A Stephen King Miniseries Was A Production Nightmare Thanks To One Key Location

The premise of Stephen King's 1990 novella "The Langoliers" is very strange indeed. It involves a group of nine airline passengers who wake up during a red-eye, only to find that everyone else has vanished. They land safely at an airport in Bangor, Maine (natch), and find that there, too, everyone has vanished. The world seems weirdly muted to them, lifeless. No machines work. The passengers come to the conclusion that their plane flew through a time portal, which put them out-of-synch with regular time. They hear an eerie sound on the horizon, and one of the passengers suggest the sound is coming from the Langoliers, a fictional monster that his abusive father used to tell him about. The Langoliers are coming to get them. They eat naughty boys. 

It turns out that Langoliers are real (!), and it's their job to eat the world after the present has passed. Humans continue to stay in the present, of course, but once the present is over, the world needs to be eaten up by giant black meatballs with fangs. The nine human passengers have to find a way to get a plane in the air again and fly back through the time hole before the Langoliers arrive to devour them as well. The story also features a blind child with psychic powers and an angry yuppie who goes insane. 

This kooky story (first published in the "Four After Midnight" collection) was adapted into a TV miniseries in 1995, and it's just as strange as the story that inspired it. Bronson Pinchot gives a gloriously unhinged performance as the mad yuppie, and stars opposite Dean Stockwell, David Morse, and Patricia Wettig. The miniseries was actually filmed at the small Bangor, Maine airport, as writer/director Tom Holland and producer David Kappes hoped to bring some authenticity to the series. Sadly, the airport was still in use when shooting took place, which made shooting outdoor scenes a massive headache. The dramas were covered by the Portland Press Herald on September 4, 1994. 

One can see by watching "The Langoliers" the mundane authenticity of the airport in question. It doesn't look like a set. It has that strange purgatorial, ultra-liminal quality of a dumpy regional airport. The Bangor International Airport, a comparatively low-traffic place, is barely decorated, apart from framed posted of generic meals and images evoking Maine's local agriculture. 

According to the Portland Press Herald, filming "The Langoliers," a two-part, four-hour miniseries, took about two months, and the production wasn't so well-moneyed as to be able to shut down the airport just for filming. As such, the actors had to rehearse their scenes in front of a few hundred passengers who were always passing by. Actress Kate Maberly had a few scenes where she was coated with blood, and the Herald reported how much fun she had walking around in front of the public while splattered.

Kappes noted that production staff did scout other airports for potential filming, including Pittsburgh's airport, and the then-new Denver airport, but Bangor was truer to Stephen King's original story. "They were closed," he said, "but they were wrong. They weren't Bangor. Bangor is where this is supposed to take place. By working here, it brought a reality that really helped the story." 

But shooting at an active, open airport caused no small amount of issues. The miniseries' production manager, Charles Miller, was quoted complaining about the noise; it's hard to get clean sound when full-size jets are constantly taking off and landing. The cast and production staff had to stay at a motel that was immediately adjacent to the airport, too, so the noise didn't stop when the crew left the set to rest. Everyone smelled jet fuel. 

Charles Miller was given quite a glow-up by the Herald, praising his abilities to wrangle everything as capably as he did. Miller drove around the airport in the miniature transport vehicles one typically sees while traveling, only his vehicles were specially altered to go way faster. One can imagine Miller and the crew (about 130 people in toto) careening around corners as if piloting a go-kart race. He noted: "There is only one worse job than this, and that's a location manager. [...] I know. I've been one of those, too." Miller was given special attention as he, like Stephen King, is a Maine native. According to the Herald article, a lot of the crew and extras were native Mainers. Indeed, even the film's caterer was a local BBQ mogul unused to visiting move sets.

Overall, despite the noise and the exposure to the public, the convenience of filming in an active airport outstripped the problems. With everyone sleeping within walking distance of the set, prepping and shooting was swift. Also, the production had access to one of the airport's WWII-era hangars, where they could construct a fake plane and any artificial interiors they needed. Miller pointed out that they were able to bring in an actual vintage airplane, sawed into pieces, to use as their set. All they really needed to do was find a way to air-condition a hangar of that size. 

The Herald describes a widespread net of local workers, all getting together to make a miniseries in their town, which rarely gets Hollywood visitors. The actual miniseries is just as strange as the book, however, and isn't widely loved, even by /Film. It only sports a 48% approval rating on Rotten Tomatoes (based on 21 reviews), with some critics complaining that not enough happens in the four-hour running time. Whatever the quality of the direction and the dialogue, though, the Bangor Airport played itself marvelously.