Frank Darabont

by D.K. Holm

Date of birth: 28 January, 1959

Hell Night , (1981), [production aide];
The Seduction, (1982), [miscellaneous crew] ;
The Woman in the Room, (1983);
Crimes of Passion, (1984), [miscellaneous crew];
The Blob, (1988), [writer only];
A Nightmare on Elm Street 3: Dream Warriors, (1987), [writer only] ;
"The Ventriloquist," HBO Presents Tales from the Crypt, (1989), [writer];
Buried Alive , (1990, for TV) ;
Till Death Do Us Part, (1990, for TV) ;
The Young Indian Jones Chronicles, (1992), [writer];
The Shawshank Redemption, (1994), [also writer] ;
Mary Shelley's Frankenstein , (1994), [writer];
The Fan, (1996), [writer only] ;
Eraser, (1996), [writer only];
The Shining , (1997), [TV mini-series, actor only, as Dr Daniel Edwards] ;
Black Cat Run , (1998), [ for TV, writer, producer] ;
John Carpenter's Vampires, (1998), [actor only];
Saving Private Ryan, (1998), [writer only ];
The Green Mile, (1999) [also writer, producer] ;
Projected: The Bijou; Salton Sea ; Doc Savage: The Man of Bronze

fter two major feature films, the most immediate linking theme in the work of Frank Darabont, besides Oscar mania and a dependence on Stephen King, is an obsession with tall people. In The Shawshank Redemption, , Darabont cast the gargantuan Tim Robbins as the poor fool locked up in prison in the '30s. In the more recent The Green Mile, also based on a King text, he casts character actor Michael Duncan as the behemoth with a heart of gold (and makes him seem much taller than he actually is).

Visually, the two films look much different. Shawshank has a grittier, more realistic style. Green Mile, especially in its interiors, has the spare, focused, dynamic quality of the old EC comics. On the other hand, Darabont is credited with writing both films himself, establishing the foundation for credentials as an auteur, despite what seems to be a relatively low output and a reliance on the pre-digested texts of others. But in fact, Darabont has been active in the movies since 1981, and almost 20 years is a long time in a cruel industry that does not forgive failure, or even temporary absences. One must admire him at least for surviving.

One way that Darabont has seemed to surive is by picking his friends well. Durabont has enjoyed the support of a series of mentors. He was an early associate of Chuck Russell, and like many other current successful directors cut some of his cinematic baby teeth on an Elm Street movie. He briefly came under the Speilberg umbrella by writing some of the Indiana Jones shows (and later working on Saving Private Ryan ). But his most imporant mentor has been Stephen King. Darabont has directed no less than three King pieces, including a short that was broadcast on PBS in 1983, and which also focused on someone incarcerated—in this case a dying woman.

Darabont's main theme seems, rather obviously, to be prison. Besides the two big features, a TV movie he wrote ( Black Cat Run ) has a prison setting, and incarceration of one kind or another seems to have a allure for the writer-director. Even the non-explicitly penal films are metaphors for imprisonment: being buried alive, the prison of a malformed body in Coppola's Frankenstein adaptation, the prison-like hotel in the mini-series version of The Shining (in which he only acted). Basically, it is an easy metaphor, but one that audiences respond to.

Darabont has also stuck obsessively to one genre. Almost all of his films and TV shows have been in the fantasy field. But if Durabont has become the premiere mainstream prestige interpreter of Stephen King, it is probably because he adapts the non-horror stories, which are more likely to attract a greater portion of the viewing public. Darabont seems to be drawn to the most crowd pleasing elements in the King aesthetic; he emphasizes the sentimentality of the work over the suspense or horror. He wants to make male weepies, which in essence means male-oriented films that women want to see, too.

Height is not a frivolus approach to King's work. As a tall, gangly, awkward, and basically ugly person, the world famous multimillionaire author has always stuck out in a crowd, first for socially painful reasons, and then later for the inhuman level of his fame (his success is so uncanny that John Carpenter was able to make a rather funny horror comedy, In the Mouth of Madness, about the basis for that kind of acheivement). King's world is that of the '50s, and Darabont embraces it ultimately to his detriment. King is an American child of the Eisenhower era obsessed with bullies, with social approval, with high school hierarcies, with the pop culture that kids from the '50s experienced. As the victim of bullies, he also drifted toward respite in an easy liberalism that is manifested in The Green Mile as a portrayal of a black man as a simple soul with a noble spirit that shows dignity under oppression, a creature singled out by God for a special gift. This is Stanley Kramer country. If the King-Darabont liberalism is rooted in vague, well-meaning films such as The Defiant Ones and Of Mice and Men, this approach also continues to form the basis for successful movies because the American commercial cinema naturally gravitates to that easy form of "feeling" that seems like thinking.

For all Darabont's efficiency, however, this is workmanlike cinema, the kind that appeals to the prejudices and inchoate beliefs of the mass public—in a higher form of justice, in an afterlife, in a racial equality that is not particularly equal. Yet Darabont seems to take it all very seriously, and ends up having his name on the credits of movies that feature remarkable ensemble acting: Morgan Freeman and Robbins in Shawshank, and Tom Hanks, David Morse, Barry Pepper, David Morse, and Jeffrey DeMunn in The Green Mile. If Darabont has not visually or narratively aspited to more in a career that is both long and short at the same time, he at least knows his limitations and mines cunningly the thin if abundant vein of his talent.

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