"I have been a Stephen King Constant Reader since I was about 11 years old,” says filmmaker and Las Vegas Academy alum Julia Marchese, using the prolific author’s term for the devotees of his work. “I used to read him on the back of the bus on the way to school.” That dedication has carried over into Marchese’s filmmaking career, and her adaptation of King’s I Know What You Need is now available on the horror-focused streaming service Arrow. It will be showing at the first-ever KingCon October 24-27 at the Linq.
I Know What You Need is part of King’s long-running and recently concluded Dollar Baby program, in which King sells the film rights to his short stories for just a dollar, with the condition that the resulting films are no longer than 45 minutes and only shown for noncommercial purposes. Marchese’s take on King’s 1976 story about a college student and her creepily intuitive paramour runs exactly 45 minutes, and she received special permission from King to add it to Arrow’s library.
Marchese’s film takes place in 1976, and she filmed it at the University of Maine, where it’s set and King himself was a student. Borrowing from the aesthetics of Afterschool Specials, Marchese infuses the movie with period authenticity on a limited budget. “A lot of the stuff you see in the film is my personal stuff that I just took from my house,” she says.
Adapting her hero’s work made Marchese nervous, she says. “There are some things that you can skip over in a story that I needed to explain in the film, so I had to write interconnecting scenes. I was just terrified that people would be like, ‘That’s not Stephen King. He didn’t write that bit.’” Although she hasn’t spoken directly with the author, she takes his approval of the Arrow deal as a sign of support for the film.
The daughter of KNPR founder Lamar Marchese, Julia Marchese now lives in L.A. but would love to return to Vegas to make a documentary about the Rainbow Company Youth Theatre troupe, in which she participated for eight years. For now, she’s co-hosting multiple podcasts (including the King-focused The Losers’ Club), developing several potential projects, and feeling grateful for the success of I Know What You Need. “The other Constant Readers can see that I’m serious, that I’ve really put in the work,” she says. “I’ve read everything. I’m not messing around.”