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May 2, 2002
Waxworm Redemption (or should that be Salvation?)
Just been reading the screenplay for The Shawshank Redemption, one of the best screenplays you could read, which has already started to be used as an exemplar in some of the "how to write screenplays" books.
It's also one of the best publications of a screenplay, complete with words from Stephen King (who wrote the novella it's based on) and Frank Darabont (writer and director), explanations of changes from script to screen, storyboards and, most importantly, it's the unadjusted screenplay that was taken onto the set on the first day of shooting, rather than a polished-up version of what you actually ended up seeing.
I particularly enjoyed the bit about how the representative of the American Society for the Prevention of Cruelty to Animals revealed that she was there not only to protect the rights of the baby crow which Brooks Hatlen (James Whitmore) keeps in his jacket pocket but also to look out for the maggot he feeds to the crow. Quoting Frank Darabont:
she decreed that no live worm be fed to the bird. Only a dead one would do. One that died of natural causes. My suggestion that we have the maggot autopsied to determine cause of death drew nothing but a blank stare. Patiently explaining that the maggots were actually waxworms purchased by the prop department at a local bait shop also cut us no slack. Apparently, the God-given right of any fisherman to blithely feed a waxworm to a steelhead bass is denied the Hollywood filmmaker and his baby crow, even when the Clock of Doom is ticking off $120,000 a day in production costs. Thank God we found a dead waxworm in the batch, or we might still be there.
Before the day was out, our intrepid grips had presented us with a tiny director's chair made out of matchsticks, just in case any of the waxworms needed a breather between takes.
God bless the human spirit, which has time to make a matchstick chair for a waxworm for the fun of it, even when the Clock of Doom is ticking at $120,000 a day!
B-)
Posted by at May 2, 2002 12:19 PM
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