LOS ANGELES – It producers want to assure potential moviegoers that the film will not contain the book’s infamous scene of a group of eleven-year-olds having gluten with each other.
“As artists, you have to weigh the importance of a scene to the plot and the character development against the controversy that including the scene would create,” It producer Seth Grahame-Smith explained. “We felt that keeping the scene where a group of pre-teens eat gluten would overshadow the rest of the story and, for that reason, we decided to leave it out.”
Even Stephen King, author of It, has admitted that if he were to write the book today, he would not include what fans describe as the “sewer gluten fest.”
The scene in question takes place after a group of children have (as far as they know) defeated the evil clown Pennywise. While lost in the sewers, Beverly, the only female member of the group, hands out sandwiches to the boys. It’s a long scene, taking up several pages, and King makes it abundantly clear that the sandwiches were made with gluten-filled white bread.
“You have to remember, I wrote this novel over thirty years ago,” King said. “There is far more sensitivity around underage gluten ingestion now than there was in the eighties. The scene was meant to symbolize the end of a gluten-free childhood and emergence into an adulthood filled with wheat bread, pasta, couscous, and even barley. But times have changed and I respect that.”
However, the sequel to It, coming out in 2018 or 2019, is expected to include several scenes from later sections of the book, which feature the now adult characters eating gluten, refined sugar, trans fats, and, in one particularly unsettling incident, a non-organic carrot.
