After 40 Years, Maximum Overdrive Is Still Bad Enough to be Good

This story was produced in collaboration with WUNC’s The Broadside.

It’s a Friday night in late July on the North Carolina coast. The remnants of a tropical storm have turned the roads to rivers. And yet Jengo’s Playhouse, a 65-seat cinema in Wilmington’s Soda Pop District, is full. 

The marquee out front advertises a 7:30 p.m. showing of Maximum Overdrive, the locally shot auto horror spectacular that first hit screens 40 years ago. The film’s faithful have shown up not only to watch, but to celebrate with some of the original crew.

Among them is Jock Brandis, who holds court before the screening, answering questions and telling stories about the notorious production. Brandis was the movie’s best boy, a job in the grip department. 

“Maximum Overdrive may have been the most chaotic movie I ever worked on,” he says, “and considering I’m a veteran of a movie called Death Bed: The Bed That Eats People…that’s saying something.” 

Based on the Stephen King short story “Trucks” and directed by the author himself, Maximum Overdrive follows a group of survivors trapped in the Dixie Boy truck stop after all the world’s machines—most memorably an 18-wheeler bearing the face of the Green Goblin—come to life. The animation is caused by Earth passing through the tail of a mysterious comet, which something something makes technology turn violent. (The movie wastes little time with explanations.) 

Listen: Trucks, Drugs, and Rock and Roll

A little over 40 years ago, filming began for an ambitious movie called Maximum Overdrive led by a legendary producer. But then… everything that could go wrong, did go wrong.

September 10, 2026

The point is, after generations spent serving their human masters, the machines have now turned the tables. For 98 minutes our heroes, led by Emilio Estevez as Bill Robinson, must fight back—all to a soundtrack of AC/DC needle drops.

“ No one ever asks me about the great Muppet movies I did or the great [David] Cronenberg movies I did,” Brandis says, shaking his head. “They ask about this one.” 

Filmed in Wilmington in 1985, Maximum Overdrive is remembered as much for the chaos behind the scenes as what appeared on screen. Bankrolled by an Italian producer and laden with production problems caused by weather, on-set accidents, and a first-time director high on more than life, the movie nearly fell apart. Yet its legacy lives on in the North Carolina film community it helped create.

Shock and Awful

Exactly how North Carolina inherited the film industry gets told a few different ways, but the gist is this: It was the early ’80s and Dino De Laurentiis, an Oscar-winning producer known for classics like Barbarella and Federico Fellini’s La Strada, was looking for a mansion. Not to live in, but as the setting for the band of shadowy government types doing telepathic experiments in his next movie, Firestarter. 

Also based on the work of Stephen King, the film starred eight-year-old Drew Barrymore, who’d just lit up the screen in E.T., as a deadly pyrokinetic. De Laurentiis sat in his New York office with fellow producer Frank Capra Jr., searching for inspiration in photo books of Southern Gothic homes. In either exasperation or a flash of brilliance, De Laurentiis finally pointed to the estate on one of the covers: “Why don’t we just go there?” 

“There” turned out to be Orton Plantation, the sprawling Greek Revival compound half an hour southwest of Wilmington on the Cape Fear River. Orton has a tragic history as the destination for countless enslaved Africans brought ashore at nearby Brunswick Town to cultivate rice. By the time Capra and De Laurentiis arrived, Orton was mainly known as a garden and historic site with ample acreage, good weather, and an even milder climate for labor laws.

De Laurentiis fell in love. 

In November 1983, he announced the construction of a multi-stage studio complex on Wilmington’s 23rd Street. Over the next six years, his company produced more than a dozen movies here, including David Lynch’s groundbreaking surrealist thriller Blue Velvet and a string of King screamers like Cats Eye and Silver Bullet.

Cut to 1985, and the King/De Laurentiis enterprise was poised for its most high-octane outing yet: Maximum Overdrive. Chock-full of stunts and special effects, the film would’ve been a challenge for any seasoned director—which, unfortunately, Overdrive did not have. For the first time, King himself took the big chair, despite reportedly telling Dino De Laurentiis he had no interest in the job. Production took place over 12 weeks of sweltering New Hanover County summer, with crews—a mix of locals and international hires struggling over a language barrier—working 12-hour days, six days a week.

“We were exhausted,” recalled Jayme Bednarczyk, the movie’s wardrobe supervisor. She remembers King fondly as a person, but said he was out of his depth as a director. In an interview years later, the author admitted to being “coked out of my mind all through production” and said he didn’t know what he was doing.

Delays and mistakes plagued the film. While shooting an early scene on a baseball field, the crew had to halt production for days after an overnight storm obliterated the set. But even when the cameras did roll, there was no guarantee they were capturing what they were supposed to. 

Actor Bob Gunter, who played a baseball coach killed by a can-firing soda machine (it makes sense in the movie … mostly), recalled filming an entire dialogue scene that didn’t make the final cut. After seeing the finished movie, Bob asked why, only to learn the cameras had run out of film. No one ever called for another take.

Grip Joe D’Alessandro was on set the day the farce turned to tragedy. He was working on a scene in which one of the movie’s young stars tries to escape a sentient lawnmower. 

To capture the dramatic shot of the radio-controlled lawnmower racing straight toward the lens, cinematographer Armando Nannuzzi placed the camera low to the ground on a device called a hi-hat, a kind of mini tripod, leveled with wooden wedges.

“As the lawnmower came forward,” D’Alessandro recalled, “the camera operator grabbed the camera to get it away from the lawnmower that was supposed to stop. It didn’t stop. It kept coming.”

The lawnmower’s metal blades struck the wooden wedges, sending splinters flying. One of them struck Nannuzzi in his right eye. A lawsuit later claimed Nannuzzi had suffered “sustained severe and permanent damage to his ‘shooting eye,’” and that King had insisted the blades be left in the machine despite objections from the crew. The movie’s producers settled with Nannuzzi for $975,000.

“It was terrible,” said D’Alessandro. “It was like a Stephen King movie.” 

A Beloved ‘Stinker’

Maximum Overdrive bombed. The movie didn’t make back its estimated $10 million budget, Estevez earned a Golden Raspberry nomination for worst actor of the year, and King swore off directing for good. He’s rarely talked about the experience, referring to it only as “a stinker” in his memoir, On Writing. I tried to talk with King while working on this story, and he politely declined through a friend, who said he was busy working on his next book.

In so many ways, the movie seemed destined to be forgotten. And yet, sitting in the packed house at Jengo’s Playhouse in July, it was hard to imagine a world, or a Wilmington, without it.

De Laurentiis Entertainment Group went belly-up in 1989 (although De Laurentiis himself kept working, continuing to produce movies until shortly before his death in 2010 at age 91), but the infrastructure he created lived on. Its location on 23rd Street eventually became EUE/Screen Gems, the largest studio space in the U.S. outside of California. As the small screen surged in the mid-2000s, a generation’s worth of locals got their shot as extras on One Tree Hill and Dawson’s Creek. Then Marvel came to town in 2012, shooting scenes for the mega-budget Iron Man 3 in the port. That year, direct spending by the film industry in North Carolina was estimated at $376 million. 

Even Maximum Overdrive found an audience, eventually, as new generations came to embrace the schlocky thriller as a relic of times gone by. Fans descended on Wilmington in search of the filming locations. In 2013 Tim Shockey, a collector from Ohio, restored the original Goblin face and took it on tour across the U.S. and Canada.

From humble beginnings atop a stack of books on De Laurentiis’ desk, North Carolina had earned its new nickname: Wilmywood.

But in any good narrative arc there comes a point when all seems lost. After the state largely eliminated tax incentives for films in 2014, production across North Carolina waned. Then came streaming, the decline of movie theaters, the pandemic, inflation, offshoring, AI. Last year, the N.C. Department of Commerce reported $185.5 million in direct film spending, down from $302 million in 2024. 

This July, just weeks before the rainy evening in the Soda Pop District, Gov. Josh Stein signed a budget that increases the maximum grants for film and television production by $23 million, plus allocates an additional $1.2 million for productions with micro-budgets between $50,000 and $1.5 million. Most industry folks I talked to saw the funding as a good start, though procedural changes to how the N.C. Department of Commerce can spend the money may mean new productions won’t see the benefits until at least 2029. 

Up on the screen, Overdrive reaches its explosive conclusion (no spoilers here, even 40 years later). As credits roll and the audience breaks into applause, there’s a sense of pride in the room, as if everyone agrees, This may not be the best movie ever made, but it’s ours.