Frank Darabont

April 15, 9:46 PMCelebrity Profile ExaminerAndy Williamson

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FRANK DARABONT

Sometimes success is all about timing.  And patience.  And waiting.  Just ask Frank Darabont, whose 1994 film adaptation of Stephen King’s The Shawshank Redemption tanked during its initial theatrical release.  In the years since, that movie has become one of the most beloved films of all time -- though it usually lingers around the top 3 spots on the IMDB list of favorite motion pictures, as of this writing it is currently NO. 1.

Frank Darabont was born on January 28th, 1959, in a refugee camp in Montbeliard, France.  Frank’s parents, who fled Budapest after 1956 Hungarian Revolution, moved to the United States when Frank was only a baby.  Settling in Chicago, and later Los Angeles, Frank attended Hollywood High School.  Enamored of movies, pop culture, pulp fiction, and the novels of Stephen King, the aspiring filmmaker’s first job in the ‘biz’ was as a production assistant on the low-budget horror film Hell Night (1981), starring Linda Blair.  Over the next few years, while trying to establish himself as a writer, Frank held similar jobs on equally low-budget fare, usually doing set dressing or construction for the art department.

In 1980, 21-year-old Frank contacted author Stephen King regarding one of his short stories.  Frank wanted to turn The Woman in the Room, from 1978’s Night Shift collection, into a short film.  King had a policy of offering student filmmakers the rights to his shorter fiction for one dollar, provided the film in question was not shown publicly without King’s permission, and that Stephen himself got a copy.  (Quite a few of these have been produced over the decades, and have since become known as Dollar Babies.)  Mr. King consented to Frank’s request, and was pleasantly surprised when three years later, he received a copy of Frank’s short film adaptation.  King loved it ("Clearly the best of the short films made from my stuff," said Steve), and the short went on to be a semifinalist for Academy Award consideration during that year’s Oscars; though (contrary to rumor) it was not nominated.  Much more about this can be found in an interview conducted by Lilja’s Library (one of the best King resources on the web).

FRANK DARABONT

Frank’s first professional writing credit was on 1987’s A Nightmare on Elm Street 3: Dream Warriors.  He went on to co-write the 1988 remake of The Blob, and The Fly II, the 1989 sequel to David Cronenberg’s 1986 remake of the 1958 classic, The Fly (got that?).  During the early 1990s, Frank wrote scripts for 2 episodes of HBO’s Tales From the Crypt, 5 episodes of George Lucas’ television series, The Young Indiana Jones Chronicles, and co-wrote the screenplay for Mary Shelley’s Frankenstein, directed by Kenneth Branaugh.  Frank made his directorial debut with a 1990 TV movie Buried Alive -- the $2 million budgeted, USA Network production got Frank some great reviews.  It also opened the door for him to make his first feature.

After winning Stephen King’s trust with his short adaptation of The Woman in the Room, Frank contacted Steve again in 1987, asking for permission to turn Rita Hayworth and Shawshank Redemption (one of four novellas in his 1982 collection Different Seasons) into a screenplay.  King agreed, mostly out of curiosity for what Frank would do with what this “moody tale with more thinking than action in it ... not the sort of thing that usually makes a good movie.”  Five years later in 1992, Frank sent Steve his completed script for (the slightly less clunkily titled) The Shawshank Redemption.  Steve was deeply moved by it, and renewed Frank’s option; though he seriously doubted any major studio would let Frank film what he had written.  It was too long, too faithful, too earnest -- a throwback to the kind of films that hadn’t been made since Jimmy Cagney was in his prime.  Yet as it turned out, a bit of karmic synchronicity was about to take care of that concern.

ROBBINS AND FREEMAN IN SHAWSHANK

Castle Rock Entertainment (so named for the fictional town in the first movie they produced in 1986, Stand By Me, based on Stephen King’s The Body, another novella from Different Seasons), also loved Frank’s script and agreed to not only produce, but to give him all the creative control he wanted.  Though the prison drama, starring Tim Robbins and Morgan Freeman, was (mostly) a critical darling, it barely made back its $25 million dollar budget.  It was also nominated for seven Academy Awards, including Best Picture, but won none.  In 1994, The Shawshank Redemption and Rodney Dangerfield had at least one thing in common.

But, time passed, and after the film had been released on cable and video (... oh yeah, and TBS), people began to take notice of The Shawshank Redemption, often using its themes of perseverance under extreme duress as a metaphor for any personal hardship.  It is now considered one of the best films of all time.

Five years later, Frank adapted and directed another Stephen King book set behind bars, The Green Mile.  Frank later joked, “I have the world’s smallest specialty -- I only make Stephen King prison movies set in the thirties and forties.”  Tom Hanks starred as a Death Row prison guard who begins to suspect that the hulking black man in one of his cells might not only be innocent, but have Christ-like healing powers.  Michael Clarke Duncan costarred as the childlike John Coffey.  Surely helped by fans of Shawshank, The Green Mile grossed nearly $287 million toward its $60 million budget.  It was nominated for four Academy Awards, and (again) won none, although it did take home a Golden Globe for Duncan, as well as a few other prestigious awards.  A wonderful film.

FRANK DARABONT

In 2001, Frank followed up with The Majestic, starring Jim Carrey as a blacklisted screenwriter in 1950s Hollywood, who after a car accident, wakes up in a small town with amnesia, and to townsfolk convinced he is one of their lost sons.  The film, which paid loving homage to old movie houses, and the Frank Capra fare that used to play in them, was neither a critical or commercial success (it only recouped half of its $72 million budget theatrically) -- though there are still those (including myself) who champion this as a great movie.

In the late nineties and early aughties, Frank did some uncredited script polishing on Steven Spielberg’s Saving Private Ryan and Minority Report.  Soon after, George Lucas hired Frank to pen the script for the fourth Indiana Jones movie, then called Indiana Jones and the City of the Gods.  After spending a year on it, Frank gave it to the Spielberg, who read it and said it was “the best script I’ve read since 'Raiders of the Lost Ark'.”  However, George Lucas did not like it, and turned the project over to screenwriter David Koepp.  Frank was crushed, and vowed never to write a script for somebody else again.  (In 2008, for a period of only a few hours, Frank Darabont’s unfilmed screenplay, Indiana Jones and City of the Gods was released online as a PDF -- it was quickly pulled.  Yes ... I have read it, and was surprised how much of Frank’s version carried over into Crystal Skull.  While it is not perfect, it does take itself more seriously -- there is no “Mutt,” and the scenes between Indy and Marion read like the Casablancian reunion I always wanted it to be.)

STEPHEN KING AND FRANK DARABONT

Though Frank had previously published the screenplays for both The Shawshank Redemption and The Green Mile (both highly recommended), in 2005, he published a novella he had written in his early twenties, called Walpuski's Typewriter.

In 2007, making good on a promise he had made for years, Frank went back to Stephen King Land yet again with his adaptation of The Mist.  Originally published in King’s 1985 collection Skeleton Crew, The Mist told the twisted little tale of Maine residents who get trapped in a supermarket after a mysterious mist rolls into town.  Needless to say, “there’s something in the mist!” ... and its not nice.  With a budget of $18 million (a fraction of his Majestic budget), Frank filmed the movie down and dirty, using the production team from the FX series The Shield (of which Frank was a fan, and had recently guest-directed).  The Mist was released in November of 2007, and eventually made $53 million worldwide.  The film didn’t do very well in the U.S., assumedly because of a verrrry brave ending that polarized audiences into either extreme love or hate.  (I, for one, loved it -- one of the best horror films ever made.)  Like an homage to 1960’s sci-fi fare, and also an intelligent treatise on the societal breakdowns that occur when scared people are locked up together, The Mist plays like a cross between John Carpenter’s The Thing and William Golding’s The Lord of the Flies.  Those who thought the ending was “horrible” need to tweak their adjective: the ending was “horrifying” ... and there’s a difference.  On the 2-disc Collector’s Edition DVD of The Mist, Frank includes a black-and-white version that somehow exudes even more of the Night of the Living Dead vibe that the color version hints at -- highly recommended.

READY FOR MY CLOSE UP MR. DEMILLE

EXAMINER’S NOTE: I wish I had more personal information about Frank to share in this profile, but as for marital status, or even what part of the country (or what country) he lives in, Frank remains elusive and mysterious (I'm assuming Los Angeles).  If you have any apropos information regarding Mr. Darabont (or if you ARE Mr. Darabont) and feel like sharing, please feel free to contact me and I will adjust this bio accordingly.

UP NEXT: adapting and directing Stephen King’s The Long Walk (originally published under his pseudonym Richard Bachman), adapting and directing Robert McCammon’s Mine, and adapting and directing Ray Bradbury’s Fahrenheit 451.

Lilja’s Library, one of the best Stephen King sites on the web, has conducted three fascinating interviews with Frank.  You can find them here, here, and here.

Frank Darabont Quotes:

"If you're going to succeed, you've got to be like one of those punch-drunk fighters in the old Warner Bros. boxing pictures: too stupid to fall down, you just keep slugging and stay on your feet." -- Premiere, October 1994

On his rejected script for Indiana Jones 4: “Steven was very, very happy with the script and said it was the best draft of anything since Raiders of the Lost Ark.  That's really high praise and gave me a real sense of accomplishment, especially when you love the material you're working on as much as I love the Indiana Jones films.  And then you have George Lucas read it and say, 'Yeah, I don't think so, I don't like it.'  And then he resets it to zero when Spielberg is ready to shoot it that coming year, [which] is a real kick to the nuts.  You can only waste so much time and so many years of your life on experiences like that, you can only get so emotionally invested and have the rug pulled out from under you before you say enough of that.”

"The Majestic is a movie I'm very proud of and I really love.  It achieved exactly what I set out to make and I find it very moving. It's a very sweet and quaint movie.  That's always a tough sell."

Regarding the societal breakdown in The Mist: "The human race is fundamentally insane.  If you put two of us into a room together we're soon gonna start figuring out good reasons to kill one another."

On The Shawshank Redemption: “I really don't think you can get tired of the kind of loving reaction that people have for this movie.  It seems to have become its own ambassador to the world.  It does mean something to people, and that's so fantastic to me.  How many people have even one thing like that in their lives?  If the obituary is, Frank 'Shawshank Redemption' Darabont died today at the age of, hopefully, 110, that would be awesome.  Of course, I hope people check out the other films I've made too, and I hope they enjoy them and I hope I get to make some more that they enjoy.  But hey, if the one thing I'm remembered for is Shawshank, why on Earth would I complain about that?  Few people are remembered for anything."