Salem’s Lot has landed and both our reviews on the site seem to echo the point of view of the wider world. Disappointing and feels rushed, would be the major themes. The movie was long delayed and there were rumors that Warner Bros. had rolled up their sleeves and gotten involved, as they are famous for doing, and this is where it all started to go wrong.
Now it seems those rumors have been tacitly confirmed by the director of the movie himself, Gary Dauberman.
The famous Tobe Hooper miniseries from 1979 was in two parts and almost exactly 3 hours long. The 2004 mini-series starring Rob Lowe as Ben Mears was just two minutes longer. The criticism of the new version is that so much from the book, and the previous versions, appears to be missing as it jumps from scene to scene seemingly in some kind of hurry to get to the end in record time.
In an interview with Den of Geek, (via Dark Horizons) the writer-director of this version said his first cut of the film came in about three hours, working from a script that is about 180 pages long. The general rule is that 1 minute of screen time = approx 1 page of script, so this tracks. He said:
“There’s so much great stuff. It’s like, what do you have to weed out? An audience’s attention span only goes so long. There are a lot of great side stories and B-stories in this book that I love, and it was hard to let those go in order to give more real estate to our core group of heroes.
That was probably the biggest challenge – editing the story, and then figuring out those repercussions and those ripple effects into the main storyline. My first cut was about three hours. There’s a lot left out.
My first draft of the script is 180-odd pages or something because you’re trying to include everything. And a lot of it has to do with a lot of the secondary characters and stuff that I spoke about. So it was sad to see that stuff go, but it’s like a necessary evil.”
This sounds like he is trying to be diplomatic as he wants to keep in the good graces of the major Hollywood studio.
It also seemed like an absolutely idiotic decision once it was confirmed Salem’s Lot would be an HBO Max special and not a theatrical release in the US. Three-hour run times and more intricate stories are almost exactly what streaming was invented for. Warner Bros., you ignorant slut!
As one of our reviewers pointed out, young Ben Mears and Hubert Martson were listed on the IMDb as characters but did not appear in the film. Dauberman confirms he filmed the house sequence including the ghost of Marston, but it had to be cut:
“To me it’s so important because it’s why Ben believes the vampire stuff, but we’re not telling that story, so that was the hardest thing to cut because I love the sequence.”
The almost instant acceptance of the supernatural is likewise something that our reviewers say seems a bit jarring in this new version.
Warner Bros. may well need a director’s cut of Salem’s Lot out of this as a low-cost bit of product, as they are not having a good week so far.