and that's the way we wanted to do it. So the deal didn't happen in '96.
Now, neither Stephen nor I ever forgot about it. What happened was Sony bought the rights to make it into a feature. Steve figured, give them three or four or five years and they'll never succeed in coming up with a theatrical script that works. And of course, Steve was right. The five years goes by. They took two or three different shots and nothing worked, so the property was languishing.
Meanwhile, in one of the supreme ironies, Steve had this horrific life-changing experience and near-fatal accident in the summer of '99.
It must have been a terrible time for him.
Carliner: He spent the better part of the next year in hospitals, where, of course, the whole Kingdom Hospital thing came back to mind. Now if you're Stephen King and you've had a near-death experience and you find yourself getting an MRI and going through all the things that happen to you when you're in a hospital, what do you do? He went back in his mind. Now remember, Sony still owned the rights to this thing. When he came out and felt up to it, Steve sat down and right out of his gut, he sat down and wrote 15 hours of scripts. He didn't have the rights. He just felt it so strongly.
He was able to bring to what Lars did a whole other deeper level of meaning and of terror. Only Stephen King, who had seen the white light, if you will, was able to breathe that into Kingdom Hospital. This is amazing, when you realize that he wrote 15 hours of scripts and he didn't control the rights to the property.
I think it's the best screenwriting of his entire career. It was inspired. You can feel it. You can sense it. The characters are brilliant. At that point we contacted ABC. They read the scripts overnight and said, "You're on the air." And then we went to Sony and said, "OK, you guys have the rights to Lars von Trier's The Kingdom, but you can't do anything with it. How would you like to put it on the air as a television series?" And so we made a marriage.
That's how it came to be. But it's ironic. If we had made the show back in '96, it would have been terrific, but it would not have been anywhere near what it is now. And what it is now could only have happened because of this horrible tragedy that befell Steve. It's life-affirming. Out of the worst circumstances oftentimes comes an opportunity, if you look at it that way.
What's the story about?
Carliner: In the Danish version, I remember when I looked at the video cover it was described by one critic as "ER on acid." I think that's probably as good a short description as you can get. "ER on acid" is probably a pretty accurate description of what this is. Remember, we're talking about the basic concept, which is very delicious. In Lars' version, here was a hospital, an institution which is dedicated to science and to the debunking of superstition, an institution dedicated to rational thought and double-blind studies and science in the real Western sense of the word. And this hospital in Denmark was built over a peat bog which contained the trapped souls of many, many people. What happened is, the decomposition of certain bodies and so forth left the spirits still lurking.
Now in our piece, Steve set this in Lewiston, Maine. Our hospital is built over the site of something horrible, as well. It's built on the site of what was a textile mill that burned to the ground on All Souls' Day in 1869, but it burned under mysterious circumstances. There were a great number of child laborers that were working downstairs in the basement of this mill. All throughout the New England, mills were operating in their heyday, especially making uniforms during the Civil War. So there was this horrible fire that occurred under mysterious circumstances, and many of the children were burned alive in the basement of this mill. In the 1930s, another hospital was built on the same site, which ironically burned down as well several years later on All Souls' Day. A new hospital was built and this is the Kingdom Hospital of today.
We get into the hospital through Stephen King's alter ego. This is, again, another departure from what Lars did. We get into the hospital because of what is described in the piece as America's most famous artist, who, of course, is Stephen King, who is America's most famous writer. And at the beginning this character is jogging down the road outside of his home in Maine when he is obliterated by a guy who is drunk and on drugs and fighting with his dog in this van, which veers off the road and knocks him 16 feet in the air. He is almost dead. What happens to our character, Peter Rickman, at the beginning of Kingdom Hospital, if you want to know what happened to Stephen King, this is exactly what happened frame for frame for frame. It is terrifying. We took seven days to shoot this one scene of the accident.
It must have been hard for King.
Carliner: Well, it wasn't easy for him to watch it, but we discussed it at great length. When you see this, it is so shocking on film, and it's even more shocking when you realize this is what happened to Steve.
What we're talking about, the line between art and reality is so blurred here sometimes, and that's what's so amazing. That's one of the reasons this thing is so incredible. While Steve was in the hospital he did flicker between life and death, and in that twilight state he saw things which he has written about. And you've got to say to yourself if you're in science fiction, if Stephen King has a near-death experience and he sees things and then he sits down and shares that with all of us, you've got to assume that's going to be reasonably interesting, don't you think?
Yes, I think so.
Carliner: This is tapping into the mind of the master in an almost altered state. So what he's written here is really brilliant, because he's building on what was already brilliant. It's not like we're going to throw out what Lars von Trier did. We have taken what Lars did and used all the characters, most of the plot, and just built on it. I've made movies where you buy a big title and you realize when you get into it you really can't do much with it, but you've got a best-selling title and you've got to come up with something. This is not that case. This is building on something that was already brilliant. What you have here, in a sense, is a fusion of vision and, even though they didn't work together on it because each one operated independent of the other, in that sense it's a collaborative vision of two of the most interesting artists in the world today, one Lars von Trier, the other Stephen King.
King's always written great characters. Tell me about the cast.
Carliner: We spent months and months trying to find the right cast. The secret to this when you've got a brilliant script and brilliant characters, it also makes it easier to get a brilliant cast. The roles are so terrific, so actors are willing to work at much less than they otherwise would. We have 22 continuing characters, and I believe they work way beyond what we had expected.
What's special about this series for you?
Carliner: What's unique about Kingdom Hospital is that it's terrifying, no doubt about it. But it's also hysterically funny at times. It's a black comedy. Now that's a very endangered species. They're difficult to pull off. Almost impossible, because to try and find the balance, you're on a tightrope. You're walking a tightrope, and if you make a misstep you're going to plunge.
I think you will find there will be some surprises. There are things I've not told you about. There are things that I cannot tell you about, because Steve doesn't want it to be discussed. He wants it to be discovered when people see it. So there are a couple of things no one will know about until they actually see the first two hours. There are a couple of secrets embedded.
Does the material scare you?
Carliner: Hospitals are pretty terrifying places. I respond to this material because I grew up in Johns Hopkins in Baltimore. My father was a doctor. When I was a child, I spent a lot of time hanging around Johns Hopkins. It is a fairly spooky place, especially the original building—well, it could have been Kingdom Hospital.
So I got it from the get-go. Hospitals are scary places. You don't want to go to a hospital unless you absolutely have to, because people get killed in hospitals. And yet that is the place where you're going to be healed. Well, we submit that hospitals are also places of terror and danger and mistakes and disease. And so, if you're Stephen King, you work in this world of relativity. You have an interesting place to deal with the whole concept of ghosts and of the past. It's a very, very rich menu to deal with the kinds of things that Stephen King has been dealing with all of his professional career.
How is this different from anything else you've done?
Carliner: Let me tell you something. I've won my share of Emmys and Golden Globes, Peabody Awards, and I've done some very significant work of a more historical nature. But this is, I believe, every bit as smart and profound and interesting as was George Wallace or as was Stalin, which were two movies I did that were at a very high level. This is an equally high level of intelligence and a very, very thought-provoking piece. It was more than just mindless entertainment. It's more than what Frank Lloyd Wright said about television, it's more than "chewing gum for the eyes."
For you, what was the biggest challenge in approaching this project?
Carliner: Understand what we're doing is unprecedented on a lot of levels. We have one director, Craig Baxley. This is not being shot, even though it is going to be programmed as a two-hour movie with 11 one-hour episodes, on a weekly basis. We're shooting it as one giant movie. Because it's so complex and because there are so many sets, so many locations. What we're doing is we're shooting 140 days. We shot 70 days and we took a two-week break and we're shooting another 70 days.
What does it take to executive produce a project like this?
Carliner: My job as executive producer is to try to ensure that what Stephen King sees in his head is what he sees on the screen when he sees the final movie. And we have a team of people that understand and also love him. Craig and I understand that we are here to make Steve's dreams come true. What he sees is what we deliver. That's what our mission is. And so, as you begin to work together, I mean Stephen and I have been working together since 1995, you begin to understand the same language—speak the same language—almost a shorthand. And so it's really unique—we have a group of people who have been together now, many of us since 1996, all working on these projects with Stephen. But this is the most ambitious one ever. It's the kind of show that could only really happen at a point when networks are desperate. It's a very risky proposition. When you say you are going to do a black comedy, and you are going to do it on network television, eyes normally would roll. I mean, in one sense this is a 15-hour pilot for a series. So, we're saying: "OK, you're going to have to spend close to $40 million and you're going to have to do this pilot in 15 hours."
That's quite a pilot.
Carliner: Steve, quite frankly, is much happier with multi-episode forms, the miniseries form, the multi-episode form than feature film. And if look you at his books, his big expansive books, I mean, we've talked about this often. If Charles Dickens were alive and well today, he'd be Stephen King. He'd be doing what Steve is doing. He writes rich characters, interesting characters. He takes time to develop his characters. And he always puts these characters in unbelievable circumstances. So, you get people that you have, that "there but for the grace of God go you," in a circumstance which is completely unexpected and sometimes even otherworldly.
How has the accident affected Mr. King?
Carliner: He's still recovering from the effects of that terrible, terrible accident. He's dealing with a lot of the leftovers. 'Cause he goes on and on and doesn't let himself stop until nature conks him on the head and says, "Slow down, Steve."
He has a lot of healing to do. I mean, when he accepted his National Book Award, The New York Times the next day described him and his wonderful speech he gave as being frail. Well, he had pneumonia. He had pneumonia when he accepted the award, and he is still recovering from that accident. He told me ... I'll never forget this, it was the first time we spoke. It was weeks and weeks and weeks after it happened, during our first phone conversation. He said, "You know, you just never realize that your entire life can change in a second and a half."
That's very true.
Carliner: That's very true. That's what has happened. Steve has to live with pain each and every day of his life. There's pain there that just doesn't go away. When you see the accident in the opening episode of Kingdom Hospital, I think that will explain everything. When you see what happened, and there was no exaggeration, that is exactly what happened. Then you realize that one, it's a miracle that he is even here today; and, two, it's a miracle that it has not stopped him.
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