Shubhabrata Dutta
Directed by Rob Reiner, ‘Stand By Me’ is a coming-of-age drama film about four young friends, Gordie, Chris, Teddy, and Vern, as they embark upon a mission to look for the body of a missing 12-year-old kid named Ray Brower, who lost his life in an accident. As they search for Brower’s corpse, the quest takes them through bittersweet experiences that provide a sense of danger that comes with maturity and metamorphosis and it becomes a journey of self-discovery for the four preteens. Set in Oregon in the summer of 1959, the story is brought to life by the compelling performances of Wil Wheaton, River Phoenix, Jerry O’Connell, Corey Feldman, Kiefer Sutherland, John Cusack, and Richard Dreyfuss.
Over the years, the Academy Award-nominated 1986 film has received a lot of acclaim and is considered one of the greatest films of all time. A bunch of kids going on a thrilling adventure but ending up in dire situations is something that might make many wonder if there is any truth to it.
Stand by Me is Based on a Book
‘Stand by Me’ is not based on a true story, but there’s more to it than you might think. Driven by a script penned by Raynold Gideon and Bruce A. Evans, the film is based on Stephen King’s novella titled ‘The Body,’ which is one of the four novellas of King’s 1982 ‘Different Seasons’ collection and is one of his more dramatic pieces of non-horror work. As revealed by the revered author himself, there is a connection between the film and King’s childhood. While speaking to Chicago Tribune in 1986, director Reiner shed light on King’s reaction upon watching the film. He said, “We showed the film to Stephen King alone in a screening room, and when it was over he was pretty broken up.”
Reiner added, “He excused himself for about 15 minutes. When he came back he said, ‘That’s the best film ever made out of anything I’ve written, which isn’t saying much. But you’ve really captured my story. It is autobiographical.’” Talking about the real-life experiences that make the story very personal to him, King stated, as per Reiner, that “I was the writer (Gordie)… and my best friend was the guy who actually did instill the confidence in me to become a writer (Chris). And he actually was killed as a young man.”
In the film, we get four 12-year-olds setting out to look for the dead body of Ray Brower, another kid of the same age, who is missing and believed to be dead. Their motive is to get famous, but what follows is the dawning of life’s fragility and the omnipresence of death on them. Of course, they don’t understand it the way we, as the audience, interpret it, but they do feel it at a subconscious level with objective feelings of fear, sadness, and pain. As touched upon in his nonfiction book, ‘Danse Macabre,’ King said that his mother, Ruth Pillsbury King, informed him that he also lost a friend in an accident at the tender age of 4, and that it deeply impacted him as he returned home “white as a ghost.”
King wrote, “It turned out that the kid I had been playing with had been run over by a freight train while playing on or crossing the tracks (years later, my mother told me they had picked up the pieces in a wicker basket). I would not tell her why I’d not waited to be picked up or phoned that I wanted to come home; I would not tell her why my chum’s mom hadn’t walked me back but had allowed me to come alone. My mom never knew if I had been near him when it happened, if it had occurred before I even arrived, or if I had wandered away after it happened.”
He added, “Perhaps she had her own ideas on the subject. But as I’ve said, I have no memory of the incident at all; only of having been told about it some years after the fact.” It is surreal how King showcases death while maintaining innocence, and that too through his own experiences that have become the basis of not just ‘Stand By Me’ but many other films adapted from his novels. In an interview with The Telegraph in 2011, director Reiner explained how he added a sense of reliability to the character of Gordie.
The director said, “In the book, it was about four boys, but…once I made Gordie the central focus of the piece then it made sense to me: this movie was all about a kid who didn’t feel good about himself and whose father didn’t love him. And through the experience of going to find the dead body and his friendship with these boys, he began to feel empowered and went on to become a very successful writer. He basically became Stephen King.”
In a 2016 interview with Variety, actor Corey Feldman, who plays Teddy stated, “When I did it, Rob was impressed a lot by the reality in my delivery. I didn’t have any problem getting to the emotional places. My life was such turmoil and havoc. I didn’t have the best home life. I didn’t lead a normal life. I was aware of that from a very early age. I remember being 7 years and coming home from school thinking, am I going to get abused today? Am I going to get beaten today? Most kids don’t have to think about this kind of stuff. They’re not thinking they’re going to get hit by their parents because they’re not doing well enough in school, which will prevent them from getting a work permit, which will prevent them from being an actor.”
It isn’t tough to argue against the statement that ‘Stand By Me’ is a true story, especially for someone who doesn’t know that it is adapted from a novella that is quite autobiographical in nature. But the above-quoted words prove that there is so much reality incorporated within the fiction. What we need to realize here is that every aspect of the film and the way it explores childhood is as real as life itself. The issues of childhood that we see in the film are genuine. The coming of age is real. The fear of death, as seen through the eyes of 12-year-olds, is authentic. The friendship between Gordie, Chris, Teddy, and Vern is palpable, and so is the final line of the movie, delivered by an adult Gordie (Richard Dreyfuss): “I never had any friends later on like the ones I had when I was 12. Jesus, does anyone?”
All the aforementioned points make the film a part of life. And when Stephen King pours the magical potion of his experiences into his cauldron of chronicles, all that we can do is breathe in the smell and lose ourselves in the influence. Although the writers took some heavy creative liberties while adapting the novella, ‘Stand By Me’ is packed with several events that the author borrowed from his life.
Read More: Best Stephen King Movies of All Time
