There’s a special joy that comes when one rediscovers mementos from childhood. Not only is there a happiness that comes with just finding something that has been assumed long lost, but there’s a magical capacity unique items have to spark memories not conjured for decades. Of course, these treasures are typically enjoyed singularly – but Stephen King fans everywhere will probably be able to appreciate a recent discovery by Adam Faraizl, who memorably played Eddie Kaspbrak in the beloved 1990 miniseries IT.
Earlier this month, I had the chance to interview Faraizl and his fellow original Loser’s Club co-stars about Pennywise: The Story Of IT – a new documentary chronicling the history of the titular Stephen King adaptation – and I asked if any of them are in possession of anything that they got to keep from the set. The actor who played young Eddie then revealed how he walked away from the production with a shower tile from his big sequence in the miniseries. Said Faraizl,
I knew I had it at some point, but from the shower scene that was filmed, I asked to take a souvenir of that, cause obviously that was my big scene. It was constructed on a sound stage and they built a full inside of a bathroom – like tiling and everything – but the entrance to the bathroom, where I actually fall down in the corner at the end of the whole shot, was the entrance to it. And the tiling actually wrapped around to the outside and would never be on camera anywhere.
The scene in question here, of course, is the sequence where Eddie Kaspbrak has his terrifying solo experience with Tim Curry’s iconic Pennywise The Dancing Clown. The nerdy, asthmatic kid is sent to the showers by his gym teacher, and Pennywise terrorizes him first by blasting hot steam from the shower nozzles, and then by crawling out of the drainpipe.
Looking at the set, young Adam Faraizl discovered that there was one tile at the end that looked like it could be plucked without fuss, so he made a request to the production designer:
The line of black tiles that goes around the center of the bathroom, there was one that was hanging off at the end. And so I asked the guy who made the set and was like, 'Hey, can I just take this as a souvenir?' It kind of had like a touchstone feeling to it, and it something I was into cause I was 12.
While it was treasured by Adam Faraizl when he was a kid, it eventually got lost to time… but that just meant that it was left to eventually be rediscovered. Faraizl explained that he not only found the bathroom tile recently, but also another memento that he kept from the IT set:
I had lost that – it disappeared into my childhood stuff. At some point I was like, 'I know I had that somewhere.' Well, just recently, not only did I find that when I went back down to Texas to see my family, I also found one of the fake rocks that we were throwing at Henry Bowers.
When they were first made by the IT props department, the “rocks” in the rock fight were designed to be soft and not hurt the actors when pelted, but Faraizl explained that time has changed the material a bit. He continued,
It's made of polystyrene or some other type of foam that I'm not quite familiar with. So it's degraded in the Texas heat over the years, and it's a little bit less soft than it used to be. It's a little bit more like an actual rock now. But I did find both of those, and so I do have those now.
To learn more about the making of the 1990 series that successfully traumatized a generation (in a good way), Pennywise: The Story Of IT is now widely available digitally. You can buy or rent it on Google Play, and it’s available to watch with a premium subscription on both Amazon and The Roku Channel.
For more about the history of the miniseries as it relates to the book, check out my Adapting Stephen King column about 1990’s IT, and head over to our Upcoming Stephen King Movies and TV guide to learn about all of the projects that are currently in the works.
