One of the best Stephen King movies isn’t all that Stephen King-y. It’s Stand by Me, and despite revolving around a corpse, it’s a (sometimes funny) drama — a bracing coming-of-age yarn where the kids talk like real kids. (That’s to say they cuss a lot.) Real King heads know, though, that the source isn’t named after the Ben E. King song. It’s called, simply, The Body, a short story found in his collection Different Seasons (which also produced The Shawshank Redemption and Apt Pupil). That’s not a very catchy movie title, though, and you may have two of its stars for the switcheroo.
Per HuffPost, Kiefer Sutherland — who played ne’er-do-well Ace, the film’s closest thing to a baddie — told an anecdote from the film’s set during a recent appearance on The Tonight Show.
“We were making ‘Stand by Me,’ which was a Stephen King short story called The Body, and River Phoenix was learning guitar and playing guitar and he was actually very, very good,” Sutherland recounted. “And I was playing ‘Stand by Me’ and singing that song, and he said, ‘Oh, I love the melody of that song,’ and he hadn’t heard it before.”
Sutherland continued, “So I was teaching it to him and Rob Reiner walked by and said, ‘Oh, I haven’t heard that song for a long time, I love it.’”
Does that mean Sutherland and Phoenix are responsible for the film’s catchier title? Sutherland couldn’t say with exactitude, but he could say what they did “was part of that conversation.”
Stand by Me was a biggie for both the young actors. It was only Phoenix’s second film, after Joe Dante’s Explorers, and it was only Sutherland’s fourth, paving the way for the even more villainous character he played in The Lost Boys the following year. As for Reiner, it was his first non-comedy, paving the way for the even funnier-scarier Misery some four years later.
Stand by Me currently streams on Netflix and on AMC+.
(Via HuffPost)
