Rosie’s General Store serves breakfast all day, and it’s the type of place where residents of this town of 1,140 will stop in to buy lottery tickets, a loaf of bread or the special jumbo lobster roll. It’s also the inspiration for the Sweetbriar Rose, a diner in Stephen King’s 2009 opus about a small town cut off from the outside world by a mysterious and impenetrable dome.
A television adaptation of that novel, “Under the Dome,” will have its premiere on Monday night on CBS, which was why Mr. King found himself talking one day recently with the real-life Rose about the TV version of her character, one of nearly 70 in his 1,074-page doorstop of a novel. “I told you I want to be taller and thinner,” Rose McKenzie told Mr. King heartily as he ate blueberry pancakes with maple syrup.
“And through the power of narration, you are,” he assured her.
After nearly 100 television and film adaptations of his novels and short stories, Mr. King is used to the Hollywood version of his characters ending up younger and more glamorous than their often-haggard literary counterparts. It’s one of those things he doesn’t try to fight. He has developed a rule about collaborating on adaptations of his work: “Usually my attitude is go all the way in or all the way out, but don’t be a noodge,” Mr. King said.
But he’s being something of a noodge about “Under the Dome.” After reading the script for a coming episode, Mr. King was concerned that in it, Jim Rennie Jr., the degenerate son of the town’s alpha male, says that he scraped his hand while cutting wood with an ax. “I said, ‘Ax and hand, really?’ ” Mr. King said. “I had them change it to hatchet.” A hatchet’s blade is closer to the user’s hand, he explained.
Rather than turn the series over entirely to the producers, as he has with other adaptations to varying degrees of success, Mr. King has stayed involved, and it seems fitting. “Under the Dome” encapsulates the arc of his writing career: Started before he became a published novelist, the book was released 37 years later, when he was so renowned that the e-book version contributed to a price war.
The television series won’t have much effect one way or the other on Mr. King’s reputation as a master storyteller. CBS, by comparison, has more at stake with “Under the Dome,” as it risks shaking up the reliable models for summer television and online streaming.
Not only is it unusual for a broadcast network to introduce a dramatic series in late June, but CBS has broken with network tradition by selling the exclusive digital rights to Amazon. Under the deal struck with the online retailer, Amazon Prime subscribers will be able to stream episodes of “Under the Dome” just four days after they are broadcast on CBS. The deal is the first of its kind for a broadcast network and a Web streaming service and will be a closely watched test.
Beyond reading the scripts, Mr. King has visited the set and occasionally offers advice. He mostly leaves casting, character arcs, plot development and story lines to the executive producers, who include the comic book writer Brian K. Vaughan and Neal Baer, a longtime writer on “Law & Order: SVU” and “E.R.”
The television adaptation inevitably ups the visual ante. In the book, a woodchuck is split in half (“blood squirted and pumped; guts tumbled into the dirt”) as the giant dome violently descends on the fictional town of Chester’s Mill, Me.; in the TV version, a cow is severed through computer-generated effects. The Iraq war veteran and short-order cook who assumes the hero’s role in the book disposes of a dead body in the first episode, hinting at a potential murder plot, not found in the novel, that could muddy his image.
After Mr. King downed Ms. McKenzie’s pancakes and a side of sausage, we headed to Bridgton, a nearby town that inspired the fictional Chester’s Mill. In a gray T-shirt, jeans and black sneakers, he is tall but slight at 65, as if the strong breeze that passed through the quiet town square could knock him over. The weather on this late spring day felt oddly like the sunny fall one he describes as the backdrop of “Dome Day,” which is how residents of Chester’s Mill refer to the day the dome arrived. As he drove, it was hard not to get the feeling that an alien structure could descend at any moment.
Mr. King started “Under the Dome” in 1972, when he was working as a high school English teacher in Hampden, Me. He wrote the first chapter about the woodchuck then shelved the idea for more than three decades until he finally felt confident he could tackle the logistics of an entire town trapped, as if in a snow globe. He wrote the original draft, more than 1,500 pages, in just 15 months, completing it in March 2009.
“I was on fire,” he said of the writing process. “It was great. I loved it.”
He said he had always envisioned the dome as an allegory for an environmentally threatened earth and had therefore emphasized to the creators of the TV series that no matter how many departures they take from the novel — and fans of the book will notice many of them — the writers had to retain the important themes.
“I sat down with Brian and Neal and said, ‘Don’t ever lose sight of the major idea behind ‘Under the Dome,’ which is we all live under a dome,” Mr. King said. “That’s it: earth and resources are finite.”
Amblin Television, the production company owned by Steven Spielberg, initially pitched “Under the Dome” to Showtime. But executives at the pay cable channel didn’t feel that the show quite fit into its lineup of dramas like “Homeland” and “Shameless,” and passed.
But Showtime’s broadcast sibling CBS had been looking for a splashy series that could break out during the less-cluttered summer months. “We wanted to get our hands on something with all the bells and whistles to launch something very big in the summer,” said Nina Tassler, president of CBS Entertainment.
But all those bells and whistles — an extensive cast, elaborate effects and sets depicting a bucolic town in crisis — cost more than CBS wanted to spend on a 13-episode summer series. That prompted the CBS Corporation (which also owns Simon & Schuster, which published “Under the Dome” under its Scribner imprint) to explore other ways to finance the series. Enter Amazon.
Leslie Moonves, president and chief executive of CBS, noted that the syndication of series like “NCIS” and “The Big Bang Theory” on basic cable had attracted new viewers to the broadcast network. CBS is hoping that online syndication, especially the ability to watch episodes one after another within days of the original broadcast, will have a similar effect.
“This certainly is an experiment,” Mr. Moonves said. “Will binge viewing help this show? Will it help any show on broadcast? We’ll see.”
Executives at Amazon aren’t entirely sure how online customers will stream “Dome” — whether they will save up several episodes for binge viewing, or use it to catch up on a single episode they missed on TV. “I’d describe this as something we’re going to try for customers and see how they react,” said Brad Beale, head of content acquisition on Amazon’s digital video team.
Mr. King helped Amazon promote the Kindle 2 e-book reader and has an assortment of other e-readers, but on this day he was reading a chunky hardback edition of “Silken Prey,” a thriller by John Sandford. He mused on consumption habits as he drove his S.U.V. along a two-lane road surrounded by forest. “The interesting thing to me about this whole ‘Dome’ business is that they’re taking a model that changed the face of TV and how people watch TV, and they’re trying to adapt it to network TV,” he said.
The publication of “Under the Dome” helped transform the book industry, CBS has noted, so why not TV? When the novel came out, the hardcover version cost $35; Amazon priced the e-book at just $9.99, which prompted Walmart to lower its prices on a handful of popular titles and set off an all-out price war. “It was the e-book version of World War II,” Mr. King said. Soon we passed a curve in the road near where Mr. King was struck by a car in 1999 while on one of his afternoon walks. The accident and his long, painful recovery from a collapsed lung, a broken hip and leg fractures had a deep impact on his writing. Over the last several years, much of his work, while fantastical and at times scary, has had firm roots in the real world but also social and political undertones, from “Under the Dome” (praised in The New York Times for offering “the scope and flavor of literary Americana”) to “11/23/63,” in which the main character travels back in time to the days before the Kennedy assassination.
“The last thing I want now is to be pretentious or try and be something I’m not,” Mr. King said. “But it did make me aware that time is short,” he said of the accident.
Pretentious Mr. King is not. Later he picked up a book off the $1 cart outside Bridgton Books and poked fun at the author’s photo — a grave pose with a pen in hand. “Now, that’s a serious writer,” he joked. “That guy is not messing around.”
He has a self-deprecating sense of humor about being known as the master of horror. “I’m like the girl from the wrong side of the tracks who gets a certain reputation,” he said. Once, at a grocery store near Sarasota, Fla., where Mr. King and his wife, Tabitha, spend winters, an old woman told him that she doesn’t read his gory books and prefers more wholesome fare like “The Shawshank Redemption.” Mr. King told her he wrote that one, too.
“She said, ‘No you didn’t,’ ” he recalled, laughing. “That was the whole exchange.”
Part of what makes “Under the Dome” terrifying, Stephen King-style, is that the reader feels as trapped as the two Dorphans (short for dome orphans) who were cut off from their parents when the structure touched down. And then there are the assorted characters who morph from small-town normalcy to all-out lunacy after Dome Day.
When Mr. Vaughan and Mr. Baer were interviewing writers to work on the show, they asked them what they would do if they were trapped under a dome in their hometowns. “Some people said right away, ‘I’d go for the guns’ or ‘I’d hole up in my house’; others were more community-driven,” Mr. Vaughan said. He declined to go into specifics about the most interesting replies, saying that they had been worked into forthcoming plot lines.
Mr. Vaughan said that Mr. King’s help (and his cachet) had been invaluable but that he knew it would be up to him and the other writers to make the series work. He recalled some advice that he said Mr. King had given him early on: “To quote Elvis, ‘It’s your baby, you rock it now.’ ”
While Mr. King’s work has had varying degrees of success on TV — “The Dead Zone” lasted six seasons on USA, “Kingdom Hospital” lasted only a single season on ABC — he said he prefers TV adaptations to films based on his books. He likened the movies, especially the long ones, to sitting on a suitcase. “You try to get everything in there and you know what, it doesn’t work most of the time,” he said.
“Misery,” the 1990 thriller starring James Caan and Kathy Bates, and “Stand By Me,” the 1986 coming-of-age drama directed by Rob Reiner, are exceptions, he suggests, because they are based, respectively, on a short novel and a short story.
He does not devote much ink in his novel to explaining the supernatural origins of the bullet- and missile-proof dome, but the overarching mystery is eventually solved. He wants the television series to do the same, even if it is canceled prematurely.
And if “Under the Dome” is a hit, it could run for multiple seasons, giving Mr. King and the writers tantalizing opportunities to explore dark story lines that didn’t make it into the book. For example, Mr. King left a separate attempt at a story about a community isolated from the outside world unfinished in 1982, when he was living in a depressing apartment complex in suburban Pittsburgh. In that telling, it is an apartment building that is cut off; residents grow desperate, and cannibalism ensues.
“I never did get to cannibalism in ‘Dome,’ ” Mr. King said with a grin. “But maybe after three or four seasons. ...”
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Originally Posted by sgc1999
