Why AMC fired Darabont from THE WALKING DEAD…
In the good ol’ days, Hollywood kept its fights behind the scenes. We’d wait a few years, maybe decades, for a good storyteller to come along and really put the pieces together. Mark Harris’s Pictures at a Revolution and Peter Biskind’s Down and Dirty Pictures are just two recent examples.
Those days are long over, of course. But even by today’s standards, AMC’s battles with the creators and studios behind Mad Men and Breaking Bad were highly-publicized. (Nobody in Hollywood likes a winner, especially a creative upstart like AMC.) Nothing, however, disrupted the basic cable network’s public reputation like its recent falling out with Frank Darabont over The Walking Dead.
There’s been a lot of talk about why Darabont and AMC parted ways. I’ve mentioned to people that Darabont, a writer who directs only every few years, might not have made the transition to the rigorous TV production schedule. Other’s have talked about the creative direction of the show, with a lackluster series finale that resulted Darabont firing the entire writing staff.
Thankfully, the Hollywood Reporter’s Kim Masters weaved an enticing tale (that she should turn into a book) that sets the record straight: It’s the budget stupid.
But AMC’s budget-cutting upset him. “Frank doesn’t like to see the cast and crew overworked and underpaid,” says a show insider. As recently as the end of May, with the show’s second season poised to go into production, Darabont seemed to be holding out hope that AMC would relent. “Creatively, I have no complaints thus far,” he said at a THR roundtable. “But I believe if they do move ahead with what they’re talking about, it will affect the show creatively … in a negative way. Which just strikes me as odd. If you have an asset, why would you punish it?”
Darabont might have been worried that the per-episode budget for AMC’s only in-house series was cut from from $3.4 million to $2.75 million. But here’s the most interesting takeaway from Masters’s article:
But this source says that AMC had its own ideas about how to make the show more cheaply. The show shoots for eight days per episode, and the network suggested that half should be indoors. “Four days inside and four days out? That’s not Walking Dead,” says this insider. “This is not a show that takes place around the dinner table.” That was just one of what this person describes as “silly notes” from AMC. Couldn’t the audience hear the zombies sometimes and not see them, to save on makeup? The source says Darabont fought “a constant battle to keep the show big in scope and style.”
So not just the budget, but also significant creative differences that could ultimately hurt the show. Anyone who has read the comics know that “the insider” here is right. How much of a departure from the comics will be acceptable is up for discussion, but scope and style were two things that The Walking Dead, even in its weaker moments, had going for it.
The show isn’t dead yet. The Shield‘s Glen Mazzara who joined the show full-time after the first season has take over Darabont’s duties, with a little help from the comic creator Robert Kirkman. Whether or not they can bring back some of the magic of those early episodes is something we’ll have to wait and see. For Darabont’s fans, we’ll just have to settle for a trip to prison without the man who made The Shawshank Redemption.
Get Email Updates
