The Shawshank Redemption followers shocked by true story behind ‘maggot’ scene | Films | Entertainment | EUROtoday

The inventive group behind the enduring movie The Shawshank Redemption needed to suppose on their ft after being barred from utilizing reside animals in a selected scene.

In a memorable second from the basic film, character Brooks Hatlen is seen tending to his pet crow inside the confines of the jail partitions, however the American Humane Society took problem with the unique plan for this sequence.

Despite its preliminary lukewarm reception, the movie, which relies on Stephen King’s novella and stars Hollywood heavyweights Morgan Freeman and Tim Robbins, has since been elevated to legendary standing, typically hailed as one of many biggest movies ever made.

However, the journey to create The Shawshank Redemption was not with out its challenges. One explicit hurdle concerned a scene the place Hatlen feeds his crow, prompting the filmmakers to embark on an uncommon quest.

A current revelation on the r/TodayILearned subreddit illuminated the behind-the-scenes wrestle with a seemingly easy shot that turned out to be fairly problematic for the crew.

According to the publish: “During a scene in The Shawshank Redemption in which a crow was to be fed a maggot, the American Humane Society objected against the idea of a live animal being killed for the scene meaning the team had to find and use a maggot that had died of natural causes.”

Director Frank Darabont mirrored on this peculiar state of affairs in his screenplay notes, which have been later made public following the movie’s launch.

He remarked that the maggot couldn’t have been deliberately killed by the manufacturing group, and that even a joke about finding one which had perished naturally didn’t amuse the American Humane society.

A fan reminisced: “Darabont talks about this in his published annotated script. The crew had to find a maggot that was already dead (as in, the crew couldn’t just kill one and then feed it to the bird).

“When the crew dug via the tin of bait that they had bought on the native fishing retailer and located one which was already lifeless, Darabont supplied to have it autopsied to verify it had died of pure causes. The ASPCA rep on the shoot did not, apparently, discover it humorous.

“By the end of the day, the prop department had made a tiny director’s chair out of matchsticks to give the live worms somewhere to rest between takes.”

Additionally, additional particulars emerged when Darabont revealed {that a} waxwork worm was used as an alternative throughout the scene. In the DVD commentary, Darabont confirmed a consultant was current on set to “protect the rights” of the maggot.

He recounted: “This was a waxworm my prop guys purchased a local bait store. We had the ASPCA lady come on this day because we had that little baby crow in Jim Whitmore’s vest pocket, and I figured they were there to make sure nobody mistreated the baby crow, right? No.

“This lady was additionally there to guard the rights of the ‘maggot’ within the scene, and was insistent that we don’t feed a reside maggot to the child crow.

“I was trying to reason with this lady by pointing out that it was from a bait shop and anyone in the country could walk in, buy a box of worms, ram a hook through them and drop them in a river to be eaten by bass, but for some reason a filmmaker with $100,000+ a day pouring out the door is not allowed to feed a live waxworm to a baby crow?”.

“I laud the ASPCA because there were a lot of filmmaking abuses back in the day, when filmmakers used to trip horses with wires and do a lot of very cruel things, and the ASPCA has put a stop to that. However, when you can’t kill bait because of the bureaucracy I think it has gotten a little bit silly.”