DARABONT

Frank Darabont started in this industry as a production assistant and set dresser, not a writer. In 1983, he and a group of friends got the rights to adapt Stephen King's short story "The Woman in the Room" for exactly one dollar — part of King's long-running practice of licensing his shorter work to aspiring filmmakers for a token fee, just to see what they'd do with it. Darabont wasn't happy with how his own short turned out, but King was impressed enough by it to form a real, lasting trust in him.

Before any of that paid off, Darabont spent most of a decade as a working genre screenwriter, and this collection has the receipts. He partnered with Chuck Russell, and together they sold New Line an original script that, after rewrites, became A Nightmare on Elm Street 3: Dream Warriors, with Russell directing. That film's success let them get their own earlier, previously unsold script produced too — the 1988 remake of The Blob, Russell directing again. By then established as a reliable writer for hire, Darabont was separately brought on for The Fly II, an early draft of The Rocketeer, and an unproduced Commando sequel. This was the actual shape of his career for most of the 1980s: horror sequels and remakes, not literary prestige pictures.

The prestige pictures came from cashing in exactly the goodwill that first dollar bought. King granted Darabont a handshake deal for the rights to adapt "Rita Hayworth and Shawshank Redemption," and Darabont paid him $5,000 for them — a check King never actually cashed. Years after the film's release, King had it framed and mailed back to Darabont with a handwritten note: "In case you ever need bail money." Once the Shawshank screenplay started circulating and generating real industry interest, producers offered Darabont $2.5 million just to hand the script to someone more experienced and walk away from directing it himself. He turned it down and insisted on directing it — a bet that worked out considerably better than the payout would have.