by George Beahm
Not to make too fine a point here, but Duncan delivered the goods. He just nailed it. Put it on the wall, hammered it in, stood back, and said, in effect, go ahead and take a good look: That’s me playing John Coffey.
Running a little over three hours, the movie weaves its narrative through several smaller stories that come together in the end and reveal to us what we knew from the beginning: that the world is filled with mystery and wonder, and the miracles of life reveal God’s grace and compassion. To say anything more is to give away too much of the story line, and so I won’t: It’s King’s tale, and Darabont’s retelling, and I merely want to point you in the right direction. For the love of God, read the book and see the movie.
The film went on to become a critical and financial success, reaffirming Frank Darabont’s prodigious talent. As King wrote in his introduction to The Green Mile: The Shooting Script, “In a decade where too many movies are cold and glossy and have all the emotional gradient of a customized muscle-car, Frank makes openhearted audience-pleasers that beg us to go with the belly laughs and turn on the old waterworks … to respond.”
Life, King reminds us, is fragile; we are at the mercy of powers beyond us and the randomness of the universe, as Johnny Smith, in The Dead Zone, finds out when his life is forever changed after a random skating accident.
In a perfect world, we’d see many more performances by the Big Man, Michael Clarke Duncan, but it was not to be. We live in an imperfect world that, at times, seems devoid of justice and sense: On September 3, 2012, at age fifty-two, Michael Clarke Duncan died.
Tom Hanks said, “He was the treasure we all discovered on the set of The Green Mile. He was magic. He was a big love of [a] man and his passing leaves us stunned.”
Frank Darabont echoed Hanks’s words. “Michael was the gentlest of souls—an exemplar of decency, integrity and kindness. The sadness I feel is inexpressible.”
And Stephen King said, “No one has ever done a character I wrote more justice.”
In this world in which there’s not enough justice to go around, which always seems in short supply, I hope heaven booms with the sound of Duncan’s expansive voice; his larger-than-life, infectious laugh; and his broad smile that lit up our world … and surely, heaven, too.
Multiple Takes
Frank Darabont: “Steve, to me, is like Dickens. He is a storyteller, an old-fashioned storyteller in the best sense of the word. Both Stephen and Dickens were accused by the literary snobs of their day of being horribly populist, pandering writers because, God forbid, there should be a plot. It’s not just about plot with Steve” (Daniel Argent and Erik Bauer, Film Review, 1997/1999).
“He’s got such a spark of humanity, real humanism, in his work, even in the more obviously horror pieces. That’s what I found most compelling about this story. It was a hell of an emotional journey” (Donna Freydkin, CNN Interactive, 2001).
Bruce Willis, to Darabont: “I found John Coffey” (Donna Freydkin, CNN Interactive, 2001).
Tom Hanks: “I’ve never had the ensemble experience that I had on The Green Mile. … There was a bona fide affection for one another” (AMC blog).
Michael Clarke Duncan: “I think John Coffey is an angel. That is the best way I can describe it. Any time you give of yourself and don’t ask for anything in return, I think that is very angelic. And, to want to see the simple things, I think that says a lot about his spirit. And, you have this man if he could, if he had the heart of a villain, there would be no cell in that town that could hold him. It is very humble, and nice and sweet” (Matthew Kinne, John Ankerberg Show, 2000).
“It was a wonderful thing to have him. He was like a Zen master. He uses, I call it ‘mental capabilities,’ on you. No matter how many scenes you’re going through, Frank can get you to do more, even when you’re tired.… But each one, I wanted to do good for him, cause he makes you feel like you have it in you. You want to achieve for him” (Cynthia Fuchs, July 9, 2009, popmatters.com).
Critics’ Take
Hollywood.com: “The amazing Clarke Duncan both physically menacing and radiantly warm also completely inhabits his role. Clarke Duncan is so mesmerizing as the gentle giant you’ll be convinced that he was created just for this part. (Though I hope this is just the start of a long career.)” (April 24, 2001).
Variety: “[T]he ensemble acting is of a high order. Hanks excels as the prison guard who is well balanced enough to nearly always handle his many troubles in proper, imaginative fashion” (Todd McCarthy, November 28, 1999).
1 The date a movie opens simultaneously nationwide in U.S. theaters.
118
FRANK DARABONT: AN INTERVIEW
BY HANS-ÅKE LILJA
FEBRUARY 6, 2007
I wanted to publish an interview with one film director, and though many such interviews are available, I felt that Darabont could speak for his fellow directors.
I was privileged to work with Frank on an art book called Knowing Darkness: Artists Inspired by Stephen King. He proofread and corrected my interviews with Drew Struzan and Bernie Wrightson, for which I am thankful: His insights improved both pieces. He also contributed the introduction to the book, which set the tone for what followed—a gallery of art that is a visual testimony to the illustrative riches of King’s fiction.
This interview, conducted by Hans-Åke Lilja, a superfan who has run the best Stephen King fan Web site on the planet since 1996, sheds much light on Frank’s thoughts about King, King’s books and movies, and Frank himself. Published online on Lija’s Web site and reprinted in Lilja’s Library: The World of Stephen King. the interview will probably be new to you, and well worth your time and attention.
Like many of his contemporaries, Frank’s early years in the film business were challenging, mirroring King’s early years as a writer; in both cases, their talent and dedication took them from obscurity to worldwide fame. Obviously, both directing and writing are demanding occupations that require one’s very best.
H-e-r-e’s Frank Darabont!
Lilja: In 1983 you did The Woman in the Room. Can you tell me how that happened? As I understand it it’s one of the first “Dollar Babies,” right?
Frank Darabont: In 1980, I was 20 years old, working many miserable low-paid jobs just to survive, and dreaming of a career in films someday. During that time I was a theater usher, telephone operator.… Man, I can’t even remember all the awful jobs I had back then. I even ran a forklift and did a lot of heavy lifting for an auction company that liquidated industrial machine shops. That was the year I approached Stephen King about The Woman in the Room, and I hadn’t even had my first job in movies yet! But I nonetheless decided I wanted to make a short film from his story, which I thought was lovely and deeply moving, so I wrote him a letter asking for his permission. I was shocked that he said yes. (I found out later about his “dollar baby” policy, which shows what a generous man he is. I doubt The Woman in the Room was the first “dollar baby,” but I’m certain it must be among the first wave of those films.)
Let me digress to say that my very first real job in films happened later that same year, after I’d gotten Steve’s permission to do The Woman in the Room. Chuck Russell hired me as a P.A. on a shitty no-budget film called Hell Night, starring Linda Blair. If you haven’t seen it, I don’t really recommend it. Quentin Tarantino keeps telling me he really likes Hell Night, but I keep telling him he’s the only one. It was one of the cheesier entries in the “slasher movie” cycle. But if you ever do see it, you can check out my name in the end credits—my very first movie job! “P.A.,” by the way, stands for “production assistant,” although I’ve always felt it could also stand for “pissant.” It is the lowest job in movies, a gofer who runs around doing every crappy job they hand you and never getting any sleep. I made 150 dollars a week, which was horrible pay even back then. But it was my entry into the film business, and began my association with Chuck Russell. Chuck was a line producer on low budget films at that time, just making a living, whic
h is how he hired me. We later became dear friends and wound up collaborating as writers on a number of screenplays, including A Nightmare on Elm Street 3: Dream Warriors. That was Chuck’s first directing job and my first professional writing credit, in 1986.
Anyway, back to 1980. I wrote Steve King my letter, he said yes, and it took me three years to make The Woman in the Room. It took a while to raise enough money (from some kindly investors in Iowa) to shoot the movie and get it in the can. But then I had to personally earn the rest of the money needed to put the film through post-production: editing the film, doing the sound, paying for the lab work, etc. By 1983 I was working as a prop assistant on TV commercials—not great money, but it was enough to get my movie finished. I earned $11,000 that year and spent $7,000 of it finishing my movie—how I survived on $4,000 that year is something I still can’t explain; to this day I have no idea how I did it. (The IRS was also quite curious: that was the only year I’ve ever gotten audited for taxes, because they couldn’t believe anybody could survive on $4,000 a year.) All I can say is, my rent was cheap and I lived very frugally. I spent that entire year with a borrowed Moviola in my bedroom, editing the film. I had heaps of 16mm film piled all over the place. At night, I had to move all the piles of film off my bed onto the floor so I could go to sleep. In the morning, I’d have to move the piles of film from the floor back onto my bed so I could walk to the bathroom. Very glamorous!
But eventually the movie did get done, and we entered it for Oscar consideration in the short film category. There are two things we should correct: 1) It wasn’t the 1986 Academy Awards, but earlier—either ‘83 or ‘84, I forget the exact year. 2) More significantly, The Woman in the Room was not nominated; it was named in the top nine out of the ninety short films submitted that year, but we failed to make the final cut of four nominated films. (For some strange reason, the common belief has arisen through the years that the film was nominated, but that is incorrect.)
Lilja: Did King comment on what he thought about it? The Woman in the Room is a rather personal story to him.…
Darabont: He liked it. In fact, we used his quote “Clearly the best of the short films made from my stuff” on the video box. He did feel the character I added, The Prisoner (played by Brian Libby, who later played Floyd in The Shawshank Redemption), was a bit clichéd, and I can’t disagree. Steve’s favorite bit was the dream sequence where the mom turns into a rotted corpse—he loved that! Hey, give Steve a rotted corpse and he’s your pal for life. Here’s some trivia: That corpse originally appeared in Hell Night. (If I remember correctly, Linda Blair stumbles into a room at one point where a bunch of corpses are propped around a table—it was a male corpse, but in my short I passed him off as a woman. Corpse in drag!)
Some two years after Hell Night, I borrowed the corpse to use in The Woman in the Room from the makeup FX guys who built it. He wound up sitting in my living room for a few months. Sometimes I’d wake up in the middle of the night and forget he was there. I’d wander half-asleep out to the kitchen to get a glass of water and he’d scare the shit out of me, this big human shape sitting in the dark in my living room.
That dream sequence was something I also added to the story. Looking back on it, I guess I took a lot of liberties with Steve’s material. I’m kind of surprised he liked it as much as he did. But he liked it well enough that when I approached him again in 1986 to ask for the rights to The Shawshank Redemption, he said yes. So spending three years busting my ass to make that short did pay off in a very nice way: It gave Steve a certain amount of confidence in me.
As for me, I look at The Woman in the Room now and wonder what Steve saw in it. The movie actually makes me cringe a little, as I suppose any work you did as a kid will make you cringe (unless you’re Mozart). Honestly, it looks like an earnest but very young filmmaker at work to me. The result strikes me as pretty creaky and overly careful in its approach. I think I was really afraid of making any mistakes, so my approach to shooting and editing was cautious, to say the least. And it’s slow! Yikes!
Lilja: He later gave the OK to put it out on video. Whose idea was that? Yours? King’s? Most “Dollar Babies” never get out to the big public, so it must have felt good.
Darabont: That was always my intention, even when I first approached him for the rights. So, yes, I was a “dollar baby” in a sense, but I had worked out a deal with his agent that paid Steve some more money if I got video distribution. So he eventually made more than a buck, though it was still a very generous deal for us. Unfortunately, the video distributor we originally got into business with totally fucked us. The guy’s name was Gary Gray (not the director, I hasten to add!), this bottom-feeder with no integrity who made a shitload of money on the video but never paid us a dime of it, even though we had signed contracts. Jeff Shiro, who made The Boogeyman (which was paired with The Woman in the Room on the video), got equally screwed. Of course I didn’t have a dime to my name back then, so hiring a lawyer was out of the question. I don’t know if Gray is still out there somewhere, but I bet he is. Any young filmmakers thinking of getting into business with him should run in the opposite direction. And Gary, if you’re reading this: shame on you. I may track you down and come after you someday with a tribe of high-priced Hollywood lawyers shrieking like crazed Apaches in an old Western, just to see the look on your face.
At some point along the way, the video got bought by Spelling’s video releasing company. I’m not even sure how that happened. I imagine it was that original distributor trying to squeeze a few more bucks out of it. Happily, Spelling did have integrity; they do business in a straightforward manner, so money started trickling in for a few years. It was a pleasure all those years later to track down my Iowa investors and send them checks. That’s all I ever wanted, to see them paid back. It took a while, but at least they got their money. I think I might have kicked in a few bucks of my own, since I was making a good living by then.
Lilja: Then eleven years later you did The Shawshank Redemption, which became a big success and nominated for seven Academy Awards. It’s also one of the most popular adaptations from a King story. Why do you think that is?
Darabont: Well, it’s the power of the story, for sure. Steve wrote a humdinger there; he hit that ball right over the fence. It has a tremendous humanity to it, which makes for the best kind of storytelling. I recognized it the moment I read it. And it works gorgeously as metaphor—everybody who sees it can project their own trials and tribulations, and hopes for triumph, into it. I’ve often referred to it as the “Rorschach Test” of movies. People see what they want to see in it, even if they’ve never been to prison. It’s a very potent experience that way, and that’s all credit to Steve King. The man writes deep, and with that story he was writing deeper than usual. All I had to do was translate it to the screen and not screw it up. I’m probably making that sound easier than it was, but the task was made a lot easier by the fact that I had Castle Rock’s complete trust and support. That’s an amazing group of people at that company. Bless their hearts, because the level of trust a filmmaker experiences there is almost unique in this business. If I’d had standard studio interference and meddling on that movie, if I’d spent my time battling to defend my film against executives who wanted everything different, Lord knows how that movie would have turned out. Probably not so well. It would have been some crappy prison movie long forgotten by now. But I had Castle Rock, and they were just the best.
Lilja: How happy are you with that movie yourself? Is it fair to say that The Shawshank Redemption was your big break?
Darabont: I’d certainly qualify The Shawshank Redemption as a big break. You can’t get seven Academy Award nominations including Best Picture and not suddenly be taken very seriously as a director. And that movie led directly to The Green Mile. Hanks, one of my favorite people in the world, saw The Shawshank Redemption and rang me up and said: “Hey, love your work, we should find something to do together. If you ever have a script you think I’d be right fo
r, send it to me.” That’s quite a nice door to have opened.
And, yes, I’m delighted with the movie. I watched it again when we had our Ten Year Anniversary screening and DVD re-release. And with all that time and distance, I was knocked out by how well the movie holds up. (I’m glad I didn’t get the same feeling I got watching The Woman in the Room again!) You know, after a decade goes by, you (the filmmaker) don’t really feel like you had anything to do with it, you just kind of sit there and watch the movie on its own terms. It’s almost like somebody else’s movie by then; you just get caught up in the story like any audience member. And I was very pleased with what I saw. It’s that Steve King tale, man, it works a treat. But the thing that really jumped out at me was how great Tim Robbins was. I’d somewhat forgotten that. Everybody talks about Morgan Freeman, and of course he’s just superb—I always hear how much everybody loves his narration—but Tim really carries equal weight on his shoulders for the movie working so well. Don’t tell him I said that; he’ll get a swelled head.
Lilja: Then five years later you have another success based on a King book. This time it’s The Green Mile, which was nominated for four Academy Awards. Why do you think your King adaptations are so successful?
Darabont: Because when I recognize that a story is great, I try not to mess with it too much. I promise you, that’s not a glib answer. That’s why The Green Mile wound up being three hours long. I’m the first to admit that’s not an optimal length for a movie. It’s a lot to ask of an audience to sit for three hours, but if I’d made that movie two hours, it would have cut the heart out of Steve’s story. It would have given us a mangled version.
119
THE REAL THING: DREW STRUZAN
A PROFILE BY GEORGE BEAHM
