Brain Snacks: Tasty Tidbits of Knowledge
Andy's pipe-dream town, where he intends to open a hotel, is a real place. It has about 100,000 people, probably a lot less when Andy busted out, and it features a beautiful bay and a lot of sandy beaches. So yeah, a hotel funded by a escaped prisoner with tons of cash is probably a viable option there. (Source)
Life really does imitate art…sometimes. Case in point: a 2007 New Jersey prison escape by inmates Otis Blunt and Jose Espinosa. How'd they do it? They dug a hole in the wall, then covered it up with girlie posters… just like Andy! Sadly for them, they didn't have any fake IDs or giant piles of cash waiting for them: they were caught just a couple of weeks later. (Maybe they should stop showing the movie in prisons, just to be safe.) (Source)
According to Stephen King, people have a hard time believing that he wrote Shawshank. He even has a cute little story illustrating it (as reported by fellow Incredibly Cool Author Neil Gaiman). (Source)
In his afterward to the book, King talks about fears early on in his career about getting typecast as a horror writer. His first novel, Carrie, is about a telekinetic girl who kills her high school tormentors. When his second novel, Salem's Lot—about a town that gets taken over by vampires—came out, the hand-wringing began in earnest. Of course, both those books sold countless copies, and suddenly it looked like "typecasting" would be a sure bet for Mr. King. This means that when he tried to sell a not-scary story like Shawshank, no one wanted to buy. That theme repeated itself with the movie, as we shall soon see.
The movie adaptation of Shawshank is considered a modern classic, but when it first came out, nobody saw it. It grossed only $28 million in theaters according to Box Office Mojo, and while it was nominated for seven Academy Awards, it didn't win a single one. It found its audience later on, first as a video rental (remember those?), and then on cable… mostly because it was aired all the time on TNT (the cable channel). Apparently, it became so popular because of its power to change people's lives after viewing it. Hope really does spring eternal, it seems. (Source)