Not holding anything back, Frank Darabont has opened up about his firing from AMC’s hit show “The Walking Dead“, of which he was the showrunner for season 1 and 2, and the circumstances that led to such a decision. This information is coming up as Darabont is pursuing claims that AMC breached their contract with him, resulting in a loss of tens of millions of dollars that they allegedly owe him.
Darabont held pretty much nothing back in his scathing remarks on AMC executives surrounding the situation. For example, when talking about budgeting for the show, Darabont brought up emails touting the myriad of successes which, apparently, had no bearing on costs:
I remember Joel Stillerman, in a meeting in my office, when we were all discussing the issues of the upcoming season, we said to him, ‘Surely that the success of the show, which, by the way, you guys are bragging about because we keep getting e-mails saying, ‘Hey, we’re breaking viewership records in 120 countries around the world by hundreds of percent, in some countries by over 1,000%,’ at the same time we’re hearing how successful the show is for you, you’re telling us that this, this budget issue is not going to budge at all. And he said, ‘The success of the show has no bearing on this discussion,’ in a rather icy manner.
Another huge blow that shook Darabont and the crew to the core was when AMC announced that they were apparently keeping the tax credit.
Not only cutting us from 3.4 [million] to 3 [million], that was bad enough, but then they dropped the bomb on us that, oh, by the way, they’re also keeping the tax credit. They’re going to pocket the tax credit. So, between the two you’ve got a full 25% cut across the board. Now, that tax credit, by the way, was something that, again, you go back to the treatment of the cast and crew. The cast and crew were earning, busting their butts, leaving it all on the field, to earn. The fact that we couldn’t then take that tax credit and put it on the screen or alleviate shooting conditions to any degree, I thought that was adding insult to injury. But again, our success had no bearing on that discussion according to him.
Darabont continues with even more information, such as meetings with the VP of Scripted Programming and the lack of interest and empathy from AMC execs, all of which can be read here.
