This Stephen King Adaptation Was So Bad the Author Sued

Jul 21, 2023

'The Lawnmower Man's bizarre film version looks nothing like King's original story.

In 1975, Cavalier magazine published a weird little story by Stephen King called "The Lawnmower Man" about Harold Parkette, a suburban dad who hires a lawn care company to mow his overgrown yard and finds himself dealing with an odd but jovial man who apparently works for the Greek god Pan and whose magic lawnmower seems to have a mind of its own. When the man strips naked to eat the grass clippings in full view of any nosy neighbor that cares to look, the hapless suburbanite calls the cops, who arrive too late — Parkette has become the lawnmower man's latest sacrifice. In 1992, New Line Cinema released a film adaptation originally titled Stephen King's The Lawnmower Man, which bore so little resemblance to King's original story that the author sued the distributor to get his name taken off the title and out of the marketing — and won.

The 10-page story isn't substantial enough on its own for a feature length adaptation, so Allied Vision, which owned the film rights to the work, brought on writers Brett Leonard and Gimel Everett, who blended King's story with their own preexisting screenplay, Cyber God. The resulting film is a bizarre cross between Flowers for Algernon and Lucy in which an intellectually disabled man named Jobe Smith (Jeff Fahey), who mows lawns for a living, undergoes scientific experiments designed to make him smarter which involve injecting him with nootropic drugs and plugging him into an elaborate virtual reality setup. As his IQ soars off the charts, he develops Lucy-like abilities such as mind reading and telekinesis, and begins using them to seek revenge on those who have wronged him. Eventually he resolves to transform into a being of pure energy and merge with the internet. Yes, really.

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Jobe looks and acts nothing at all like King's nameless pagan gardener (a much better proxy would be Dumb and Dumber's Harry Dunne), and the seeds of King's story are present only in a single scene in which Jobe murders the abusive father of his young friend Peter with his giant, telepathically controlled red lawnmower. After King got his hands on a copy of the screenplay in the fall of 1991, he and his lawyer started pressing Allied and New Line to take his name off of it, a campaign he kept up until the movie was released in March 1992. King then saw the movie, which was still titled Stephen King's The Lawnmower Man, at an early screening, and although he admitted that it was visually "extraordinary," he was "still unhappy" with the "trolls at New Line Pictures."

Reviews for the film were middling to negative, adding fuel to King's claims that his association with it would damage his artistic reputation. Critic Steve Newton wrote in the Georgia Straight, "Boy, they sure did scrape the bottom of the Stephen King barrel for this movie. ... [T]he blatant effort to cash in on King's name—perhaps pushed by the Oscar-winning success of Misery—has never been so evident before, and at this rate we can surely expect the prime terror and gruesome shocks of Stephen King's Grocery List," while Washington Post critic Richard Harrington opined, "So loosely based on a Stephen King short story as to constitute fraud, 'The Lawnmower Man' goes right to the bottom of a growing list of failed King adaptations."

In late May 1992, King filed a lawsuit against New Line to get his name removed from the film and sought damages in the form of all profits "attributable to the use of Stephen King's name." At the time, the film had brought in $30 million at the box office. The case was settled a year later when the court decided that New Line had to remove the possessor credit, meaning take King's name out of the title, but could keep the "based upon" writing credit. It also awarded King $2.5 million in damages.

However, New Line had already released the theatrical version of the film and an unrated director's cut on VHS with King's name plastered all over the packaging and promotional posters in August 1992. To correct the problem, the court ordered New Line to send new packaging or "paste-overs" to any retailers selling the tapes along with a demand via certified mail that the retailers actually use them.

This is where it gets really juicy. In June 1993, King sent private investigators to video stores in five cities around the country to find out whether New Line had followed the court's orders. To King's frustration, the PIs found his name still clearly visible on nearly 90% of the tapes they checked. King took New Line back to court, where it was determined that the distributor had only made a token effort to comply with the court's initial directive. New Line was held in contempt and ordered to pay King $10,000 a day until the issue was fixed, plus any profits made from VHS sales since the court's previous ruling. Yet today, you can still easily find copies online with King's name in the title.

So how does The Lawnmower Man hold up as a film? As the reviews indicate, the quality is mixed. Pierce Brosnan, who plays the scientist who administers the drugs and VR treatments to Jobe, is charming and earnest as usual, and Fahey's toned-down portrayal of the intellectually disabled Jobe is also solid, as far as such portrayals go.

Although the computer graphics look cartoonish by today's standards, at the time, they were revolutionary. While 1991's Terminator 2: Judgment Day had a mere nine minutes of CG effects, The Lawnmower Man boasted 23 minutes, including several extended psychedelic sequences inside the VR world, a bizarre cybersex scene, and some unusual effects during Jobe's final assault on the government facility responsible for the experiments.

The graphics work was done by Xaos, Inc. and Angel Studios (now called Rockstar San Diego, Inc. and best known for the Red Dead video game series), both of which had to develop their own software for some of the effects, which were so new that no commercial tools existed to create them. Although it's easy to forget now, not only was CGI still in its infancy, but VR and the internet itself weren't well-known among average viewers. You can find a stark reminder in Kathleen Maher's Austin Chronicle review of the film, in which she takes the trouble to explain to her readers that the "net" is made up of "electronic bulletin boards like CompuServe, Genie, or Prodigy."

The film's biggest weakness is its dialogue, which is at times laughable, featuring lines such as "Your naive idiocy makes me very angry!" and "Once I've entered the neural net, my birth cry will be the sound of every phone on this planet ringing in unison." Despite this, or maybe partly because of it, The Lawnmower Man has garnered a cult following among fans who appreciate both its over-the-top nature and its historical significance. It exists today as a piece of art that documents both a major point in the evolution of filmmaking technology, as well as the burgeoning ubiquity of computers in our lives and the fears and anxieties that came with them.

Lindsey writes about movies and language for Collider and other outlets. She has an M.A. in Language and Rhetoric and published her first book in 2022.