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.

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.

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.[citation needed] 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 work on 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 with a $2,000,000 budget 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 a Best Adapted Screenplay at the 1995 Academy Awards. The film was also nominated for six other Academy Awards including Best Picture.

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. He followed this with The Majestic two years later in 2001 to considerably less fanfare. Following lukewarm reviews from critics, the film failed at the box-office, recouping only half of its $72 million budget internationally.

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 2002, he penned an early draft of Indiana Jones 4, and while Spielberg reportedly loved it, George Lucas rejected the script for reasons unknown.

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.

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
• The Mist (2007) - director, screenwriter
• Fahrenheit 451 (2008) - director , screenwriter

External links

• Frank Darabont at the Internet Movie Database
• Cemetery Dance Publications, publisher of Darabont's first book