The Green Mile (film)

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The Green Mile
Promotional poster for The Green Mile
Directed by	Frank Darabont
Produced by	Frank Darabont David Valdes
Written by	Novel: Stephen King Screenplay: Frank Darabont
Starring	Tom Hanks David Morse Bonnie Hunt Michael Clarke Duncan Barry Pepper James Cromwell Doug Hutchison Patricia Clarkson
Music by	Thomas Newman
Cinematography	David Tattersall
Editing by	Richard Francis-Bruce
Distributed by	Warner Bros. (USA theatrical/worldwide DVD) UIP/Universal (non-USA theatrical)
Release date(s)	December 10, 1999
Running time	188 minutes
Language	English French
Budget	$60 million USD
IMDb profile

The Green Mile is a 1999 movie, directed by Frank Darabont and adapted by him from the Stephen King novel The Green Mile. The film stars Tom Hanks as Paul Edgecomb and Michael Clarke Duncan as John Coffey.

The movie is primarily about Edgecomb and his life as a prison guard on Death Row in the 1930s. The movie is told in flashback by the protagonist in a nursing home and follows a string of supernatural and metaphysical events upon the arrival of convicted murderer John Coffey.

For the 2000 Academy Awards, the movie was nominated for four awards (Best Actor in a Supporting Role, Best Picture, Best Sound, and Best Writing: Screenplay Based on Material Previously Produced or Published) but won none of them.

1 Plot summary
2 Featured cast
3 Trivia
4 Deviations from source material
5 Filming locations
6 Soundtrack listing
7 Awards and nominations
8 References
9 External links

[edit] Plot summary

Spoiler warning: Plot and/or ending details follow.

The Green Mile is a story told in "flashback" by an elderly Paul Edgecomb in a nursing home. He tells a friend about the summer of 1935 when he was a prison guard in charge of Louisiana death row inmates. His domain was called "The Green Mile" because the condemned prisoners walking to their execution are said to be walking "the last mile", here on a stretch of green linoleum. The main feature of the cellblock was "Old Sparky," the electric chair.

One day, a new inmate arrives. He is seven-foot tall (about 2.1 meters) John Coffey, a black man wrongfully convicted of raping and killing two young white girls. Coffey immediately shows himself to be a "gentle giant", keeping to himself, afraid of the dark and being moved to tears on occasion. Soon enough, Coffey reveals his extraordinary healing powers by healing Edgecomb's urinary infection and bringing a mouse back from the dead. Later, he would heal the terminally ill wife of the warden.

At the same time, Percy Wetmore, a vicious, sadistic guard who takes pleasure in intimidating and injuring inmates, exasperates everyone else in the cellblock. However, he "knows people in high places" (he was the nephew of the governor's wife), preventing Edgecomb or anybody else from doing anything significant to curb his deviant behavior. What Wetmore wants is to be put "up front" (i.e., in charge) during an execution: then, he promises, he will transfer himself to another government job (as an officer in a mental institution) and Edgecomb will never hear from him again.

Afterward he hedges on his promise. Meanwhile, a violent prisoner named "Wild Bill" Wharton arrives, due to be executed for a multiple murder he committed during a robbery. At one point he grabs Coffey's arm, and Coffey senses that Wharton is also the true killer of the two girls, the crime for which Coffey was falsely convicted and sent to death row. Coffey then uses his powers to impel Wetmore to empty his gun into Wharton, and then fall into a permanent catatonic state. Stunned by these events, Edgecomb queries Coffey, who says he "punished" those men, then takes Edgecomb's hand and imparts a vision of what really happened to the girls, a vision which Edgecomb finds nearly unbearable to endure. Wharton is dead at Wetmore's hand, and Wetmore ends up as an inmate at the very asylum he was to have managed.

Notwithstanding Coffey's incredible abilities and the wrongness of his conviction, he ends up being executed, due in large part to geographically-based racial overtones (the movie was set in the American South, during a period of racial segregation). The story proper ends there, and Edgecomb says that he subsequently transferred from death row to a juvenile facility, where he spent the remainder of his career.

The story then returns to the present, where Edgecomb explains to his friend why he is able to remember the events of 1935: he is in fact 108 years old and still in excellent health. This is seeming a side-effect of Coffey's life-giving power - Mr. Jingles, the mouse resurrected by Coffey, is also still alive - but Paul sees it as his just desert for not stopping Coffey's execution that has outlived all his relatives and friends. As he puts it, he has had to walk his own Green Mile..."but sometimes, oh God, the Green Mile is so long."

[edit] Featured cast

Actor	Role
Eve Brent	Elaine Connelly
Brent Briscoe	Bill Dodge
Patricia Clarkson	Melinda Moores
James Cromwell	Warden Hal Moores
Jeffrey DeMunn	Harry Terwilliger
Michael Clarke Duncan	John Coffey
Graham Greene	Arlen Bitterbuck
Dabbs Greer	Old Paul Edgecomb
Tom Hanks	Paul Edgecomb
Bonnie Hunt	Jan Edgecomb
Doug Hutchison	Percy Wetmore
Michael Jeter	Eduard Delacroix
David Morse	Brutus "Brutal" Howell
Barry Pepper	Dean Stanton
Sam Rockwell	'Wild Bill' Wharton
William Sadler	Klaus Detterick
Gary Sinise	Burt Hammersmith
Harry Dean Stanton	Toot-Toot
Bill McKinney	Jack Van Hay

[edit] Trivia

Originally set in 1932, the timeframe was moved to 1935 so the film Top Hat (released in that year) could be featured.
The prison guards wear uniforms to aid the film's visual style, even though they were not in use at the time in which the movie is set.
The music played over the loudspeakers in the retirement home as Old Paul Edgecomb first walks out of his room is the same as that which the nurses played at medication time in One Flew Over the Cuckoo's Nest (1975).
Originally, Tom Hanks was going to play Old Paul Edgecomb but the makeup tests did not make him look credible enough to be an elderly man. Dabbs Greer was cast instead in the role.
By the time Paul introduced Elaine to Mr. Jingles, the mouse would have to be at least 64 years old, over nine times the age of the oldest ever known real mouse.
While many of Stephen King's novels are set in the author's native Maine, The Green Mile takes place in Louisiana. However, the surname of the main character — Edgecomb — is the name of a town on Maine's mid-coast.
The electric chair featured in the film was built from the original designs of an example named "Old Sparky", which is part of the museum/tour of the Moundsville State Penitentiary in West Virginia. The prison was one of the finalists for the final shooting location. "Old Sparky" has been a common nickname for the electric chair in a number of states that used it.
A teaser trailer, gradually revealing Mr. Jingles to be making his way about the electric chair, was shot but not used. With no other creature present to give a sense of scale, it was decided that the close-ups of the mouse made it resemble a rat.<ref>The Green Mile Special Edition DVD</ref>

[edit] Deviations from source material

The Green Mile is, for the most part, faithful to Stephen King's original novel. There are, however, a few slight alterations.

The novel is a written story, delivered by the elderly Edgecomb to his fellow nursing home patient, Elaine. Each of the six volumes includes both an entry in the Green Mile story, as well as brief bookend scenes taking place in a modern day nursing home. These scenes included not only Paul's relationship with Elaine, but also his interaction with a sadistic employee, Brad Dolan, who reminds him of Percy Wetmore, his Green Mile co-worker. It is these interactions that cause him to remember 1933, his last year on the Mile. In the film, Brad Dolan is left out completely, and the bookend sequences only take place at the very beginning and end of the movie. Instead of Dolan, it is watching the 1935 film Top Hat that provokes the flashback, and this film is added to the main storyline as well, in which John Coffey's last request is to be able to see a "flicker show" (motion picture) before he is executed.
In the book, Hal Moores has an assistant named Curtis Anderson. He does not appear in the film, and his lines and scenes are given to Moores instead. Other inmates of the Green Mile who did not have speaking roles, and are inconsequential to the plot, are also omitted.
The first and second volumes of the book are told out of chronological order. The first book begins with the arrival of John Coffey, and provides details of the murder for which he is convicted. At this point in time, inmate Eduard Delacroix already has his pet mouse, Mr. Jingles, and another inmate, Arlen Bitterbuck, has already been executed. The second book goes back in time, to before Coffey is brought in, to explain where Mr. Jingles came from, and who Bitterbuck was. The film re-arranges these events so that Coffey's arrival is the first event to take place, and all others follow it.
In the book, strong evidence — ignored by the authorities — is presented to the reader of Coffey's innocence in Edgecomb's eyes: for example, the tracking dogs' confusion at the site of the girls' murder resulting from the murderer and the girls' bodies leaving in different directions. In the movie, however, John Coffey grabs Paul Edgecomb's hand and along with transferring 'life' to him, he also shows Edgecomb who really killed the two girls.

[edit] Filming locations

The following is a list of filming locations for The Green Mile:

[edit] Soundtrack listing

Professional reviews
The Green Mile (Original Soundtrack)
Image:GreenMileSoundtrack.jpg
Soundtrack by Various Artists
Released	December 14, 1999
Genre	Soundtrack
Length	74:15
Label	Warner Bros.
All Music Guide (3/5) link

The Green Mile soundtrack contains mostly instrumental pieces scored by Thomas Newman. Below is a listing of the songs (and their track numbers on the CD) that weren't composed by Newman.
8. "Cheek to Cheek" performed by Fred Astaire – 2:38
19. "I Can't Give You Anything But Love" performed by Billie Holiday – 3:27
27. "Did You Ever See a Dream Walking?" performed by Gene Austin – 2:52
34. "Charmaine" performed by Guy Lombardo & His Royal Canadians – 2:25

[edit] Awards and nominations

1999 Academy Awards (Oscars)

Nominated - Best Performance by an Actor in a Supporting Role — Michael Clarke Duncan
Nominated - Best Picture — David Valdes, Frank Darabont
Nominated - Best Sound Mixing — Robert J. Litt, Elliot Tyson, Michael Herbick, Willie D. Burton
Nominated - Best Adapted Screenplay — Frank Darabont

2000 Academy of Science Fiction, Fantasy & Horror Films (Saturn Awards)

Won - Best Supporting Actor (Film) — Michael Clarke Duncan
Won - Best Supporting Actress (Film) — Patricia Clarkson
Won - Best Action/Adventure/Thriller Film
Nominated - Best Director — Frank Darabont
Nominated - Best Music — Thomas Newman

2000 BMI Film & TV Awards

Won - BMI Film Music Award — Thomas Newman

2000 Black Reel Awards

Won - Theatrical - Best Supporting Actor — Michael Clarke Duncan

2000 Blockbuster Entertainment Awards

Won - Favorite Actor - Drama — Tom Hanks
Nominated - Favorite Supporting Actor - Drama — Michael Clarke Duncan
Nominated - Favorite Supporting Actress - Drama — Bonnie Hunt

2000 Bram Stoker Awards

Nominated - Best Screenplay — Frank Darabont

2000 Broadcast Film Critics Association Awards

Won - Best Screenplay, Adaptation — Frank Darabont
Won - Best Supporting Actor — Michael Clarke Duncan
Nominated - Best Picture

2000 Chicago Film Critics Association Awards

Nominated - Best Supporting Actor — Michael Clarke Duncan
Nominated - Most Promising Actor — Michael Clarke Duncan

2000 Directors Guild of America

Nominated - Outstanding Directorial Achievement in Motion Pictures — Frank Darabont

2000 Golden Globe Awards

Nominated - Best Supporting Actor - Motion Picture — Michael Clarke Duncan

2000 Image Awards

Nominated - Outstanding Supporting Actor in a Motion Picture — Michael Clarke Duncan

2000 MTV Movie Awards

Nominated - Best Breakthrough Male Performance — Michael Clarke Duncan

2000 Motion Picture Sound Editors (Golden Reel Award)

Nominated - Best Sound Editing - Dialogue and ADR — Mark A. Mangini, Julia Evershade
Nominated - Best Sound Editing - Effects and Foley — Mark A. Mangini, Aaron Glascock, Howell Gibbens, David E. Stone, Solange S. Schwalbe

2000 People's Choice Awards