10 Movie Scenes With Unexpected Influences
8. Fat Ass' Beating Was Based On The Rodney King Videotape - The Shawshank Redemption
One of the many traumatic scenes in The Shawshank Redemption sees an unnamed prisoner, referred to and credited as "Fat Ass" (Frank Medrano), get beaten to death by the psychopathic guard Byron Hadley (Clancy Brown).
But in order to stage a sufficiently unnerving sequence, writer-director Frank Darabont took inspiration from a horrifying act of real-life violence - the 1991 assault of a Black American man, Rodney King, by LAPD officers, as was famously caught on video and eventually led to the 1992 Los Angeles riots.
Darabont felt that there was a power to the distant viewpoint of the King video, keeping the audience far from the incident itself, and so decided to film Fat Ass' murder the exact same way.
And so, the scene is shot from afar with a telephoto lens, cutting only to show the concerned faces of the other inmates watching the assault, rather than opting for a more "cinematic" attack filled with cuts and close-ups.