A Short Story About Sharon Stone and Wes Craven

I ended up on the Wikipedia page for Wes Craven today as a result of one of those aimless Wiki-walkabouts that teach you stuff you didn’t need to know. I got to this page wholly independently of the previous entry here on Craven collaborator Kevin Williamson, but this little nothing fits in well with that Williamson-style pop culture mishmash narrative.

wes craven, john milton, sharon stone now, mimi craven then

Craven has been married three times, first to Bonnie Broecker — mother to Jessica Craven, who formerly sang with The Chapin Sisters — and after that to Mimi Craven. This actress is probably most familiar to Wes Craven fans for roles in A Nightmare on Elm Street and Swamp Thing and to non-Craven fans for playing Russell Dalrymple’s bored, beautiful date on the Seinfeld episode “The Watch.” Mimi and Wes Craven divorced in 1987.

According to Wikipedia, director Jos Eszterhas’s 2001 book American Rhapsody alleges that the Cravens divorced as a result of Mimi’s affair with Sharon Stone, whom Craven directed in the 1981 film Deadly Blessing, and that Stone sent Wes Craven a bouquet of black roses upon the finalization of the split. That’s quite a story, and I’m kind of surprised I’d never heard it before. Though Wikipedia says that Wes Craven has never remarked about the lesbian affair rumors, he does edge around the topic in a 2011 interview with the New York Times. Upon being asked whether his marriage ended because his wife had an affair with Sharon Stone, Craven says this:

The marriage did not end for that reason. Sharon and Mimi had a very close friendship for many years. And dead black roses were sent to me. I called my ex-wife and asked her if she had done it. She didn’t exactly say she had but did say the reason that I deserved them was because I had once referred to her as a stewardess rather than a flight attendant. It’s as absurd as that.

Craven also adds that the black roses “might have been Sharon’s idea, but that would only be speculation.”

And I suppose that’s as classy a way you can answer a rather awkward question like this one. But here’s a thing that occurred to me, a guy who’s seen Wes Craven’s Scream, like, a million times: Regardless of whether the affair rumor is true or who sent Wes Craven black rose, Scream mentions Sharon Stone repeatedly. Even in a script that makes a point of packing in the highest possible number of pop culture references per page, Stone comes up more often than other celebrities. First, Tatum argues that the killer could easily be female, using Basic Instinct as evidence. Second, Gale Weathers mentions that instead of reporting from Woodsboro, she should “be in New York, covering the Sharon Stone stalker.” And finally when Sidney learns the motive behind the murders — her mom had an affair with her boyfriend’s dad, thus ending their marriage — the killer explains, “That woman was a slut-bag whore who flashed her shit all over town like she was Sharon Stone or something.” (Cue Matthew Lillard’s character, doing some impression I’ve never been able to place: “Let’s face it, Sidney: You mother was no Sharon Stone.”)

Now, I realize that Kevin Williamson wrote the script to Scream, not Wes Craven, but the director is still responsible for the whole movie. And if you’re constructing a narrative about some bad blood between Wes Craven and Sharon Stone — existing either because she stole his wife or because she’s simply his ex-wife’s buddy (non-sexual sense) — and how this blood leaks out in a way the general public gets to see, these Scream references make for interesting footnotes. If he wanted to, Craven could have said, “By the way, can we make these Sharon Stone references into Demi Moore references? Long story.”

I feel like it’s also worth mentioning that the catalyst for the whole Scream series — and for everyone from Drew Barrymore to Emma Roberts getting bumped off onscreen — is a nasty relationship between a director and a would-be actress. At the end of the third movie, you find out that things went south for Sidney’s mom following ambiguous badness between her and John Milton, a horror movie director who serves as a stand-in for Craven himself, though not in any awful sex crime ways. Obviously, I can’t say on my own what it means or if it means anything, but it makes for an interesting parallel for the life of a director best-known for a series of movies about Hollywood, actors and the give-and-take between movies and real life.

In conclusion, I would like to point out that Googling around to write this also landed me on this page, which Sharon Stone can never, ever see.

(Image sources: Wes Craven, John Milton, Mimi Craven, Sharon Stone.)

Return to the Kevin Williamson School of Character Naming

Back in 2010, I wrote a post titled “The Kevin Williamson School of Character Naming,” in which I talked about how the scribe behind Scream and Dawson’s Creek has a few peculiar tics when it comes to deciding what he’s going to call his characters. Basically, he populates his works with an unusually high number of characters whose last names end in -er (Casey Becker, Joey Potter, etc.), and to a lesser extend characters whose last names end in -s (Randy Meeks, Gale Weathers), whose names end in -y (Tatum Riley, Dawson Leery) or who have a boy’s name despite being female (Andie McPhee, Sam Price). It’s just something he does.

So when I found out that Williamson had written the new Kevin Bacon series The Following, I had to look at the name of the characters. So what have we got? Kevin Bacon plays Agent Ryan Hardy, Natalie Zea plays Claire Matthews, Annie Parisse plays Debra Parker and Maggie Grace plays Sarah Fuller. So he’s still doing it.

This proves nothing, of course, and a lot of writers probably have similar habits, but I’m somehow just fascinated to look a given person’s body of written work and say, “Oh, see? He does this one particular thing again and again.” I wonder if this is something other Kevin Williamson fans have picked up on.

The Kevin Williamson School of Character Naming

Though I tried to avoid news about the new Scream sequel, I ended up reading an item about Lauren Graham being cast in it. I like Lauren Graham. I think she’s a talented actress — more of a comedic one, sure, but a good one nonetheless who may well get to use her full range in this new Scream movie. Her joining Scream 4 was enough to make me investigate this rather unexpected sequel in order to see what it was really about. The film has Emma Roberts playing what I assume to be the central role: Jill Kessler, the cousin of Neve Campbell’s character. Graham plays the character’s mother, Kate Kessler. Sidney Prescott (Cambell), Dewey Riley (David Arquette) and Gale Weathers (Courtney Cox) are all returning, even though the movie will focus largely on a new batch of potential corpses. The film takes place ten years after the events of Scream 3.

So there’s that. Personally, I feel the series should have died with the third movie and poor Jennifer Jolie — the kind of amazing character Parker Posey played, whose name seems to associate Jennifer Aniston and Angelina Jolie long before they ever had a reason to be associated. However, I will nonetheless see Scream 4 in the theater and be entertained, so perhaps this extension beyond the original planned trilogy will prove to be a worthwhile venture after all.

The fact that Roberts and Graham’s characters have the last name Kessler reminded me of a certain habit that series creator Kevin Williamson has when naming his characters. Williamson — the writer of Scream and most recently The Vampire Diaries — tends to favor certain types of names. Consider, if you will, the following:

In Scream, there’s Casey Becker (Drew Barrymore) and Stu Macher (Matthew Lillard). In Scream 2, there’s Cici Cooper (Sarah Michelle Gellar). In Dawson’s Creek, there’s Joey Potter (Katie Homes) and Pacey Witter (Joshua Jackson). In The Faculty, there’s Nurse Harper (Salma Hayek). In Teaching Miss Tingle, there’s Luke Churner (Barry Watson) and Principal Potter (Michael McKean). In the short-lived ABC series Wastleland, there’s Jesse Presser (Sasha Alexander) and Dawnie Parker (Marisa Coughlan). In the WB series Glory Days, there’s Zane Walker (Ben Crowley). In the CW series Hidden Palms, there’s Johnny Miller (Taylor Handley) and Liza Witter (Ellary Porterfield).

Weird, huh? I’d almost argue that he’s using “agent” names as a shorthand way of defining his characters, but I don’t think that’s the case. Having the last name Becker seems to have little bearing on Drew Barrymore’s character in Scream, unless the etymology of Becker goes back to something meaning “person who dies unexpectedly soon.” And it’s also not that Williamson is choosing common last names. Cooper and Parker might show up a lot in any given American phonebook, sure, but how often do you meet people with the last name Churner? Presser? Witter?

Though the “agent” names show up the most frequently in Williamson’s work, they’re not the only ones that show up more than once.

He also likes surnames that end in s:

In Scream, there’s Randy Meeks. In Scream 2, there’s Maureen Evans (Jada Pinkett) and Phil Stevens (Omar Epps). In Teaching Miss Tingle, there’s Miss Banks (Molly Ringwald). In Glory Days, there’s Ellie Sparks (Poppy Montgomery). In Hidden Palms, there’s Gretta Matthews (Amber Heard) and Nikki Barnes (Tessa Thompson).

He also likes surnames that end in y:

In Scream, there’s Tatum Riley (Rose McGowan), Cotton Weary (Liev Schreiber) and Principal Himbry (Henry Winkler). In Dawson’s Creek, there’s Dawson Leery (James Van Der Beek) and Jen Lindley (Michelle Williams). In Hidden Palms, there’s Bob and Karen Hardy (D.W. Moffett and Gail O’Grady).

And he also likes to give masculine names to female characters:

In Scream, there’s Sidney Prescott. In Scream 2, there’s Murphy (Portia de Rossi). In Dawson’s Creek, there’s Andie McPhee (Meredith Monroe). In The Faculty, there’s Stokely “Stokes” Mitchell (Clea DuVall). In Wasteland, there’s Sam Price (Rebecca Gayheart).

(Note: These lists exclude Scream 3, which Williamson had a hand in creating but the script for which was written by Ehren Krueger. It also leaves out I Know What You Did Last Summer and The Vampire Diaries, since they’re both based on books I have not read and I’m therefore not sure whether the characters in these were named by Williamson. And, finally, it skips the majority of Dawson’s Creek, since Williamson left the show in its second season.)

And then there are a whole lot of names that show up twice in Williamson’s work — newscasters named Gail appear in both the Screams and Dawson’s Creek, Casey is also the name of Elijah Woods’s character in The Faculty, there’s a Dawnie in both Scream 2 and Wasteland, and Sarah Michelle Gellar’s character mentions a Dawson’s Beach in I Know What You Did Last Summer, just to name a few. And even though Williamson is apparently not credited with any work on Halloween: 20 Years Later, at least according to IMDb, I’m pretty sure he at least wrote a treatment for the film, which could account for why it features Jamie Lee Curtis’s character starting a new life as a high school English teacher named Ms. Tate, which happens to be the name of Sidney’s English teacher in Scream.

So what have we learned?

For one, I have a weirdly encyclopedic knowledge of the work of Kevin Williamson — not because I love all of it, but mostly because I loved Scream enough that I’ve interestedly tracked this writer’s career for the last decade-and-a-half. I also, for some reason, still remember the name of Sidney Prescott’s English teacher, even though she only appears in Scream for about ten seconds and even though her name may only be mentioned in the script and not the film itself. That all aside, what I was hoping to point out is that Williamson clearly has developed a few naming conventions within his work. I honestly wonder if it’s intentional or if it’s the result of something subconscious. For what it’s worth, the IMDb page for Scream 4 also lists Hayden Panettiere as playing Kirby Reed (girl with guy’s name), Rory Culkin as playing Charlie Walker (surname ends in er) and Lake Bell as playing Judy Hicks (surname ends in s). So if Williamson is aware of these habits, he certainly has no intention of changing them.

NOTE: Anyone who saw Scream 4 knows that Jill and Kate Kessler became Jill and Kate Roberts. I do not know if this happened before or after Ehren Kruger revised parts of the script, but Roberts is still a name that ends in s. Also, Kate ended up being played by Mary McDonnell, but that’s neither here nor there.

Still Screaming After All These Years

On the heels of my post about the movie adaptation of Where the Wild Things Are, I offer this, however unenthusiastically: We will someday see Scream 4. By which I mean that we may someday see commercials and billboards promoting it and likely bearing the text “Scream 4.” Whether any of us will go see the actual film is another matter altogether.

An allegedly credible source recently leaked the news that director Wes Craven (whose filmography includes the previous Scream movies, A Nightmare on Elm Street, and the poorly conceived but hilariously named Shocker) and screenwriter Kevin Williamson (Scream and Dawson’s Creek, both of which he departed from before their conclusions) may retream for another round of self-referential horror comedy, this one, of course, involving a newer, younger set of potential body bag-fillers. Whether the rumor even approaches the truth remains to be seen, of course, but the possibility of Scream 4 ever hitting theaters prompted me to reflect on the original movie.

image from new york post

Looking at this blog as a gauge of what has grabbed my attention over the past few years, a reader could hardly tell that the first Scream played a major role in my teenage years and, now that I think about it, helped me love movies in general. I haven’t written much about Scream here, perhaps because the passage of team has strengthened my critical eye and perhaps because I eventually realized that the people who rave about slasher movies are, in general, weirdos.

Whatever the reason, the three Scream movies now represent a part of my life that feels longer ago than it actually was: high school. And rightly so — the movies basically framed my high school years, with the first coming out at the start of my freshman year and the third in the winter of my senior year. A relic of my former life though these movies may no be, they nonetheless made an impact on me — and pop culture in general.

In short, this: The mantra of the frightened movie-goer who is trying to mentally escape the dread of being slashed to death on the spot by a cinematic psychokiller is “It’s only a movie. It’s only a movie. It’s only a movie,” or so we’re told. When it comes to Scream, however, I’m willing to argue that it’s not only a movie.

image from nerve.com

Outside the context of my life, I think it’s interesting to look at Scream in the context of the flood of that particular type of self-aware, teenage-centered TV shows and movies that followed and which were released between the time I was 14 and 18 years old. Many owed a debt to Scream in some way. Think about it: Scream put Williamson on the map. Following its success in 1996, we had Dawson’s Creek, which Williamson created; the “true” TV series incarnation of Buffy the Vampire Slayer, which mixed teenaged angst, pop culture references and horror in a way that it may not have been able to do successfully were it not for Scream; and movies like She’s All That, which starred an astounding number of alumni from previous Kevin Williamson efforts. And She’s All That was released in 1999 — only three years after Scream hit theaters — which goes to show how quickly Williamson built a small teenspoitation empire. Even today, anytime a twentysomething actor playing a Billy Everyteen spouts a pop culture reference to emphasize a point, I think of Williamson, the guy who once turned a conversation about an edited-for-TV broadcast of The Exorcist into a PG-13-appropriate booty call.

Independent of the pop culture continuum, Scream resonated with me personally because, to put it simply, I was the perfect person to watch it. The 14-year-old version of me who wandered into the theater to watch Scream literally knew nothing about it save for the fact that the girl from E.T. was in it. Seriously. That’s it. I didn’t even know that Drew Barrymore’s character died in the first ten minutes much less that she would do so in a particularly gruesome manner. (“Her insides on the outside,” as the late Tatum Riley put it so succinctly.) Beyond that, I hadn’t seen horror movies before Scream. I’d read about them — allowing me to understand a lot of the film’s in-jokes — and had always been to type to scan the backs of the VHS boxes in the video store horror section until would make me stop. But I’d never actually sat and watched anything that would have actually scared me. (Okay, I had technically seen Halloween 5 at a fifth grade birthday party sleep over, but — and this is full disclosure here — I hid my eyes for most of it. Also, the movie sucked, I realize now, and seeing it without knowing who Michael Myers was or what had transpired in the previous films made it more confusing than anything else.) While I sat watching Scream, all these factors combined to create a perfect storm: I sat in my seat completely engrossed, my leg shaking with anticipation and my body involuntarily jumping at the kind of scare scenes a horror movie veteran would have seen coming a hundred miles away.

image from chaseness.wordpress.com

Immediately after, I went home and did my homework, using this new thing called “the inter-net” to read about how the movie came to be and the various sources it drew upon. As a result, I rented Halloween. I rented Suspiria. I even rented “that werewolf movie with E.T.’s mom in it.” I started reading movie reviews — of Scream specifically, but soon whatever happened to be out. I bought movie magazines. I suddenly had some idea what was coming to a theater near me before it actually did. I had a passion.

It helped, of course, that the movie was actually good. I’ll still argue in its favor today, perhaps less wholeheartedly than I might have when I was still a teenager but with reasonable vigor nonetheless. Scream was funny and scary, I thought, and that’s not an easy combination to pull off. (Case in point: The Frighteners, directed by a pre-Lord of the Rings Peter Jackson.) It had some great lines, among them, “Movies don’t create psychos. Movies make psychos more creative.” And, finally, it was far better acted that just about every slasher movie in history. I honestly think Barrymore has seldom acted so convincingly outside the opening “Jiffy Pop” sequence.

One review of Scream — in Entertainment Weekly, if I remember correctly — called it the first movie to ever merit comparison to both Clueless and Psycho. I agree with this claim. It probably was, and this fact helps demonstrate the final reason why I think Scream deserves to be remembered as more than just a scary movie that managed to make money: It embodied the late 90s in one glaring, unfortunate way, what with its creation of a media-saturated teenaged world that would be repeatedly punctured by violence. Keep in mind that all those teenybopper movies and TV shows I mentioned took on the world during the years when the post office shooting spree trend gave way to the school shooting spree trend. In the way that school shootings unnerved those of us who went to school those small towns where nothing bad ever happens, the students of Scream’s Woodsboro High had to fear being struck down in their adolescent prime, likely for no reason, likely at the hands of someone they knew and had previously trusted not to kill them. I can’t realistically compare the grief that school shooting survivors suffered to the phony dread of slasher movies, but the fact that Scream had revived the genre to the point that its peak coincided with the Columbine High School massacre seems noteworthy, though not for the alleged cause-and-effect relationship that some claimed at the time.

All the preceding arguments may not win over those who never bothered with Scream or did and left the theater unmoved, I suppose, but they represent my reasons why those people perhaps should have bothered or might want to reevaluate their stance on the film. These reasons also encapsulate my motivations for doubting the motivations behind making Scream 4. As Ain’t It Cool News noted about the news of the purported sequel, “It seems possible that Wes Craven could be persuaded to come back to direct. Why? I’m told he's a big fan of the money.”

image from best-horror-movies.com

Indeed, I do assume that greed is a motivating factor here, and not some belief that some aspect of the Scream saga needs to be told again or some desire to once more parody the slasher films of the 80s. After all, those movies — with their photogenic, talentless serial killer fodder — aren’t even the dominant off-shoot of the horror genre anymore: It’s now Hostel-style gore flicks and bloodless remakes of Asian fright flicks. (The latter of which became a profitable type of movie only in the wake of The Ring, the script for which was written by Ehren Krueger, who took over the writing duties for Scream 3 after Williamson bailed to work Wasteland, his short-lived TV series follow up to Dawson’s Creek. And the torture porn and J-horror retreads already get mocked by the Scary Movie series, which itself began as a parody of Scream and I Know What You Did Last Summer and even takes its name from the Scream’s working title.

As most do, the Scream series deteriorated with each sequel, but not by much, at least, with Scream 2. Scream 3 did not fare as well, but even at the hands of a less talented screenwriter less familiar with the series, it still managed to offer some neat ideas, including some novel takes on the series-spanning theme of life and death interacting with the their representations in Hollywood. But though it ended the series with a series with more of a whimper than was deserved by the gasp of air that was the first movie.

No, the Scream series doesn’t need to extend into the new millennium, for the reasons I just mentioned — greed shouldn’t extend the life of movie franchises, the target of the series’ humor has been pretty well staked, the world may have moved to far beyond the point where a pop culture-saturated horror seems necessary — but also for my own indefensible, personal reason: I want to keep the 90s where they belong. For me, Scream was and is this particular time period in such away that I don’t look forward to watching some latter-day, tacked-on sequel try and absorb the pop culture that we now have ten years down the line. It can try, of course, and it might even succeed, but I’d much prefer to leave Scream, Scream 2 and Scream 3 in the same time period that allowed the bands appearing on their soundtracks to be popular. (Take a look at them, if you have a chance, and get a refresher in recently forgotten bands: Sugar Ray, Tonic, Less Than Jake, Orgy, System of a Down, Fuel even Creed, for god’s sake. Scary indeed.) Really, if there’s ever any hope for “smart” horror movies, one of the few to actually fit in that category should know better than to slowly let the life drain out of it over the course of endless sequels.