Today’s story will meander, so bear with me.
It starts in 1956, when Soviet forces crushed the Hungarian Revolution—an uprising against the country’s Soviet-backed Communist government—and drove roughly 200,000 people into exile.
Among them were a Hungarian couple who fled with their nine children and eventually landed in a refugee camp in Montbéliard, France. There, in 1959, they had one more child—a boy they named Ferenc Árpád.
Soon afterward, the Darabont family emigrated to the United States, and Ferenc grew up first in Chicago and then in Los Angeles. He became a typical American kid in most ways—and maybe especially a Hollywood kid.
Years later, he’d say he found his life’s ambition after seeing George Lucas’s first feature film, THX 1138, released in 1971. Ferenc—who now went by Frank—graduated from Hollywood High School in 1977.
Instead of college, he got a job at Grauman’s Egyptian Theatre, working the concession stand and as an usher, watching movies over and over for free, and spending “endless hours” writing.
Around the same time, he read Stephen King’s The Shining and fell in love.
“I became a fan of his work from that moment on,” he later recalled. “I have read every word that the man’s published and some that he hasn’t.”
Frank had no formal training, but he wanted to try directing a film. Around the same time, King had created what became known as the Dollar Baby program, under which he allowed students and other aspiring filmmakers to adapt certain short stories for $1, under two main conditions:
First, the film couldn’t be released commercially without King’s approval.
Second, the filmmaker had to send King a copy so he could see what they’d done with it.
Frank wrote to King asking for permission to make a film from a short story called “The Woman in the Room.” King said yes. Price: $1.
Frank was about 20 when he started, and it took him three years to finish the film. But after he sent King a copy, King called it “clearly the best” of the short films based on his work.
Fast-forward. Frank started building a career. He found work as a production assistant and set dresser on low-budget Hollywood movies—basically, working with the art department to make sure whatever appeared on camera looked right.
He wrote an original screenplay called Black Cat Run that a studio bought, although it wasn’t produced until more than a decade later. He also wrote a spec script for the TV show M*A*S*H.
That one caught the attention of a producer named Chuck Russell, who invited Frank to become his writing partner—and gave him a real, working Hollywood career as a writer, mostly rewriting other people’s scripts when problems appeared after studios bought them. One of their biggest successes was A Nightmare on Elm Street 3: Dream Warriors.
And then Frank got the idea to adapt another Stephen King work for the screen: the novella Rita Hayworth and Shawshank Redemption.
Again, we’re going to compress time here. King sold him the rights for $5,000—although, to fast-forward again, he never cashed the check. But Frank was so busy as a working writer by then that five years passed before he took time away from paying gigs to write the screenplay.
From there, however, things moved fast. It took him about eight weeks to write the script, and within two weeks of showing it to Castle Rock, he had a $25 million budget—but only after turning down an offer of roughly $2.5 million to step aside and let Rob Reiner direct, with Tom Cruise and Harrison Ford in the lead roles.
And on September 23, 1994—so, my God, 32 years ago this week—The Shawshank Redemption began its U.S. theatrical release.
The funny thing about this movie is that I am 100% confident I don’t have to explain the plot, identify Tim Robbins and Morgan Freeman as the stars, or tell you that it’s now considered one of the greatest movies of all time.
And yet it bombed at the box office.
Bad timing, I guess. It was competing for attention in the same year as Forrest Gump and Pulp Fiction, and it earned only $16 million during its initial domestic run against that $25 million budget.
Then came word of mouth, seven Oscar nominations, huge VHS rentals, and repeated showings on TNT after Ted Turner bought Castle Rock. All of it expanded the movie’s reach and built its reputation.
Writers and even directors tend to stay behind the scenes, so if you don’t know how things turned out for Frank Darabont, he went on to even more success: The Green Mile, The Mist, The Walking Dead on television, and, most recently, two episodes of the final season of Netflix’s Stranger Things.
Overall, I think his is a story about the value of letting the path meander—as long as you don’t lose sight of where you hope it will lead.
And there’s a great quote, by the way, about why he decided not to take Rob Reiner’s money back in the early 1990s, long before he had achieved the kind of success that eventually followed.
“You can continue to defer your dreams in exchange for money,” he told Vanity Fair. “… and die without ever having done the thing you set out to do.”
7 other moments from history this week
Sunday, September 20: “The world threw itself into this first festival in a state of near-intoxication.” — Philippe Erlanger, the French diplomat and historian behind the Cannes Film Festival, describing its opening on this day in 1946, a year after the war ended. The festival had originally been scheduled for September 1939.
Monday, September 21: “I was thinking about women. The other half of the viewing audience.” — Roone Arledge, the ABC Sports executive, in his memoir on the broadcast he created, Monday Night Football, which debuted on this day in 1970 when the Browns beat the Jets 31–21 in Cleveland. A crowd of 85,703 attended, and advertisers paid $65,000 a minute.
Tuesday, September 22: “Farmers need us, and we will always need them.” — Willie Nelson, who organized the first Farm Aid concert with Neil Young and John Mellencamp on this day in 1985 at Memorial Stadium in Champaign, Illinois. About 80,000 people attended a show put together in six weeks, after Bob Dylan suggested at Live Aid that some of the money go to American farmers.
Wednesday, September 23: “We were met by all the village and received a harty welcom.” — William Clark, in his journal entry on the day the Lewis and Clark expedition returned to St. Louis on this day in 1806. Sergeant John Ordway wrote that the party fired three rounds as it approached the town and the crowd on shore answered with three cheers.
Thursday, September 24: “Success is 99 percent failure.” — Soichiro Honda, founder of the Honda Motor Company, which was incorporated in Hamamatsu, Japan, on this day in 1948. The company grew out of his idea of fitting surplus wartime generator engines to bicycles.
Friday, September 25: “If this was that big a deal, I want to see it through.” — Ernest Green, one of the Little Rock Nine, recalling when he walked into Little Rock Central High School past soldiers with bayonets, on this day in 1957. The students entered escorted by the 101st Airborne Division, and Green became the school’s first Black graduate in May 1958.
Saturday, September 26: “My friend and colleague M. Besso steadfastly stood by me in my work.” — Albert Einstein, in the closing line of “On the Electrodynamics of Moving Bodies,” his special relativity paper, published in Annalen der Physik on this day in 1905. Einstein, then 26 and working at the Swiss patent office in Bern, thanked no one else in the paper.
I thoroughly enjoy your newsletter and liked this one especially. Thank you!