A look inside Hollywood and the movies. : REALLY SCARY : Stephen King Kicks Grass

It’s not that Stephen King dislikes New Line Cinema’s “The Lawnmower Man.”

“I think it’s pretty good,” he says. But he’s got a problem with the ads that trumpets it as “Stephen King’s Lawnmower Man.”

“I hate it that New Line’s got my name plastered all over the place,” King said in an interview from his home in Bangor, Me. “It’s the biggest rip-off that you could imagine because there’s nothing of me in there. It just makes me furious.”

According to King, the film, which pulled in close to $8 million during its opening weekend, bears little resemblance to the short story of the same name that appeared in his “Night Shift” collection published in the mid-’70s. “The Lawnmower Man” and several other stories from that collection--including “Trucks,” which became the film “Maximum Overdrive”--were sold off to various producers. Eventually “The Lawnmower Man” ended up at Allied Vision, the company that produced the film.

The story “Lawnmower Man” is about a man who hires someone to cut his own lawn. The man cuts the lawn in a very novel way--by eating it.

“The guy turns out to be this big, fat slob of a guy, who looks nothing like (the film’s star) Jeff Fahey,” says King. “There’s also nothing about computers and virtual reality in my story, which seems to be all that the movie is about.”

King, who saw “The Lawnmower Man” at a special screening in Bangor, says there’s one scene from the story that made it into the film--where a man gets chewed up by a lawnmower. “If you go out for popcorn, you’ll miss it,” he says.

“My name shouldn’t be on it,” he continued. “New Line isn’t interested in anything that’s right or anything that’s going to help the consumer. They’re interested in exploiting me. My work is being strip-mined by the same studio that gave us the Ninja Turtles.”

New Line Chairman and CEO Bob Shaye says, “We had nothing to do with changing the story. The story didn’t come with the screenplay. We’re the distributors. We bought the rights fair and square.”

According to Shaye, he first became aware of King’s unhappiness when New Line’s president of production, Sara Risher, received a phone call from King’s agent, Rand Holston of CAA. “I was shocked,” he says. “We hadn’t heard a word from King up to that point. She told his agent that our company’s point of view is that we acquired the rights to the film and we had nothing to do with the making of the film.”

As for using King’s name in the advertising, Shaye responds: “That’s what we paid for. That was part and parcel of why we bought this project. His name was the most important thing we were buying.”

And what about those who say King shouldn’t worry about such things? “People can say this is stupid and that I’m getting rich, but I don’t feel that way,” says King. “My name is my fortune and it’s the only name I’ve got. I’ve got a minuscule percentage, but I’ll never see a cent. Take my word on it.”