Stephen King: 'Carrie' almost didn't happen

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Stephen King's 'A Good Marriage' heads to theaters

Legendary author wrote screenplay for the film

NEW YORK – "Carrie" almost didn't happen.

Stephen King, whose latest book-to-movie adaptation "A Good Marriage" hits theaters on October 3rd, said he thought his first stab at it stunk, so he threw it away.

"I had 16 or 18 pages, and it was in a girl's locker room, and I didn't know anything about that, and I tossed it in the wastebasket because I didn't think it was very good," King told FOX411. "My wife came along and brushed off the cigarette ashes and everything and unfolded it and read it and she said, ‘I think this is good, you've got something here’ and I said ‘It's really too long to be a short story and it's too short to be a novel’ and she said ‘I'll help you’ and she did."

King is still amazed by the story's staying power.

"That book has sort of had this life that I never expected it to have. I mean it's been a movie, it's been remade, it's been a TV movie, it’s been a play," he said. "I think they did it with puppets or something Off-Broadway. It's had a much longer life then I ever would have expected.”

Stephen King’s “A Good Marriage” is his latest creation to get a big screen adaptation. It follows a wife who discovers her husband has been living with a frightening secret. The legendary author also wrote the screenplay, something he hasn’t done since 1989’s “Pet Semetary.”

“A lot of the books have been made into movies, but this thing wouldn't leave me alone. It just stayed on my mind," he said. "I knew Peter Askin who directed the picture from a previous project and finally I went to him and I said, ‘Would you have any interest in directing a movie of this if I wrote a script that you liked?’ and he said yes. So the project went forward from there.”

King says the premise is the stuff movies are made of. “The idea that a wife doesn't always know her husband and finds out after years of marriage that she's been sleeping with a stranger, that really sort of motivated me and I wanted to see it on the screen because, frankly, I thought it would make a terrific suspense movie.”

Star Joan Allen says she kept King's source material close at hand during the filming.

“I read the novella, it's about 90 pages something like that," she said. "I read it several times during the course of filming because there were really wonderful descriptive pieces, just character things that actually were very helpful."

“A Good Marriage” hits theaters and VOD on October 3rd.