Frank Darabont
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Frank Darabont (born on January 28, 1959) is an American film director, screenwriter, and producer. He has been involved in the production of two Academy Award-nominated films, The Shawshank Redemption and The Green Mile.
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[edit] Early life
Darabont was born in a refugee camp in Montbeliard, France. His parents fled Hungary after the 1956 Hungarian Revolution. When he was still an infant, his family moved to the United States, where he has remained.
[edit] Filmmaking career
By the age of 20, Darabont became involved in filmmaking. One of his first films was a short adaptation of Stephen King's The Woman in the Room, which made the semi-finalist list for Academy Award consideration in 1983. This short "Dollar Baby" led to a close association with King, who granted him the "handshake deal" rights to another one of his shorter works, Rita Hayworth and the Shawshank Redemption from the collection Different Seasons.
Prior to his directing career, Darabont was a highly successful and sought after screenwriter with exceptional work on otherwise cheap genre films that included: A Nightmare on Elm Street 3: Dream Warriors, The Blob and The Fly II.
Darabont made his feature length directorial debut with Buried Alive, a TV movie that aired on the USA Network in 1990. Darabont followed with an extended run as writer for George Lucas's short-lived television series The Young Indiana Jones Chronicles. He became famous, however, after making good on the deal with Stephen King by writing and directing 1994 The Shawshank Redemption for which he was nominated for an Best Adapted Screenplay at the 1995 Academy Awards. The film was also nominated for an Best Picture,but he was not nominated for the Best Director award.
After a five-year hiatus, Darabont returned to the screen with the extremely well-received The Green Mile, a film he directed, scripted and produced. Like The Shawshank Redemption, this film is also based on a Stephen King work. The film was nominated for the Oscar for Best Picture and Darabont was nominated for his second Academy Award for Writing Adapted Screenplay, but again not for Best Director. He followed this with The Majestic two years later in 2001 to considerably less fanfare in addition to criticism from audiences and critics for the too heavy-handed Frank Capra-like story and performances. [citation needed]
Known well for his scriptwriting ability, Darabont is known to have doctored the scripts of the Steven Spielberg films Saving Private Ryan and Minority Report.
In 2005, Cemetery Dance Publications published Darabont's novella "Walpuski's Typewriter" in a limited edition. The story, originally written in his early twenties, first appeared in Jessie Horsting's magazine Midnight Graffiti.
[edit] Filmography (as director)
- Buried Alive (1990) (TV) - director
- The Shawshank Redemption (1994) - director, screenwriter
- The Green Mile (1999) - director, screenwriter, producer
- The Majestic (2001) - director, producer
- Frank Darabont will remake Fahrenheit 451, a film based on the Ray Bradbury novel.The current release date is planned to be in 2007.
- Frank Darabont is planning to follow up his Stephen King legacy with yet another film based on his writings. This time he will adapt The Mist, a story about "a group of people trapped in a supermarket surrounded by a fog filled with hideous monsters."
