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Many people would claim that Frank Darabont has made the best Stephen King adaptations ever put on film, but did you know that over a decade before making The Shawshank Redemption, it would be Stephen King himself who helped Frank Darabont become a filmmaker? Frank would use one of Stephen King’s infamous “Dollar Babies” where King would allow aspiring filmmakers to license one of his short stories for just $1. Darabont would adapt King’s short The Woman in the Room which would be short-listed for an Academy Award for Best Live Action Short film in 1983. Despite not getting the nomination, and not even particularly liking the short, King was a fan and for $5,000, granted Darabont the rights to adapt another of his short stories: Rita Hayworth and Shawshank Redemption.

Of course, Darabont wasn’t quite ready to tackle something as massive as that story just yet, so he made...

Next weekend sees the release of the big new DreamWorks franchise kick-starter "I Am Number Four," a kind of sci-fi version of "Twilight" with way cooler monsters. (You can read our complete thoughts next week.) The movie was directed by D.J. Caruso, who got his start on the low budget Frank Darabont-scripted cable movie "Black Cat Run" and has since risen to become Steven Spielberg's go-to guy, directing a succession of slick, expensive genre films in the form of "Disturbia," "Eagle Eye," and now "I Am Number Four" (which is easily his biggest film to date and a job he…...