For the Love of Shawshank

You can tell yourself that you cherish your favorite movie, but there’s just no way you love it as much as Rick Ayres loves The Shawshank Redemption. Ayres has seen Shawshank thousands of times, he says—about once every other day for the past 10 years. His DVD copy is so worn that it skips and freezes. To this day, he’ll pause the film if he steps outside or grabs a drink, afraid he might miss something. Living with a film so intimately that he can practically breathe its photochemical fumes has helped him through a divorce, heart attack, battle with esophageal cancer, and countless bad days at work. If he’s having a particularly rough shift, he texts his wife and asks her to queue the DVD in the player.

In 2012, per Rick’s request, his wife searched on a public library computer (the Ayreses didn’t own one) where Shawshank was filmed: Mansfield, Ohio, about a four-hour drive from their home in Ontario, Canada. The discovery inspired the couple to make a pilgrimage. Upon arrival, Ayres asked local tour guides to take him through Shawshank’s most notable locations: Warden Norton’s office; Brooks’s bench; Andy’s escape tunnel; the oak tree where Ellis Boyd Redding discovers a note from a friend.

Each plays a pivotal role in The Shawshank Redemption, which follows the wrongly convicted Andy Dufresne (Tim Robbins) as he attempts to escape from Shawshank State Penitentiary. His belief in hope and change galvanizes his fellow inmates, including Morgan Freeman’s Red, who rediscover those concepts while outmaneuvering the corruption and brutality inside the penitentiary’s walls. The film’s message—that righteous faith will be rewarded, that life’s circumstances don’t define a person—is what still animates fans like Ayres, even 25 years after the film’s release.

A lightning strike split the Shawshank tree to half its former glory in 2011, and strong winds blew the rest down several summers later. But Rick Ayres bore witness. He’ll tell you that when he reached that oak tree, still voluminous and umbrella-like when viewed from the right angle, he lit a cigarette and began to weep. “This is the happiest day of my life,” he said, and stayed near the tree for over two hours.

“I realize it’s only a movie, but it’s very, very real to me,” Ayres later told me. “I’ve had some people say to me, Geez, you watch it that often? Get a life. Get a hobby or something. I have a life; I have hobbies. But that’s my favorite movie. And if I want to watch it every day, I’ll watch it every day.”

Between 2013 and 2018, more than 600,000 visitors hailing from China, New Zealand, the United Kingdom, and all across America came to see where Shawshank was filmed. Each of them was likely ecstatic to discover how economic stagnation has preserved the Rust Belt town of Mansfield: It still looks just as it did on film 25 years ago, when it served as a stand-in for a quaint Maine hamlet in the 1950s.

Thanks to these pilgrims, the town’s fortunes are rising; their tourism annually brings in $13 million to the area, a figure that almost matches The Shawshank Redemption’s 1994 box office numbers. Though it was deemed a flop upon release, repeat cable showings and rentals gradually won the movie classic status and a fiercely allegiant cult—a long-gestating adoration that has resulted in Shawshank being ranked as IMDb’s highest-rated drama of all time, while a 2015 YouGov poll declared it Britain’s favorite movie.

In anticipation of the film’s 25th anniversary, its cast and crew returned to Mansfield this past August. For some—including director and screenwriter Frank Darabont—it was their first time back since shooting the movie.

“I can’t believe [that] 25 years have gone by since the movie came out. Now it’s an artifact,” Darabont said. “There are people now who can vote, who can drink, who weren’t even born then. To have that perspective of time take place is kind of surreal—I turned 60 this year. I was 34 when we shot this movie. It’s just like, How did that happen?”

Before he influenced all those fans through his film, Frank Darabont was just another Hollywood screenwriter with dreams of directing. He was on his way to achieving those dreams at the 1993 Los Angeles Location Expo, where he had one burning question for attendees: “Hey, you got any big, empty prisons?”

After establishing a foothold writing B-horror flicks, Darabont had written a screenplay based on the Stephen King novella Rita Hayworth and Shawshank Redemption. The script quickly became the talk around studios. Castle Rock, the biggest suitor, was willing to pay him about $4 million for the script under one condition—that Rob Reiner would direct, not Darabont, with Tom Cruise attached to star. Though he struggled with the decision, Darabont refused the offer and insisted on directing, knowing he’d never receive a better screenplay for his first movie. Due in part to Castle Rock producer Liz Glotzer, who threatened to quit if she couldn’t make Shawshank, Darabont eventually closed a deal to helm the project.

Just as The Shawshank Redemption helped revive Mansfield and Upper Sandusky, other films have invigorated locations across the country. You can play catch on the Field of Dreams in Dyersville, Iowa; grab a slice at Mystic Pizza in Mystic, Connecticut; look out for Jaws in Edgartown, Massachusetts; fall in love with Twilight vampires in St. Helens, Oregon. You can’t help but wonder: As Hollywood’s biggest productions increasingly rely on green screens rather than brick-and-mortar locations—and as non-franchise, middle-tier affairs like Shawshank and Mystic Pizza disappear from theaters—will that relationship to films be lost in the process? If there were no freestanding Shawshank Penitentiary, where will the Rick Ayreses and Thomas Barbaras of the world go? For now, these pilgrims have Mansfield. Standing in the Ohio State Reformatory’s Central Guard room with his former cast and crew, Gil Bellows said that, while they were filming Shawshank, he could feel the ghosts of the prisoners around them. “What struck me today,” he added, “is there are new ghosts in this place—and they’re beautiful.”

– Courtesy: Vanity Fair