The Stephen King Companion

by George Beahm

  “I’ve admired King’s work over the years, but I’m not a horror devotee. I read metaphysics and Jung and, occasionally, Clive Barker. I’m an eclectic reader.… After this film, it’ll start again. More Norman Bates references, and People magazine will refer to me as Kathy ‘Misery’ Bates. Everybody wants to type you. There’s a human urge to pigeonhole. It’s just rampant in Hollywood” (Glenn Lowell, Daily Press, December 8, 1990).

  8.

  The Shawshank Redemption: Redeeming Stephen King’s Film Reputation

  I never in a million years thought he would get the film made.

  —Stephen King, introduction to The Shawshank Redemption: The Shooting Script, 1995

  Release date: October 14, 1994; Tomatometer: 91%; audience score: 98%. Directed by and screenplay by Frank Darabont. Budget: $25 million; total domestic gross: $28.3 million.

  Frank Darabont is your typical “overnight” success. In his case, the “overnight” success took him thirteen years, from the time he worked as a lowly production assistant on a 1981 film called Hell Night, starring Linda Blair, a film described by the Internet Movie Database thus:

  Four college pledges are forced to spend the night in a deserted old mansion where they get killed off one by one by the monstrous surviving members of a family massacre years earlier for trespassing on their living grounds.

  In 1994, Darabont wrote and directed The Shawshank Redemption, which changed his life. His path to Shawshank Prison came by way of a “dollar baby” film, when Darabont received permission from King to film “The Woman in the Room,” which King said, in an introduction to The Green Mile: The Screenplay, was a “beautiful and moving version” that he counts as the first, and best, “dollar baby” short film.

  Darabont, a gentleman, followed up by sending the award citation for his film to King, who had sized him up correctly: “Nice guy.”

  The nice guy went back a second time, with a request for a major motion picture, for which he paid $5,000 for the rights. Given a green light by King, Darabont wrote a full-length script for The Shawshank Redemption and sent it to King, who wrote in an introduction to The Green Mile: The Screenplay:

  I gave Frank permission to show the script around—he could shop it until he dropped, as far as I was concerned—but only in my wildest dreams did I expect it would be made. It was too long, too faithful to the source story … and a little too kind. Not even in those wild dreams did I expect it would end up being the screen adaptation of my work that people say they like the best—no mean accomplishment, considering there have been over thirty of them.

  What King and Darabont didn’t expect was that the movie with the awkward title would go on to become a film classic, and launch Darabont’s film career into high orbit.

  What’s telling about Darabont’s character is that when Castle Rock Entertainment got the screenplay, which was written on spec (i.e., with no money upfront for Darabont), the company wanted Reiner to be at the helm as director and dangled “shit loads of money” as an inducement. But Darabont remained steadfast and decided being rich overnight wasn’t his goal; his goal was to make a world-class film of a story he absolutely loved, and he wanted to bring it to the screen his way.

  Remember when I said Darabont was a gentleman? He is. And he’s a man of integrity who can’t be bought.

  But, ironically, The Shawshank Redemption wasn’t a box office hit when initially released, for several reasons. First, because it was at such variance with the films for which King is known—horror films—the studio heads decided not to use King’s name for fear that it might alienate mainstream viewers who would dismiss the film outright and refuse to give it a fair viewing. Second, it’s a quiet little story about the relationship between two prison inmates; it’s not sexy or action-packed, and it lacks women characters, which they felt would make it less appealing to a general audience. And, third, the unrevealing title made it difficult to figure out just what the film was about. What, exactly, is a shawshank? (A “shank,” by the way, is prison slang for a homemade knife, so that helped, but not nearly enough.) No wonder Tim Robbins’s fans came up to him and asked, “What was that Shinkshonk Reduction thing?”

  Titles aside, the content is what’s most important, and in this film there are two standout performances: Morgan Freeman, playing Ellis Boyd “Red” Redding, and Tim Robbins playing Andy Dufresne. Freeman was nominated for an Oscar and a Golden Globe, and Robbins was nominated for a Screen Actors Guild Award and a Chlotrudis Award; unfortunately, in what can only be perceived as a gross miscarriage of justice, both came away empty-handed.

  The movie, though, had “legs.” Sturdy legs, as it turned out. It went on to become a critical success and a fan favorite as well. In fact, when the American Film Institute ranked the top one hundred greatest movies of all time, The Shawshank Redemption was 72; the readers of Empire magazine voted it the best film of the nineties and the fourth best film of all time; and Internet Movie Database subscribers ranked it right up there with The Godfather and Star Wars.

  As Frank Darabont explained to Empire magazine: “It was crash and burn. As I discovered, there’s a difference between the audience enjoying a movie and being convinced to show up in the first place.… Thank God for video.”

  It went on to become the number one top video rental of 1995, with 320,000 rental copies in the United States alone. It also went on to become a TV favorite, which brought the actors residuals that continue to this day, as Bob Gunton (the prison warden) explained to The Wall Street Journal: “I suspect my daughter, years from now, will still be getting checks.” (By the film’s tenth anniversary, in 2004, Gunton has gotten close to “six figures,” noted The Wall Street Journal.)

  “Castle Rock Pictures has more or less rescued my film-associated reputation from the scrap-heap, and no picture had more to do with that than the one which eventually became known as The Shawshank Redemption,” King wrote in his introduction to the script used for shooting, published in book form.

  King, in fact, loves to recount an encounter he had with a woman who couldn’t reconcile the fact that he was the author whose story from Different Seasons, “Rita Hayworth and Shawshank Redemption,” was the basis for The Shawshank Redemption. Neil Gaiman quoted him in an interview for The Sunday Times:

  I was down here in the supermarket, and this old woman comes around the corner … obviously one of the kind of women who says whatever is on her brain. She said, “I know who you are; you are the horror writer. I don’t read anything that you do, but I respect your right to do it. I just like things more genuine, like that Shawshank Redemption.”

  And I said, “I wrote that.” And she said, “No, you didn’t.” And she walked off and went on her way.

  That woman’s reaction, mirroring that of many others, explains the film’s enduring appeal. As Tim Robbins recounted to Mark Kermode, “All I know is that there isn’t a day when I’m not approached about that film, approached by people who say how important that film is to them, who tell me that they’ve seen it 20, 30, 40 times and who are just so … thankful.”

  Multiple Takes

  Stephen King: “And Frank will say, ‘I have the world’s smallest specialty. I only do prison movies written by Stephen King.’ And he’s been going on about how proud he is that he made The Mist and broke out of that mold. But I told him, ‘Frank, it’s still a story about people in prison. They’re just in a prison in a supermarket!’” (Gilbert Cruz, Time, November 23, 2007).

  Frank Darabont: “More than cinematic or visual, I first responded to the emotional content of it. The really wonderful characters, the wonderful relationships, the obstacles they face and overcome. Secondarily, there was the visual element of it which always boiled down to, ‘Gee, if we could find a really cool-looking prison to shoot, this is going to be a really cool-looking movie.’ And luckily, that happened. We found the Ohio State Reformatory in Mansfield, Ohio, which they had just shut down two years prior. It was an incredible, gothic place. Mostly though, it
was the emotional content. It’s the little things that make a movie good, the little emotional moments. The rest of it is all candy” (Daniel Argent and Erik Bauer, Creative Screenwriting, Volume 4, #2, Summer 1997).

  Morgan Freeman: “I don’t know what happened when it first came out.… In fact I remember someone asking me on the night of the Academy Awards why I thought Shawshank had done so poorly at box-office when films like Dumb and Dumber, which opened the same season, had done so well. After all, Shawshank had gotten pretty good reviews, whereas Dumb and Dumber had been thoroughly and relentlessly trashed by critics” (Mark Kermode, August 21, 2004, theguardian.com).

  Tim Robbins: “It’s a film about people being in jail, and having the hope to get out. Why is that universal? Because although not everybody has been in jail, on a deeper, more metaphysical level, many people feel enslaved by their environment, their jobs, their relationships—by whatever it is in the course of their lives that puts walls and bars around them. And Shawshank is a story about enduring and ultimately escaping from that imprisonment” (Mark Kermode, August 21, 2004, theguardian.com).

  9.

  Dolores Claiborne: A Happy Accident

  Release date: March 24, 1995; Tomatometer: 82%; audience score: 81%. Screenplay by Tony Gilroy; directed by Taylor Hackford. Budget: not stated; total domestic gross: $24.3 million.

  As any actor knows, your looks can work for or against you in Hollywood casting, as in real life. In Kathy Bates’s case, after winning an Oscar for her performance in Misery, her name would assuredly come up in casting lists for the demanding role of Dolores Claiborne, in which she would have to carry the film on her able-bodied shoulders.

  But it wouldn’t be a glamorous role; there’d be no place for an actress like Nicole Kidman or Cameron Diaz. It needed an actress who, as Bates saw it, “doesn’t take any guff off anybody and she becomes hard and crusty to do it.” Dolores Claiborne is a plaintalking, unvarnished woman who speaks her mind, and one line from the movie gives us a sense of who she is:

  Now, you listen to me, Mr. Grand High Poobah of Upper Buttcrack, I’m just about half-past give a shit with your fun and games.

  Dolores has seen life upfront and personal and has had it with her husband Joe St. George, who is described in the book as

  a goddamned millstone I wore around my neck. Worse, really, because a millstone don’t get drunk and then come home smellin of beer and wantin to throw a fuck into you at one in the morning. Wasn’t none of that the reason why I killed the sonofawhore, but I guess it’s as good a place as any to start.

  “All of us would just like to be real people,” Kathy Bates told David Sacks of The New York Times in 1991. “But for women especially, somehow movies have gotten to be about glamour; either you’re gorgeous or you’re a dog. And I guess I’ll find out more about this as I continue working in films, but I have heard a lot, ‘Well, we had something different in mind visually.’ And no actor likes to hear that.”

  Bates got the coveted role for Dolores Claiborne and delivered an outstanding performance. Filmed off the coast of Nova Scotia, Canada, the movie gives us a sense of Maine divested from any supernatural trappings. Set on Little Tall Island, off the Maine coast, the movie is a microcosm of insular Maine life as seen through the eyes of an islander who has had more than her full share of sorrow and hardship at the hands of her no-account, shiftless husband, who, in the novel, “didn’t leave me a pot to piss in and hardly a window to throw it out of.”

  Joe St. George, who is no saint, left his mark on his wife, and also on their daughter, Selena; and in this memorable film, a psychological thriller, Dolores must not only clear her own name but build a bridge to reach and reconcile with her daughter, played by Jennifer Jason Leigh, who lives in New York.

  Unlike other King novels that lend themselves to big box office potential, Dolores Claiborne, bereft of any supernatural component, is one of domestic horror: A woman endures an abusive marriage at the hands of her husband, who also feels their daughter, then underage, is fair game.

  Kathy Bates’s nuanced performance, performed against a gray-brown canvas of an isolated small island off the Maine coast, garnered attention. Screenwriter William Goldman wrote, “No one gave a better performance than Kathy Bates in Dolores Claiborne.” And in “The Ten Most Underrated Movies,” Elizabeth MacDonald, writing for Forbes (2003), wrote, “Not just the movie but both actresses [Kathy Bates and Judy Parfitt] should have won Oscars for their searing performances and catty humor.”

  Kathy Bates garnered three nominations for her role as Dolores Claiborne: a Saturn Award for best actress, from the Academy of Science Fiction, Fantasy, and Horror Films; a Chicago Film Critics Association Award; and a Chlotrudis Award (as did Jennifer Jason Leigh, for best supporting actress).

  Kathy Bates came away empty-handed on the awards front, but the critics and the fans loved her, and isn’t that what really counts?

  Multiple Takes

  Roger Ebert: “Stephen King fans hoping for ghouls and Satanic subplots and bizarre visitations may be disappointed by Dolores Claiborne. I was surprised how affecting the movie was, mostly because Bates and Leigh formed such a well-matched and convincing pair. Does this movie creep up on you? Oh, my gravy” (Chicago Sun-Times, March 24, 1995).

  Janet Maslin: “Written as a book-length harangue from its heroine’s point of view, and directed efficiently by Taylor Hackford, Dolores Claiborne has become a vivid film that revolves around Ms. Bates’ powerhouse of a performance.… The role of Dolores may be rough around the edges, but it’s a windfall for Ms. Bates, who does a walloping good job. She’s the perfect no-nonsense actress to bring this woman to life” (New York Times, March 24, 1995).

  10.

  The Green Mile: A Leap of Faith: Do You Believe in Miracles?

  Release date: December 10, 1999; Tomatometer: 80%; audience score: 94%. Directed and screenplay by Frank Darabont. Budget: $65 million; total domestic gross: $136.8 million.

  Frank Darabont knows a good story when he reads one, and when he read the first of six installments of The Green Mile, he was hooked again. In his introduction to The Green Mile: The Shooting Script, he explains that he didn’t pick up the phone; instead, he took a plane from Los Angeles to Denver, got a rental car and drove up to Estes Park, and walked in on the TV remake of The Shining, where he saw Stephen King dressed in a white tux and “leading” a big band. As Darabont recounts:

  In between takes, Steve saw me, blinked, and came over to ask what I was doing there. I grabbed him by the lapels, ready to start shaking, and said, “I’ve come for The Green Mile.”

  Steve shrugged and replied, “Oh, okay, sure. Hey, you wanna be an extra in this scene?”

  Darabont, who knows that making a full-length feature film is the most demanding and difficult challenge in the creative arts, picks and chooses them carefully. He’s driven by passion and commitment and responds to a well-told tale. So when he picked up The Two Dead Girls, as he recounted in his Shooting Script introduction, “What I did know was that I was in the hands of a master storyteller, that I was spellbound, that this was King firing on all pistons. In other words, I decided to proceed purely on a leap of faith, convinced Steve would not let me down.”

  With public expectations high, on the heels of The Shawshank Redemption, and a budget big enough to do the film right—including a $20 million paycheck for Tom Hanks as the “E Block” supervisor at Louisiana’s Cold Mountain Penitentiary in 1935—the movie’s success would stand or fall on the performance of the actor chosen to play John Coffey, whose initials, J.C., are symbolic. The challenging role required an actor with broad shoulders, and the actor who was finally selected was indeed a big man with broad shoulders, and a bigger heart.

  As Michael Clarke Duncan recounted in an interview with Matthew Kinne in 2000, for The John Ankerberg Show:

  The role came about by Bruce Willis. He told me about The Green Mile, and he said, “This will definitely change your career. I’m going to call Fra
nk Darabont when we get back to LA,” and he said, “Mike, go buy the novel now, so that when this audition comes up, you’ll have a little bit of a better edge than the rest.” We got back to LA; four days later, Frank Darabont calls me. He says he wants me to come in for an audition. I went in.… I bring the emotion up. He says, “Can you come back?” I said, “O.K.” I didn’t hear from him for about three weeks. He then said I want you to come in for a screen test. That is the big Hollywood thing. They hired me an acting coach, but the role means a lifetime achievement for me. Armageddon put me on the map and let people see me, but … this role is my first breakout role.

  Standing six feet, five inches tall, and weighing 315 pounds, Duncan seems better suited to be a bouncer or bodyguard, both of which he had done before getting in the film business, but he found his real talent in acting: Duncan, a gentle giant of a man, brought John Coffey to life on screen in a way that touched millions. As a result, Duncan was showered with accolades and nominated for numerous awards that showed he had acting chops.

  “Like Shawshank, this story is uplifting,” said Darabont in Film Review. “But this has a much more complex tone. It’s also got a sort of lovely melancholy thing going on. I’m looking for something that is hopeful, and that’s what I find attractive in these stories. I want something my heart can believe in.”

  What Darabont responded to was John Coffey’s numinous quality, which required a nuanced performance from Duncan. If audiences took him to heart and were convinced by his performance, the movie would almost assuredly be a success.