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Most filmmakers inevitably end their careers with some unrealized projects. Adapting Stephen King’s horror tome “IT” is one such effort for Cary Fukunaga<\/a>, but also the late George Romero, godfather of the zombie movie.<\/a><\/p>\n The first “IT” adaptation was a 1990 TV mini-series, aired on ABC in two 90-minute episodes. Writer Lawrence D. Cohen, who previously adapted King’s novel “Carrie” in 1976 for director Brian DePalma, wrote the script. Much of that script, though, was rewritten by director Tommy Lee Wallace. A friend and collaborator of John Carpenter, Wallace was an editor and production designer on the horror master’s famous 1978 slasher “Halloween. Five years later, Wallace stepped up to direct “Halloween III: Season of the Witch.” On “IT,” Carpenter’s understudy became Romero’s.<\/p>\n In both the 2015 oral history “Back to Derry: An Oral History of ‘Stephen King’s IT'”<\/a> and the 2021 making-of documentary “Pennywise: The Story of IT,”<\/a> Cohen discusses how Romero was the first director approached to make “IT.” Romero was apparently a fan of the book, and he’d previously directed “Creepshow,” a horror anthology penned by King.<\/p>\n So why didn’t Romero’s “IT” happen? The official story is that Romero had a scheduling conflict, but Cohen has speculated there was another reason.\u00a0“IT” is over 1100 pages, and Cohen pitched the miniseries to run between eight and “ideally ten” hours. Then ABC “lost their nerve” about a commitment that big, Cohen told Yahoo, so the series was cut to the final runtime.<\/p>\n “Truthfully, I think getting only four hours instead of eight took the magic out of the project for [Romero],” Cohen continued. During his “Pennywise” interview, he also said: “I think the dream of what [Romero and I] had in mind was absolutely amazing, I just think we were about 20 years early in having it.”<\/p>\n