{"id":1057,"date":"2014-09-29T20:21:58","date_gmt":"2014-09-29T20:21:58","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/cumnockmediaclass.wordpress.com\/?p=1057"},"modified":"2014-09-29T20:21:58","modified_gmt":"2014-09-29T20:21:58","slug":"shawshank-vanity-fair-article-20th-anniversary","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/blogs.glowscotland.org.uk\/ea\/cumnockmedia\/2014\/09\/29\/shawshank-vanity-fair-article-20th-anniversary\/","title":{"rendered":"Shawshank – Vanity Fair article 20th anniversary"},"content":{"rendered":"

From flop to success<\/a><\/p>\n

Twenty years ago this week, The Shawshank Redemption hit multiplexes. It\u2019s a period prison drama <\/strong>with stately, old-fashioned rhythms<\/strong>, starring Tim Robbins as Andy Dufresne, wrongfully convicted of killing his wife, her lover and serving two life terms, and Morgan Freeman as fellow lifer \u201cRed\u201d Redding, who narrates the film. But the 90s were an era of booyah action movies starring the likes of Arnold Schwarzenegger and Bruce Willis. In Shawshank, the story of a decades-long quest for redemption and freedom<\/strong>, the closest things to action sequences involve fighting off buggery or defiantly blasting a Mozart duettino. Reviews were mostly favorable, but the film bombed<\/strong>, failing to earn even $1 million on its opening weekend and eventually eking out $16 million (about $25 million today) at the American box office during its initial release, not nearly enough\u2014and even less so after marketing costs and exhibitors\u2019 cuts\u2014to recoup its $25 million budget.<\/p>\n

That was then. Today The Shawshank Redemption tops the IMDb\u2019s Top 250 cinema-favorites list with more than a million votes<\/strong>, having passed the previous champ, The Godfather, in 2008. (While The Godfather\u2014trailing by 300,000 votes\u2014has maintained its runner-up position, Citizen Kane, the perennial greatest movie ever in critics\u2019 polls, whispers \u201cRosebud\u201d from No. 66.) Readers of the British movie magazine Empire voted The Shawshank Redemption* No. 4 in a 2008 list of \u201cthe 500 Greatest Films of All Time,\u201d and in 2011 the film won a BBC Radio favorite-film poll.<\/p>\n

Morgan Freeman relies on less empirical evidence. \u201cAbout everywhere you go, people say, \u2018The Shawshank Redemption\u2014greatest movie I ever saw,\u2019\u2009\u201d he told me. \u201cJust comes out of them.\u201d Not that he\u2019s a disinterested observer, but Tim Robbins backs his co-star: \u201cI swear to God, all over the world\u2014all over the world\u2014wherever I go, there are people who say, \u2018That movie changed my life.\u2019<\/strong>\u2009\u201d Even the world\u2019s most famous former prisoner connected with the movie, according to Robbins: \u201cWhen I met [Nelson Mandela], he talked about loving Shawshank.\u201d<\/p>\n

How did a period prison film running 142 minutes\u2014a life sentence for most audiences\u2014become a global phenomenon <\/strong>capable of rankling a world superpower and stirring a Nobel Peace Prize winner? To borrow a quote from Shawshank, \u201cGeology is the study of pressure and time. That\u2019s all it takes, really. Pressure and time.\u201d<\/p>\n<\/blockquote>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

From flop to success Twenty years ago this week, The Shawshank Redemption hit multiplexes. It\u2019s a period prison drama with stately, old-fashioned rhythms, starring Tim Robbins as Andy Dufresne, wrongfully convicted of killing his wife, her lover and serving two life terms, and Morgan Freeman as fellow lifer \u201cRed\u201d Redding, who narrates the film. But … <\/p>\n

Continue reading “Shawshank – Vanity Fair article 20th anniversary”<\/span><\/a><\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":4655,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[3069],"tags":[73509],"class_list":["post-1057","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-film","tag-shawshank","eportfolio_category-none"],"jetpack_featured_media_url":"","jetpack_sharing_enabled":true,"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/blogs.glowscotland.org.uk\/ea\/cumnockmedia\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/1057","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/blogs.glowscotland.org.uk\/ea\/cumnockmedia\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/blogs.glowscotland.org.uk\/ea\/cumnockmedia\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/blogs.glowscotland.org.uk\/ea\/cumnockmedia\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/4655"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/blogs.glowscotland.org.uk\/ea\/cumnockmedia\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=1057"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/blogs.glowscotland.org.uk\/ea\/cumnockmedia\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/1057\/revisions"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/blogs.glowscotland.org.uk\/ea\/cumnockmedia\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=1057"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/blogs.glowscotland.org.uk\/ea\/cumnockmedia\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=1057"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/blogs.glowscotland.org.uk\/ea\/cumnockmedia\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=1057"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}