Welcome back to We Who Watch Behind the Rows, and welcome to the first ever installment of The Dollar Deal, where I interview filmmakers about their experiences and ambitions in making short films based on Stephen King's work. For the first installment, I'll be talking with Pennsylvania based writer/director Joseph Horning. On an editorial note, I do want to make it clear that this is not a sponsored piece, we have no connection to the film being made, and this shouldn't even be read as a suggestion to go and donate. I find the project interesting, and I thought the readers of this site would feel the same way. This piece, and potential series of pieces, is meant to be a spotlight on the ever-growing world of Dollar Babies, and the people behind them.
Joseph Horning has worked steadily in the Pennsylvania film community for the past ten years as a producer, writer, director, and sometime actor. In 2016 he joined up with Curtis K Case and formed CKC Quarterly Productions in order to produce the screenplay for Where Is My Golden Arm, and the web-series Siblings. His latest project, another CKC Quarterly Productions venture, is a Dollar Baby adaptation of One for the Road, the 'Salem's Lot-related story that appears in Stephen King's Night Shift short story collection. The film is in the crowdfunding phase at the moment, and you can watch the Indiegogo trailer and then read the interview below.
Aaron Lowe: In keeping with the theme of this blog and your project, I'd like to start by hearing your history with Stephen King. How did you first come across him as an author.
Joseph Horning: Growing up I had a vague idea of who Stephen King was. I had seen bits and pieces of the films adapted from his novels over the years but was never that interested in his work until I heard about the mini-series for IT. There was something about the idea of a clown that could change itself into any childhood fear that struck a chord with me. Now, I was never much of a reader when I was a kid, I had to be forced into reading books for school, but for some reason I wanted to read IT before the mini-series premiered. It was the first time I ever felt compelled to actually pick up a book and read for fun. I remember my mom saying “You’ll never finish that book” and she was right. The first time I tried to read IT I ended up putting it down half-way through the first chapter. I don’t think I was really ready for the world of Stephen King at that time, especially with how descriptive he can be and how massive that book is.
The first book I completely read of his was Cujo. Since then I’ve read nearly every novel he’s written and credit him for my love of books and writing.
AL: We must be around the same age, because that's remarkably similar to my introduction to Stephen King's works. I imagine all those miniseries in the '90s brought a lot of people into the Constant Reader fold. I was an avid reader at that age, so the only thing my mom said when she saw me reading IT was that one of her coworkers had been too scared to finish the novel. It had the reverse effect on me, inspiring a lifetime of awe and wonder at the macabre and spooky. You establish your King bona fides pretty clearly in your Indiegogo video. Out of all of the available Dollar Baby titles, what drew you to One for the Road?
JH: Well out of all of them it seemed like the most fun to do. I’ve always loved vampire stories and ‘Salem’s Lot was one of those films that terrified me as a newfound lover of Stephen King. I obviously saw the mini-series before reading the book so it left an impression on me, specifically with the portrayal of Barlow and the other vampires. I know that Barlow is a subject for debate amongst fans and that Rutger Hauer’s performance in the remake is much more faithful to the novel than Reggie Nalder’s, but you can’t deny that his appearance is downright scary! It felt like gothic horror in New England, the kind that H.P. Lovecraft use to write.
One for the Road was an extension of this feeling of dread but it’s more than that. Reading it gave me this sense of feeling isolated, not just because of its setting during a snowstorm, but because of what each character was going though in the moment. Gerard was alone in his quest to find help from Tookey and Booth and when they finally do decide to help him, he’s treated like an outsider as most people from out of state are. Tookey and Booth are best friends and you get the story through Booth’s point of view but even though he’s in the story helping Tookey and Gerard, he really isn’t. He’s alone somewhere, maybe in his bed dreaming, reliving that night over again. As King is fond of doing in most of his stories, the theme that “hell is repetition” plays out well here.
It’s just an all-around great horror story that’s short but packs a punch.
AL: We're still working our way through the stories in Night Shift here at We Who Watch, and one thing keeps coming up is how amazingly succinct Stephen King could be. He's known for his longer works and the epic length of some of his novels, but his short stories can pack quite a wallop at only a dozen or so pages long.
I was surprised at the level of ambition I saw in your plans for this short film, shooting in Centralia, harness rigs for the flying effects, prosthetic makeup, are there any aspects that you're nervous about? Any that you're particularly excited about tackling?
JH: Anyone who has an investment in the making of a film, whether it’s the writer, director, producer or actors are all excited and nervous at the same time. Anyone who’s said they never felt any trepidation making a film is either lying or has never made one before. It’s a scary process because you go into this thing with an idea of how you want your film to look and sometimes it comes out looking much different than how you envisioned it. That’s not always a bad thing. Sometimes it ends up being better than you could’ve hoped; other times not so much. That’s what I’m most nervous about – the final result of the film. That all comes down to me, though. I’m critical of everything I create so even if it’s good I’m always saying, “Yeah but it would be better if we had done this.”
I’m very confident in the team I’m putting together to make One for the Road. When I first sat down with my producer Chris Wagler to discuss locations, sets and special effects my initial thought was that the only way we’d achieve any sort of stunts with levitation would be in front of a green screen. The concern I had with that was matching the exterior lighting at night in a studio. If we had a big enough budget we could do it using the same technique they used in ‘Salem’s Lot by sitting the actors on a chair connected to a boom. We probably still could. Chris assuaged my concerns by telling me he could easily build a rig with a harness to lift the actresses off the ground. It’s a pretty simple idea that will have a big payoff at the end of the film if it works.
I’ve seen other adaptations where the vampires just move through the scene normally like we do. In King’s story for One for the Road Janey is described as drifting out of the woods towards Gerard like a ghost. Now you can interpret that any way you want but to me it conjures up an image of her floating on air, the tip of her shoe just brushing the top of the snow. That to me is a frightening image and one that would definitely make our film standout from others. That’s what I’m excited to see.
The whole pre-production process is nerve-racking. I just can’t wait to finalize our cast and move forward on production.
AL: From the glimpses you've shown so far, you seem to be expanding the short story quite a bit, from apparent larger roles for the wife and daughter characters, to more explicit ties to the 1979 Tobe Hooper film. Are you using the story more as a jumping off point, or will this be a fairly faithful adaptation?
JH: I tried to stay as faithful to the original story as possible though I’ve made some changes, specifically in expanding the Lumley families journey to Maine and the circumstances that leave them stranded in ‘Salem’s Lot. Anyone who’s read the story knows that it takes place in the middle of winter during a violent snowstorm that cripples most of the state. Gerard Lumley and his family get stranded in the snow after making a wrong turn and he has to trudge through the freezing cold to find help from Tookey and Booth who are shutting down Tookey’s Bar for the night.
This is where King’s story for One for the Road starts, as Gerard comes barreling through the door. What I decided after reading the story was that if it were adapted to a film of any length, the audience would only be shocked by what they see transpiring on screen. They wouldn’t feel any remorse for the Lumley’s, except perhaps Gerard. I wanted people who watch this film to have an emotional response to what happens to Janey and Francie Lumley, so I took what Gerard said in the story about them coming to Maine to visit relatives and added on scenes showing the family together in the car. I wanted there to be an emotional investment so that when the final horror unfolds we’re not only shocked but feel sorry for what they go through.
The other change is as I said with the circumstances leading up to how they get stranded in ‘Salem’s Lot. I explained in my Indiegogo campaign video that we’ve taken liberties with the story since it does take place in the middle of a snowstorm and we can’t just make snow appear out of nowhere. We are going to shoot in the winter but there is no guarantee that there will be snow on the ground. The weather in Pennsylvania can be temperamental. One day it’s 34 degrees and the next it’s in the sixties. So we came up with an alternative to the car getting stuck in the snow. I’m not going to reveal what that is but it’s simple and effective. It also allows me to feature a vampire that hasn’t been seen since the 1979 ‘Salem’s Lot mini-series which will be the connector to that film.
AL: How did you get into filmmaking? What inspirations pointed you towards writing and directing?
JH: It all goes back to IT. Well, partly. IT was the deciding factor in why I chose to work in films but I’ll get to that in a minute.
When I was younger I always wanted to be a comic book artist. It’s what I loved to do more than anything. One summer when I was 11 or 12 the high school in my hometown began hosting a Summer Consortium for local kids who were into art, theater, writing and photography. I was enrolled for the art courses but I had to also pick a second course in order to attend. I reluctantly chose photography. It was one of the best decisions I ever made. The teacher I had during that and subsequent summers was Mr. John Doyle. He opened my eyes to how the world looked through a lens, but more importantly he introduced me to the art of filmmaking. We weren’t just there to take photos; we were also going to shoot a short movie. That excited me for some reason and I just jumped right in and started throwing out ideas for us to shoot. Until that point I never really thought of myself as a storyteller, just an artist. But I guess you could say I had to be a little of both. Each character I created had a unique backstory so the impetus of what would become my love of screenwriting was already present.
The first movie I ever made was this ridiculous murder mystery that took place at the school and the following year we made a horror movie called Death Be Not Proud. I didn’t write that one, I starred in it. It was fun but I never felt comfortable being on camera. I still don’t.
What really cemented me into wanting to make films was IT. I loved the mini-series when it first came out but after I read the novel I just started asking myself what the filmmakers were thinking. Yes it was a decent adaptation but the heart and horror of the book just wasn’t there. I decided that it was my duty to re-write the film and make a more faithful adaptation, complete with all of the terrifying scenes that kept me up at night. I started writing in the summer of 1992 without any idea on how a script was structured and I think by that winter I had this amalgamation of novel slash script that was bigger than the actual source material. I still have it lying around in a drawer as a reminder of where I started and how bad I was.
The more I studied that better I got but I never would be where I am today if it wasn’t for Mr. Doyle’s photography class and my desire to see IT made into a purely terrifying film.
AL: I still love a lot about the previous IT adaptation, but agree it's basically half of a great film. Definitely for what it was, a television movie in 1990, it's pretty much the best anyone could have hoped for. That's funny that you wrote a script for your own version of that film, because one of the first things I remember writing was a short script for a sequel to The Blob in 6th grade. Probably because that first film ends with the blob just dropped into Alaska, where I was born. I never had much talent as an illustrator, but I got so far as making a bunch of index cards with scene illustrations on one side and the actual text on the back. Unfortunately that material has been lost to the ages, but it's a great way to practice your craft; to basically reverse engineer the things you love and home in on what you love about them. Speaking of which...
Your previous short film, The Field Across the Way, carried some real Tales from the Darkside vibes, particularly in the opening titles which gave me flashbacks to the sheer terror that television show's credits used to instill in me. It's listed as Episode 1 of The Forest of Darkness, do you have plans to continue that series?
JH: First off, thank you for getting the reference. Tales from the Darkside was one of my inspirations behind the opening sequence as well as the overall tone of the film. The other was The Twilight Zone. I originally wrote the script sometime around 2006 and just envisioned The Field Across the Way as a short film. A few years later my friend C. Augustus Garfield and I developed an idea for a web-based anthology series similar in style to shows like Tales from the Darkside but based off of local legends in Pennsylvania. We did our research and came up with dozens of stories that we planned to shoot over the course of a year. Even though it was loosely based on an old Nova Scotia myth about the forerunner of death, the first one we decided to shoot was The Field Across the Way since it was already written. I wrote half a dozen more scripts since then, and we got as far as shooting another film called Midnight Coffee, however equipment and location issues made it difficult to complete the second episode. Our hope is to resurrect the idea of the web-series after we complete One for the Road.
AL: Most of your work so far has fallen within the horror genre. Would you like to consider yourself a horror filmmaker, or is that a label you might be wary of accepting?
JH: I love all different genres, it’s just that horror and thrillers are the ones I gravitate to the most and I have no problem with being labeled a horror filmmaker. However screenwriting is my real passion. The first script I wrote that I was ever truly proud of was called Darkness on the Edge of Town. It’s a psychological thriller similar to Silence of the Lambs and Seven about a flawed FBI agent hunting down a serial killer in Philadelphia. Darkness won me my first ever screenwriting award in 2012 from the Philadelphia Film Office. Since then I’ve won the LA Screenplay Festival in 2015 and was a top 20 finalist in the Screenplay Replay Competition and Fourth Quarter Finalist in the Breaking Walls Thriller Screenplay Competition.
Over the last few years I’ve written some feature-length dramatic scripts with my friend Jonathan Cross and we actually moved ahead with production on one of them called The Trainer. Unfortunately, scheduling conflicts and budget issues caused production to stop early on and we never got the chance to finish the film. I’ve also dabbled in action/spy films with my friend Andrey Nikiforov, another filmmaker from Philadelphia. Our first collaboration was called An Unusual Request and since then have worked on three other scripts.
Most recently my business partner Curtis K Case and I developed a dramatic comedy web-series that was shot in LA called Siblings. The show focuses on an African-American family who gathers at their brother’s house on the night of his big interview with the Washington Post. He’s running for mayor and wants to bolster his image and numbers in the polls by giving his constituents a glimpse into his personal life; however things don’t turn out like he plans when his siblings arrive and prove to be completely different than they were growing up together.
So far Siblings has been making the festival circuit and has won a few awards out in California. We’re launching the series on Labor Day and hope to start working on season two shortly.
Curtis and I also co-wrote a horror script based on the old Mark Twain jump story, The Golden Arm. That has gone on to be semi-finalist in two competitions last year. I’ve also collaborated with my friend J.P. Hoffman who is a horror filmmaker that’s had some success with shorts he’s produced for Eli Roth’s Crypt TV. We’re in the process of developing original content to present to them for future film projects which I’m excited about!
AL: Finally, if budget was no concern, what would your dream Stephen King adaptation be?
JH: Well, since IT and The Dark Tower are already hitting theaters I’d have to say I’d love a crack at Insomnia or maybe even Eyes of the Dragon. Both are connecting novels in the Dark Tower series so it would be great to expand upon that cinematic universe. Insomnia definitely wins out though since it takes us back to Derry, Maine, home of the Losers Club where Mike Hanlon is still librarian, the place where I fell in love with Stephen King and where “things that disappear into the sewer system have a way – an often unpleasant one – of turning up.”
I would like to once again thank Joseph Horning for taking the time out of his schedule to answer all of my questions. If you would like to look into One for the Road further, or possibly donate to his campaign, you can follow the link below. I myself will be following the project closely. And of course I'd like to thank you for stopping by, and I hope to see you again soon.
Joseph Horning has worked steadily in the Pennsylvania film community for the past ten years as a producer, writer, director, and sometime actor. In 2016 he joined up with Curtis K Case and formed CKC Quarterly Productions in order to produce the screenplay for Where Is My Golden Arm, and the web-series Siblings. His latest project, another CKC Quarterly Productions venture, is a Dollar Baby adaptation of One for the Road, the 'Salem's Lot-related story that appears in Stephen King's Night Shift short story collection. The film is in the crowdfunding phase at the moment, and you can watch the Indiegogo trailer and then read the interview below.
Aaron Lowe: In keeping with the theme of this blog and your project, I'd like to start by hearing your history with Stephen King. How did you first come across him as an author.
Joseph Horning: Growing up I had a vague idea of who Stephen King was. I had seen bits and pieces of the films adapted from his novels over the years but was never that interested in his work until I heard about the mini-series for IT. There was something about the idea of a clown that could change itself into any childhood fear that struck a chord with me. Now, I was never much of a reader when I was a kid, I had to be forced into reading books for school, but for some reason I wanted to read IT before the mini-series premiered. It was the first time I ever felt compelled to actually pick up a book and read for fun. I remember my mom saying “You’ll never finish that book” and she was right. The first time I tried to read IT I ended up putting it down half-way through the first chapter. I don’t think I was really ready for the world of Stephen King at that time, especially with how descriptive he can be and how massive that book is.
The first book I completely read of his was Cujo. Since then I’ve read nearly every novel he’s written and credit him for my love of books and writing.
AL: We must be around the same age, because that's remarkably similar to my introduction to Stephen King's works. I imagine all those miniseries in the '90s brought a lot of people into the Constant Reader fold. I was an avid reader at that age, so the only thing my mom said when she saw me reading IT was that one of her coworkers had been too scared to finish the novel. It had the reverse effect on me, inspiring a lifetime of awe and wonder at the macabre and spooky. You establish your King bona fides pretty clearly in your Indiegogo video. Out of all of the available Dollar Baby titles, what drew you to One for the Road?
 |
| One for the Road teaser poster |
One for the Road was an extension of this feeling of dread but it’s more than that. Reading it gave me this sense of feeling isolated, not just because of its setting during a snowstorm, but because of what each character was going though in the moment. Gerard was alone in his quest to find help from Tookey and Booth and when they finally do decide to help him, he’s treated like an outsider as most people from out of state are. Tookey and Booth are best friends and you get the story through Booth’s point of view but even though he’s in the story helping Tookey and Gerard, he really isn’t. He’s alone somewhere, maybe in his bed dreaming, reliving that night over again. As King is fond of doing in most of his stories, the theme that “hell is repetition” plays out well here.
It’s just an all-around great horror story that’s short but packs a punch.
AL: We're still working our way through the stories in Night Shift here at We Who Watch, and one thing keeps coming up is how amazingly succinct Stephen King could be. He's known for his longer works and the epic length of some of his novels, but his short stories can pack quite a wallop at only a dozen or so pages long.
I was surprised at the level of ambition I saw in your plans for this short film, shooting in Centralia, harness rigs for the flying effects, prosthetic makeup, are there any aspects that you're nervous about? Any that you're particularly excited about tackling?
JH: Anyone who has an investment in the making of a film, whether it’s the writer, director, producer or actors are all excited and nervous at the same time. Anyone who’s said they never felt any trepidation making a film is either lying or has never made one before. It’s a scary process because you go into this thing with an idea of how you want your film to look and sometimes it comes out looking much different than how you envisioned it. That’s not always a bad thing. Sometimes it ends up being better than you could’ve hoped; other times not so much. That’s what I’m most nervous about – the final result of the film. That all comes down to me, though. I’m critical of everything I create so even if it’s good I’m always saying, “Yeah but it would be better if we had done this.”
I’m very confident in the team I’m putting together to make One for the Road. When I first sat down with my producer Chris Wagler to discuss locations, sets and special effects my initial thought was that the only way we’d achieve any sort of stunts with levitation would be in front of a green screen. The concern I had with that was matching the exterior lighting at night in a studio. If we had a big enough budget we could do it using the same technique they used in ‘Salem’s Lot by sitting the actors on a chair connected to a boom. We probably still could. Chris assuaged my concerns by telling me he could easily build a rig with a harness to lift the actresses off the ground. It’s a pretty simple idea that will have a big payoff at the end of the film if it works.
I’ve seen other adaptations where the vampires just move through the scene normally like we do. In King’s story for One for the Road Janey is described as drifting out of the woods towards Gerard like a ghost. Now you can interpret that any way you want but to me it conjures up an image of her floating on air, the tip of her shoe just brushing the top of the snow. That to me is a frightening image and one that would definitely make our film standout from others. That’s what I’m excited to see.
The whole pre-production process is nerve-racking. I just can’t wait to finalize our cast and move forward on production.
AL: From the glimpses you've shown so far, you seem to be expanding the short story quite a bit, from apparent larger roles for the wife and daughter characters, to more explicit ties to the 1979 Tobe Hooper film. Are you using the story more as a jumping off point, or will this be a fairly faithful adaptation?
JH: I tried to stay as faithful to the original story as possible though I’ve made some changes, specifically in expanding the Lumley families journey to Maine and the circumstances that leave them stranded in ‘Salem’s Lot. Anyone who’s read the story knows that it takes place in the middle of winter during a violent snowstorm that cripples most of the state. Gerard Lumley and his family get stranded in the snow after making a wrong turn and he has to trudge through the freezing cold to find help from Tookey and Booth who are shutting down Tookey’s Bar for the night.
 |
| C. Augustus Garfield, Joseph Horning, Chris Wegler at casting sessions for One for the Road |
The other change is as I said with the circumstances leading up to how they get stranded in ‘Salem’s Lot. I explained in my Indiegogo campaign video that we’ve taken liberties with the story since it does take place in the middle of a snowstorm and we can’t just make snow appear out of nowhere. We are going to shoot in the winter but there is no guarantee that there will be snow on the ground. The weather in Pennsylvania can be temperamental. One day it’s 34 degrees and the next it’s in the sixties. So we came up with an alternative to the car getting stuck in the snow. I’m not going to reveal what that is but it’s simple and effective. It also allows me to feature a vampire that hasn’t been seen since the 1979 ‘Salem’s Lot mini-series which will be the connector to that film.
AL: How did you get into filmmaking? What inspirations pointed you towards writing and directing?
JH: It all goes back to IT. Well, partly. IT was the deciding factor in why I chose to work in films but I’ll get to that in a minute.
When I was younger I always wanted to be a comic book artist. It’s what I loved to do more than anything. One summer when I was 11 or 12 the high school in my hometown began hosting a Summer Consortium for local kids who were into art, theater, writing and photography. I was enrolled for the art courses but I had to also pick a second course in order to attend. I reluctantly chose photography. It was one of the best decisions I ever made. The teacher I had during that and subsequent summers was Mr. John Doyle. He opened my eyes to how the world looked through a lens, but more importantly he introduced me to the art of filmmaking. We weren’t just there to take photos; we were also going to shoot a short movie. That excited me for some reason and I just jumped right in and started throwing out ideas for us to shoot. Until that point I never really thought of myself as a storyteller, just an artist. But I guess you could say I had to be a little of both. Each character I created had a unique backstory so the impetus of what would become my love of screenwriting was already present.
The first movie I ever made was this ridiculous murder mystery that took place at the school and the following year we made a horror movie called Death Be Not Proud. I didn’t write that one, I starred in it. It was fun but I never felt comfortable being on camera. I still don’t.
What really cemented me into wanting to make films was IT. I loved the mini-series when it first came out but after I read the novel I just started asking myself what the filmmakers were thinking. Yes it was a decent adaptation but the heart and horror of the book just wasn’t there. I decided that it was my duty to re-write the film and make a more faithful adaptation, complete with all of the terrifying scenes that kept me up at night. I started writing in the summer of 1992 without any idea on how a script was structured and I think by that winter I had this amalgamation of novel slash script that was bigger than the actual source material. I still have it lying around in a drawer as a reminder of where I started and how bad I was.
The more I studied that better I got but I never would be where I am today if it wasn’t for Mr. Doyle’s photography class and my desire to see IT made into a purely terrifying film.
AL: I still love a lot about the previous IT adaptation, but agree it's basically half of a great film. Definitely for what it was, a television movie in 1990, it's pretty much the best anyone could have hoped for. That's funny that you wrote a script for your own version of that film, because one of the first things I remember writing was a short script for a sequel to The Blob in 6th grade. Probably because that first film ends with the blob just dropped into Alaska, where I was born. I never had much talent as an illustrator, but I got so far as making a bunch of index cards with scene illustrations on one side and the actual text on the back. Unfortunately that material has been lost to the ages, but it's a great way to practice your craft; to basically reverse engineer the things you love and home in on what you love about them. Speaking of which...
Your previous short film, The Field Across the Way, carried some real Tales from the Darkside vibes, particularly in the opening titles which gave me flashbacks to the sheer terror that television show's credits used to instill in me. It's listed as Episode 1 of The Forest of Darkness, do you have plans to continue that series?
JH: First off, thank you for getting the reference. Tales from the Darkside was one of my inspirations behind the opening sequence as well as the overall tone of the film. The other was The Twilight Zone. I originally wrote the script sometime around 2006 and just envisioned The Field Across the Way as a short film. A few years later my friend C. Augustus Garfield and I developed an idea for a web-based anthology series similar in style to shows like Tales from the Darkside but based off of local legends in Pennsylvania. We did our research and came up with dozens of stories that we planned to shoot over the course of a year. Even though it was loosely based on an old Nova Scotia myth about the forerunner of death, the first one we decided to shoot was The Field Across the Way since it was already written. I wrote half a dozen more scripts since then, and we got as far as shooting another film called Midnight Coffee, however equipment and location issues made it difficult to complete the second episode. Our hope is to resurrect the idea of the web-series after we complete One for the Road.
AL: Most of your work so far has fallen within the horror genre. Would you like to consider yourself a horror filmmaker, or is that a label you might be wary of accepting?
JH: I love all different genres, it’s just that horror and thrillers are the ones I gravitate to the most and I have no problem with being labeled a horror filmmaker. However screenwriting is my real passion. The first script I wrote that I was ever truly proud of was called Darkness on the Edge of Town. It’s a psychological thriller similar to Silence of the Lambs and Seven about a flawed FBI agent hunting down a serial killer in Philadelphia. Darkness won me my first ever screenwriting award in 2012 from the Philadelphia Film Office. Since then I’ve won the LA Screenplay Festival in 2015 and was a top 20 finalist in the Screenplay Replay Competition and Fourth Quarter Finalist in the Breaking Walls Thriller Screenplay Competition.
 |
| Curtis K Case of CKC Productions |
Most recently my business partner Curtis K Case and I developed a dramatic comedy web-series that was shot in LA called Siblings. The show focuses on an African-American family who gathers at their brother’s house on the night of his big interview with the Washington Post. He’s running for mayor and wants to bolster his image and numbers in the polls by giving his constituents a glimpse into his personal life; however things don’t turn out like he plans when his siblings arrive and prove to be completely different than they were growing up together.
So far Siblings has been making the festival circuit and has won a few awards out in California. We’re launching the series on Labor Day and hope to start working on season two shortly.
Curtis and I also co-wrote a horror script based on the old Mark Twain jump story, The Golden Arm. That has gone on to be semi-finalist in two competitions last year. I’ve also collaborated with my friend J.P. Hoffman who is a horror filmmaker that’s had some success with shorts he’s produced for Eli Roth’s Crypt TV. We’re in the process of developing original content to present to them for future film projects which I’m excited about!
AL: Finally, if budget was no concern, what would your dream Stephen King adaptation be?
JH: Well, since IT and The Dark Tower are already hitting theaters I’d have to say I’d love a crack at Insomnia or maybe even Eyes of the Dragon. Both are connecting novels in the Dark Tower series so it would be great to expand upon that cinematic universe. Insomnia definitely wins out though since it takes us back to Derry, Maine, home of the Losers Club where Mike Hanlon is still librarian, the place where I fell in love with Stephen King and where “things that disappear into the sewer system have a way – an often unpleasant one – of turning up.”
I would like to once again thank Joseph Horning for taking the time out of his schedule to answer all of my questions. If you would like to look into One for the Road further, or possibly donate to his campaign, you can follow the link below. I myself will be following the project closely. And of course I'd like to thank you for stopping by, and I hope to see you again soon.
