MOVIES TV helps 'Shawshank''s redemption

The movie has become a must-see cult hit.
By ANDRE MOUCHARD
ORANGE COUNTY REGISTER
There are bad movies, good movies, great movies and "The Shawshank Redemption."
"It's one of those perfect screenplays," says "Shawshank" fan Arnold Kunert, a retired English teacher who lives in Irvine, Calif. "I can sit down any time and watch."
If you have access to nonpremium cable, or if you've bumped into much movie stuff on the Internet, you know how Kunert feels.
The film version of the Stephen King story about a banker who maintains his humanity during an unjust and very long stint in prison is, 10 years after its release, rentable, buyable, channel-surfable proof of the existence of a new category of art -- the ubiquitous cult movie.
"Shawshank" is mega, and it's gone mega in the face of two hurdles that usually prevent huge, movie meganess.
Box office flop
First, "Shawshank" tanked at the box office. The movie cost $25 million to make, but sold just $28.3 million worth of tickets. Not the preferred start to any movie's afterlife.
Second, while solid (it received seven Oscar nominations), "Shawshank" isn't a critical darling. Although the movie pulled some decent reviews, nobody who gets paid for their movie opinion ranked it with "Lawrence of Arabia" or "Casablanca." "Shawshank" might not be as critically favored as "Escape From Alcatraz," a movie from which it, uh, borrows liberally.
But all that was 10 years ago, ancient history in the life of a monster cult movie. These days, everything about "Shawshank" screams hit.
Second greatest movie
This month, for example, the movie lovers who click in to the popular Web site International Movie Database (www.IMDb.com) rank "Shawshank" as the second greatest film of all time, sandwiched between the first two "Godfather" flicks. The lofty rank is no fluke. "Shawshank" has held a top-five spot on the IMDb poll for at least the past five years.
Flip deeper into the Internet and you'll find several Web sites devoted to "Shawshank," complete with trivia about the movie and news about the film's big stars (Tim Robbins and Morgan Freeman), plus comments from viewers.
"In a slow month, I get a few dozen letters. In a busy month, I get maybe 200. People simply love this movie," says Franco Trampe, a payroll accountant in Milwaukee who, in 1998, created "The Shawshank Redemption" Web Page as part of a college project.
"It's a universal story," Trampe adds. "And, in the end, it wraps up nicely with a little bow. A lot of people want that."
How did it happen
Fine. But how did "Shawshank" rise from underseen theatrical release to must-see cult hit? Such a transformation once would require critics to change their diabolical ways or a leap in status for the movie's big star, or, at the very least, several thousand midnight screenings on or near college campuses. But in a modern media world, there are several avenues for a movie to reinvent itself. "Shawshank" has traveled most of them.
The Oscar nominations, for example, gave the movie a brief second run in theaters in early 1995. And that, in turn, helped make "Shawshank" a movie-rental giant. The film was the biggest rental of 1995 and has remained a strong rental and DVD seller in the past decade.
"Shawshank" director/writer Frank Darabont put it this way in a 1999 story in The Wall Street Journal: "The nominations elevated the film out of the pit of obscurity that it was tumbling into."
But if the Academy pulled "Shawshank" out of a pit, bleary-eyed channel surfers pushed the movie somewhere closer to the ozone. In the click-click-click world of nonpremium cable, "Shawshank" seems to be on an endless loop.
TNT is pusher
The biggest "Shawshank" pusher is TNT. After a run on pay cable, "Shawshank" made its network television debut on TNT in June 1997. Three years later, it was the first title aired when TNT launched its "Saturday Night New Classics" program.
Since then, "Shawshank" has run on TNT an average of six times per year; at least three dozen times overall.
"It's a unique film in that it so underachieved at the box office and has so overachieved consistently on TV," says Ken Schwab, who oversees movie programming for TNT and TBS.