The Long Walk trailer is now available here…
Stephen King did some of his most interesting work under the pen-name of Richard Bachman. The Running Man was one of those projects, coming soon to the screen again. Another adaption of a Bachman story will beat it – The Long Walk.
Now, the first photos have been released from the upcoming adaption from The Hunger Games director Francis Lawrence.
While not the first of King’s novels to be published, The Long Walk was the first novel he wrote, having begun it in 1966 – 67 during his freshman year at the University of Maine, some eight years before his first published novel, Carrie, was released in 1974.
Many commentators try to claim that The Long Walk is an allegory for the Vietnam War. King has never confirmed this himself.
King’s story is set in an alternate, dystopian version of the United States. The Long Walk is an annual, televised contest in which 100 young men walk, without stopping, along U.S. Route 1.
Each walker must keep his pace above 4 miles per hour (6.4 km/h). If a walker drops below this speed for 30 seconds for any reason, he gets a warning. A walker can earn back this penalty if he walks for an hour without earning another.
If a walker gets three warnings and fails to resume pace after 30 seconds, he is eliminated. The winner is the last walker to remain in the contest; the prize is determined by the winner himself.
The story centres on a sixteen-year-old walker named Raymond Garraty and his fellow teens, some good, some bad, and some mysterious.
In 1988, George A. Romero was approached to direct the film adaptation, but it never happened.
By 2007, Frank Darabont had secured the rights to the film adaptation of the novel. He said that he would “get to it one day”. He planned to make it low-budget, “weird, existential, and very self contained”.
Again, that never happened. Now Francis Lawrence takes up the reigns and the movie is finally a reality.
In an interview with Vanity Fair, Lawrence said he knew some people would make comparisons to The Hunger Games.
“Anything that has a contest with death as the stakes and some sort of big prize if you win can be connected in some way. But in The Hunger Games, everybody’s competing in a very different kind of way.
There are alliances and you are trying to kill one another. Here, you’re not actually trying to kill one another. It’s a very different dynamic, in terms of relationships.”
The Vanity Fair article also contains some images from the upcoming movie.
Cooper Hoffman, David Jonsson, Mark Hamill and Judy Greer star in The Long Walk which will be released in cinemas on September 12th.