Johnny Smith

But I could not finish it because...

Johnny's mom and dad are so much more present in the book than they are in this movie.

And his mother is fucking insufferable.

And she was so insufferable that I could not deal with her anymore.

have it in my drawer over there.

so you know and it's like I just couldn't deal with her and his dad was the his dad was very much a Christian man in the book but he did not take it to the extremes the mom did and was very much trying to um just be more level headed and I guess realistic about things while still trying to keep as much faith as he could.

But I think a part of him was mad, was angry at God for, um, for what happened to Johnny.

Uh, but also in the book, like his dad and Sarah have a lot more of a relationship because

And

neither is Johnny Smith.

Everyone else is an actor of i'm gonna say primarily some repute in their home country uh you know we've got a norwegian lady named sinovi lund uh we've got renata vacca plays gabriella we've got octavio octavia probably Hinojosa, Paulette Hernandez, Jorge Briseño.

Great cast of largely Mexican actors and an Norwegian lady.

Yeah.

They say that great power comes with great responsibility, and the same applies to Johnny Smith from The Dead Zone.

As a child, he discovers that he has the gift of clairvoyance, but after an accident leaves him in a five-year coma, he awakens with a much stronger sense of the ability.

So, uh, I'm don't kn- even though I don't actually watch the movie, I feel like I'll just picture Christopher Walken-

It's a curse that isolates you from the rest of humanity.

The ultimate example of this has to be Johnny Smith in the 1979 novel, The Dead Zone.

I love how King sets this up.

It's so tragic.

The classic time travel dilemma.

Exactly.

And the brilliance of The Dead Zone is that Johnny Smith is the last person on Earth who wants to be an assassin.

He's a high school teacher.

For a guy known as the geek from 80s teen movies, he completely reinvents himself here.

He plays Johnny Smith, a beloved small town science teacher who gets into a horrific car accident and falls into a deep coma for six agonizing years.

When he finally wakes up, he discovers that his entire life has moved on without him.

His fiance married another man and had his child.

The novel is incredibly expansive.

It follows Johnny Smith, a man who wakes up from a five-year coma with the ability to see the future and the secrets of anyone he touches.

Yeah.

And King uses this power as a massive canvas to explore sweeping sociological concepts like, the book is deeply concerned with the political landscape of America, the rise of demagogues, and a sprawling examination of the, quote, "banality of evil."

Instead of a broad societal critique, Cronenberg zeroes in on the crushing intimate burden of the protagonist.

He paces the film like an unbearably tense thriller.

And the absolute linchpin of that mechanism is Christopher Walken's legendary performance as Johnny Smith.

Oh, he's so good in this.

Released in 1983, it was directed by David Cronenberg, the Canadian master of body horror and national treasure, whose other films include The Fly, Scanners, Videodrome, and A History of Violence.

It stars Christopher Walken as Johnny Smith, a quiet school teacher whose life is shattered after a car accident leaves him with the terrifying ability to see the past and future through touch.

Brooke Adams plays Sarah Bracknell, the woman Johnny loves but returns to find has built a life without him.

Tom Skerritt is Sheriff George Bannerman, who recruits Johnny to help solve a series of brutal murders.

And Herbert Long plays Dr. Sam Wyzak, the compassionate neurologist who becomes one of the few people to truly understand Johnny's gift and its cost.

And finally, of course, we have Martin Sheen, who delivers one of his most unnerving performances as Greg Stilson, a charismatic populist politician whose smile hides a feature that only Johnny can see.

It was produced by legendary Italian producer Dino De Laurentiis, who had quite an eye for Stephen King.

He also produced Firestarter, Cat's Eye, Silver Bullet and Maximum Overdrive.

It's not the main thrust of the dead zone either.

It's kind of one of the bigger things that happens to that forces Johnny Smith to understand that he has a power that could be used for something.

to, let's just say, to stop bad things from occurring.

But this idea is that this is a town that's living in the shadow of something and you can feel that there's a there's like the king spent some time setting setting these things up saying look they you like grandmas scare their grandchildren into going to bed by telling them that if they don't go to bed frank dodd's gonna like leap out of your closet is gonna fucking kill you right right now go to bed eat your cereal billy or frank dodd's gonna come that's kind of like the last refuge of a shitty parent is to scare people scare children yes true um but so in the film you kind of see there is this that this kid tad has a fear of, there's a monster in the closet, and where is this monster coming from? And it doesn't necessarily get explained very well in the book, but you can at least understand that this fear is subconscious.

Yeah, it was the, it was the one I was thinking of, Christopher Walken.

Yeah, yeah, Christopher Walken as Johnny Smith, the, uh, guy who can see into the future.

I highly recommend the book.

It is so good.