The scene was shot over a “hard, hard day,” says Freeman. “We were actually tarring that roof. And tar doesn’t stay hot and viscous long. It tends to dry and harden, so you’re really working. For the different setups you had to keep doing it over and over and over and over and over.”
Darabont recalls the scene as a complicated “technical thing,” because he had to match a camera move very precisely to some narration that Freeman had pre-recorded, requiring take after take. “Then I remember we got a nice take. I turned around, and somebody behind me had tears rolling down their face, and I thought, O.K., good, that one worked.’ ” By the end of the sequence “we were exhausted,” says Freeman. When the cast finally got to “sit down and drink that beer, it was very welcome.”
Robbins merely flashes his famously inscrutable smile when asked about tensions on the set of Shawshank, though he does allow that any “difficult times . . . had to do with the length of the days.” Freeman, like his character, Red, has no problem rounding out the narrative. “Most of the time, the tension was between the cast and director. I remember having a bad moment with the director, had a few of those,” says Freeman. Most “bad moments” stemmed from Darabont’s asking for repeated takes. “The answer [I’d give him] was no,” says Freeman. “I don’t want to be chewing the scenery. Acting itself isn’t difficult. But having to do something again and again for no discernible reason tends to be a bit debilitating to the energy.” Freeman recalls a scene where the guards re-trace Andy’s escape route, retching when they discover themselves sitting in raw sewage. “My character was listening and laughing, just howling with laughter. I had to shoot that too many times.”
Darabont puts a diplomatic spin on his feature-film debut: “I learned a lot. A director really needs to have an internal barometer to measure what any given actor needs.”
Darabont likens the stress of principal photography to “being beaten with sticks” as the constant artistic compromise makes “every day of filming feel like a failure.” But in the editing room “you start to forget all those self-torturing thoughts.” The first edit of a film that ran nearly two and a half hours in its trimmest form was “long,” says Glotzer. Among the scenes eventually left on the cutting-room floor was one of Red adjusting unevenly to his release during the Summer of Love, when, as his voiceover proclaims, there’s “not a brassiere to be seen.” One scene the producer insisted on keeping was her idea in the first place: Red and Andy’s post-prison reunion on a beach in Zihuatanejo, Mexico. Darabont’s original story ended like King’s—ambiguously—with Red on a bus hoping to get to Mexico. Darabont thought Glotzer’s ending was the “commercial, sappy version,” she says. Yet Glotzer was “adamant. If what you intend is that they’re going to get together, why not give the audience the pleasure of seeing them?”
A leisurely paced prison film with literary inflection didn’t exactly scream blockbuster. Yet Shawshank tested through the roof, according to Glotzer. “I mean, they were the best screenings ever.” Critics were mostly in agreement. Gene Siskel named it “one of the year’s best films” and compared it to One Flew over the Cuckoo’s Nest, though the long-serving Los Angeles critic Kenneth Turan captured a persistent minority objection to the movie’s “sentimentality,” likening the picture to “a big glob of cotton candy.”
When the movie opened on September 23, 1994, expectations were high. Hollywood tradition dictates filmmakers drive from theater to theater on opening night, ostensibly to stand in the back of packed houses to witness audiences laughing and crying at all the carefully constructed moments. Glotzer recalls that she and Darabont “went to the Cinerama Dome, which was the coolest theater,” where the film was playing. Located on Sunset Boulevard, the 1960s-built movie house has more than 900 seats, but “no one was there”—which Glotzer blames on the “bad L.A. Times review.” The desperate filmmakers cornered two girls outside and “actually sold tickets” on the premise that if the pair didn’t like Shawshank they could call Castle Rock on Monday for a refund. “That was our big opening night,” Glotzer says dryly.
Freeman blames the title for the film’s initial flameout. “Nobody could say, ‘Shawshank Redemption.’ What sells anything is word of mouth. Now, your friends say, ‘Ah, man, I saw this movie, The . . . what was it? Shank, Sham, Shim? Something like that. Anyways, terrific.’ Well, that doesn’t sell you.”
Even if moviegoers could remember the title, 1994 was the year of two other films on opposite sides of the naughty-nice spectrum: Pulp Fiction and Forrest Gump. Both films became instant cultural phenomena—quoted, parodied, and ultimately devouring box-office receipts worldwide, while “The Shimshunk Reduction,” as Freeman started calling it, continued to play to mostly empty houses.
But in early 1995, Shawshank got its first shot at redemption when the Academy of Motion Picture Arts and Sciences nominated the film in seven categories, including best picture, best actor (Freeman), and best adapted screenplay. An awards-season re-release added a bit more money to the coffers. The film was snubbed on Oscar night, a big evening for Forrest Gump, but the award buzz gave Shawshank a second life when it was released on VHS shortly after the Oscars. It would become the top-renting title that year. That turn of events “surprised me most,” says Deakins. “Go figure.”
In the early 90s, the cable-television pioneer Ted Turner was hungry for “quality entertainment product,” as he once put it, to feed his new TNT network. He already owned MGM’s pre-1948 film library. Yet Turner couldn’t rely on dated talkies to bring in new audiences, so in 1993 he bought Castle Rock to expand his repertory. With production and distribution now under one roof, TNT was able to leapfrog the networks—which normally got first dibs on broadcast rights to new movies—and acquired the rights to Shawshank, Turner in essence selling the film to himself.
Memories are faulty 20 years on, especially when it comes to recalling precise figures, and the box containing the financial records for Shawshank has gone missing on a studio lot. Many accounts have suggested that Turner sold himself the rights for “much lower than normal for such a big film,” as the Shawshank trivia page on IMDb puts it. Darabont remembers it this way: “Turner, bless his heart, part of his deal for those movies that got funded during his ownership [of Castle Rock] was that he got to air them as much as he wanted.” A more likely scenario, in Glotzer’s view, starts with the cost of a film’s licensing fee generally being based on its box-office receipts; Shawshank’s dismal $28 million gross would have translated into a bargain basem*nt fee while TNT could still charge a premium for commercial time. However the economic stars aligned, TNT first aired the movie in June 1997 to top basic-cable ratings, and then began showing it over and over . . . and over. “Yeah, someone said, ‘On any given day, turn on the TV and see The Shawshank Redemption,’ ” says Freeman.
And it was through television that the real alchemy between Shawshank and its audience began. The film’s popularity “wasn’t a weed growing,” says Freeman. “It was kind of an oak tree or something—you know, slow growth.”
A chick flick The Shawshank Redemption is not. There are only two actresses in the film—not counting screen-siren posters of Rita Hayworth, Marilyn Monroe, and Raquel Welch—speaking 23 words of dialogue (eight of which are repetitions of “Oh God” in a sex scene). Rather, Shawshank falls under the rubric of “guy cry” movies. Though Deakins’s nuanced cinematography is lost on the small screen, watching Shawshank on TV allows a man to shed a few cathartic tears—usually during the montage where Brooks hangs himself—while ensconced on his Barcalounger in the privacy of his home. (A typical Tweet on the subject comes from @chrisk69: “A man is allowed to cry like a little girl once a year, and as Shawshank Redemption is on the TV tonight my time has come. #Brookswashere.”) Many home viewers embraced the film’s sentiment and emotion—qualities some critics took Shawshank to the woodshed for—and were moved by the film’s theme of undying hope as expressed through Red and Andy’s undying bond.
