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1. Who directed The Green Mile?
Frank Darabont
It was his second Stephen King prison story in a row after The Shawshank Redemption, and Darabont again wrote the screenplay himself; the result runs past three hours. He had started out adapting King's short story The Woman in the Room as a student film.
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2. Who wrote the original novel?
Stephen King
King published it in 1996 as six slim monthly paperbacks, a serial in the Dickens manner, so readers reached the ending a part at a time. The book is narrated by Paul as an old man in a nursing home, a frame the film keeps.
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3. Who plays guard Paul Edgecomb?
Tom Hanks
Hanks took the part straight after Saving Private Ryan, and Darabont tried him in old-age makeup for the nursing-home scenes before handing the elderly Paul to Dabbs Greer. By then Paul claims to be well past a hundred, and has an idea why.
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4. Who plays John Coffey?
Michael Clarke Duncan
Duncan had been a bit-part heavy and a bodyguard until Bruce Willis, his Armageddon co-star, recommended him to Darabont. The part earned him a supporting actor nomination, and he introduces himself as Coffey 'like the drink, only not spelled the same'.
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5. Why is the cell block called the Green Mile?
Its floor is green
The lime-colored linoleum runs from the cells to the door of the execution room, so a condemned man's last walk is along it, and the guards use the name for the block itself. King's narrator describes the floor as the color of old limes.
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6. What is the prison called?
Cold Mountain Penitentiary
A Louisiana prison in 1935, with the exteriors shot at the disused Tennessee State Penitentiary in Nashville. Shawshank, among the distractors, is Darabont's other King prison, in Maine; Blackgate is Batman's, and Folsom is real, and Johnny Cash's.
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7. What special ability does Coffey have?
He can heal others
The first thing he cures is Paul's bladder infection, by taking hold of him through the bars and then coughing out the sickness as a cloud of insects. Paul goes home early and surprises his wife, Jan, played by Bonnie Hunt, with the results.
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8. What does Coffey fear despite his size?
The dark
He asks Paul on his first night whether the lights stay on after bedtime, because he gets scared in strange places, and the fear comes back at the end, when he asks not to have the hood put over his face. The size and the fear together make the character.
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9. What is the prison mouse called?
Mr. Jingles
The mouse appears on the block before the man who will adopt him, and the guards' first instinct is to hunt it down the Mile, Percy with his baton out. It beats them to the restraint room every time, and the guards decide it is smart enough to leave alone.
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10. Which inmate befriends the mouse?
Eduard Delacroix
Delacroix, a Cajun murderer played by Michael Jeter, keeps the mouse in a cigar box and is promised it will retire to a mouse circus in Florida called Mouseville, a kindness the guards invent. His execution is the one Percy sabotages by leaving the sponge dry.
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11. What is the electric chair at Cold Mountain called?
Old Sparky
The guards rehearse every execution on it with Toot-Toot, the trusty, standing in for the condemned man, which is how Percy learns the routine he later sabotages. Gruesome Gertie was Louisiana's real chair and Yellow Mama was Alabama's.
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12. What do the guards arrange for Coffey the night before his execution?
A screening of Top Hat
He has never seen a moving picture, so Paul threads a projector and Coffey watches Fred Astaire and Ginger Rogers in the Cheek to Cheek number, which he hears again in his head on the Mile. 'I'm tired, boss,' he tells Paul, when asked what he wants.
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13. What is the nickname of guard Brutus Howell?
Brutal
Brutus Howell, the biggest guard on the block, is played by David Morse, and he does most of the lifting when Wharton or Percy needs handling. The name is a joke at the expense of the mildest man on the Mile, and Paul's closest ally in everything that follows.
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14. Whom do the guards smuggle Coffey out of the prison to heal?
The warden's wife
Melinda Moores, played by Patricia Clarkson, is dying of a brain tumor, so Paul, Brutal, Dean and Harry drive Coffey to the warden's house at night with Percy left in a straitjacket in the restraint room. The warden, Hal Moores, is played by James Cromwell.
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15. What toy-like object does Mr. Jingles chase and retrieve?
A wooden spool
A colored wooden spool that Delacroix rolls down the Mile for the mouse to fetch. Percy's boot crushes it along with its owner, and the revived Mr Jingles is still rolling a spool in the nursing home decades later, when Paul shows him to Elaine.
