“I like reading about prison for some reason,” she says. Ever.” Freeman repeated a variation of that accolade-if not the best script, certainly among the top.Ĭompleted in an eight-week writing jag, Darabont’s script had the good fortune to land on the desk of a filmmaker with “a prison obsession”-longtime Castle Rock Entertainment producer Liz Glotzer. “And I thought, Perhaps now is the time.”Īlfred Hitchcock reportedly said some version of “To make a great film you need three things: the script, the script, and the script.” Robbins says of Darabont’s finished adaptation, “It was the best script I’ve ever read. “In 1987, my first produced screenplay credit was A Nightmare on Elm Street 3,” says Darabont. With his ultimate goal a feature film, Darabont waited for his résumé to lengthen enough to support his aspirations before approaching King again. But Darabont’s real obsession was a prison yarn, Rita Hayworth and Shawshank Redemption, from Different Seasons, a collection of four novellas that represented King’s attempt to break out of the genre corner he’d written himself into over the years. In 1983 a 20-something Darabont handed King a buck to make The Woman in the Room, one of the few amateur short films based on his work that the author enjoyed. Instead, King maintains a policy of granting newbie directors in need of a calling card the rights to his short stories for one dollar. The author famously hated director Stanley Kubrick’s adaptation of his novel The Shining-King felt actor Shelley Duvall’s Wendy was “one of the most misogynistic characters ever put on film”-but he didn’t punish other filmmakers. Not many novelists have seen their work sail past as many movie-studio gatekeepers as King, starting with 1976’s blood-soaked hit Carrie. But Darabont, a “rabid and devoted” Stephen King fan, nursed a chimera: turning one of the writer’s stories into a film. I was nailing sets together on low-budget films to keep body and soul together,” he says. But in the 1980s, before his Oscar nominations and his stints as creator and executive producer of the AMC series The Walking Dead and the TNT series Mob City, Darabont was just another broke Hollywood hanger-on imagining his name on the back of a director’s chair. Writer-director Frank Darabont now owns a Spanish villa in Los Angeles’s Los Feliz district-Brad Pitt and Angelina Jolie also call the neighborhood home-which serves solely as his bustling production office. Reviews were mostly favorable, but the film bombed, failing to earn even $1 million on its opening weekend and eventually eking out $16 million (about $25 million today) at the American box office during its initial release, not nearly enough-and even less so after marketing costs and exhibitors’ cuts-to recoup its $25 million budget.ĭirector Frank Darabont on set. In Shawshank, the story of a decades-long quest for redemption and freedom, the closest things to action sequences involve fighting off buggery or defiantly blasting a Mozart duettino. But the 90s were an era of booyah action movies starring the likes of Arnold Schwarzenegger and Bruce Willis. It’s a period prison drama with stately, old-fashioned rhythms, starring Tim Robbins as Andy Dufresne, wrongfully convicted of killing his wife, her lover and serving two life terms, and Morgan Freeman as fellow lifer “Red” Redding, who narrates the film. Twenty years ago this week, The Shawshank Redemption hit multiplexes. Blocked search terms included “blind person,” “embassy,” and “Shawshank.” The embarrassed country’s Internet police tried to squelch the story by censoring micro-blogs, an information-sharing platform in China similar to the government-banned Twitter. The story of the blind man eluding a domestic-security apparatus with an annual budget of $111 billion “electrified China’s rights activists,” according to The New York Times. Three hundred miles later-at one point he was reduced to crawling after breaking bones in his foot-the fugitive reached his sanctuary: the American Embassy in Beijing. And so, to escape, the 40-year-old Chen waited for a moonless sky, and then scaled the government-built wall around his house, relying on his other senses to guide him across rivers and roads. Political activism against the Chinese government had earned Chen six years of what he called “brutal” detainment-translation: regular beatings-first in prison and later under house arrest. On a night in April 2012, they were all but impossible for Chen Guangcheng: one blind Chinese dissident against the 100 guards surrounding his home and village in Shandong province. The odds of a successful jailbreak are never good.
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