Zero-to-Hero Sets King’s Captives Free: Frank Darabont

When Armageddon’s Michael Clarke Duncan found out he would work side-by-side with Tom Hanks on the set of The Green Mile, he ran to his mother.

"We cried,” he told CNN. “I said, 'Mom, I'm gonna be working with Tom!' And she said, 'Oh, Tom!' Then I said, 'I'm going to be working with Frank Darabont,' and she said, 'Who?'. She didn't know who Frank was, and I told him that, I told him that my mother didn't know who he was'"(Freydkin, 1999, para. 12).

Frank Darabont may not command much attention standing 5’8,” bald, with a hint of a beard and brown eyes, but his work and love for Stephen King novels has amazed millions not long after his humble beginnings on January 28, 1959. He was born in a French refugee camp soon after his parents fled Budapest after the unsuccessful 1956 Hungarian uprising. The Darabonts moved again to Chicago, where Frank spent much of his childhood before yet again relocating to Los Angeles. He graduated from Hollywood High School and secured his first job in the film industry as a production assistant for the 1981 low-budget horror film, Hell Night, starring Linda Blair. He found many small jobs working as production assistant and set designer for several years. To date, he has written nearly twenty screenplays, directed six cinematic productions for the silver screen or television, has acted in three and produced eight (IMDb). Not bad for a guy who started on the set of a B-movie. Frank Darabont uses believable and easily identifiable characters, as well as realistic settings to speak tenderly and honestly of justice, freedom and the human condition.

Frank is one of only six directors to have his first two feature length films receive nominations for Best Picture Academy Award. The first was The Shawshank Redemption (1994), which earned seven Oscar nominations including Best Adapted Screenplay from Stephen King’s short story, “Rita Hayworth and the Shawshank Redemption.” The second was another adaptation of a Stephen King novel, The Green Mile (1999), which earned four nominations including Best Screenplay. He had many smaller roles in the film industry around that time, including reportedly offering assistance on the scripts of Lucas’ Star Wars prequels, Spielberg’s Saving Private Ryan and Minority Report. In 2001, he co-authored the screenplay and directed The Majestic, starring Jim Carrey(IMDb).

Frank’s most recent work under his production company, Darkwoods Productions, was The Salton Sea (2002), written by Tony Gayton and directed by D.J. Caruso. He also served as executive producer of Collateral (2004), starring Tom Cruise. His current project is Fahrenheit 451, from Ray Bradbury’s science fiction novel of the same name, which has been announced with an expected release in 2005. To scout possible locations for the movie, Frank traveled back to his homeland of Hungary in September. He is also working on the screenplay for Mission Impossible III(IMDb).

Frank Darabont has several cinematic and directorial trademarks. For example, he has often been labeled with making Stephen King movies or, more specifically, "prison dramas"(Holm, 1999, para. 7). Two of his most popular films, The Shawshank Redemption and The Green Mile are both based on Stephen King novels and set in prison. The Majestic uses the suffocating threat of McCarthyism to hang the threat of prison over the protagonists head. Shawshank portrays prisoners waiting to escape, get out on parole or die. The Mile portrays prisoners waiting to fry in the electric chair and the dynamics among the prison guards. Both films expound on the themes of justice and freedom. In the classic Hollywood ride-into-the-sunset style, both films show the "good guy" being set free, even if death is the medium used to accomplish it. The Majestic is a film that deals with the true-to-life threat of the loss of freedom, as Peter (Jim Carrey) is named as a Communist. All three films introduce us to a wrongly accused man fighting to make things right again. Time Asia magazine's article, "Prison Bound" discusses Darabont's signature genre, relating his style to that of writer, director and producer David Lean, who is most famous for The Bridge on the River Kwai (1957), Lawrence of Arabia (1962) and Dr. Zhivago (1965). To that, Frank replied,

"The production designer on The Green Mile, Terence Marsh, had worked on Lawrence of Arabia and Dr. Zhivago with David Lean, and Terry would tell me what a genius he was. Then one day he said to me, 'the way you work reminds me of David Lean.' It's hard to get a better compliment than that" (Short, 1999, para. 19).

I think Darabont is one of the few directors devoted to keeping their story true to the source. I have read The Green Mile and seen the movie. The differences between the two are slight compared to most modern book-to-screen works. It seems as though Darabont sticks to the style of directors from the 20s and 30s before the auteuristic era. I grew to love "old" movies because of my grandma's love for Frank Capra movies, so I've noticed that directors before the "auteur" became known committed to producing what would become well-known classics by sticking strictly to the source, rather than deviating from that path in the name of creativity, much like the earliest Alfred Hitchcock and Capra films.

Darabont’s love of Stephen King began in high school, when he first read “The Shining.” It was “the most amazing human tragedy I think I've ever read”(Freydkin, 1999). Robert Ebert has related Darabont’s inspiration, Stephen King, to Charles Dickens, who “created worlds that enveloped us and populated them with colorful, peculiar, sharply seen characters. King in his strongest work is a storyteller likely to survive as Dickens has, despite the sniffs of the litcrit establishment” (Ebert, 1999). A combination of King’s intense characters and plots and Darabont’s directorial style makes any Darabont film an intensely emotional learning experience about the human condition.

Darabont’s main characters are deeply passionate people, who are very motivated to do great things or even just to do what they believe is right. Andy Dufresne (Tim Robbins) was a wrongly-convicted man who built an extensive prison library collection and tutored inmates to pass the GED exam while he planned to escape in Shawshank. Paul Edgecomb (Tom Hanks) was a prison guard intensely involved with the inmates in his care, protecting them—murderers, rapists, thieves—from the brutally crude treatment of co-worker Percy Wetmore (Doug Hutchison) in The Green Mile. Peter Appleton (Jim Carrey) was passionate about screenwriting in The Majestic, but after he lost his memory and was mistaken for a long lost son, he devoted himself to help rebuild the town theater as well as inadvertently heal the town by temporarily being one of the many sons they lost in the war. An interesting fact to note is that the three films primarily feature men, with women playing secondary or background roles. Obviously, you aren’t going to see any women in a men’s prison, but it was something I noticed, even in The Majestic. Only Adele Stanton (Laurie Holden) made any kind of impression as a female character in the film. The others were memorable, but played very small roles. We still live in a patriarchal society, so it’s not surprising for this to still happen, but I think there have been some major breakthroughs in cinema over the past twenty years regarding women and cinema.

Darabont has also used racial undertones to strengthen and weaken both of his most popular films. In Shawshank, “Red” (Morgan Freeman) befriends Andy and encourages him throughout his sentence, as well as witnesses his incredible determination to be set free from his undeserved incarceration. While Andy comes to prison with much knowledge about business, simply putting his brains to work again when sentenced inside, Red’s survival allegedly is dependent on him staying inside, being the man who can get you things, but with no marketable skills on the outside after a life spent mainly in prison. In the Mile, the black John Coffey sits on death row, stripped of all earthly comforts and powers. However, his gift of physical healing transcends his bondage, even though it was that very gift that got him falsely accused (Ebert, 1999). Both black men appeared inferior, but we see they have gifts and talents of their own. Red proved highly valuable to the men in prison, but couldn’t adjust to life outside. John Coffey was a simple headed, unintelligent man who had a special gift. It seems as though the sentiment is that black people are not very smart, but can prove useful. I don’t agree with that idea, but I’ll agree that the concept may have helped to further the plots along, especially in the Mile.

Visually, Darabont likes his sets pretty evenly-lit. He does emphasize contrast with bright tungsten lighting in The Green Mile, which is used to spotlight the important elements of the scene, especially when prisoner John Coffey (Michael Clarke Duncan) reveals his gift of physical healing. All the lights on death row would brighten, sometimes to the point that the bulbs would explode. Near the end, when Edgecomb takes Coffey’s hand to learn about the real killer of his alleged victims, nearly all the bulbs behind Edgecomb break, sending a seemingly heavenly shower of pure white sparks down upon the two of them. The bright lights were very effective at giving an ethereal quality to sometimes very depressing scenes and difficult issues. The human eye is naturally drawn to the brightest area of any visual field, so Darabont’s use of bright lighted scenes were effective in inviting us to take the entire scene in all the time.

Spatially, we aren’t brought in too close to our characters, with a preference on medium shots to close ups, even during an emotional moment. At first I felt alienated by this technique, but I began appreciating the perspective it gave me on what was going on around the other characters. The strong characters, excellent choice of actors and powerful stories drew me into the environment so well that I felt I was there and therefore didn’t need to be right in the character’s face.

Color plays an important part in Darabont’s films, setting the scene and mood for the characters. Darabont seems to be very flexible in his use of color throughout his films, not favoring any particular palette. The Mile and Shawshank evoked a depressing, hopeless feeling with cool color palettes. The Shawshank prisoner’s jumpsuits were blue and many of the scenes showing Andy alone were dark and somber both in lighting and color. In the Mile, the prisoners wore regular clothes, but this prison block had a much warmer feel to it than Shawshank. Sunlight streamed through the overhead windows and the walls glowed a gentle yellow color. It was by no means a happy place but, as Paul said, "We think of this place like an intensive care ward of a hospital.” It is a sterile place, but most of the guards have a real compassion for the prisoners at this last stage of their life. The Majestic has a much bolder look, set in Hollywood and then in the small town of Lawson. Hollywood, naturally, was all aglow with actors, sets and classic cars. Lawson was decorated with that small-town charm that warms you up to the residents almost immediately. The theater, prior to the renovation, looked like a tired, torn and neglected old building, representative of the bruised post-World War II town. After the renovation, the theater was ablaze in a wash of neon lights, plush red carpeting and gold accents, reflecting much of the pride, excitement and joy of a community finally healing from its wounds.

Several structural elements served to strengthen the film, including voice-overs and flashbacks. The Mile was book-ended as a flashback to visually tell the take an elderly Paul Edgecomb tells to his friend at the nursing home. There is no way Paul could have just told us the whole story and done it justice in any capacity. So meeting Paul as an old man and reliving his younger years through his story, coupled with voice-overs at appropriate times, served this movie well to keep us all on top of this amazing story. In Shawshank, we see a flashback of Andy sitting in his car, drunk and ready to kill his wife and her new lover. We also see a flashback of the real killer tell a new inmate about how he did it. These flashbacks give us a sense of depth and time. The voice-over of Red permeated the movie. It’s obvious that Andy is the main character, but Red gives a first-person account of the entire time Andy is in prison. Darabont’s use of voice-overs gives the viewer a personal sense of connection with the protagonist and an insight as to how things work, a classic technique of film noir.
Techniques such as voice-overs and flashbacks are effective ways to accomplish Darabont’s goal to give the audience an inside view to a little-known world—the inner workings of prison and the tortured minds of the inmates. He uses a voyeuristic mentality in revealing the characters foibles and oddities, as well as the complex issues involved. One watches the protagonist in prison or among a town full of people that appear foreign to him and learns to relate on a personal level through visual and aural effects.
Darabont’s films are inspiring, acceptable and visually interesting in all aspects. I think his films are basically realistic and heartfelt. His adaptations of King’s work adequately reflect his talent to tastefully and emotionally portray work from the most famous horror pulp writer of our time. His films also explore the deeper meanings of humanity and the lesser-seen aspects of life. Most importantly, I believe his work has given the film industry great adaptation standards to live up to. His cinematic contribution to society is not unnoticed, but has helped develop the film industry and cinema styles widely used in the field today. Darabont has achieved what every director dreams of. Not bad for a guy who started on the set of a B-movie.

References

Ebert, Roger. (1999, December 10). The Green Mile. In Chicago Sun Times [Online]. Available: http://rogerebert.suntimes.com/apps/pbcs.dll/article?AID=/19991210/REVIEWS/912100302/1023 [2004, November 10].

Frank Darabont. (n.d.). Retrieved October 20, 2004, from the Internet Movie Database http://www.imdb.com/name/nm0001104/. [2004, October 30].

Freydkin, Donna. (1999, December 10). Frank Darabont does hard time in ‘The Green Mile.’ Cable News Network Interactive [Online]. Available: http://archives.cnn.com/1999/SHOWBIZ/Movies/12/10/greenmile.darabont/ [2004, November 1].

Holm, D.K. (1999). Frank Darabont. In Cinemonkey Director’s Project [Online]. Available: http://www.cinemonkey.com/reviews/holmdarabont/darabont.html [2004, October 30].