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Recently Released In Theaters Reviews
The Dark Knight Mamma Mia! Take Space Chimps Hellboy II: The Golden Army Journey to the Center of the Earth Garden Party August Diminished Capacity Kabluey Hancock Wall-E Wanted Finding Amanda Get Smart Recently Added Spotlights Heath Ledger Christian Bale Aaron Eckhart Maggie Gyllenhaal Gary Oldman Minnie Driver Brendan Fraser Anita Briem Josh Hutcherson James McAvoy Brittany Snow Matthew Broderick The Jonas Brothers Mike Myers Romany Malco |
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 Stephen King
Interview By: Michael Dance When Stephen King broke into mainstream success a few decades ago, the first thing he wanted to do was pass the buck and help out like-minded but struggling writers. One of the things he came up with was an open offer: anyone could buy the rights to a film adaptation of any of his work for the cost of $1. In 1983, then-unknown writer/director Frank Darabont took him up on the offer and made a short film out of King’s story The Woman in the Room. It would be the start of a beautiful friendship. Darabont was initially aiming for a career as a director of low-budget genre fare. But a decade later, he got the chance to adapt and direct another King story, this one an uncharacteristic prison-set novella called Rita Hayworth and the Shawshank Redemption. The final product, of course, was The Shawshank Redemption, which earned ten Oscar nominations and to this day is #2 on imdb.com’s list of the top-rated 250 films ever. In 1999, Darabont directed The Green Mile, King’s other prison story – and like Shawshank, it was nominated for Best Picture. But something was missing – Darabont, now in the upper echelons of Hollywood filmmakers, had lost touch with the low-budget genre films he’d wanted to do from the beginning. The solution was to go back to one of King’s few stories that remained un-adapted: The Mist. We had a chance to meet Stephen King himself at a recent press conference. “I love to work with Frank,” he says. “Well, I don’t work with Frank, I basically just stand aside and let him do his thing. The thing about Frank that I’ve always liked is that he still has a child’s imagination coupled with an adult’s ability to see the core of the material and then execute his vision. You’ve got a couple of things going on there that hook up together. You don’t see it in a lot of filmmakers…with Frank, I feel very comfortable that I’m going to get something that’s usually extraordinary.” While, as Darabont likes to say, King single-handedly brought the horror genre out of the ghetto and into the mainstream, the director has been heretofore responsible for showing King’s non-horror side in the two prison stories. “I’ve got to tell this story,” King says. “We live half the year in Sarasota, and my wife and I have worked out an agreement: she’ll do all the heavy shopping, but she’ll send me to do the crap she forgets. So I’m there in the supermarket one day, and I got my little cart, and I come around a corner and see this woman. I’ve got to say she’s about 95. And she said, ‘I know who you are! You write those stories, those awful horror stories. I don’t respect that. I don’t like that. I like uplifting movies like that Shawshank Redemption.’” After |
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