I almost forgot.
I'd hate to deprive you of this.
Salvation lies within.
- Yes sir.
- Frank Darabont's 1994 film The Shawshank Redemption has become one of the most
popular movies of all time.
The tale of Andy Dufresne's time in Shawshank prison is even the highest rated
movie ever if you ask IMDB.
- But the inspiration for the movie came from Stephen King's short story titled
Rita Hayworth and Shawshank Redemption.
The 100 or so
pages worth of novella appeared in the collection that also featured two
other future movies, Apt Pupil and The Body, which was the basis of Stand By Me.
- But we're not talking about either of those today.
We're talking about Morgan Freeman officially becoming the best narrator of
all time.
- That's all it takes, really.
Pressure and time.
- So, without further ado and no restraint on spoilers, let's get into it.
What's the difference?
(Music)
Well, kids, there are a ton of similarities between the book and movie.
Both feature a banker named Andy Dufresne falsely imprisoned for
the murder of his wife and her lover.
The stoic Andy makes fast friends with prison everyman Red, and after
long years of struggling to maintain his humanity and hope, Andy escapes through
a hole in his cell wall kept hidden by a variety of posters of pin-up girls.
- Don't forget the (Bleep) pipe.
- Right, and he crawls through 500 yards of raw sewage to freedom.
(Sound) - But the book and
movie aren't exactly the same.
To start with, the two main characters' appearances are different.
Book Andy is described as short and mousy, while movie Andy is tall,
like Tim Robbins is the tallest guy in any given scene in the movie tall.
And the book Red is named Red because he's Irish and
has red hair, which is changed to an offhanded joke in the film.
- Name's Red.
- Red, why do they call you that?
- Maybe it's because I'm Irish.
- But the most obvious significant difference between the book and
movie is the perspective.
While the film is, of course, narrated by the greatest voice ever,
the book is quite literally Red's memoirs.
His written account of the legend of Andy Dufresne.
- The film, however, opens with a traditionally narrative retelling of
Andy's trial and conviction for double murder.
>From there, the film offers no framework to explain the omniscient narration other
than it's a movie, and we're all just kind of used to that sort of thing.
- Many minor differences include the side characters.
For example, the book features several different wardens,
running through a couple different guys before landing on Warden Norton,
one of the main antagonists of the film.
- Put your trust in the Lord, the rest belongs to me.
- The toughest screw to ever walk a turn at Shawshank, Byron Hadley, who plays in
the entire film, is gone and retired well before the climax of the book.
- So the story's basically the same,
some of the supporting cast is superficially different.
Great, whatever.
But, here's where this episode of What's the Difference gets interesting.
Most of our adaptations have to cut things wholesale from their novel counterparts
leaving behind a more efficient, focused version of the story.
What we see with Shawshank is a movie that adds
to the story to fill out its near two and a half hours run time.
- Easy peasy, Japaneasy - Brooks, for example,
is the long-time inmate who runs the library in both the book and the movie.
But book Brooks is introduced, paroled and
leaves Shawshank crying in the space of a few pages.
The bird, Jake, is not Brooks' in the book, but instead belonged to an inmate
with a relatively short eight years stay in the prison.
- (Sound) - The most significant thing about him is
that Jake, the bird, shows up starved to death shortly after his release,
a metaphor for the learned helplessness of Shawshank's residents.
- The threat of Brooks' institutionalization in the movie is much
more direct, however.
Movie Brooks has been at Shawshank longer than anybody,
like this novella counterpart, but the movie dives much deeper into Brooks'
experience as a heartbreaking example of what prison has taken from these men.
The sequence of Brooks on the outside narrated by Brooks' letter
to the guys still in Shawshank is entirely created for the film, it's also yet
another shift away from the exclusively Red voice of the novella.
- That's the basic them of this adaptation,
take characters from the book and expand upon them to flesh out the movie.
Aside from the enormous editions to Brooks' presence in the story,
the movie expands on captain of the guards Byron Hadley and warden Norton
- While their characters are the same in
both mediums, the movie upgrades them both to essentially co-antagonists.
- Hadley and Norton are bad dudes in the book for sure, but
in the movie they're ever present and even worse.
The second time we meet Hadley on screen, he beats a man to death,
which doesn't explicitly happen in the book at all.
- If I hear so much as as mouse fart in here the rest of the night,
I swear by god and sunny Jesus, you will all visit the infirmary.
When a young inmate, Tommy Williams, shows up with a story that could get Andy's
name cleared- - Which happens in the book as well.
- But in the book, Norton just transfers Tommy to a different prison and
sends Andy to solitary for two weeks.
In the movie, Norton and Hadley straight up murder Tommy and
lock Andy away for two whole months.
- Of course, in both book and movie, Norton wants Tommy's story to go away so
that Andy can continue cooking the books for all the shady dealings and
side hustles the warden's got going, but
the money laundering operation pays off in very different ways.
In the book, after Andy's escape, he doesn't share the evidence of corruption
in Shawshank, and the warden just retires a broken man.
Again, owing to the exclusively Red's voice structure of the novel,
we don't find out what happened to Norton, simply because Red never did.
- In the movie though, Andy really sticks it to Norton and
Hadley, making his escape with all the evidence needed to arrest Hadley and
convince Norton to kill himself instead of facing the music.
Andy also makes off with almost 400,000 of Norton's
ill gotten dollars by assuming the identity of Randall Stevens,
the man Andy invented to help with the money laundering.
- Book Andy, however, didn't leave with any of Norton's money.
In fact, after Andy was arrested for his wife's murder,
but before he was sent to Shawshank, he and a banker friend set out to
move all of Andy's assets under the fake name Peter Stevens.
While Andy was in prison,
his banker friend managed the affairs of Peter Stevens, making investments,
and stockpiling a tidy nest egg just sitting in a safe deposit box.
The key to which is buried under a piece of volcanic rock, under an oak tree,
in a hayfield on the north side of Buxton.
- All that to say expanding on Hadley and
Norton, not only filled out the story to feature length,
it also expanded on a central theme of Stephen King's original novella.
The idea that there's a part of every person that can't be put behind bars,
that will always be free, so long as one can hope.
The novella puts forth this theme through Andy's painstaking,
nearly three decades long escape plan.
The movie, however, adds the direct fight against the system, personified by Hadley
and Norton and Andy's very real and damaging victory over the pair of them.
- And this perhaps puts a finger on the spirit of adaptations in general.
While a book is able to ponder ideas for pages at a time,
the visual medium of film has a different way of going about it.
Because movies in general benefit from a bad guy that needs defeating,
The Shawshank Redemption pulled two antagonists up
from a pool of several to focus on.
- They send you here for life, that's exactly what they take.
- The good guys in the story get the same treatment.
The thread of Red's parole hearing is an invention for the movie.
While the book briefly ponders the idea of rehabilitation,
Red is given a series of scenes in the movie that illustrate his change in
views on the subject through performance more than text.
In short, this is a film adaptation that doesn't just fill time, but
takes advantage of the different medium to flesh out the themes of the novella.
That's all for this episode of What's the Difference?.
We're heading back to the prison library to see what other books might be worth
covering before we bust out of here through a (Bleep) pipe.
- Hey, you didn't say anything about crawling through a (Bleep) pipe.
- No, I was just, it's just a joke.
- Good, because that seems really gross and unnecessary.
- You're probably right.
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What's The Difference?