When Dee was offered the role of Abagail, she felt she "was" the character and "my whole life has been research for Mother Abagail." Rob Lowe had been originally considered for the role of Larry Underwood, but Lowe felt that playing the more unusual role of the deaf and mute Nick Andros would be a great challenge and was able to convince Garris that it would better suit the production (Lowe has been deaf in his right ear since childhood). Adam Storke ended up with the role of Underwood, where his musical skills were an asset. Bates's character, Rae Flowers, was originally a man (Ray Flowers), but when Bates became available, King – who wanted her to play the part – rewrote the role as a woman. King played Teddy Weizak, the first character he played that was intelligent and not a typecast "country asshole." He has less of a presence in the miniseries, as King "had a lot of other fish on a lot of other griddles that I was trying to fry all at once." This also meant some of the lines Weizak originally meant to speak were transferred to Garris' character Henry Dunbarton. Production Budget Despite the large scale of The Stand, ABC didn't cover all of its production costs and Laurel "lost its shirt" when it came to budgeting; the network expected Laurel to profit from worldwide distribution and home media sales, as it was owned by Blockbuster Video and the miniseries would get a worldwide distribution from one of the company's subsidiaries, Worldvision Enterprises. The total budget was $26 million, more than double that of all previous ABC King miniseries where it would be set at $12 million. With $3 million used for development, however, $23 million was used for production, leaving only $6 million for each two-hour episode. Filming The shooting of The Stand, which lasted for six months, took on a style of guerrilla filmmaking, where it was shot on a 16mm film camera; filming took place in at least two different locations each day, "places I hadn't seen until we began shooting there," Garris explained; and the effects artists had to do their job at a lower-than-usual price. Garris did everything he could to emphasize the miniseries' scale, such as filming wide shots of all the locations. Production designer Nelson Coates created all of the production's 225 sets. The dream version of