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[Upcoming Episodes]

Regarding The Shawshank Redemption, if any of you folks out there are A.V. Club readers, I've done Random Roles with four of the cast members over the years. I won't bother offering up the links to all 'em, but just for the sake of sharing their stories, I put all of the actors' reminiscences together for your reading enjoyment, so it plays like an oral history. (BTW, just for the record, all of four gentlemen proved to be solid interviews, so their individual interviews are well worth seeking out if you're a Random Roles fan and haven't caught 'em all.)

 

 

Morgan Freeman (“Ellis Boyd ‘Red’ Redding”): When I got the script for Shawshank, nobody said anything about it. Just, “Read the script.” So I read it. Then I called my agent and said, “I don’t care which role it is, I’ll do it. I want it.” And then I said, “What role do they want?” He said, “They want you to do Red.” I said, “You’re kidding! That’s the movie!” [Laughs.] But, no, they weren’t kidding. And the rest, as they say, is history.

 

Bob Gunton (“Warden Norton”): I’m sure that, unless the gods come down from heaven with another marvelous movie, that will be the movie that I will probably be remembered for and that I am most proud of. It’s one of the few movies where I got a lot of screen time and also great scenes, and it’s where I learned that if you’re a character actor, unless the camera comes in for a close-up, you’re really just part of the mise en scène. You’re really just sort of background, or moving the story along. But in this case, I was the antagonist to Andy. And it was a great collection of actors once again, all of the prisoners. I loved working with Frank Darabont, and Morgan was great, Tim [Robbins] was terrific—it was a dream role, and I had to work pretty hard to get it.

 

Frank and the producer wanted me to do it from jump street, but initially the studio said, “Yeah, well, the guy’s a good actor, but this is a starring role. This calls for a star.” So they tested me, and I’d been doing Demolition Man just before, and my head was shaved. And I knew if I did this role, I didn’t want to do it with a chrome dome, so they actually bought me a wig for the screen test. [Laughs.] And I was still shooting Demolition Man, so they flew me to New York, and Tim very generously was off-camera during the screen test, so I did the scenes actually opposite him. And Roger [Deakins], the cinematographer, shot the screen test. So I had everything going for me! And sure enough, a couple of days later, they called me and said, “You’re on. They want you.”

 

William Sadler (“Heywood”): I had just done the first episode of the series Tales From The Crypt, and Frank Darabont was one of the writers. He approached me on the set when I was visiting one day, and he came over and said, “I’m going to do this movie, it’s called Rita Hayworth And The Shawshank Redemption, and I would like you to be in it.” He said it just like that. A couple of days later, he mailed me a copy of the Stephen King anthology, I think it’s called Different Seasons, and I read the novella, and I have to say, when Frank first said that he was writing the screenplay and wanted me to be in it, when you’re in Los Angeles, there’s a part of you that says, “Yeah, right.” [Laughs.] Because everybody you meet is writing a movie, and they want you to be in it. Every cab driver is writing a movie! But thank God, it turned out that Frank was completely serious, and something like a year and a half or two years later there we were shooting it, and it was one of the most fun shoots I’ve ever been involved with.

 

Clancy Brown (“Captain Hadley”): Everybody loved that script, because Frank [Darabont] is one of the best writers out there. He got the first string in probably every department on the script, because he was kind of an unknown commodity as a director. That’s where I met [cinematographer] Roger Deakins. Strangely enough, I had met Deakins’ wife, James, on Blue Steel. Who else did they have? Terry Marsh, the production designer, who was genius on that one. But nobody knew it was going to be any good. And even when it came out, nobody knew it was going to be any good, because nobody went to see it when it came out! And then when the Oscars came around, it actually got noticed, which was deserving. And now you can’t avoid it! [Laughs.] It’s just, like, on all the time now! But, yeah, that was a fun one. Made a lot of good friends on that one.

 

[Hadley] was pretty bad. [Laughs.] But, see, that’s where Frank’s a great writer. In the short story, there’s a whole turnover of the administration of that prison, and he had to figure a way to keep those characters consistent. So Hadley and the warden were absolute Frank Darabont constructs, based on stuff that happened somewhere in the novella that Stephen wrote. But those are Frank Darabont characters through and through. I’d work with [Frank] again in a heartbeat. I love that guy.

 

Gunton: It was a wonderful three months in beautiful downtown Mansfield, Ohio. Actually, I was back there last year for the 20th reunion of Shawshank, and the way that movie has become such a cult and has such devotion around the world… I mean, in Morocco, in Europe, in Australia—and recently I was in South America doing a movie about the Chilean miners, and down there people would come up to me with their words of homage for the movie. It really is a classic.

 

Sadler: I mean, they just don’t come around, movies like that. Frank even talks about that. Whenever we get together, we just sort of shake our heads and say, “Can you believe it’s still going as strong as it is?” He feels like we really caught lightning in a bottle, and I think to some degree that’s true. It was a strong script, but I don’t think any of us had any idea that it was going to take on this life of its own and become such a beloved film.

 

Gunton: It was disappointing when it first came out, because the reviews were not all that great, and the attendance for the initial run was not good. Even after it was nominated for a couple of Academy Awards and was re-released, it did not do good business.

 

Sadler: I don’t know if you remember, but it opened in the movie theaters, and it closed, like, a week later or two weeks later. It had no run at all. Nobody knew what a Shawshank was. No one could pronounce it. It’s a terrible name. I remember Frank showing me a list of 10 different names they were going to call it, because everyone knew that name was just dreadful. And people tell each other, “I saw this movie last night. It was great! It was called… Shrimptank something?” [Laughs.]

 

Freeman: Nobody could say “Shawshank Redemption.” Marketing only really works with word of mouth. It’s like, now you can see how things… well, as you said earlier, they go viral. That’s word of mouth. I tell my friend and you tell your friend, and you say, “I saw this movie, it was really terrific, it had so-and-so and so-and-so in it, and it was called… Shank… Shad… Sham… Well, it was something like that.” [Laughs.] You do that, and I’ll forget all about it! That’s why it didn’t do well.

 

Brown: Yeah, we’ve heard that. But my joke about the name—because everybody always asks us what’s the crazier version of the name you’ve ever heard, and Morgan likes to say, “Oh, it was The Scrimshaw Redaction,” blah blah blah—I always say, “You know the craziest name I ever heard for The Shawshank Redemption? The Green Mile.” [Laughs.]

 

Sadler: I think the name hurt almost more than anything else. Morgan and Tim Robbins were not household names at the time. I mean, they were strong film actors, but there wasn’t a name attached like Tom Cruise that you could hang the movie on. They went for a strong ensemble, and that’s what they got, and I really do think that’s part of the magic and the strength of that film: It felt like you could aim the camera at any face in that room and see the whole story played out in those eyes. It was a true ensemble.

 

Gunton: It continues now to be one of the most remunerative of the movies I’ve done, in terms of residuals and stuff, because it’s played all the time, but more important than that, people just respond to it with almost a religious respect. So to be associated with that movie, particularly in an important role, it’s a great, great privilege, and it’s a lot of great memories for me.

 

Was it gratifying to see it finally finding an audience over the years?

 

Freeman: In a way, yeah. I mean, I didn’t have a back end. [Laughs.]

 

Do you find that to be the film quoted back to you the most?

 

Freeman: Yeah. Oh, yeah. “Get busy livin’, or get busy dyin’.” I hear that all over the place!

[Moment by Moment (1978)]

When I did a Random Roles interview with Tomlin, I wasn't sure how to broach the subject of Moment by Moment, and I kept wondering if there was any way to bring it up without her suddenly shouting, "This interview is over!" But she actually provided me with an opportunity when she mentioned it offhandedly in conversation about a different film, because I was able to reference the way she mentioned it:

 

AVC: You mentioned Moment By Moment in a manner that sounded like you didn’t really want to discuss [the film] a great deal.

LT: Oh, I don’t care. That’s just the way things go, you know? But I will say that after people just laid on it and laid on it, I said to one of the movie critics for The New York Times—I can’t think of her name right now and I don’t think she writes there anymore—“I’m not going to discuss Moment By Moment because it’s too long ago, and it doesn’t do me any good.” For years that’s all anybody ever wanted to talk about, because John [Travolta] was such a big star.

AVC: What was the experience like of working with your partner Jane as your director?

LT: Oh, that was hard as hell. It’s not Jane’s temperament to do that. She’s too genteel, too Southern, too kind, too empathetic. It’s too much to go into it. I’m not going to even talk about it. We loved John, though. John had come to see Appearing Nightly, our first Broadway show, and he loved it so much that he went back and… He had a three-movie deal with Robert Stigwood, and he told Stigwood that he wanted to do the third movie with us. And we’re thinking, “Yeah, okay, that’ll be fun!” [Laughs.] And it just wasn’t for us. It didn’t work out. But we didn’t know we’d get whacked over the head for it! We’d seen movies come and movies go, but never anything like that. And we hated to have let John down, because he’d been riding so high and all that stuff.

[Eve of Destruction (1991)]

Plot synopsis: A female scientist (Renee Soutendijk) creates a robotic version of herself, only to have it malfunction during a trial run. Emotionally out of control, the sexy android begins to indulge its creator's secret inner desires. With no other option available (as far as you know), a terrorist hunter (Gregory Hines) is hired to deactivate the android. Oh, and did we mention that it's a walking, talking nuclear bomb that's about to explode? Because it is.

 

Biggest reason it's bad: There are many, most of them tied to the fact that it's an unabashed Terminator ripoff that tries to go sexy by making the killing machine a woman, but the terrible performance du jour belongs to Soutendijk, who - left-handed compliment alert! - is definitely well-suited to play robotic and is a master of bulging her eyes out to distinguish when she's playing the android rather than the scientist.

 

Biggest reason it's worth watching: Gregory Hines, who - God love him - did his best to maintain the action-flick momentum he built with Running Scared. Honorable mention goes to Kurt Fuller, who's always great when he's in full weasel mode.

 

Trailer: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=_sARb0uQvpI

[Superman IV: The Quest for Peace (1987)]

Just in case Paul happens to check in on this topic before the show, I did a Random Roles with the esteemed Mr. Cryer several years ago for the A.V. Club, and we had actually talked about trying to do a Comic-Con panel devoted to Superman IV, but it never came to pass. Still, he had plenty to say about the film during the course of our conversation, so if anyone's interested in the discussion...

 

That was an absolutely heartbreaking experience for me, because I had loved the Richard Donner Superman like nobody’s business. I was a Comic Con-fanboy-crazy guy about that movie. I just loved it so much. So I’d always thought that if I got the opportunity to be in a Superman movie, I’d jump at it. Superman II was terrific, but then Superman III was kind of a mess, and the idea of Superman IV was to resurrect the franchise. They had new producers, and Golan-Globus had been doing all these cheesy genre movies. They had made a great deal of money with their Cannon films, and this was their bid for respectability. They were gonna reboot the franchise, and resurrect it for everybody after the debacle that was Superman III. Little did we know that we were actually going to be working on the debacle to end all debacles.

 

 

But it started very promisingly. My very first day, we were doing a huge practical effect, a flying effect. It was going to be me and Gene Hackman. Okay, first of all, that’s incredibly cool. But we were in a ’30s-style open-top roadster and, basically, Superman—played by Christopher Reeve, also amazingly cool—flies underneath the car, and he would fly away with it. Nowadays they would do that with green screen. You’d be lucky if you ever actually even got in the car. But at the time, they did it practical. So they literally got one of those huge construction cranes that are usually on the top of buildings, and lifted this convertible 40, 50 feet in the air, with Christopher Reeve wired underneath it in full Superman outfit. Did I say “outfit”? I’m apparently from the 1950s. [Laughs.] In full Superman costume. And they literally flew us away. The idea was that, at the end of the movie, he catches us and flies away with us. I just was in heaven. I mean, I’m working with Gene Hackman, I’ve gotten to meet Christopher Reeve, and here’s Superman flying me away in this car!

 

But what I came to realize as we kept shooting was that things kept getting… They were running out of money, but I didn’t know that. I just noticed little things, like the craft-service table got more and more meager. And they took less and less time every day. We would get props that were especially, uh, crappy. But I was still having a blast, and working with Gene Hackman was so much fun. Although it drove me crazy, too, because Lex Luthor was creating a villain called Nuclear Man, and yet Gene Hackman kept pronouncing it “nu-cue-lar.” So during one of the scenes I corrected him. In character. And to his credit, he did not go Popeye Doyle on my ass. [Laughs.] I think it made it into the movie, actually, although I haven’t seen the movie in ages.

 

Toward the end of the thing, they started dropping whole sequences that they were going to shoot, and I thought, “That doesn’t bode well.” But I finished my shooting and went back to the United States—we shot in England. A few months later I ran into Chris Reeve on the street, and I said, “Hey, let’s have lunch!” And he said, “Okay, sure!” We went out for lunch, and I said, “I’m so excited about the movie! When’s it coming out?” And he said [Takes a deep breath.] “You need to know: It’s an absolute mess. We had six months of flying work that we were supposed to shoot; they cut five months of it. They’ve thrown together an edit that barely makes sense.” And I was absolutely devastated, because I really wanted to be a part of bringing Superman back, you know?

 

The movie does not do justice to the script at all. The script was actually pretty clever. The script was basically that a kid asks Superman to get rid of all the nuclear weapons in the world, saying, “You’re Superman! Why can’t you do it?” That was a much bigger part of it than a lot of the really dumb Nuclear Man stuff that ended up being used. It ended up with Superman basically deciding that’s something Earthlings are going to have to do for themselves, which I thought was an important message at the time. When I finally did see the movie, every frame of it hurt me physically. [Laughs.] I’d had such high hopes for it that… To feel like you’re a part of the downfall of something that you had hoped to resurrect, that’s a tough thing to take.

 

But that it has acquired a so-bad-it’s-good sort of thing after all these years is kind of fun. And I’ve said publicly that if they ask me to be on a Superman IV panel at Comic-Con, I’ll do it! But… [sighs.] You do get into this business because you love these stories, and if you care about them, seeing them go in a direction that you hoped they wouldn’t, it does hurt. The fullness of time has given me some perspective on it.

 

https://tv.avclub.co...ting-1798238147

 

[Liberty & Bash (1989)]

Plot summary: Liberty (Miles O'Keeffe), Bash (Lou Ferrigno), and their friend Jesse Richard Eden) served together in a war in Central America. Now Liberty and Bash work with kids, making sure the youth of today are keeping their noses clean, and they're trying to make a difference in the community. When Jesse gets mixed up with a bad crowd - two words: drug lords - and turns up dead, it's up to Liberty and Bash to enter into a new war, this time in their own backyard

 

Trailer:

[Let's Get Harry (1986)]

The plot: While in Colombia on business, American engineer Harry Burck (Mark Harmon) is kidnapped. When word of his abduction reaches his company back in Indiana, Harry's brother (Michael Schoeffling) and his friends Bob (Thomas F. Wilson), Spence (Glenn Frey) and Kurt (Rick Rossovich) decide to embark on a mission to extract Harry from his predicament and get him home safe. There are only two problems: they don't have the money to get there, and they don't have any experience in search and rescue missions. The funding comes from Jack (Gary Busey), a local used car salesman who gives them the money as long as they promise to let him tag along, and they hire mercenary Norman Shrike (Robert Duvall) to provide the requisite know-how on to hunt down Harry and get him back home.

 

Is it so bad that it's good, or is it so much of an '80s ensemble action flick that it's awesome? You be the judge. But I humbly submit it for your approval.

 

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