The Shawshank Redemption: A Shooting Script – Frank Darabont, 1996 ★★★½

Plotting for Hope

As revealed in the pages of this Newmarket Screenplay publication, the story of writer/director Frank Darabont resembled that of the protagonist of this, his breakout film, one Andy Dufresne. When you find yourself stuck in a hole, with everyone telling you there’s no way out, don’t give up hope.

The Shawshank Redemption focuses on two penitentiary inmates, played by Tim Robbins and Morgan Freeman, gutting their way to freedom. Few films in history have succeeded like this one has, standing atop the IMdB Top Rated Movie chart as it has for as long as I can remember.

Darabont recalls in his introduction how he first came upon the source work, one of four novellas that make up Stephen King’s 1982 collection Different Seasons; how he came to write a spec script and sent it to King in hopes of being sold the rights; how he had to struggle with self-doubt even after getting those rights. “If one cares about the work, if aiming high and stretching is a personal goal, then writing becomes a constant exercise in seeking the limits of one’s own abilities,” he explains.

Something else he explains in his introduction is how this paperback replicates in its entirety the last draft of the script approved for shooting, before final cuts and on-set rewrites took place:

I’ve noticed an unfortunate trend in published screenplays lately, which is to transcribe the finished film and then pass it off as the script…It’s all beautifully typeset and lavishly illustrated, but there’s one problem – it isn’t the screenplay. It doesn’t look like one, read like one, or smell like one.

The Shawshank Redemption, a fictional representation of a miracle, was a small miracle itself. Andy had to dig out a wall with a tiny hammer and crawl through five hundred yards of sewer pipe; Darabont spent years building sets and writing spec scripts for his break.

Maybe a couple of dozen movies have the power of stopping me in my tracks if I pass a screen where they are playing. The Shawshank Redemption, good as it is, is not one of those. The basic premise, guys stuck in a prison for a long time trying to stay human, strikes me when I think upon it as a monotonous way to spend two hours and 22 minutes, the film’s running time. The film commands my respect, as it would anybody’s; I just don’t love it.

Yet watching the film, as I did after reading this screenplay, is immersive. It has this unique feeling about it, an authentic sense of life being lived, not simply imitated. The story moves fluidly, develops key themes without calling undue attention to them, provide humor and beguilement in ways that don’t interfere with the plot. It’s a marvel of cinematic narrative, the sort of film you expect they’d study in a film school if that film school is any good.

What is its power? The Newmarket screenplay offers some ideas.

Efficiency: From the opening sequence, which shows how Andy landed at Shawshank for a crime he didn’t commit, to the memorable denouement, concluding with a morning bedcheck that reveals Andy not in his cell, The Shawshank Redemption moves quickly. On the page, you can see how Darabont accomplishes this, employing a succession of short scenes that establish its many plot twists with minimal fuss.

Similarly, the many memorable phrases that you take away from watching this movie are remarkably short and plainspoken: “Get busy living, or get busy dying…” “Hope is a dangerous thing…” “I had Mr. Mozart to keep me company. Hardly felt the time at all…” “I think a man working outdoors feels more like a man if he can have a bottle of suds…” “His judgment cometh and that right soon…”

Maturity: Because it’s adapted from a Stephen King story, the novella “Rita Hayworth And The Shawshank Redemption,” you might expect The Shawshank Redemption aiming to please horror-loving teenagers. Both novella and script contain much suspense. But instead of delivering thrills, cheap or otherwise, Shawshank’s focus is on life, both as something to be endured and lived well.

There’s a worldly quality to the setting, the tempo, and the bonding we see happen between Andy and his best friend, Red. One scene showcases the pair thinking about their disparate terms spent at Shawshank, of 30 years and 10 years, and realizing neither knows where it went: “Prison time is slow time. Sometimes it feels like stop-time. So you do what you can to keep going…”

Writer-director Frank Darabont (at left) plans a scene with Morgan Freeman. Darabont notes in this book how a horde of grasshoppers appeared in frame for this particular scene, giving it a magic quality that was entirely unplanned. Image from http://cinearchive.org/post/78243362396/frank-darabont-gives-one-of-my-favorite-commentary.

There’s a risk in such a focus, that it will draw out the viewing experience and leave you checking the time. But when you actually watch Shawshank, like Andy and Red you marvel at where the time goes.

Authenticity: Everything about Shawshank the film feels right. You come to appreciate this reading the script. The way Andy is introduced into the prison environment, his being bullied and raped early on by the jailhouse “Sisters,” the clever way his bank-manager background is employed by the warden to design and manage his embezzlement scam; it all happens in a way that feels natural, not forced.

The concept of “institutionalization” gets aired out, something you don’t think of but makes a lot of sense. You can see how once in prison, life outside becomes a concept that grows scarier as it becomes realer. One aged convict, Brooks, is released only to find he can’t hack it outside. Red fears the same will happen to him. Hence Andy’s preoccupation with not giving up hope, in fighting against prison life becoming his life.

The sense of time’s passage outside the prison yard is subtly yet unmistakably conveyed, in such small ways as the succession of sex symbols whose posters decorate Andy’s cell. This is a carryover from the King novella (as alluded to in the title) but here the development is represented in other ways, too, like in the fact we witness Rita Hayworth on screen in the movie as a character in a prison screening of her 1946 film Gilda before Andy comes over to Red with a request upon which the plot turns.

Andy: Rita Hayworth. Can you get her?

Red: No problem. Take a few weeks.

Andy: Weeks?

Red: Don’t have her stuffed down my pants this very moment, sorry to say.

The Newmarket paperback reveals something about this scene which Darabont elaborates upon in a back section of the book he calls “Mutatis Mutandis, Or Why’d Some Stuff Get Changed.” In the original shooting script, the movie on screen as Andy made his request to Red was supposed to be The Lost Weekend with Ray Milland. But that film was owned by Paramount Pictures, which wanted a lot of money. Darabont was encouraged to look at the film library of his own distributor, Columbia, instead:

I’ll never forgot the moment Niki [Shawshank producer Niki Marvin] looked up from scanning the titles and said, “Hey! There’s a bunch of Rita Hayworth movies on this list! Let’s use Gilda for God’s sakes…Creative choices don’t get any better than that.

Other changes from page to screen are also discussed. “Mutatus Mutandis” is like a commentary track on a DVD, with Darabont pointing out why some ideas that look great on the page didn’t make it to the final film. Often this involved shortening and eliminating material that doesn’t advance the plot.

For example, there are scenes dealing with the fate of a prisoner’s pet crow, whose death becomes a somber endnote to a section of the story. In the “Mutandus” Darabont calls this “among my favorite sequences written.” But there was no time for the crow’s demise in the actual shoot, and the bird’s fate was thus left up in the air. The result, he says, “does put an interesting and different spin” on the film,” tying back to its overall single-word message of Hope.

Other changes involve descriptions of camera angles that worked better when Darabont took the advice of his cinematographer, Roger Deakins, and members of the cast.

There are things about the overall story that leave me a bit cold. The villains feel a bit rote, a subplot about Andy teaching a prisoner to read is a forced effort at gilding the lily, and there are logic issues like how Andy can manage to oversee a major money-laundering endeavor when he spends a month (two months in the film!) in solitary confinement for mouthing off to the warden.

Yet as much as I want to resist the push of the throng when it comes to embracing The Shawshank Redemption, I find in this screenplay much more to admire. Darabont tells a great story, both within the narrative of the film as well as along the margins of this book, in detailing how one of today’s most popular classics came into being.