Stand by Me (film)
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| Stand by Me | |
|---|---|
 Theatrical Release Poster |
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| Directed by | Rob Reiner |
| Produced by | Bruce A. Evans |
| Written by | Stephen King |
| Starring | Wil Wheaton River Phoenix Corey Feldman Jerry O'Connell Kiefer Sutherland |
| Music by | Jack Nitzsche |
| Cinematography | Thomas Del Ruth |
| Editing by | Robert Leighton |
| Distributed by | Columbia Pictures |
| Release date(s) | August 8, 1986 (limited) August 22, 1986 (wide) |
| Running time | 88 min. |
| Country |  |
| Language | English |
| Budget | $8 million |
| Gross revenue | $52,287,414 |
| Allmovie profile | |
| IMDb profile | |
Stand by Me is a 1986 adventure-drama film directed by Rob Reiner. The title comes from a song with the same title by Ben E. King (which plays during the closing credits) and is based on the novella The Body by Stephen King, who called it his favorite adaptation of one of his works up to that point.
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[edit] Plot Synopsis
Stand by Me is a coming of age film set in rural Oregon in late summer, 1959. It portrays a journey embarked upon by four 12 year-old boys across the woodlands near their hometown to see the dead body of another boy who was close to their own age. The film is told through the recollections of the main character, Gordie Lachance, a freelance writer. It describes how his friend Vern overheard his older brother discussing the body of a missing boy after accidentally coming across it in the woods with his friend.
The lead characters go on a journey into the woods to find the body of a boy named Ray Brower, who was struck by a train while picking berries in the woods. Through the boys' misadventures and conversations, the viewer learns about each character's personality. Each of the boys, for varying reasons, lives in the shadow of their fathers and older brothers. Gordie's talent for storytelling (as illustrated by his improvised short story "Lard-Ass") pegs him as the most likely of the four to have a promising future.
The film contrasts the four main characters, who are depicted as well-meaning and relatively virtuous, with a gang of bullies led by a local hood, "Ace" Merrill.
[edit] Characters
The main characters are Gordie Lachance (Wil Wheaton), and his three friends Chris Chambers (River Phoenix), Teddy Duchamp (Corey Feldman), and Vern Tessio (Jerry O'Connell), all 12 years old.
Each has a physical and/or emotional burden. Chris is from a family of criminals and alcoholics and, despite his intelligence and desire to break the generational curse, he is usually stereotyped accordingly. Teddy is an eccentric and physically deformed after his mentally-unstable father (whom Teddy sees as a war hero who "stormed the beach at Normandy") held his ear to a stove and nearly burned it off, thus forcing him to wear a hearing aid. Vern, overweight and timid, is easily scared, and thus often picked on. Gordie is a quiet, bookish boy with a penchant for telling stories, rejected by his father following the death of his football-star older brother Dennis "Denny" Lachance (John Cusack) in an automobile accident. The story is narrated by the adult Gordie (Richard Dreyfuss), who makes brief appearances at the beginning and the end of the film. At the start, we see that Chris Chambers has died, but at the end we find out more about what happened. Gordie is grieving over this, and has become a writer, and we have just witnessed the story as he was writing it.
[edit] Cast
- Wil Wheaton as Gordie Lachance
- River Phoenix as Chris Chambers
- Corey Feldman as Teddy Duchamp
- Jerry O'Connell as Vern Tessio
- Kiefer Sutherland as John "Ace" Merrill
- Casey Siemaszko as Billy Tessio
- Gary Riley as Charlie Hogan
- Bradley Gregg as Richard "Eyeball" Chambers
- John Cusack as Denny Lachance
- Marshall Bell as Mr. Lachance
- Frances Lee McCain as Mrs. Lachance
- Bruce Kirby as Mr. Quidacioluo
- Scott Beach as Mayor Grundy
- Richard Dreyfuss as Gordie as an Adult/The Writer
[edit] Book discrepancies
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This article or section may contain original research or unverified claims. Please improve the article by adding references. See the talk page for details. (June 2008) |
While Stand by Me is generally faithful to the original Stephen King novella, the film makes some notable deviations from its source material. For example, the time is moved back a year from 1960 to 1959. Although both stories take place in a town called "Castle Rock", the original Stephen King story is set in Maine, while the film takes place in Oregon, where it was filmed. Castle Rock locations were shot in Brownsville, Oregon.
Parts of the story’s timeline are altered in the film. Chris and Gordie’s conversation about his writing career and what will be different when they are in junior high, the scene where Chris tells Gordie the truth about the milk money incident, and Gordie’s story about "Lard Ass" all take place at different moments in film. The book also features more events that occur shortly after the journey. It describes what happened when the boys came back to their homes, as well as an incident where Gordie was attacked by Ace but refused to turn him in.
Some scenes are added to or removed from the film. It has more scenes involving the older gang than King's novella; the scenes where Ace steals Gordie’s cap, when the gang plays “mailbox baseball”, when they discuss Ray Brower’s body together in the junkyard, and when they have a race together on the highway were not in the book. The film ignores Gordie’s short story entitled Stud City, and adds two of his flashback scenes, in which his brother gives him a baseball cap and when he takes part in a family dinner.
There are a number of repeated elements that are added into the film, including the boys continually singing the theme song from Have Gun — Will Travel, Vern’s comical obsession with his comb, Gordie and Chris doing "pinky swearing" when they give each other promises, and the characters giving each other "two for flinching" by softly punching each other. In addition, Gordie’s relationship with his brother is much more intense in the film, while in the novella, Denny and Gordie were not entirely close to each other.
The film includes some additional conversations between the boys that weren’t in the book, including their discussions around the campfire, their argument over whether or not they should go back after the leech attack, whether to cross the field as a shortcut to the Royal River, what kind of animal Goofy is, and who would win in a faceoff between Mighty Mouse and Superman. Other debates are trimmed down. In the book, the boys threatened to inform police about Milo trying to sic his dog on Gordie during the argument that arose after he called Mr. Duchamp a lunatic, and Teddy later argued for bringing Ray Brower’s body back with them.
There are some actions in the plot that are performed by different characters in the book from in the film. In the book, it was Gordie, not Chris, who wrestled Teddy off the tracks before he could attempt a train dodge, while in the book it was Chris who pulled out the gun, but Gordie does it in the film. Also, the gang member who threatened the boys with a knife in the book was actually Jackie Mudgett, and not Ace. Some lines of dialogue are spoken by different characters. In the book, the line "...going to see a dead kid, maybe it shouldn’t be a party" was spoken by Vern, and the line "you won't mind if we check the seat of your jockey shorts for Hershey squirts" was spoken by Teddy. In the film, both of these lines are spoken by Gordie.
The film features characters that weren’t in the book, and vice versa. For instance, in the book there were two additional boys in Gordie's "gang" named John and Marty DeSpain who were out of town during the story, but they are never mentioned in the film. In turn, the book didn’t feature the various members in the crowd during the pie-eating contest that the film identifies.
Some of the characteristics of the people in the story are changed. For instance, both of Teddy's ears had been burned in the book, but in the film only his left one had. (The book also gives a more thorough description of the events leading up to Teddy's father being institutionalized, including said burnings). Chopper was a mongrel dog, while in the film he is a golden retriever, the name of the mayor who serves as the announcer during the pie-eating contest is changed from “Charbonneau” to “Grundy”, and Vern’s nickname, "Penny" (because of the incident where Vern spends nine months looking for pennies, and not four years as in the book), is never brought up. Gordie was also a huge Red Sox fan in the book, and his admiration for Ted Williams was noted. This trait is never stated in the film, in which Gordie wears a New York Yankees cap.
Another notable difference between the book and the film is the character of the store clerk. In the book, he was a grumpy person who tried to cheat Gordie of his money twice and yelled angrily at him as he left the shop. In the film, he is a kind and sympathetic man who is curious about Gordie’s personal life, and who empathizes with Gordie over Denny’s demise, as he, himself, lost a brother during the Korean War. In the book, Denny was in the military at the time of his death. The film doesn't establish this, although props in Denny's room gives the idea that he was probably out of high school and maybe even in college when the accident took place.
Significantly, the book provides an epilogue that kills off more than just the protagonist's best friend. Both of the two main characters whose fates are ignored in the film meet the least distinguished of fates in King's book: Vern passes out on a cigarette and sets a blaze, and Teddy dies when his vehicle hits a utility pole and rolls several times as he and his passengers are drinking and passing around joints; a female passenger also is fatally injured. In both the book and the film, the tragic figure is Chris Chambers. King engages in ample foreshadowing by establishing Chris as preternaturally and essentially good, the more so because of his "diamond in the rough" nature: his family is composed of criminals, in a time and a town where the apple rarely fell far from the tree. Chris is tough and well-grown, but uses his maturity to be a peacemaker rather than a warrior. His peacemaking tendency and maturity are established repeatedly: He is throughout the book and film the voice of reason, saving his friends from both physical and emotional harm. Chris's death is an early but fitting sacrifice: in a fast food restaurant, he instinctively steps between two men who have engaged in a knife-fight. Chris is stabbed in the throat, being granted an instant death. Gordie is the sole survivor, who lives on and writes, but without his friends. Note that in a dream sequence following the infamous leech sequence in the book, Gordie shows his ambivalence to childhood friends--envisioning his friends as grasping to his limbs and drowning him, and declaring that friends only "hold you down." The loss of his best friend Chris reminds him that he will "never have friends like that again."
The ultimate punishment is only shown in the book: the fate of the antagonist, Ace. Rather than the quick death granted to Chris, Teddy, and Vern, Ace is seen by Gordie years later in a local bar: his sharp features softened by fat, grown old before his time. Gordie's victory is that of living well. A more detailed and graphic account of Ace Merrill's later years and subsequent death is in King's novel Needful Things, in which Ace plays a prominent character later in his life.
[edit] Award nominations
- Golden Globe Award for Best Motion Picture - Drama
- Academy Award for Writing Adapted Screenplay (Raynold Gideon & Bruce A. Evans)
- WGA Award for Best Screenplay Based on Material from Another Medium (Raynold Gideon & Bruce A. Evans)
- Directors Guild of America Award for Outstanding Directorial Achievement in Motion Pictures (Rob Reiner)
- Golden Globe Award for Best Director (Rob Reiner)
[edit] External links
- Stand by Me at the Internet Movie Database
- Stand by Me at Allmovie
- Stand by Me at Box Office Mojo
- Stand by Me filming locations from cinema-astoria.com
- Brownsville, Oregon Stand by Me film locations from Brownsville Chamber of Commerce
| Preceded by The Fly |
Box office number-one films of 1986 (USA) September 1, 1986 – September 21, 1986 |
Succeeded by Top Gun |
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