The Shawshank Redemption

Hello, and welcome back to What Went Wrong, your favorite podcast full stop that just so happens to be about movies and how it is nearly impossible to make them, let alone a good one, let alone what some people, I believe, think is one of the greatest movies of all time.

I am one of your hosts, Lizzie Bassett, here as always with Chris Winterbauer.

And Chris, what movie do we have for them today?

Slingblade, apparently?

Rude.

That was my Morgan Freeman narrating 90% of the Shawshank Redemption movies.

You can say I liked Andy from the start.

Yes, we are discussing 1994's The Shawshank Redemption, a film many of us millennials, I can safely say, probably remember watching on television over and over and over again.

We will get to that.

Lizzie, had you seen the Shawshank Redemption before?

I'm assuming that you had.

And what were your thoughts upon watching or re-watching it for the podcast?

Well, you mentioned television.

That is the only place I've ever seen the Shawshank Redemption before.

And to your point, yes, for anybody that didn't grow up in our age group, this literally ran at least every week, if not every day, just on repeat on certain channels.

And I don't know why.

I will tell you why by the end of this episode.

Okay, I'm excited because it was non-stop.

And I just remember it was like, if you're flipping through channels and you hit like TNT or whatever it was, you would watch a section of the Shawshank Redemption.

And it was TNT.

Very good memory.

Okay, so I literally did this.

I would be like, oh, Shawshank Redemption's on.

I guess I'll watch the part where Andy crawls out of the tunnel.

But like, I never sat down and watched the whole thing in sequence.

So I think I didn't really know what was going on, what I was watching.

I also imagine what I saw was probably decently edited for TV because this was quite a bit grimmer than I remembered from what I was watching.

So that was my experience was this is my first time really sitting down and watching the Shaw Shank Redemption in full.

I really, really enjoyed it.

Obviously, it's a wonderful movie.

Love that it was in Maine.

That's fun.

A little bit of, obviously, I know it's a Stephen King short story, but I will say this.

This is one of those movies for me that I think because

it became so sort of iconic, it feels so stylized in a way that I think I didn't recognize when I was young and watching this.

Just because I think it's been made fun of at this point.

Like, you know, the Morgan Freeman voiceover, everybody's monologuing, everybody's like staring very intensely into space, trying to eke out some of the tears.

And they're all great.

But yeah, it was more heightened than I think I had remembered or expected.

But really enjoyed it.

Really enjoyed all the performances.

Obviously, Morgan Freeman, wonderful.

Brooks, the guy who played Brooks, broke my heart.

That was very sad.

Loved all the supporting characters.

And I always forget that Tim Robbins is absolutely enormous.

He's like six foot five and they just can't hide it.

He was at the time and has remained one of the tallest actors in Hollywood.

He's great, also, I should say, not just tall, also great.

I love the Shawshank Redemption.

I also saw it on television a bit, but I watched this with my dad a number of times growing up.

This seems like a Steve Winterbauer movie.

Oh, absolutely.

And a Chris Winnerbauer movie.

Yeah.

I find that the movies that give me the most comfort and that I'm the biggest sucker for are movies about male friendship camaraderie movies, which I think are rare.

Like really pure platonic love male friendship movies are hard to find if they're not based around a mission or some sort of action or, you know, something like that.

And so, I really love the tender underpinnings of this movie.

And I agree with you, Lizzie.

I do think it, and Frank Darabont has said as much.

You know, there are some hack-need elements.

The voiceover was considered a little hoary, even for the time, but he talks a lot about how he always wanted to push the sentimentality, but never tip over.

I think it does.

I agree.

I think he toes the line really well.

And so, this remains a favorite of mine.

And I now love it more because the story behind the Shaw Shank Redemption, I think, is as compelling as the movie itself.

And I really can't wait to dive in.

Oh, I can't wait.

What tunnel of poo-poo are we going to dive into?

A couple.

As you mentioned, Lizzie, Shaw Shank Redemption is now one of the most famous prison films of all time.

It's one of the best known American films, actually.

If you go by its IMDb ratings, it is arguably the most popular movie on the internet, technically speaking.

For a long time it was.

I don't know if it still is.

Is it the number one movie on IMDb still?

We'll get there.

But this fate, as a true American classic, was far from certain.

And a lot of people were skeptical that this Stephen King novella, as you mentioned, could even be turned into a feature film, including Stephen King himself.

But before we get there, the details.

The Shawshank Redemption is a 1994 prison drama film directed by Frank Darabont.

It was written by by Frank Darabont, and it's based on Stephen King's novella, Rita Hayworth and the Shawshank Redemption.

It stars Morgan Freeman as Ellis Red Redding, Tim Robbins as Andy Dufrane, a maliciously wonderful Bob Gunton as Warden Samuel Norton, William Sadler as Haywood, Clancy Brown as Mr.

Krabs,

Prison Guard Captain Byron Hadley, Gil Bellows as Tommy Williams, and you mentioned Lizzie James Whitmore as Brooks Hatlin, and many, many, many more.

You guys will recognize many a wonderful character actor in the background of this movie.

Now, the sources for today's episode include, but are not limited to, Morgan Freeman, a biography by Kathleen Tracy, The Little Known Story of How the Shawshank Redemption Became One of the Most Beloved Films of All Time, published by Vanity Fair, The Shawshank Redemption, Two Pros and Countless Cons by Entertainment Weekly, The Shawshank Redemption at 25 by Deadline, Shawshank the Redeeming Feature, a documentary you can watch on YouTube, Mark Kermode's book on the Shawshank Redemption, and many more articles, retrospectives, and interviews.

There is so much out here on this movie.

Morgan Freeman, in fact, has basically started to tell people, please don't ask me about the Shawshank Redemption anymore in his interviews because he's so tired of talking about it.

So, how did a non-horror novella from Hollywood's favorite horror maestro end up in the hands of a former set dresser and become one of the most rewatchable movies of all time.

And Lizzie, what tunnel of crap did they go through to get there?

Let's talk about it.

So Lizzie, how familiar are you as a main native with author Stephen King?

Well, I don't think I can call myself a main native.

They'd probably qualify me as a summa person, which is, you know, frowned upon.

Maine transplants.

Decently familiar, although I have still not been to his house, I'm sorry to say.

Come on, Stephen, where's the invite?

Seriously, let me go see your spider gates.

I think he has cool wrought iron gates up front of his house.

I've seen a lot of Stephen King TV and film adaptations, but I haven't actually read a ton.

I've read some of his more recent novels like The Outsider and I guess classics like The Stand, but I'm certainly not a Stephen King expert.

That's okay, because I've read literally almost every book Stephen King has ever written, including Different Seasons, which is the book that contains Rita Hayworth and the Shaw Shank Redemption.

So let's talk about where Stephen King was in the early 1980s.

So, he's only roughly six or seven years into his actual published career at this point, and his name is already ubiquitous with the horror genre, both in the literary world and in Hollywood.

He is one of the most bankable, visible, widely read novelists in the United States.

So, Lizzie, if you remember, Brian DePalma's Carrie adaptation with Sissy Space had grossed nearly $35 million and nabbed two Oscar nominations, which I love.

And then Stanley Kubrick's The Shining did nearly $50 million in 1980.

Notably, Stephen King, not a fan of that adaptation, at least at the time.

He'd even found time to publish under a pseudonym.

Lizzie, if you're not familiar, Richard Bachman is the pseudonym that Stephen King used for, I believe, a period of about seven years.

He wrote five books under that name.

He was unmasked by the mid-1980s.

People said, okay, this is the same person.

The styles are very similar.

But success was a bit of a prison for Stephen King.

Stories that were not supernatural or scary were difficult to publish.

He'd written four such stories, or four that we'll focus on.

Rita Hayworth and the Shah Shank Redemption, Apt Pupil, The Body, and The Breathing Method.

So unlike King's novels, which are long,

anybody who's read It or The Stand can tell you they can run upward of a thousand pages.

His short stories, by contrast, are often extremely economical.

These four stories fell in this no man's land in in between.

So, unlike King's novels, very long, or his short stories, often very tight, these stories fell between 25,000 and 35,000 words.

And so, as Stephen King himself described it, quote, in between the novel and the short story is a confused, anarchy-riddled literary banana republic that is sometimes called the novella.

Rather than try to sell them on their own, King and his editor decide to wrap them up into a book and sell them as, quote, something different, hence the name Different Seasons.

Now, like Cujo the year prior and Firestarter the year before that, Different Seasons was a hit.

And King had proved that he had more to offer than horror alone.

He was 35 years old.

He was rich.

He was prolific.

He was famous.

35.

35.

No, that's how old I am.

I haven't done anything.

You've made a podcast.

And a baby.

Yeah.

King had already made two or three babies, so he had you beat there too.

Whatever.

He's rich, prolific, and famous.

Three things that young Frank Darabont is most definitely not.

Now, Lizzie, like the characters in Rita Hayworth and the Shashink Redemption, Frank Darabont's family knew a thing or two about losing freedom.

On October 23rd, 1956, the people of Hungary attempted a countrywide revolution against their government, the Hungarian People's Republic, which existed under the subjugation of the USSR.

This was a 15-day uprising, and it was crushed by Soviet tanks and troops on November 7th, And nearly 250,000 people fled the country on foot seeking food, clothing, and political asylum.

Two of them were Frank Darabont's parents.

On January 28th, 1959, when they were living as refugees in France, they welcomed a boy into their lives, Ferenc Arpad Derabont,

which would later be anglicized to Frank Darabont.

So Frank and his family came to the United States when he was an infant on a boat, and he spent the first five years of his life in Chicago.

They then relocated to Los Angeles, and it's there that Frank fell in love with what medium, Lizzie?

Cinema.

Cinema.

And it was one movie in particular that apparently really inspired him, George Lucas's THX 1138, starring Robert Duvall, which was released in 1971.

Hollywood, though, may as well have been on the moon for Frank Darabon.

He graduated from Hollywood High School in 1977, and he didn't go to college.

He just went to work.

He served concessions and ushered at Grauman's Egyptian Theater in Hollywood and watched films for free.

That was like the big perk of the job is that he could watch movies for free and he could learn.

He would work on sets as a PA on low-budget features, and he wrote on a typewriter with whatever free time that he could find.

So that PA work leads to set construction and set dressing, which Daribont has called his film school.

As he later put it, his job was to be the, quote, guy on the set who represents the art department.

If a wall needs to be moved or a chair needs to be moved or a different bit of dressing needs to come in, that's the set dresser.

And I was able to observe quite a few productions during about a six-year period as a set dresser.

End quote.

Darabont said he had, quote, no career whatsoever.

But like the characters in Shawshank, he had hope.

And that hope, Lizzie, came in the form of Stephen King.

Darabont, like a lot of Americans, was a huge Stephen King fan.

And he had a big dream.

to adapt one of Stephen King's stories for the big screen.

But that's gotta feel like a pipe dream, right?

Arguably the biggest author in the United States, lending his story to a no-name set dresser in Hollywood, right?

Who hasn't even directed anything yet.

Darabont's this broke kid.

He's got a high school diploma, but Stephen King also knew what it was like to be broke.

Before Carrie had been published, Stephen King was poor, dirt poor.

He and his wife, author Tabitha, were struggling to raise two kids in a trailer off of King's meager teaching wages, which were an upgrade.

He had before that worked at a laundromat.

And the publishing industry looked as impenetrable to him as Hollywood did to Daribont.

And so you guys can read this.

King has written at length about the kindness of strangers, editors who took chances on him early on, who read his early books, the ones that weren't even published.

And so he very much, I think, across his career, has had this attitude of wanting to pay it forward to the next generation of creatives.

Lissy, have you ever heard of something called the Dollar Baby program?

No,

I haven't.

Can I enter my child into it?

I was going to say, you can sell her for a dollar.

As we've learned on this show, securing the rights for a literary property can be prohibitively expensive.

So we just covered Superman the movie.

The Saul Kinds spent $3 million on the rights for the Man of Steel.

But Stephen King was willing to sell you a story for a dollar.

Beginning in the late 1970s, Stephen King let any bona fide student or emerging filmmaker license one of his unoptioned short stories or novellas for one dollar.

Wow.

Quote, over my accountant's moans and head-clutching protests, end quote.

The Dollar Baby program had three stipulations.

One, the film had to have a runtime of under 45 minutes.

Two, it had to be a strictly non-commercial license, so it was for festival or academic work only.

Three, King had to be sent a finished copy when it was done, and he had to be given an on-screen credit.

So he would watch all of them as well.

But what's really cool is it gave filmmakers an opportunity to flex their muscles and create a calling card.

You couldn't monetize it, but you could use it to show what you could do.

Right.

And so in 1983, Frank Darabont paid Stephen King $1 for the rights to a short story called The Woman in the Room.

The Woman in the Room is a very, very simple, non-horror story.

It's the final vignette from the collection Night Shift, and the first line reads, the question is, is, can he do it?

The it in question is euthanasia.

So the story is about a lawyer who is struggling to care for slash emotionally deal with his mother who's dying of cancer.

And by the end of the story, with the help of some inspiration from a criminal that he's defending, he euthanizes his own mom.

In the reality, King is writing about himself.

His mom had died of cancer while Carrie was being released.

And in a lot of ways, the book is kind of the perfect prelude to Rita Hayworth and the Shawshank Redemption.

It's this question, can I do it, right, that rolls around the character's mind, like Andy Dufrayne at the beginning of the movie.

Can I kill my wife?

Can I kill this lover?

So Darabont's adaptation, I think, is really wonderful.

It's very simple.

It's very well shot.

There's basically no horror except for a brief dream sequence about midway through.

It's 30 minutes long, uses a little bit of music, has great cinematography.

The DP would go on to shoot Glen Gary, Glenn Ross, and be a very successful feature film cinematographer.

And I think Darabont very smartly realized that King was writing about himself because he makes the main character look like Stephen King.

Like, you know, Stephen King's glasses.

He styles him very much in that way.

Most of the short films made off of the Dollar Baby program were by King's own admission, not very good.

Darabont sends him The Woman in the Room, and it left King in, quote, slackjawed amazement, end quote.

So to this point, the best Dollar Baby adaptation that's been done.

And Darabont had found kind of one of his first fans, along with his first agent, Alan Green, who Darabont described as the very first guy who really took a chance on representing me.

So Darabont has a win.

King likes his story, but he's not satisfied.

And he has his sights on another Stephen King narrative that is a little darker than the woman in the room.

And that's called The Mist.

Lizzie, did you ever see The Mist?

I didn't, but I know about it.

Right.

Another Maine set.

I mean, virtually all King books are set in Maine.

It's a 1980 novella.

It follows a group of townfolk from Bridgeton, Maine, who end up trapped in a supermarket as a dense mist filled with Lovecraftian creatures surrounds them.

It's very hard horror, classic king horror.

And of course, the people in the supermarket become more horrifying than the monsters outside.

Yeah.

But Daribont was leery of horror, and he didn't want to be typecast much in the way that I think King felt he had been typecast early in his career.

So as Darabont later said, I grew up with Norman Rockwell and Frank Capra, and there's a part of me that's completely captivated by those kinds of storytellers who would tell those kinds of tall tales.

⁇ End quote.

So he went with his second choice, Rita Hayworth and the Shawshank Redemption, which on paper seems like a very unusual choice to try to adapt into a feature film.

Yeah.

As Vanity Fair later put it, Lizzie, the 96-page story is anything but cinematic, consisting largely of Red ruminating about fellow prisoner Andy, confounding Hollywood's Hollywood's predilection for high-concept Harry Potter meets diehard, log lines.

Neither of those movies existed at the time that Darabont optioned this, though.

Yeah, I could say.

But Darabont didn't see Shawshank as a prison movie.

He saw it as a tall tale.

I think maybe closer even to something like Big Fish, for example, by Tim Burton.

100%.

It has a very Big Fish vibe.

Well, I guess Big Fish has a very Shawshank redemption vibe.

Sure.

So in roughly 1987, Darabont sends Stephen King a check for $5,000, which I have to imagine is an incredible amount of money for the young, struggling writer-director for the rights to Rita Hayworth and the Shawshank Redemption, an option.

According to Darabont, even Stephen King did not understand how Shawshank could be a movie.

But to Darabont, it was, quote, just dead obvious.

That's just because it's so much internal monologuing is that it's not super plot heavy.

What's the main hang-up?

I think there is not an obvious structure because it is written as a recollection, a memoir of another prisoner.

Got it.

It feels very episodic when you read it.

I did reread it for the podcast, and we'll get into the differences between the movie and the novella, although the movie's a very faithful adaptation of the novella.

You had to be able to imagine certain plot devices in order to lock it into a feature form.

And Daribont does a fantastic job in imagining those plot devices.

I don't think, though, it was so obvious that Daribont could just sit down and write it right away because he basically avoided writing this for five years.

So he optioned it and then just said, I'm not ready and put it in a drawer and waited.

But Stephen King gave it to him for $5,000?

He optioned it for $5,000.

So I think, and again, I don't know the term of the option.

I couldn't figure that out.

I read a secondary source that said 30 months, but we just don't know.

My guess is that Daribont optioned it and had somebody else come forward saying they were going to want to buy it, Darabont probably would have been shit out of luck.

And so he's actually very lucky that in those intervening five years, nobody else came for that project.

But during that time, he was improving as a writer and a director.

So he did a couple of screenplays, A Nightmare on Elm Street, three Dream Warriors.

I actually really like that one.

The Blob.

I like the Blob.

Oh, nice.

I love the Blob.

And The Fly 2, which I haven't seen.

What's interesting is he was worried about being typecast as a director, but he was already typecast as a writer.

He was doing low-budget horror films very consistently.

Yeah.

And on the directing side, he had directed a feature film, but it was technically a TV movie.

It's called Buried Alive.

It was a $2 million TV movie.

It aired on the USA network in 1990.

And in kind of an interesting bit of narrative echoing, it was about a man who discovers that his wife and lover are trying to kill him,

not the other way around.

In the early 1990s, Daribont was, according to his friend, author David Show, considering directing either one of the Child's Play franchise films, this would have presumably been Child's Play 3, or a quote Child's Play-like film.

So, Haunted Doll.

In either case, it doesn't sound like Daribont was particularly excited about it.

So, he finally sat down to write Rita Hayworth and the Shaw Shank Redemption to prove to himself and to Stephen King that this story could be a movie.

You paid $5,000 for it.

Exactly.

So, he takes a turn in solitary, his stints eight weeks, and at the end of it, he has a script and he knows exactly where to send send it.

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Before Frank Darabont had sent his $5,000 check to Stephen King, Writer, director, producer, and actor Rob Reiner had optioned the second story in Stephen King's different seasons, Lizzie.

Stand by Me.

The body, as it was known, but Stand By Me, the movie that it would become.

It's a coming-of-age story, if you guys are somehow unfamiliar, following four boys who set out to find the dead body of a missing boy in Maine.

The movie was a big financial success.

It was well received critically.

It's great.

And Stephen King himself was a very, very, very big fan.

So in 1987, the year after the film came out, Rob Reiner established Castle Rock Entertainment with startup capital provided by standby me distributor Columbia Pictures.

And guys, Castle Rock, as any Stephen King aficionado knows, is the fictional town featured in The Body, but also The Dead Zone, Cujo, needful things.

I think it's probably only the second most famous Stephen King fake town behind Dairy, which is where Pennywise the Clown is from.

I love that you just say that like it's his hometown.

Yeah.

He's just a normal guy.

He's just a normal dairy man.

Well, I mean, he's kind of from across the like multiverse, the Stephen King multiverse, but he does basically live in a a standpipe.

Like Stephen King loves pipes.

He loves standpipes.

He always talks about and Tennywise lives in a pipe.

You know, Andy escapes through a pipe in the book, too.

Stephen King.

Just a regular guy in a pipe and dairy.

Just Tim Curry in a pipe and dairy, as it was in the 90s.

So Reiner wanted to set up a, quote, filmmaker-friendly haven, insulated from studio politics, and he started off strong.

Castle Rock's run from about 89 to 93 is insane.

When Harry met Sally, misery, oh man, a few good men, and on the television side, they produced Seinfeld.

Whoa, that's right.

It's wild.

Yeah, that's crazy.

So Darabont sends the Shawshank script to this studio that had already done the companion story from different seasons.

It's really a perfect fit.

And it lands on the desk of producer Liz Glotzer, who is apparently the person at Castle Rock who loved prison movies.

And so if anything came in prison related, they're like, send it to Liz.

She loves it.

I love prison.

That's what she said.

Now, you mentioned why did this feel like it couldn't be adapted into a film, from a book?

And let's talk about some of the differences from the book to the movie.

So Daribont, as I mentioned, has done a very respectful, elegant, faithful adaptation of King's work, but it's very inventive in the way that it takes something that's loose and flowing and gives it a rhyming, plant and pay-based structure.

The themes of the bond between Andy and Red, The Rock Hammer, Rita Hayworth, The Daring Escape, The Secret Identity, that's all there.

Most of the characters are roughly the same.

There are composites, you know, that are made.

But Daribont puts in these really, really smart flagpoles for the audience to understand as we're moving through.

So a couple of examples.

Red's parole hearings, the three parole hearings.

We get one kind of parole hearing he describes at the beginning of the novella, and that's it.

And Daribont is the one who structures the film with the first one, the mid one, and then in arguably my favorite scene of the film his final parole hearing brooks's release into the wild and that entire montage that ends with brooks was here completely fabricated by darabont so that entire sequence is new to the film and the relationship between andy and brooks is something that was also added to the film brooks was basically out of the library and out of the prison by the time andy gets into the library and then just little flourishes you know salvation lying within the rock hammer being held in the bible the wardens come up in the murder of Tommy Williams, multiple wardens become one, a bunch of villainous guards become one, Red and Andy are given kind of a recognizable crew, you know, Lloyd and Hayward.

And so Liz Glotzer kind of falls in love with this very leisurely paced but compelling prison drama.

And she actually stopped reading about 90 pages in because she was so scared that it wouldn't end in a way that was satisfying.

And she gets to the ending, she puts it down, and she later said, quote, it was the best script I'd ever read when I read it.

Wow.

End quote.

So let's talk a little bit about prison movies, because I didn't know that prison movies are very niche in Hollywood from a production perspective.

So do you know how many prisons there are in the United States?

I didn't know this.

No, I don't.

A lot, I'm guessing.

1,700 facilities or so is what I read online.

The United States runs far more individual places of confinement than any other country in in the world.

Of course, we love prisons, just like that lady does.

We do love prisons.

You know, we beat Brazil.

I think Brazil may have the second most prisons, but we beat them by 300.

If you add in jails, we've got close to 5,000 prisons and jails in the United States.

And of course, this doesn't include juvenile detention centers, tribal and military lockups, state psychiatric hospitals, and of course, immigration detention, which I'm sure have skyrocketed in recent months as well.

And so despite the fact that incarceration is really ubiquitous in the United States, prison films have been a very niche offering throughout Hollywood history.

And I didn't realize this because I can remember so many famous examples of prison films, but they're kind of a rare outing on a year-to-year basis.

And so, a little research led to the rough estimate that about one to maybe 2% of films released year-to-year, if not less, are actually prison films.

And these are dwarfed by Westerns in the 30s, 40s, and 50s, musicals, horror by an order of magnitude for the most part.

And so, Vanity Fair chalked it up to prison films not being considered moneymakers, but I don't think that's really true because, again, a bit of research reveals that a number of prison films have provided really solid returns over the years.

Like Midnight Express did 35 million against 2.3.

The Longest Yard, 43 against 2.9.

Yeah, that was a big hit.

Escape from Alcatraz, 43 against 8.

Cool Hand Luke, 16 against 3.2.

I mean, there are flops, don't get me wrong, but it seems like it's actually a relatively healthy genre.

I think that the issue is that they have limited upside.

I could find very few examples where they made more than $50 million.

I have another idea about why it may be less appealing, and this could be totally wrong, but there's no opportunity for a female lead, a romantic lead.

You nailed it.

Exactly.

No room for romance and limited opportunity to appeal to a female audience.

Well, plenty of room for romance, Chris, but not in the way that they thought was marketable, I guess.

Not that what we see in Shaw Shank is romantic.

It's not.

I just mean, just because it's all men doesn't mean that they couldn't fall in love in prison.

Of course.

And they do fall in love.

I actually think the Shawshank Redemption is a love story.

It is a friendship love story.

And it's one of the reasons it's so successful.

But that's not common inside the prison film genre.

No, no, no.

There's also, you don't get the chance to explore exotic scenery.

You're trapped in one location that's often very dreary and depressing.

Drab, yeah.

And there is also no opportunity for product placement, which seems minor, but if you think about post-ET, you can't even have a character drinking a Pepsi.

No, it's true.

Because he's a convict at the end of the day.

So heading into the 90s, dude movies tended to be dominated by things like Die Hard, Lethal Weapon, Terminator 2.

There's a lot of profit in action flicks.

Glotzer is going to be fighting an uphill battle, she feels.

So she sends the script to Reiner and she stakes her career on it.

She says, Rob, I'm quitting if we don't produce this movie.

Fortunately, it didn't come to that.

Rob Reiner reads it.

I love love it.

In fact, he loved it too much.

According to Vanity Fair, Rob Reiner sent Frank Darabont an offer he nearly couldn't refuse.

Frank, we'll give you $3 million for your script, but I, Rob Reiner, am gonna direct it with Tom Cruise in the lead role, since we just made a few good men together.

Lizzie, do you think you could have turned down $3 million?

And Tom Cruise?

No.

In 90s 90s money?

That's a lot of money.

And if you had been working as a set dresser and, you know, a low-budget writer until this point, I don't think I could have turned it down either.

Also, I want to say I think Tom Cruise could have been good.

He especially could have been good, as we'll get to with the way that the character was actually described.

Oh.

So we'll talk about that in a moment.

Now, Frank Darabont was tormented, Lizzie, by this offer.

Yeah, I bet.

He had spent years struggling as a writer.

barely making rent.

He's 33 years old at this point, and he is being offered more money than perhaps he'd hope to earn in his entire life.

No way would I turn, I would be like, what's the, what do you want me to sign?

Also, if he said no and insisted that he direct, Castle Rock could fire him at any point for cause and just say he was incompetent.

He has no connections in Hollywood.

He has one agent who believes in him and they could just replace him with Rob Reiner anyway.

But Daribont couldn't extinguish his hope.

As he later said, you can continue to defer your dreams in exchange for money and die without ever having done the thing you set out to do.

I think he knew money would be a prison.

So he turned it down.

$3 million.

Shawshank was his.

And Rob Reiner was kicking himself.

As he later joked, Different Seasons is on my desk for years.

You would have thought we'd have read the next story, but we didn't.

They just read the first one.

I don't know if I fully buy that because, at least in the copy I have, Rita Hayworth is the first story.

No, I'm sure he read it.

But it's always possible.

Who knows?

I love Rob Reiner.

And speaking of, true to his reputation as a mensch, he said, Frank, it's yours.

And he took Darabont on as his protege.

So in May of 1992, two weeks after he'd sent out the script to Castle Rock, a $25 million budget is drawn up.

And Darabon, I read, was paid well, $750,000 for the script and his directing fee.

And I believe he got a percentage of the back end as well.

Yeah, that's pretty good.

Word goes out to town, the Shawshank redemption is coming.

Now, I think there's probably nothing more exciting as a writer than sparking a studio bidding war.

I cannot speak from experience, I never have, but I think there's probably nothing more exciting for a writer-director than a script that sparks a bidding war amongst actors.

And so, as producer Nikki Marvin later put it, quote, the script got Xeroxed and it went around to every actor in Hollywood, and we got besieged.

We were getting calls from people at our homes, cell phones.

It took on a life of its own.

End quote.

I totally understand why.

Lizzie, any ideas about folks who might have been interested around the time?

We discussed Tom Cruise briefly.

Brad Pitt.

We'll get to him.

Yep.

Well, it's got to be all men.

I don't know.

Brad Pitt's the only one I got in my head.

Well, that's a good guess because he's involved, and we'll discuss him briefly.

Nicholas Cage was apparently also interested.

Of course.

And Charlie Sheen.

Oh.

Presumably in the role of Andy Dufran.

But I think the most interesting bit of casting in this film is the film's narrator, Red, as he goes by in the book.

His name is not fully written out in the book, or Ellis Boyd Redding in Darrabont's adaptation.

Now, again, Lizzie, any self-respecting Stephen King fan can tell you that the biggest superficial change between the book and the film is Red's race.

I was wondering about that because he makes a joke.

He says, maybe it's because I'm Irish.

That's right.

So in King's novella, Red is a white Irishman.

So as Darabont put it, quote, my brain went to some of my all-time favorite actors like Gene Hackman and Robert Duvall

who both also would have been great yeah for one reason or another they weren't available end quote so it was producer Liz Glotzer who recommended Morgan Freeman wow Liz My guess is that because she was coming to the script not with the short story as scripture beforehand.

But the script, yeah.

But just the script that she could look at it from a more colorblind perspective and just just really thought, like, why does he need to be white in this instance?

And had he done Driving Miss Daisy at this point?

He had.

So let's talk about that.

So Freeman had broken out pretty late in his career, basically in his 40s.

1987's Street Smart was when he got his first nomination for best supporting actor.

But 89, as you mentioned, Lizzie, was the big year.

He has Glory, one of my favorites, Driving Miss Daisy, not one of my favorites, for which he was nominated for best actor, Lean on Me, and Johnny Handsome.

And I think casting Freeman was a stroke of genius in this movie.

Oh, yeah.

His voice, I know the whole voiceover thing can feel hackneyed.

No, no, no.

But it had not been done with him before this.

That's what I mean is like it became iconic because of this movie and then it became sort of rote, but it's not in terms of when this was made.

And also, I don't think anybody else could have pulled this off.

It would have gotten tedious, I think, by the end of the movie, but he is so varied and his voice is so beautiful.

It's just like, it really, it does work so, so well.

There's such a wonderful weariness to him that when it breaks through, you know, and he smiles or he laughs or he speaks about how he likes Andy from the start.

That warmth is so infectious without having to, I mean, really, I think almost nobody overacts in this movie, but it's Freeman's subtlety and the very intricate nuances of his vocal performance, as you mentioned, that I think really carry this narrative.

Well, he plays it as just very relaxed, which makes sense.

He's been there for 30 years by the time we meet him there.

Like, I just think it's a very lived-in performance and it's really great.

Now, while his younger white counterparts may have been clamoring for a role in this movie, Lizzie, it doesn't seem like Freeman was really fighting to get it.

In 1993, the LA Times asked him what interested him in the project: quote, money, a job, work, end quote.

Okay.

Now, after some prodding, he went on to elaborate, quote, it's an interesting script.

I like Castle Rock.

They do good stuff.

And there's Rob Reiner.

I'll do anything to be associated with him.

End quote.

Now, he was more effusive in later years.

He told Vanity Fair in 2014 that the script was delightful and he was flabbergasted by the offer to play Red.

Fun fact, his son is also in the film.

The photograph of him as a young man in his parole folder is his son, Alfonso.

I was going to say it looked a lot like him.

It does.

Now, Daribont also softened Red's character quite a bit.

This is another difference from the novella.

So in the film, we know he committed murder, and he says he committed murder.

We do not know what that murder is.

In the novella, that murder is spelled out, and it's pretty shocking, and I'd like to read you the description.

I put a large insurance policy on my wife, who was three years older than I was, and then I fixed the brakes of the Chevrolet coupe that her father had given us as a wedding present.

It worked out exactly as I had planned, except I hadn't planned on her stopping to pick up the neighbor woman and the neighbor woman's infant son on their way down Castle Hill and into town.

Three life sentences for three lives taken.

Wow.

I think he smartly realized that if we understood that Red had murdered three people, including an infant child, even if that portion of the murder was accidental or, I guess, manslaughter, technically.

Well, I mean, that's very different because that's premeditated in cold blood murder versus what we get in the movie.

He describes being a kid, and it seems like it's impulsive.

It seems like maybe it's almost an accident, kind of.

Like, I mean, not, he does kill people, but it seemed to me like it was insinuated that it may have happened during a robbery or something where he that's kind of what I thought too, was it was a different crime gone awry.

Exactly.

And I think that was a smart change by Darabon.

I think it would have been hard for the audience.

In a book, he can provide you enough interiority that you can come to understand it.

But I think in a movie, that would have been pretty distancing for the audience to sit through.

Yeah.

One other funny thing that I just mentioned.

So I saw the movie before I read the book, and I also saw Malcolm X around the same time.

I assumed he was nicknamed Red as a reference to Malcolm X, whose nickname was Red when he was younger, because he had red hair.

But obviously, that's not the case.

So I just thought that was very interesting to learn.

All right, let's talk about casting Andy Dufran, or as you mentioned, Lizzie, human giant Tim Robbins.

Now, here is how Andy Dufran is described in the book.

He was a short, neat little man with sandy hair and small, clever hands.

He wore gold-rimmed spectacles.

His fingernails were always clipped, and they were always clean.

Not a six-foot-five giant.

Yeah.

Tom Hanks apparently passed on the part.

He was likely focused on Forrest Gump.

And Kevin Costner apparently passed on it too.

And my guess is he was gearing up for Wyatt Earp and then Waterworld.

Other names I found by way of secondary sources include Johnny Depp, Jeff Bridges, and Matthew Broderick.

Take those with a grain grain of salt.

They all would make sense.

Yeah.

We can confirm Tom Cruise loved the script.

He even did a table read with the team.

And again, he had just worked with Rob Reiner on a few good men.

But Darabont was too green.

Lizzie, as we discussed on The Big Flop, Tom Cruise was dead set on working with the greatest living directors at this point in his career.

He would go on to do Eyes Wide Shut with Stanley Kubrick, for example.

Yeah, go on, maybe regret that a little bit.

Exactly.

You know, Kubrick was the greatest director ever.

Darabont was a 33-year-old first-time theatrical feature director.

So, Tom Cruise apparently told Rob Reiner that he would consider the part if Reiner agreed to keep a close eye on things.

Basically, will you kind of direct with Frank?

Right.

But as Liz Glosser later said,

Reiner told Cruz, No, if you're going to do it with Darabont, it's his version.

So then, Tom Cruise didn't want to do it.

Good for Rob Reiner.

Yeah, Rob Reiner's the best.

Stand-up guy.

It may have been Darabon's vision, but it was apparently Morgan Freeman's idea to reach out to Tim Robbins.

The six foot five human giant Tim Robbins.

He was not only one of Hollywood's tallest actors, he was in the early 90s one of its most critically and commercially successful.

As Freeman put it, quote, he was just transcendent in his work.

When he got his teeth into something, he is totally watchable.

He is absolutely engrossing to me.

So it had been less than five years from Robin's breakout movie, Bull Durham.

I'm sure you've seen Lizzie.

Great movie.

And 1992 was his best year yet.

He took home best actor honors at Cannes for his turn as a studio executive in Robert Altman's The Player, which if you guys have not seen, it's a very fun movie.

And I do think that the new Apple show the studio pulls from.

And he had directed his first feature film, Bob Roberts, which is a political satire mockumentary.

It was not a big commercial hit, but it was very well received critically.

And he had even more stuff on the horizon.

Robert Altman's shortcuts, the Cohen brothers, Hudsucker proxy.

So Tim Robbins is a hot, up-and-coming performer.

According to the LA Times, Daribont and producer Nikki Marvin traveled to North Carolina to the set of the Hudsucker proxy to visit Robbins and woo him for Shawshank.

Now, Robbins says that he had been planning on taking a break, which would make sense.

He had just directed a film and he would be starring in four films in a row.

Yeah.

But, quote, it was the best script I'd read in a couple of years.

I also wanted to work with Morgan Freeman, end quote.

And I just like this idea that there's this really strong mutual respect between Freeman and Robbins as actors, despite how different they are as performers.

And it just reminds me of the relationship in the film.

Yeah.

By consolidating King's sprawling palette of characters, Darabont and casting director Deborah Aquila, or Aquila, were able to lure in a bunch of wonderful character actors to flesh out their cast.

We discussed this a little bit at the beginning, Lizzie.

You mentioned Brooks.

I love the Brooks storyline.

It's just so tragic and poignant.

This is actor James Whitmore.

He had actually been retired or had not acted in seven years, and he was lured out of retirement for this role.

He was actually twice nominated for Oscars and he had won a Golden Globe, but he's always said that he found film and TV boring because he didn't like waiting between takes and he preferred the stage.

He was a big stage performer.

So then William Sadler, who I think was probably best known for Bill and Ted's excellent adventure or bogus journey at this point.

He plays the Grim Reaper and he also was the bad guy in the second Die Hard, Die Hard 2, Die Harder.

He plays Hayward.

He has the slight stutter.

He says, you couldn't have picked Hank Williams.

Bob Gunton is, I think, transcendent as the absolutely sadistic Warden Norton.

He's great because he doesn't overplay his hand early on.

It's not immediately clear that he's going to be as sinister as he is.

I agree.

Clancy Brown joined in what would become a very classic Clancy Brown role as an equally sadistic guard Byron Hadley.

And I don't know if you notice this character, Lizzie Floyd.

He's the taller, older white inmate who's also friends with Red.

He has kind of the third most amount of lines.

That's actor Brian Libby, who acted in Darabont's The Woman in the Room short film.

He plays the prisoner that the main character is representing.

Yeah, and I think he's great in this movie, and he was really good in The Woman in the Room.

You mentioned Brad Pitt.

He was originally cast as Tommy Williams.

Oh, okay.

That makes sense.

The character who comes in and he finishes his high school diploma and ends up being betrayed by the warden.

He dropped out, though, after the success of Thelma and Luis.

I was wondering, because those would be very close together, and he's not in Thelma and Louise very much, but what he is in, you can tell, like, that's, you know, that's a movie star.

Yeah.

So he was replaced by Gil Bellows, and this was actually Gil Bellows' debut feature film.

And I think Gil

is fantastic.

I wonder if Pitt would have been more distracting in retrospect, whereas Bellows fits in more with the fabric of the film.

Who knows?

Another nearly cast or actually cast, but departed up-and-coming actor, James Gandalfini.

Lizzie, any guess as to who he might have been cast as?

Oh, God, is it Boggs?

It is.

Very good guess.

No, it's so scary.

It is.

Obviously, that role would be taken over by Mark Ralston.

Who is also scary and does a great job.

And I love James Gandalfini, but Ralston's got a more sinister quality, whereas Gandalfini feels like a bigger bully to me because of their physicality.

So I think it actually worked out for the best.

I agree.

And Gandalfini left to do true romance, which he was great in, and he would obviously go into play Tony Soprano.

There's also something, this is not the right word at all because he's so creepy in this, but there's something like sensual about his performance that I don't think that James Gandalfini would have really pulled off.

And that it really is scary.

He's upsetting.

I agree.

Now, Tim Robbins had an important stipulation before joining the film.

Roger Deakins was going to come with him as the movie's cinematographer.

Wow.

Yeah.

So yeah, Deakins and Robbins had just worked together on the HUD soccer proxy.

And Robbins knew that Deacons' experience behind the camera was a smart hedge against Darabont's lack thereof.

But Deacons wasn't the only Hollywood legend that was going to, and let's be fair, Deakins was not a Hollywood legend yet at this point, but he was a successful cinematographer.

Oscar-winning production designer Terrence Marsh, who had won Best Art Direction for Dr.

Jivago and for Oliver, and he'd also just done The Hunt for Red October.

Wow.

And then I also really want to point out: Oscar-nominated costume designer Elizabeth McBride, who had a fantastic career that was tragically cut short by cancer, I believe.

I think she passed away in her early 40s.

She had done Driving Miss Daisy, where she was nominated for an Oscar.

She had just done Thelma and Louise, and she had just done Fried Green Tomatoes.

Oh, wow.

Really, really love.

And then Shawshank Redemption.

I mean, what a run.

Yeah, that's amazing.

They even hired former inmates to share personal stories of violence similar to those in the script.

They had their team.

Now they needed a prison.

Now, Lizzie, as I'm sure you know, as a Maine native, the Shawshank State Penitentiary in Castle Rock, Maine is fictional, of course.

I would assume.

But the Ohio State Reformatory, where they filmed Shawshank Redemption, was very, very real.

It's It's built on the site of Camp Mordecai Bailey, a Union training base for Civil War soldiers.

The facility was completed in 1886 after 10 years of construction, and it was called an intermediate penitentiary.

Basically, it accepted inmates too old for juvie, but convicted of crimes more minor than those sent to the bigger Ohio State Penitentiary.

And initially, the goal of the institution was reform and rehabilitation, but honest reform and rehabilitation.

Yeah, how long did that last?

10 minutes?

Well, less than 30 years, as we'll see.

So they basically said, by way of religion, education, and a trade, if after 18 months you show progress, you could be paroled.

If not, you would do another 18 months.

And apparently, it was a very successful model.

It was based on the New York Reformatory at Elmira in New York, which one source claimed featured an 80% rehabilitation rate.

Wow.

The architecture of the structure was very unique.

It's got spires, stained glass windows.

One guard later called it Castle Grayskull.

It was designed, though, to evoke churches and cathedrals.

So one of the wardens of the prison once said, quote, prisoners were expected to sit in their cells and meditate and pray about their sins, end quote.

But it wouldn't last.

So as you mentioned, Lizzie, this same warden would go on to say, it was built as a monument to the idea that you could in fact change behavior by creating a religious experience.

We no longer believe that we can impose change on people.

The increase in prison population alone shows we don't know how to coerce change.

There are no magic buttons you can push.

And it's really interesting to me that you can kind of see his disillusionment with the program throughout his quote.

By the early 1930s, the OSR, as it was called, was overcrowded and failing.

In 1933, a research group of educators and penologists called the institution a disgrace with little or no rehabilitative values.

And in the early 1960s, the state pulled financial support for the rehab model altogether.

The OSR got converted into a maximum security prison.

And in 1978, the Council for Human Dignity filed filed a federal class action lawsuit on behalf of the roughly 2,000 inmates at the OSR.

They claimed their constitutional rights were being violated because of the, quote, brutalizing and inhumane conditions at the facility.

That suit got settled in 83, and changes were required that made basically it impossible to run the prison.

And so the deadline was set to close it by 1986.

Lucky for the Shawshank team, construction delays on the new facility pushed that close date until 1990.

In April of 1990, there was an attempted prison break that was not dissimilar from Andy Dufran's.

Whoa.

Inmates had used a homemade sledgehammer to carve an 8-inch wide, 10-inch deep hole out of a third-floor wall, which they'd hid stuffing inside of a sweatshirt.

And Lizzie, they hid the sound of the sledgehammer hitting the wall.

under the sound of the nearby weight room.

Oh.

Not unlike Andy hiding the rock under the lightning as he escapes.

The thunder, yeah.

yeah.

These inmates were all recaptured.

But the OSR was not a stranger to film productions.

Scenes for 1976's Harry and Walter go to New York, starring James Kahn, Elliot Gould, and Michael Caine, were shot there.

As was Lizzie, the wonderfully accurate and not over-the-top at all Tango and Cash with Sylvester Stallone and Kurt Russell, which we watched for a different podcast.

Yes, I remember it well.

Daribot knew that shooting at an active prison would kill their schedule.

If you shoot at a real prison, basically you have to go through security checks at the beginning and the end of the day, and it can add multiple hours to your schedule.

So lucky for them, the OSR was shut down in December of 1990.

It was timeless and it was empty.

Fun fact, the other facility that they considered was in Nashville, the Tennessee State Penitentiary, and Daribont would use that one for the exteriors in 1999's The Green Mile.

Oh, wow.

Okay.

Wow.

Frank Darabont loves prison.

Well, you know who else apparently tried to love prison?

Tim Robbins.

Oh, no.

Tim Robbins decided to attempt to go method for his research.

He visited a prison.

He put on shackles, prison gear, and said, put me in the hole for three days.

And they said, no, we will let you have three hours in there.

Yeah.

He went in for three hours.

He later admitted it was a bit of a stunt, but he did speak with a number of prisoners and guards.

And he said he came away with a profound understanding that prison was far worse, hundreds of times worse than anything he ever could have.

imagined.

And I cannot imagine to be deprived of your freedom in that way is, I think, the most terrifying thing I can think of.

Now, someone who was not interested in going to prison to research his role?

Morgan Freeman.

Good for him.

Morgan Freeman decided, you know what?

He just said, I'm not going to research it at all.

Now, he'd already done a prison film, 1980s Brewbaker, but he later said, basically, quote, Acting the part of someone who's incarcerated doesn't require any specific knowledge of incarceration because men don't change.

Once you're in that situation, you just toe whatever line you have to, end quote.

Whatever he did or didn't do, it absolutely works.

Yeah, it's great.

And my favorite quote on research here is Clancy Brown, who was offered the opportunity to talk to Ohio State correctional officers, but he then told them, listen, I don't know if you've read the script, but the last thing you want me to say is that I base this on the Ohio State Correctional Officers because I am an awful, awful person.

Yeah, seriously.

Yeah, that would not have been good.

Very sensitive of Clancy Brown.

Well done, Clancy Brown.

There's a big problem with the OSR, Lizzie.

The cells don't face each other.

The cells face out towards the windows.

So there's a central column of cells.

The cells are back to back, facing out towards windows.

It's the opposite of how it is in the movie.

Oh, okay.

So, Daribont wanted the cells to face each other.

So, Terrence Marsh and his team built that entire cell block in an abandoned Westinghouse electric factory in Mansfield, Ohio.

Wow.

That entire cell block is a build, not on a studio backlot, but again, in an abandoned electric factory in this small town.

Wow, it looks amazing.

It looks fantastic.

So principal photography begins in June of 1993 and it is brutal.

They are shooting in the Midwest in the humid summer, six days a week for 15 to 18 hours a day.

And they're shooting in an environment that feels extremely oppressive.

As Bob Gunton later said, quote, if you had a scene in that prison, you felt in your pores the weight of that place.

And it was like a character looming in every scene, end quote.

And I do think, Lizzie, I'm not sure if you agree, they do a great job of making Shawshank itself a character in the movie.

Oh, yeah, definitely.

I think one of the ways they do that is the opening helicopter shot that guides us around the entire prison as Andy's bus is arriving.

And that shot was not the idea of Daribont or DP Roger Deakins, but production designer Terrence Marsh, who apparently just offhand mentioned during a scouting trip, this place would look smashing with an opening helicopter shot.

End quote.

Great idea, Terrence Marsh.

Nice.

Yeah.

Now, one big advantage of being so limited in terms of location, they shot roughly linearly.

So, Lizzie, can you talk maybe or explain how films normally are shot out of order or versus linearly?

I will try, although you're the expert here.

So, it is unusual for something to be shot linearly, and that means that it's shot essentially in the order that the scenes are presented in the script.

The reason that that is unusual is because it's expensive, because you're shooting multiple different locations versus shooting out all of the scenes that take place in one location at one time.

Instead, you're jumping from scene to scene to scene, which means you're starting in one location, you may come back to it six scenes later, yada, yada.

So time consuming, expensive, hard for continuity reasons, and difficult, but as an actor, I think very beneficial.

Couldn't have said it better.

There was a lot of tension on Set Lizzie, and it came from a couple of key places.

On the one hand, Darabont has admitted that he struggled with the pace of shooting his first feature film.

He's described himself as a very quiet person, introverted.

The volume of questions that you are asked as a director on set is torrential, and he never had time to just stop and think.

He was also the writer of the film, and I'm sure they were adjusting the script as they go.

So he's still juggling kind of two jobs.

On the other hand, he, according to Daribont, couldn't get Roger Deakins to hurry up.

As Darabont later said, quote, with the time that he was taking to light, I really didn't have a lot of wiggle room.

I didn't have a lot lot of margin for error.

So I had to be very specific and precise, end quote.

So a lot of the tension seems to be Darabon's desire for more coverage and Deacons' desire to make the shot they're shooting look as good as possible.

And Deacons has often lamented that a lot of people say, oh, well, the Shaw Shank Redemption looks so good because it uses natural light.

And he's made the point, most of that movie is him artificially lighting these scenes to look as if he's got the power of the sun coming through the windows.

And he will begrudgingly say, like, I deserve a little, you know, me and my gaffer probably deserve a little more credit than we're being given here.

Yeah.

And the movie looks gorgeous.

It does.

I think the biggest tension, as has been reported over the years, was between Darabont and one of his lead actors.

So Tim Robbins apparently enjoyed fleshing things out with Darabont before and during the scene, but Freeman later said that what he was looking for from his director boiled down to, quote, where do I sit?

Where do I turn?

End quote.

As he later put it in 2014, acting isn't difficult.

Having to do something again and again for no discernible reason is.

End quote.

I think the tension seems to boil down to Darabont is chasing perfection or perhaps as the film's writer, a very specific delivery of certain lines and moments, and Freeman is bucking those goals.

In fact, he has said specifically he does not like working with writer directors.

Quote, For me, someone who comes to the project as a writer first is not going to be a good director.

He's going to usurp my job.

You pay an actor for his expertise.

If you don't use it, you'll raise hackles.

End quote.

So Darabont would apparently just ask for more takes to the point where Freeman would have to tell him no.

You said that Tim Robbins really enjoyed working with Frank Darabont.

How much experience had Frank Darabont had sort of working with a wide range of actors at this point?

He's directed one television movie outside of his short film.

Okay, this makes sense because like I feel like experience on a very professional level, you know, there's all different kinds of actors.

I totally understand where Morgan Freeman is coming from and it seems like this was a job for him, which by the way is totally fine.

This is a job.

And that would be hard if, you know, this is your passion project.

It's the thing you, you know, you turned down $3 million so you could direct this thing and you want to sit there and you want to like talk it out for hours and hash everything out.

And Morgan Freeman wants to show up, clock in and do his job.

And that's also fine.

I agree.

I think Freeman probably felt like if you give an actor a line reading, for example, like I want to hear it this specific way, you've stripped them of the ability to make a choice.

Yeah.

And therefore, they're no longer performing the scene.

They're parroting the scene.

At least in my personal limited experience, line readings are one of the worst things you can possibly do.

And as a director, I am guilty of doing it.

Apologies to the actors I've worked with, and I appreciate you sticking with me.

The scenes were also really hard, Lizzie.

So, for example, they actually tarred that roof that Andy, Redd, and the boys do in the film.

That is hot tar, and they are tarring the roof.

And they're doing it for take after take because it had to match Red's pre-recorded voiceover.

If the pacing was off, they had to take the scene again.

So at the end of the scene, they actually did all sit down and drink a beer, just like in the film, because they were so exhausted.

And I think that scene took so long.

That's why when he says, you know, it's 10 a.m.

And you're like, no, it's not.

It is sunset at the end of that scene.

I know.

I was like, it's 8.30.

What's happening?

They've been out there forever.

Even something as simple as throwing a baseball took its toll.

So that scene where Andy and Red first meet and Freeman's throwing the ball with Hayward, they shot that thing for nine hours.

Freeman's arm was so sore, it ended up in a sling after that scene.

Oh, God.

But Freeman wasn't the only one in pain.

Darabont has said that shooting any film is like, quote, being beaten with sticks.

The artistic compromises you have to make make every day of filming feel like a failure.

End quote.

I totally agree.

One of the compromises that he ended up making, and his escape Lizzie was supposed to be much, much longer.

So, as originally written, he was going to come out of the sewer pipe, go through the river, cross the field, get on a train.

They had one night to shoot it in the schedule.

Nope.

Probably not going to happen.

So, you get stripped down to what you see.

He ends up in the little, you know, runoff river, stands up, pulls his shirt off.

You get the crane shot where he holds his hands up to the sky.

Great.

Deacons hates that shot and that sequence.

That's, of course, like the most famous shot from the whole thing.

That they even use on the poster.

Yeah.

As he later said, I overlit it.

End quote.

You didn't, Roger.

Yeah.

You did.

It looks great.

Tim Robbins joked later that even though they went through great pains to make the shit that he crawled through in the tunnel sanitary, and there's a lot you can read online about what they put into that, including Fuller's Earth.

And I read chocolate syrup and a number of other things, the water that he fell into at the end was literally.

tested by a chemist and qualified as toxic.

It was all farm runoff.

And so he later said, Look, you want to be a good soldier.

You don't want to hold up the production.

But his one request was, can you please just have a shower ready?

So like when I get out of here, I can hop in a shower since I'm jumping into toxic runoff.

Give him a good Silkwood shower afterwards.

Now, Lizzie, King's novella, and another key difference, does not end in the fabled Ziwatanejo, nor does Darabon's first draft of the script.

Darabon's first draft ends exactly as the novella ends.

Red on a bus, leaving New England, heading for Texas.

His voiceover is exactly the same.

I hope I make it across the border.

I hope to see my friend and shake his hand.

I hope the Pacific is as blue as it has been in my dreams.

I hope.

He goes off on a bus and we are left to imagine what heaven might be like in Ziwatanejo.

I kind of thought that's where it was going to end.

Liz Glotzer wasn't satisfied.

She tells Frank at a scene where Red makes it to Ziwatanejo and reunites with with Andy.

And Daribont says, that sucks.

And Liz says, what's going to suck is if the audience watches this really brutal, painful movie with suicide and rape and wrongful conviction and murder, and they get to the end and you don't give them the conclusion between these two characters that they've been demanding.

And Daribont says, no, it's a sappy studio ending.

And Castle Rock, Liz Glosser, presumably, does something very smart.

They say, We'll pay for you to shoot it, and you can decide if you want to include it in the edit,

but you have to shoot it.

So they go to St.

Croix to shoot it, and Daribont asks Morgan Freeman to do something that's just a bridge too far.

He says, Why don't you pull out that harmonica that Andy gave you and blow on it to get his attention?

And Morgan Freeman says, No fucking way.

He said it was asinine, Morgan Freeman's right, unnecessary, and overkill.

No fucking way.

That's not a quote.

I am just giving some color commentary.

They shoot the scene and they wrap production in August of 1993.

So Darabont and Australian editor Richard France Spruce, who was a frequent George Miller collaborator,

worked on finding the form of this somewhat episodic story.

And as you mentioned, Lizzie, Darabont's biggest concern, and I believe Francis Bruce's biggest concern, was the tone.

So as Darabont said, I knew it was a very open-hearted story and something that was, you know, this fine line between honest sentiment and being overly sentimental.

I knew that there was always that fine line and you don't cross the line where it becomes corny sentiment, end quote.

I think he toes that line very nicely.

I agree.

And I think one of the reasons he does so is because of the score provided by Thomas Newman.

Very recognizable Thomas Newman score now.

But at the time, Newman was a relatively new up-and-comer in the film scene.

He had just done The Player with Tim Robbins, and I'd imagine that's how the connection was made to this film.

But he'd also done Scot of a Woman, 1992, Martin Brest.

And it should be mentioned, he is the son of Alfred Newman.

That's right.

If Daribont didn't know Thomas, he certainly knew his dad, musical prodigy, turned composer, who had won nine Oscars and was nominated 45 times.

Yeah, just that guy.

Not a big deal.

And it wasn't just his dad.

The Newman family is the most Academy Award-nominated family of all time.

Wait, can I share my favorite Newman family fact?

Share it.

So you may know that obviously there's Alfred Newman, there's Thomas Newman, there's David Newman as well, who's another very successful composer in the family.

But Chris, I'm sure you know this, there's a cousin.

Oh, yeah, I have a right.

There's a cousin in the family.

You got a friend of me.

I know a man.

Randy Newman.

Randy Newman is also a Newman.

That's right.

Very good, Lizzie.

It's a wonderfully talented, very famous family.

Yeah.

So the cut that Thomas Newman is shown is is three hours long.

And his first thought upon completing it, joy, and then despair.

Because he's like, oh my God, I really hope I don't fuck this movie up with my music.

So Newman goes to work, and Daribont and Francis Bruce just trim and trim and trim until they get to the director's cut, two and a half hours.

And Lizzie Daribont had to kill some darlings.

So we'll talk about a couple things that ended up on the cutting room floor.

So the opening of the film, Lizzie, credits sequence, full trial.

It's really focused on the trial.

That was much longer before.

And we saw a depiction of Andy Dufran's full crime as like a pre-credit sequence followed up by the trial on titles.

And I do think that's another thing that's a big difference between the book and the movie.

In the book, you establish in the first couple of pages, Andy's innocent.

In the movie, I think they leave it relatively open-ended.

For sure, for quite a while, which is great.

Until Tommy Williams arrives.

Yes.

I agree.

I think it's a great decision because it makes him a guilty man who has to be redeemed as opposed to an innocent man wrongfully imprisoned.

The film was also supposed to feature a dream sequence in which Red falls into the poster of Rita Hayworth and finds himself lost in the Pacific Ocean, him being afraid of, you know, the bigger world.

That was actually never shot due to time constraints, and Daribont was really sad that they didn't do it because it was his favorite scene in the script.

Sounds expensive.

Also, you didn't need it.

Yeah.

And I think, again, a smart cut, but you can read it in his original script.

after brooks commits suicide his bird jake the crow is found dead no the prison grounds and they do a burial for jake which i think again is just too heavy after we've just watched brooks commit suicide and then there's also a scene where a prison guard kind of follows andy's exit through the tunnel ends up in the shit-filled tunnel starts screaming it's it's and morgan freeman red is like laughing and losing it and there's a much longer sequence at the end of red adjusting to life outside of prison during the late 1960s.

But Darabont has said test screenings, people were just impatient.

We just needed to get to the end of the movie.

Yeah, didn't need any of it.

One scene that stayed, Andy and Red's reunion in Zawataneho.

They put it in for a test screening and the audiences loved it.

Tears, cheers.

A lot of people wrote on their test cards, that was their favorite scene in the whole movie.

And they really loved the movie.

Liz Glotzer later said, quote, I mean, they were the best screenings ever, end quote.

There's another quote where she says it tested through the roof.

Stephen King felt the same way.

Quote, when I first saw it, I realized he'd made not just one of the best movies ever done from my work, but a potential movie classic.

Darabont was apparently still terrified about the movie.

He was fretting over Tim Robbins' makeup in the final scene, saying it looked too liquid.

And King said, Frank, people aren't going to notice the makeup because they'll be crying.

End quote.

Yeah.

Daribont continued to tinker, and he dedicated the film to his first agent, one of the first people who'd believed in him, Alan Green.

Alan had died a few years prior of complications from AIDS when he was only 36 years old.

And I think he would have been incredibly proud of the young man who had gone from PA to set dresser to B-movie horror writer and prestige director, who now had a film that was looking like it was going to be a massive hit.

So Castle Rock and Columbia take a classic awards-bit approach with the release.

They premiere at the Toronto International Film Festival in September of 1994, and then they do a limited release at the end of the month with a plan to open wide in early October.

That's my favorite film festival, by the way.

We got to go to a lot of film festivals for IMDB, which was an amazing part of that job.

And if you ever get the chance to go to TIF, the Toronto International Film Festival, please go.

It is so, so fun.

And Tiff, if you would like to host what went wrong at your film festival, reach out.

We'd be happy to do a live episode or some interviews.

We would.

So September 23rd, Liz Glotzer and Frank Frank Darabont are in Los Angeles and as was tradition or remains tradition, they are going to go to the theater to stand in the back and see how audiences react on opening night to the film.

So they drive to the Cinerama Dome on Sunset Boulevard, Lizzie, where this podcast was conceived.

Yeah.

To buy a couple of tickets and hang around the back of the theater.

Now, the dome has been closed since March of 2020 due to the COVID-19 pandemic, but it's a Hollywood icon and you guys would recognize it, most recently featured in Once Upon a Time in Hollywood.

It seats 900 people.

Its 60s design is iconic.

Glotzer and Darabont head in, so excited, and it's empty.

The Shawshank Redemption made less than a million dollars its opening weekend.

$727,327.

Whoa.

Now, two girls did end up going to the screening that Darabont and Glotzer had attended because Darabont and Glotzer stopped them on the street and said, Go see this movie, and if you don't like it, we will reimburse you.

And they did.

Shawshank then opened wide in October, but things didn't improve much.

It made $2.4 million, its first wide weekend, which was good for number nine at the box office.

Wow.

Behind the Rosie O'Donnell and Dan Aykroyd sex comedy Exit to Eden.

It closed in late November after 10 weeks at just $16 million,

less than half of its production and marketing budget.

I had no idea it was not a theatrical success.

The Shashank Redemption was a big-time flopper.

Whoa.

Now, there are many theories as to why Shawshank flopped in its initial theatrical release.

Despite overall positive reviews, Liz Glotzer blamed a particularly negative LA Times review for at least killing momentum in Los Angeles.

Who knows?

It did not have a major bankable actor.

It had very well-received critical actors,

but it did not have a Tom Cruise.

No Brad Pitt, no Tom Cruise.

No Rob Reiner, meaning no big director, no big writer behind it, because they omitted Stephen King's name from the marketing materials because they didn't want to make associations with the horror genre.

It was also going up against Forrest Gump, which had been released in July, but was still a hit and remained at the box office for 42 weeks.

And even though Gump would soon leave theaters, Pulp Fiction arrived on October 14th.

And the Shawshank Redemption could not have been more different than these two movies that would come to dominate the culture in 1994.

Those are propulsive, time-bending movies that use needle drops and big names to draw the audience in.

And it was even getting beat to shit at the box office by the critically panned, although I will say hilarious, Dumb and Dumber.

Yeah, great movie.

I love Dumb and Dumber.

More than Forrest Gump, if I'm being honest.

They both have a place in my heart.

Now, Morgan Freeman had a different theory as to why the movie flopped.

Lizzie, let's listen.

Here is Morgan Freeman on one of my favorite programs, The Graham Norton Show.

The only real marketing movies get, I think, is word of mouth.

You can promote it all you want,

but if the first few audiences go there and come back and can't say, I really saw this great film,

then you're not going to go very far.

Though people went to see the Shawshank Redemption and then they came back, oh, man, I saw this really terrific movie.

It's called the

Shank Sham.

One lady saw me in the elevator one time.

She said, oh, I saw you in the Hudsucker Reduction.

So, if you can't get word across, then it just doesn't do well.

It's honestly a solid point.

It is.

Nobody knows what Shawshank is.

Tim Robbins has said something similar.

Actor William Sadler later claimed that Darabont had at one point shown him, quote, a list of 10 different names they were going to call it because everyone knew that name was just dreadful, end quote.

So, despite a brutal box office run, Shawshank looked due for redemption at the 1995 Academy Awards.

It was nominated for seven Oscars.

Best Picture, Best Actor in a Leading Role, Morgan Freeman.

Best Writing, adapted, for Frank Darabont.

Best Cinematography, Roger Deakins.

Best Sound, Robert J.

Litt, Elliot Tyson, Michael Herbick, and Willie D.

Burton.

Best Film Editing, Richard Francis Bruce.

Best Music Original Score, Thomas Newman.

The Oscars roll around, and Shawshank goes home completely empty-handed, shut out again by the likes of Forrest Gump and other big 1994 films.

It was done.

Hope was extinguished.

You may as well have thrown the Shawshank redemption into the Pacific because no one would have any memory of it.

But around the time Darabont first asked Stephen King for the rights to Shawshank, cable TV pioneer Ted Turner was busy launching what, Lizzie?

TNT, baby.

The Turner Network Television, or TNT.

TNT was his fifth network venture, and the problem was all of the material that he had lined up for it was old.

He had bought MGM's pre-1948 film library and was relying on old talkies to fill time on this channel.

Gone with the Wind, Lizzie, was the first film aired on TNT when it launched.

The problem is old movies don't reliably bring in new audiences.

So he did try something controversial at first, which was colorizing old black and white films.

And actually, George Lucas and Steven Spielberg spoke out against this pretty vehemently, including to Congress.

But in 1993, he bought Castle Rock Entertainment, giving him first dibs on their films to screen on his network.

I was going to say, because I know Stand By Me also ran pretty consistently.

This way, when a new film came out by Castle Rock, he had effectively right of first refusal.

He didn't have to bid against the bigger networks.

And by late 1995, Castle Rock had a surprise home video success on its hands.

The VHS release of the Shawshank Redemption.

So I buried the lead a little bit.

Shawshank struck out at the Oscars, but Columbia smartly re-released it theatrically in early 1995 when it was nominated.

And it did much better in its second theatrical release with the Oscar Buzz.

Sure.

I believe it ended its global run at around $70 million, which is roughly break-even if you incorporate marketing costs.

As Variety later reported, Warner Home Video saw untapped potential with the Shawshank Redemption.

You have awards buzz, fantastic test screenings, and people haven't seen it.

So you have an untapped audience.

So they take the poster, which is not Tim Robbins, that's a body double.

They put it on the cover of the VHS along with seven-time nominee.

They ship 320,000 VHS copies of the film around the country to video stores, which was, quote, an absurdly high number for a major box office disappointment.

This is a very risky move.

They hoped for the best, and that's what they got.

Word of mouth spread.

People figured out how to say the name.

The movie was surprisingly almost as popular with women as it was with men.

It makes sense.

It's not surprising.

The Shawshank Redemption was the most rented movie of 1995.

Wow.

Now, some have speculated that Ted Turner had a bit of Warden Norton to him.

No, not the religious sadism.

The self-dealing.

He bought Castle Rock, as I mentioned, so he could bypass having to bid other networks.

Thus, he probably paid less for Shawshank than the movie deserved.

But one part of his deal with Castle Rock worked in his favor.

Lizzie, you said this thing was on all the time, and that's because Ted Turner reserved the right to air these movies as much as he damned well pleased.

And boy, did he air it.

The Shawshank Redemption first aired on TNT in June of 1997 to top basic cable ratings and just kept on going.

I think Steven Spielberg said it best when he called it his, quote, chewing gum movie.

In other words, you've stepped in it and can't get it off your foot.

You have to watch the rest of the movie.

End quote.

I know I said this at the top too, but for anybody who did not grow up during this era, it is hard to express how much this movie was on TV.

Like, it is not an exaggeration.

If you turn your TV on in the middle of the day, you're homesick from school, the chances that you're going to see Shawshank Redemption are high.

It really, it was crazy.

That's right.

It goes through a critical reappraisal at the end of the 1990s.

It made a bunch of best of lists.

But the public is the group that holds it closest to their hearts.

And Lizzie, as you mentioned, it remains the top-rated film on IMDb to this day and one of the most valuable assets in the Warner Home Entertainment Library.

Morgan Freeman entered, for better or worse, the voiceover era of his career.

And though Tim Robbins didn't go back to prison as an actor, he did direct 1995's Dead Man Walking with Susan Sarandon and Sean Penn about a death row prisoner in Louisiana.

And he did go on to teach acting in prisons through the Actors Gang Prison Project, which is an acting group that he co-founded with Sean Cusack.

Oh, wow.

Darabont's career was launched.

He would go on to adapt the Green Mile, The Mist, and I think a lot of people consider him to be the best director of or writer of King works for the screen, with Shawshank, The Mist, and The Green Mile being three of the best, if not the three best, Stephen King adaptations for the big screen.

I always forget the Green Mile is Stephen King, too.

It is.

Darabont also made an unexpected $5,000 off the movie.

A decade after he he had optioned Shashank, he received something unusual in the mail.

It was the check that he had written to Stephen King for $5,000, framed and uncashed, along with a note, in case you ever need bail money, love Steve.

Aww.

Daribont had gotten the best deal in the history of the Dollar Baby program, two Stephen King stories for the price of one.

Wow.

Now, Lizzie, the Ohio State Reformatory sat empty for a few more years, scheduled for demolition, until some local activists came together to buy the building from the state.

Their goal was to repair and restore it to its historic structure.

They basically wanted to rehabilitate it in the way that it had once been designed to rehabilitate the men who were trapped inside of it.

And Lizzie, would you like to guess how much they paid for the OSR?

$5,000.

One.

And that concludes our coverage of the Shawshank Redemption.

Oh, that was great.

I didn't know any of that.

I had no idea it was not a box office success.

I didn't either.

I knew it was huge on television.

I assumed it was at least moderately successful at the box office.

That's what I thought.

Yeah.

Yeah.

And I think one of the reasons is that when you look on, you know, just Wikipedia or box office mojo, you'll see its total box office run, including the re-release with awards season, which gives a distorted view because it really did flop that fall and I think was pretty disappointing for everybody involved.

That's amazing.

But I have to ask, what went right?

Well, I I will leave the technical categories to you.

I'm going to say Morgan Freeman.

He brings a very grounded quality to a movie that at times can seem almost like a fairy tale in certain ways.

And he is sort of the narrator of that tale.

And I don't know of anybody else who would have really been able to pull off the voiceovers, the monologues.

He really holds this movie down.

It could have gone off the rails without him.

That's not to downplay anyone else's contribution.

Everyone in this is wonderful.

It's just that that character requires, I think, a very particular weight and also like ease to it.

And he was able to bring both of those things.

So I think Morgan Freeman.

There's so many choices here.

Obviously, Frank Darabont, who's I really came to like, especially watching his interviews.

And I think he's a really, really wonderfully talented writer and director, obviously.

There's also Rob Reiner.

I was going to say, I think Rob Reiner deserves an honorary what went right right for this if he's not going to get one.

I agree.

The way he protected the film, the way he took Daribont under his wing, it seems.

Liz Glotzer, producer

who found this, Tim Robbins.

I would like to give mine to Stephen King.

I've been a huge Stephen King fan for years, even though sometimes his novels will spin off the rails a bit at the end, as they are wont to do.

But one thing I love about King is how straightforward he's always been about his circumstances.

And And there's an article he wrote in, I think, the early 1980s called On Becoming a Brand Name.

And he just details in very plain English the circumstances of his rise and his struggle.

And he is someone who I think is remarkably talented, but understands that writing is a process.

And he writes, as he said, basically 360 days a year.

And some days are good and some days are bad.

And you don't wait for lightning to strike.

You plant as many lightning rods as possible.

And that's what you're doing, you know, the whole time.

And his book on writing, I still think is one of of the best books you can read if you want to be a writer.

And what I like especially about Stephen King is that he is able to separate the process from the result.

And I think that's what something like the Dollar Baby program is designed to do.

It's not designed to ensure a better result.

It's designed to help people get the process started and try something out.

And to do it in a way that's not financially crippling in an industry where it can feel like the only way to break in is to spend a ton of money making a short film or going to film school.

King gives a little bit of help there, provides a little bit of runway, you know, for people in a way that I think is very generous and that not a lot of writers do.

So I'll give mine to Stephen King.

And also, I just reread Rita Hayworth.

I reread The Woman in the Room and The Body.

And I think that his non-horror work is just really magical.

And the best sections of his horror books are the non-horror sections.

And I love the horror sections.

But anyway, shout out to Stephen King.

I think, you know, this movie would not have have existed if King hadn't so generously interacted with and met Frank Darabont halfway.

Daribont had the talent to back it up, 100%,

but King reached back in a way that few people ever do.

Yeah, I mean, you can have all the talent in the world, and if you don't get the opportunity, it doesn't matter.

And it's so important for people in positions of power in any industry, but particularly in an artistic industry, to reach down and help people come up because it doesn't hurt you.

I think this is such a great example of Stephen King doing that dollar baby program.

You know, you might think, what are you doing?

You're licensing this.

You know, you could be losing these opportunities.

You're giving it away.

And it's like, in the end, he did not.

In the end, he has, you know, the number one movie on IMDb.

That's exactly right.

Thank you guys so much for listening to our coverage on the Shashank Redemption.

Lizzie, would you like to tell the folks at home what you will be covering next week?

I sure would, Chris.

Next week, when I arrive at my destination, I am gonna kill Bill.

That's right, folks.

We are doing our first ever Quentin Tarantino movie on the podcast, or rather, movies, because we will be covering Kill Bill volumes one and two in one episode next week, because spoiler alert, they were filmed as one movie.

I am really, really excited about this one.

It's complicated.

It's fascinating.

I really love these movies, and I love Tarantino.

So very excited to dive in.

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You, dear listeners, give us more than hope.

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A reason for gratitude.

Daniel Edwin Davies, Nathan Sentineau, Sentineau, Slipknots 9.

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And yes, the O's do sound like O's.

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To you, our gratitude.

As Red said, hope is a good thing, maybe the best of things.

And no good thing ever dies, not with friends like you.

Thank you for keeping our hope alive.

Thank you so much, guys, for joining us for another episode of What Went Wrong.

We hope to see you next week for Kill Bill.

Go to patreon.com/slash What Went Wrong podcast to support What Went Wrong and check out our website at whatwentwrongpod.com.

What Went Wrong is a sad boom podcast presented by Lizzie Bassett and Chris Winterbauer.

Editing and music by David Bowman.

Research for this episode provided by Jesse Winterbauer with additional editing from Karen Krupsaw.