Professor Maura Grady continues "Shawshank Redemption" involvement with local reunion
Was it meant to be that Maura Grady would become an expert about the connections of “Shawshank Redemption” to the local area?
“It has been the joy of my life to be involved with the research around this great film to some extent,” said Grady, Ph.D., an Ashland University associate professor of English. “Other people have written on this film. I’m not the only one by any means. but I think I can claim to know a lot about the local area and the tourism with it.”
Not only does Grady teach the subject every year in her literature and film class as an impressive example of adaptation, but she also has been involved in a number of published materials about it and even helped the area become a popular “Shawshank” tourism destination.
Grady participated in the most recent “Shawshank” event in August: the 30th anniversary of the classic movie at several of the locations where the film was shot in the Ashland, Mansfield and Upper Sandusky areas.
“I’ve been lucky enough to get to do research on it and some work that helped increase the number of tourists who come here for the film and the satisfaction they have when they come visit,” added Grady, who has worked with economic development organization Destination Mansfield and the Ohio State Reformatory nonprofit group the past decade to help them generate millions of dollars from the movie into the local economy.
Seeing the movie when it was released – meant to be?
To find out if all that has happened in Grady’s life involving “Shawshank” were meant to be, we need to first go back to 1994 when the movie was released in theaters, including one theater in Marburg, a small city in Germany.
As an English literature and German double major at the University of Vermont, Grady was studying overseas during her junior year when the only theater in Marburg that didn’t show films dubbed in German, instead showing them in their original language, was showing “The Shawshank Redemption.”
No one in the group of other English-speaking students she would often go to this theater with had heard of the movie and didn’t want to see it. Grady still decided to go by herself – because it was meant to be that she see it, perhaps?
“I just remember sitting in that theater by myself – there were some other people there, but not a lot of people – with a huge grin on my face, just blown away by the ending that I had not anticipated,” Grady said. “Spoiler alert for a 30-year-old movie: It has a very happy ending.”
Even if she hadn’t seen the movie then, she probably would have eventually as it became much more popular after it had left the theaters, but who knows?
Being nominated for seven Oscars helped increase its popularity, as well as word of mouth from people who rented it on video after all the Academy Awards publicity even though it didn’t win any Oscars. Then, television networks started showing it.
Accepting a job at Ashland University – meant to be?
It must have been meant to be when she moved to Ashland to take a job at the university in 2011, right?
Grady admitted that she might never have watched the movie a second time had she not moved to Ashland. She didn’t even know it had been filmed in Ohio until an employee at the bank where she and her husband got a mortgage told them a scene from the movie had been filmed there. Crosby Advisory Group is now in that historic building on Main Street.
“After hearing it was shot here, I thought I should watch it again,” Grady said.
How many times have you watched it since?
“I can’t even count,” Grady said. “I never get tired of watching it.”
After about a year at AU, one of her colleagues, an associate professor of hospitality and tourism in the College of Business, asked her if she would be interested in doing a research project with him looking at the tourism and fandom of “Shawshank” and another movie filmed in Ohio, “Christmas Story,” which had scenes that were filmed in Cleveland.
“We had bonded through movies and TV and became friends,” Grady said about Richard “Robby” Roberson Jr., Ph.D., who is now teaching at the College of Coastal Georgia, his alma mater.
After the people in Upper Sandusky, where the wood shop scenes were filmed, had a 15th reunion of the movie in 2008, Mansfield decided in 2013 to have a 20th reunion of the filming of the movie in 2013.
Asked to help plan the first reunion in Mansfield – meant to be?
When Grady and Roberson approached Destination Mansfield asking if they could do a survey of fans who visit for that reunion, officials at the organization invited them to also help plan it because they said they weren’t sure what fans wanted for the event.
“We made some suggestions of what we thought fans would like and want to see,” Grady said. “I was also teaching an Honors class and made the theme ‘Shawshank’ and had students do surveys that weekend and we surveyed hundreds of fans for the 20th anniversary of the filming of the movie.”
What they discovered is fans were excited to meet anyone who was involved with the movie, so having Morgan Freeman and Tim Robbins attend wasn’t necessary, Grady said.
Neither Freeman nor Robbins has ever visited the area for any of the local “Shawshank” events, but Robbins did express interest to attend the 30th anniversary event this summer, added Grady, who traveled to Los Angeles just before the 30th with a group of other “Shawshank” enthusiasts from Ohio, including members of the Ohio State Reformatory staff and owners of the Shawshank Woodshop, to see a play that Robbins had written and directed and were able to talk to him after and invite him.
“He was excited to come, but I don’t think his schedule worked out for him,” Grady said.
Over the years, most everyone else who was involved with the movie, not only actors but behind-the-scenes people, have attended local “Shawshank” events, including Frank Darabont, the director and screenwriter who revisited the area for the first time in 2019 for the 25th anniversary.
“I’ve met him a couple of times,” Grady said. “In 2014, a group of us went out for the 20th anniversary of the movie in L.A. at the Oscars theater (Dolby Theatre). He put all of the Ohio people in the first two rows, so we were in front of some of the actors of the movie. There were about a dozen of us.
“On that trip, I got to meet a bunch of people involved with the movie,” Grady added.
Not only meeting people involved with the movie, but being able to visit actual filming locations interested visiting fans, Grady said. Those spots are now on The Shawshank Trail, which people can visit on their own anytime.
Much of the success of all the Mansfield/Ashland area “Shawshank” events can be traced to the first one in 2013, which was basically a dry run for a bigger event in 2014: the 20th anniversary of the movie.
“Robby and I made a presentation to the people involved in the planning of the 2013 reunion (after the event),” Grady said. “In 2014, we did another survey and could test what they implemented. Most of the time, people don’t implement the things you suggest, but this time they did and it was successful.”
Taking an undergrad class from a Stephen King scholar – meant to be?
From their research, Grady and Roberson published an article in a tourism publication, as well as a book with another person titled “The Shawshank Experience: Tracking the History of the World’s Favorite Movie.”
The other person? Tony Magistrale, a Stephen King scholar whom Grady took a class from at the University of Vermont about American Gothic literature that included some works from King.
Someone Grady was meant to get to know, maybe?
“The Shawshank Redemption” movie is based on the King novella “Rita Hayworth and the Shawshank Redemption.”
“I had run into him at conferences while I was in grad school,” said Grady, who went to grad school in California. “In 2014, I invited him to be the keynote speaker and he came and did a presentation about the film at AU. I spent the rest of the weekend showing him around to the ‘Shawshank’ spots and he said we need to write a book and I said, ‘I’m already writing a book with my colleague about film tourism,’ but he wanted to write one just on ‘Shawshank.’”
So, with contributions from Roberson, they published “The Shawshank Experience: Tracking the History of the World’s Favorite Movie” (Palgrave/Macmillan, 2016).
Grady and Roberson, along with former AU student Erika Gallion Velasquez, also wrote a chapter for the academic book, “Fandom as Classroom Practice: A Teaching Guide” (University of Iowa Press, 2018), and Grady contributed a chapter about “Shawshank” and “The Green Mile” to the book “Violence in the Films of Stephen King” (Rowman & Littlefield, 2021), edited by Michael Blouin and Magistrale.
So, do YOU think “The Shawshank Redemption” was meant to play such a big part in your life, Maura?
“Who knows?” she responded. Then with a big smile added: “I do know that it has been the most fun research project I could ever imagine.”