Frank Darabont & Ridley Scott Team For New Unproduced Kubrick Project [Exclusive]
Max Weinstein
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Frank Darabont is more than a little mystified by the current state of the movie business. The director of The Shawshank Redemption and The Mist says he recently wrote what he believes is his finest work. But to date, he hasn’t been able to get anyone to even consider it.
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“I spent the last year writing a script. And I know when I’m hitting on all cylinders or not. I was hitting on all cylinders,” Darabont says on the latest episode of Post Mortem with Mick Garris. “It’s a magnificent project based on a treatment that Stanley Kubrick wrote in the late ’50s—an incredible Civil War piece. It’s a very meaningful script and [when] I finished, I said, ‘This is the best thing I’ve ever done.’ And we shopped it around town and we didn’t get a single meeting.”
Darabont makes clear that wasn’t just relying on his own notoriety to get him in the door, either.“It’s not just me, the schmuck recluse living up north,” he continues. “Ridley Scott was one of the producers on it! And it’s Kubrick’s idea that he developed with Shelby Foote, a noted Civil War historian.”
This problem isn’t unique to any single filmmaker, Darabont adds, but is endemic to the industry at large. Not long ago, he ran into Rob Reiner (whose Castle Rock Entertainment backed many of Darabont’s landmark Stephen King adaptations), and said, “‘Rob, do you know what the hell’s going on in this business?’ And he goes, ‘No, no. Not a clue.’ We’re all shrugging. It used to be that there was a place where you could go and somebody was willing to put their reputation, their job, on the line to get a movie made because they believed in it. That doesn’t seem to be the case anymore.”
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“What are they making?,” Darabont asks Garris, before answering his rhetorical question. “They’re making superhero movies—Marvel movies. They’re making things for the 12-year-old comic book collectors. Are they making any movies anymore, really?” He points to Sam Mendes’ 1917 as an example of a recent film he considered to be a masterpiece, and argues that if it had come out in the ’80s or ’90s, it would’ve been a part of the cultural conversation for an entire year.
“Do movies matter like they used to?,” Darabont wonders. “My thesis is this: It was the art form of the 20th century. But now in the 21st century, it’s just another venue for distraction. It’s one of a thousand different ways that the public and the audience can distract themselves. You can find good stuff, absolutely, and a lot of good writing emigrated to television. Vince Gilligan’s Breaking Bad and Better Call Saul ended up being jewels in the crown of great television writing, for example. But you know what? There used to be three networks and a handful of little local stations! Now it’s 10,000 stations!”
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Darabont likens the increasingly crowded media landscape to overprinting money. “You know what happens when you just keep printing money? It loses its value,” he says. “In Germany, in the Weimar days, you’d get a barrel of deutsche marks and couldn’t get a loaf of bread, because it just got devalued to the point where it didn’t matter anymore. I wonder, with this massive tsunami of content… is it possible for anything to really count anymore? To be that thing that people hold dear 20 years later, like people seem to be holding Shawshank dear? Like, the way that we held Casablanca and The Wizard of Oz dear? Is it possible? Or are we now just part of all the noise?”
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