Detroit Free Press from Detroit, Michigan • Page 31

inside this section Friday, Hov. 12, 1902 DINING OUT 7 liiSlllfil pages II-I4C SEEING DOING 8, 9 TELEVISION 10 Call Entertainment: 222-6828 DETROIT FREE PRESS curtain call novelist loves vf A7r 4 ra 'W-- nis niffntmares 1 Ly If I 4 A I I III I Tn I i I By JACK MATHEWS Free Press Movie Critic HOLLYWOOD Stephen King, modern literature's most popular horror novelist, picked an apple out of a fruit basket in his Beverly Hills hotel suite, and carefully whittled off a bite with a paring knife. "I can't see myself ever getting away from the (horror) genre completely," he says, holding the knife to his mouth and sinking his teeth into the fresh slice. "There's a part of me that's probably sadistic that reacts very well to just trying to scare the bejesus out of somebody. "If I get a letter from someone saying, 'Your book kept me awake all night, I was afraid to go to I send a postcard back and say, Great! That's what I wanted to Then, he laughs a deep, healthy, mischievous laugh and carves another slice off his apple.

"Horror is one of the ways we walk our imagination," he says. "It's a way to relieve bad will be happy to know King still has nightmares himself. THE BAD NEWS is that he enjoys them. "Nightmares are another way we exercise our emotions, our feelings of insecurity, and they come right out of our own imaginations That's a wonderful thing." King had taken a rare and not particularly welcomed break from his daily writing routine to stump for "Creepshow," a five-part horror movie patterned after the gruesome E.C. comics that kept King's imagination gleefully active as a child.

The stylish anthology, directed by cult horror filmmaker George of the Romero, features such delights as rotting corpses, man-eating monsters, killer cockroaches, and an interplanetary goo that turns a farm boy, played by King, into a fern pot. It is the spitting screen image of such E.C. comics as "Tales from the Crypt" and "Vault of Horror," upon which King cut his pre-pubescent teeth. "My mom hated those comics, but she let me read them until the nightmares started," King says. "Nightmares where people were on baseball teams disembowling the bad guys and lining the base paths with their intestines.

That was one of my favorites. They used his head for the ball, and this one eye was bulging out as the bat hits it "That's when she said, 'OK, that's and started taking them away. And that's when I started buying them and putting them under my bed She'd catch me and say, 'Why are you filling your head with that I said, 'Someday, I'm going to write that junk." Yes, and he's made a fortune at it. See STEPHEN KING, Page 6C MOT cast members in "Treemonisha." Creepy people get in for free And you thought Halloween was over? "Creepshow" leads the movie openings this weekend and at tonight's first evening performance at eight theaters (the Abbey, Americana West, Hampton, Mercury, ShowcasePontiac, ShowcaseSterling Heights, Southland and Towne). The first 99 people dressed as creeps get in gratis.

At the Towne, WABX-FM deejay Allen Stagg, made up as Count Waxula, will be creepy. What hath Count Scary wrought? More serious films "Taxi Zum Klo" at the Detroit Film Theatre and "Not a Love Story" at the Maple both dealing with people who take their clothes off instead of dressing up also hit the screens. What else is new? At the Music Hall downtown, Michigan Opera Theatre runs through Scott Joplin's "Treemonisha," with Tania Leon conducting (see story, Page 3C). In front of the footlights is "Story Theater," by Actors Alliance Theater Company at Southfield's Lycee International. feelings rather than something that causes them It does have a bad effect on some people, makes them they can't sleep, they have nightmares.

But those people, after one or two experiences like that, will avoid horror the same way a person who vomits after a roller coaster ride will avoid roller coasters." People who've been kept Stephen King awake by any of King's best-selling novels "Carrie," "The Shining," "Salem's Lot," "The Dead Zone," and the current "Cujo" among them Drawing by Free Press Art Director DICK MAYER 'Creepshow' nearly a dead ringer for comics on top of it I Jack Elathows X. movies 7) a Mm HOLLYWOOD There haven't been many movies in recent years that I looked forward to with quite as much enthusiasm and hope as the George Romero-Stephen King collaboration, "Creepshow." Romero, who directed the wonderfully ghoulish and trashy "Night of the Living Dead" and "Dawn of the Dead," is the perfect choice to bring to the spreen the decayed spirit of the old E.C. Comics. And King, 'who has written a string of best-selling horror novels among them, "The Shining" and "Carrie" seemed the perfect Choice to write it. I think both of them did their jobs all right, and compared to the quality of horror movies lately, this one comes as a breath of foul air.

But it's also a big disappointment. Although "Creepshow," an anthology of five stories, is a visual and structural dead ringer for the comic books, the pace is destroyed by the length of each segment. Stories that appeared in such E.C. classics as "Tales from the Crypt" and "Vault of Horror" were usually moral fables, ending in gruesome payoffs for evil doers. And they only took three or four minutes to read.

IN FACT, there is a promotional comic book recreating the five "Creepshow" stories, and it is a breezy 10-minute read, at best. In the movie, each of the segments is stretched out over 15 to 40 minutes, which is a long time to get through a shaggy corpse story. Stylistically, "Creepshow" is a brilliant success. The movie opens with a father ripping a ghoulish comic book out of his son's hands and tossing it into the trash, and each segment that follows is introduced by splash-page illustrations from that book. The longest and best of the five stories stars Hal Holbrook as a milquetoast college professor who finds a way to get rid of his mouthy wife (Adrienne Barbeau) when his friend (Fritz Weaver) discovers a Ted Danson, left, is up to his neck in trouble at the hands of Leslie Nielsen.

iff ft" a a Ta S4, '4 tt -A I Whodunit? Well, it wasn't the butler To borrow from hitmakers Men at Work: "Who Can It Be Now?" The following ad appeared in the Nov. 5 issue of Radio Records, a Los Angeles radio industry publication: "Have ratings will travel. Our morning show is ready to hit the road and take on the big guns. We're fun and effective and Arbitron (the rating service) agrees. Our sales department will hate to see us go, because we deliver.

Bonus: our friend with Femme Fatale News." The ad invites overtures to "Two Gents" at a Detroit post office box. The paper wouldn't say who placed the ad and all the possibles have women newscasters or traffic reporters, soooo. it WNIC-AM FM's Jim Harper and Steve Gannon? "We're not going anywhere," says Harper. WRIF-FM's Jim Johnson and George Baier? "They're under contract for the forseeable future," says program director Fred Jacobs. "If we wanted to go to New York or Los Angeles, we (ABC) have stations there" and could transfer, said Johnson.

Eliminate the big enchiladas CKLW-AM's Dick Purtan and Tom Ryan who don't need to leave Detroit andor advertise their March 1 availability. WMJC-FM's Jerry St. James and Jeff Elliott? "Jerry St. James told me he's never been happier in his career than here," said program director Ken Scott. Same for Elliott, he adds.

The bottom line? Speculates Scott: "Whoever it is will deny it's them anyway. Or it might be someone from another area who has an agent or relative here." Says Jacobs: "You never know." DANCE ON Masonic producer Alan Lichtenstein can breathe easy. American Ballet Theatre dancers accepted a new four-year contract Tuesday and are expected to return to work next week after a two-month lockout by management. "It'll be nice to have them here," said Lichtenstein of the ABT's April Masonic visit that was imperiled by the labor dispute. The dance company voted 61-4 to accept a management offer providing a 74 percent raise over four years.

Weekly pay for a guaranteed 40 weeks ranged from an average of $392 for ballet corps members to $540 for soloists and $650 or more for principal dancers. ROCK ROLLIN' The third J. Geils Band live album, "Showtime," recorded over Labor Day weekend at Pine Knob, is out today. The album will bear an $8.98 list price, meaning it will be, about $6 or $7 in most local stores. Compiled by the Free Press enter-, tainment staff.

Flight grounded Peter Pan will emit showbiz and hit the books JL By DIANE HAITHMAN Free Press Staff Writer Ten years ago, former Detroiter Karyn Cole might have made much the same statement she makes onstage each night in the title role in "Peter "I'll never grow up, I don't want to go to school!" Cole, now 28, was 18 and a member of the first graduating class of Southfield Lathrup High School (71) when she decided to drop out of Wayne State University's fine arts program to launch her career as a professional performer. They wanted her to study dull things like biology, sociology and government; she wanted to act nnl ninn nvA Anvnn ('T nrn4- .1 1- A 1 jA A. X. V. anu sing aim uamc.

i uiun i wiuii leaJIl Ulcll, Mlc reca s. Ten years later, Cole, a small, friendly woman with close-cropped hair of a natural Peter-Pan red, -returns to her hometown as the star of the dates including such name performers as Marie Osmond and Cathy Rigby for the role on tour. THE KIDS at Southfield Lathrup who remember her in lead roles in the school's musicals, her classmates at Harriet Berg's modern dance class at the Jewish Community Center, and the customers at her father's store (Louis Ace Hardware in Detroit), probably view Cole as a major star. So it's surprising to hear that Cole is getting out of acting. She wants to finish school.

Cole is enrolled at New York University with en eye toward a career in child psychology. This tour, glamorous as it seems, is merely a temporary break in her studies. Cole wants us to know that she loves playing Peter Pan, is thrilled to be here. Even though she's quitting the business, she doesn't want the headlines to read "Actress Hates Theater, Bails Out." She still loves theater, but her outlook now is more realistic than when she first headed for New York. The way Cole feels about being an actress now as compared to 10 years ago before local modeling jobs and a stint as one of Detroit's version of the Golddiggers (the Dazzlers), dinner theater in Chicago and more than 200 commercials in New York is sort of like the difference between the way a child and an adult see the story of Peter Pan.

Both enjoy the story but for the adult, it's bittersweet. 7 "SOME PEOPLE look at the story, and they look at Peter Pan as the boy who didn't grow up freedom!" explains See PETER PAU Page 4C 1 MA'AimA V.AA wir' Jffi touring company of a successful Broadway show, which is doing respectable if not sellout business at Masonic Temple Auditorium. Opening night dancing, singing and IF 3-i. 7 acting in front of an audience that included an admiring group of 200 family and friends who remember her as Karyn "atryn Cole, has founcT thr.tantinn liUtt flvinn is a high omywhe is a high onlywhen -i ngien was like a high school dream come true. Cole was the stand-by Peter Pan for Sandy Duncan for a year never got sick; I never got a chance to go and she was selected over about you're up irt th ArtworK by DICK MAYER.