PAGE TO SCREEN : Mommy Weirdest

In “Dolores Claiborne,” Stephen King meets Oprah Winfrey. The 1993 book, like Oprah’s talk show, features alcoholism, domestic violence, incest, homicide, even horror--of an everyday sort. Dolores, the narrator, is a gnarly middle-aged housekeeper who is suspected of murdering both her husband and a rich invalid she cares for on an island off the coast of Maine. At first, she comes off as a psycho in the Norman Bates mold. She ends up a tragic heroine, thanks to the first person narrative (which has a tendency to humanize even the most unsavory character) and to some very topical victimization issues.

Now Dolores has come to the screen, in the person of the brilliant Kathy Bates (in photo above). “I don’t want to piss anybody off,” says screenwriter Tony Gilroy, who wrote “The Cutting Edge,” “but I don’t think anybody else could have played it.”

“William Goldman has been a rabbi to me over the years,” Gilroy says, referring to the Oscar-winning screenwriter. “He called me up on a Friday and said, ‘Go buy this book and read it over the weekend and tell me what you think.’ And I thought, This is great. Bill wants me to read this book to find out whether he should take this job. So I called him up on Monday and said, ‘What do you want to know?’ And he said, ‘Is this something you think you might be able to do?’ ” He hesitated.

“If it hadn’t been a big Steven King book, if it hadn’t been Castle Rock, I might have said, ‘Boy, I don’t see this, I don’t get it,’ ” Gilroy says. “The book isn’t in a dramatic structure. It’s a confessional. On Page 2 she says, ‘I didn’t kill Vera Donovan,’ and on Page 3 she says, ‘I did kill my husband twenty years ago.’ A novelist can play that. A dramatist needs questions and answers and conflict. So it was obvious from the beginning we were going to have to radically change the structure of the book.”

He plunged ahead, bolstered by Goldman’s support and Castle Rock’s willingness to experiment. “They have a great relationship with King,” he says. “The company is named after a town he made up. They see all his stuff first. When they got the book they said, ‘Maybe this is a courtroom drama. Maybe there’s a political angle.’ ”

Gilroy opted instead to tackle the novel’s complicated flashback structure--although he eliminated some characters (Dolores’s two sons) and revised others. These include her daughter, who exists in the book only as a child but also appears here as an adult (Jennifer Jason Leigh), and a cop (Christopher Plummer), who serves as a kind of long-running nemesis.

By all accounts, King is pleased. “I think the book meant a lot to him,” Gilroy says, though he confesses he’s never met the man. But’s it’s clear to him from the passion in King’s writing that there’s something autobiographical about Dolores Claiborne. And, as he points out, the novel’s dedicated to his mother.