For many people, the name Tim Curry brings up his iconic performance as Dr. Frank N. Furter in The Rocky Horror Picture Show, his scheming butler in Clue, or perhaps the haughty concierge in Home Alone 2. But for people coming of age 35 years ago, Curry became the stuff of nightmares as Pennywise the Dancing Clown in the 1990 ABC miniseries It, based on Stephen King's doorstop novel. There’s always been something unsettling about clowns, but Curry crystallized our fears with a performance that traumatized a generation of viewers and set the gold standard for all evil clowns to come, including Bill Skarsgård's later interpretation of Pennywise in the modern It films.
The miniseries is successful in many ways — there are several chilling sequences — but it also suffers from its network TV origins, which imposed commercial breaks every 15 minutes or so. By necessity, screenwriter Lawrence D. Cohen and co-writer/director Tommy Lee Wallace streamlined much of the story and split the book’s parallel timelines, in which a group of friends confront an ancient, evil entity in the sewers of Derry, Maine, first as children and then again as adults, into two halves over two nights. The acting by both the children and adult actors is uneven, as are some of the visual effects. But Tim Curry’s portrayal of Pennywise continues to stand out.
