Completed in an eight-week writing jag, Darabont’s script had the good fortune to land on the desk of a filmmaker with “a prison obsession”—longtime Castle Rock Entertainment producer Liz Glotzer. “I like reading about prison for some reason,” she says. “Any script that came in that was a prison movie, [my co-workers] would say, ‘Oh, Liz’ll read it.’ ”

Prison films date back to Hollywood’s earliest days, and the genre includes such landmarks as The Big House, Cool Hand Luke, Papillon, Escape from Alcatraz, and Bad Boys. But prison films have never been on the list of reliable moneymakers, which made Glotzer’s threat to quit if Castle Rock didn’t make Shawshank all the more nervy, but her passion had been stirred by her emotional response to Darabont’s script, becoming so engrossed in it she “didn’t want to finish reading.” Echoing Robbins and Freeman, she says, “It was the best script I’d ever read when I read it.”

Luckily for her, director Rob Reiner—a founder and “godfather of the company,” according to Darabont—“flipped” for the script. Reiner then made the screenwriter an offer almost no one would refuse: a rumored $3 million to direct Shawshank himself.

The figure was “something like that,” says Darabont, before pausing to “set the record straight . . . I’ve read so much speculation through the years, and now with the Internet every asshole who doesn’t know crap knows everything. I’ve heard versions of this where there was some power struggle over the script and the truth is incredibly simple.”

Reiner had himself mined Different Seasons and struck a vein when he turned the novella The Body into 1986’s Oscar-nominated Stand by Me. By the 90s, Castle Rock—formed after Stand by Me’s success and named for the movie’s fictional town—had a string of hit one-sheets on its office walls, from When Harry Met Sally, to another Reiner adaptation of yet another King story, Misery. Coming off the success of 1992’s A Few Good Men, Reiner saw that film’s star, Tom Cruise, as Shawshank’s Andy Dufresne. Though Darabont was attached to direct his script, Castle Rock asked if he would consider this alternative: “A shitload of dough,” according to Darabont, in exchange for allowing Reiner to make the movie with Cruise.

Darabont, who had been born in a French refugee camp for Hungarians fleeing the 1956 revolution and subsequently grew up poor in L.A., was tempted. “In my struggling-writer days, I could barely meet the rent,” he says. The Shawshank payday, whatever its precise number, would have put Darabont at the top of a profession he’d been “trying to achieve membership in for a lot of years.” Glotzer confirms Darabont was “completely tormented” by the offer. As if to turn the screws, Castle Rock said it would finance any other movie he wanted to direct if he ceded to Reiner. Surprisingly, though Darabont was only 33, philosophical thinking won out because, he says, “you can continue to defer your dreams in exchange for money and, you know, die without ever having done the thing you set out to do.” Still, the decision to direct the film himself was “nerve-racking. People get fucked in this business all the time. Contractually, [Castle Rock] could fire me after the first meeting, say I wasn’t hacking it, and, oh, gee, we’re just going to bring in Rob Reiner.”

True to his reputation as “a mensch,” however, Reiner acted as Darabont’s mentor instead—though, according to Glotzer, one detail needled the older director: “Rob joked, ‘[Different Seasons] is on my desk for years. You would have thought we’d have read the next story! But we didn’t.” Says Reiner, “I find it interesting that two of the most talked-about film adaptations of Stephen King’s work [Stand by Me and The Shawshank Redemption] came from the same collection of novellas and don’t rely on classic horror or supernatural elements of storytelling. In an odd way, they unmask Stephen King as a writer of exquisitely observed characters and brilliant dialog.” (In 1998, a third novella became director Bryan Singer’s Apt Pupil. Blumhouse Productions, the company behind Paranormal Activity and Insidious, optioned The Breathing Method, the remaining novella, in 2012.)