the poor box office performance of King films in the 1980s and conflicts between him and Rubinstein leading him to leave Laurel. Hollywood significantly increased their interest in screen adaptations of King's work after the box office success of Pet Sematary (1989), and many were being pitched in studios following the film's release; one of these was an adaptation of The Stand, which was reported in a January 1990 Cinefantastique article to be "the most anticipated" developing King project. Stephen King's most popular novel among fans, The Stand was controversial as a film adaptation from the beginning. Nevertheless, King began working on a screenplay based on the book for Rubinstein. King wrote a 700-page screenplay and then made five attempts to condense it into a 130-page script. Rubinstein disliked King's drafts, suggesting the author knew the novel too closely. Thus, he hired Rospo Pallenberg for screenwriting duties and planned for John Boorman to direct. Rubinstein and Laurel were very serious about the project to the point where they paid Pallenberg $30,000 for just one treatment. However, nothing further materialized. As King put it simply, there was "too much story for a movie," and yet he was skeptical about making a TV version of the book because "you can't have the end of the world brought to you by Charmin toilet tissue." As a television miniseries In June 1992, King figured that a miniseries was a way to present most of the novel's contents without having to deal with the other broadcast Standards and Practices regular television shows face. He spent four months writing a 420-page first draft without using his or Pallenberg's theatrical film drafts as reference. He submitted the draft to ABC, which offered King the ability for the script to be produced just days after submission. The network also had to follow conditions that it couldn't throw so many Standards and Practices at him that it would ruin the spirit of the source material. Worried about not disappointing fans, King took six months just to write one draft, "and then there were two more." King wrote six drafts of the miniseries before production began. Only minor changes were made in writing the miniseries, and while it is not based on the 1990 expanded version of the novel, the first scenes of the miniseries are taken from that edition. ABC still had discussions with King and Garris about certain