The new Stephen King production begins next week.
By Daniel Hartill
Staff Writer

LEWISTON – Hollywood’s popcorn crowd plans to spend next Halloween in Lewiston.

Filmmakers are adopting Stephen King’s story, “Riding the Bullet,” into a feature film. It will star Erika Christensen, Jonathan Jackson and David Arquette, an actor from the “Scream” movies.

In part, it’s set right here.

The story and the movie includes scenes in Lewiston, particularly at Central Maine Medical Center.

However, when filming begins next week, it will be in the suburbs of Vancouver, British Columbia.

“We would love to have shot our movie there,” director Mick Garris said Monday in a phone interview from Vancouver. “But our money goes 25 percent further by coming to Canada.”

He plans to do his best to replicate Maine.

The story, which King published as an Internet e-book in 1999, tells of a student at the University of Maine who hitchhikes from the school in Orono to Lewiston’s Central Maine Medical Center, where his mother lies dying.

Along the way, the hitchhiker gets a ride with a creepy figure who forces him into a kind of “Sophie’s Choice,” said Garris.

He must decide whether he or his mother dies. Garris co-wrote the screenplay with King. Together, they moved the story’s events to 1969, the same period when King was a student in Orono.

King wrote the original story while he was recuperating from his 1999 accident in which he was struck by a van while walking near his home in Lovell. That recuperation began at the same Lewiston hospital in the story.

“It’s going to be CMMC in the movie,” said Garris. “I don’t even know if it existed back then.”

It did, but it was Central Maine General back then. The hospital has become popular in King’s fiction.

The Durham native is working on a TV series due out in January called “Kingdom Hospital.”

Also shot in British Columbia and set in Lewiston, the series is about a haunted hospital.

Garris, who directed TV versions of King’s “The Stand” and “The Shining,” said the Northwest is a good stand-in for Maine. The climate, the foliage and much of the architecture can pass for Maine, he said. Modest homes tend to look the same all over.

“People in Lewiston are going to recognize the difference,” Garris said. They’ll try to keep the differences down, though.

Dean Barker, the property master on the film, hopes to recreate much of Maine in 1969 with the use of some small objects: things such as ladies’ purses and the kinds of articles someone might have on a desk.

Barker has called several places in the city, including the Sun Journal, in hopes of connecting to the city’s past. He has been seeking yearbooks and other artifacts of the period.

“It’s the small things that sell a setting,” Barker said. “Maine in 1969 wasn’t like California. It wasn’t all beads and hippies.”

“Riding the Bullet” is tentatively scheduled for theatrical release next October, Garris said.

dhartill@sunjournal.com

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