Reading through them, it's easy to see why. In what is arguably the most level-headed of the emails, sent on July 21, 2010, Darabont, 58, tells a creative exec at AMC whom he considers "an ally" to "stop invoking 'the writers room'" in their exchanges. "There IS no writers room... I am the writers room."
The failings of the show's writing staff and crew — and in particular the camera operators — are a repeated theme of the rants. In the same email, he singles out one pair of writers as "fucking lazy assholes" and "overpaid con artists." After receiving what he felt was a woefully subpar script from a pair of writers, Darabont tells the exec, "If it were up to me, I'd have not only fired [them], I'd have hunted down and fucking killed them with a brick, then gone and burned down their homes."
"I told those assholes at least half a dozen times," Darabont continues. "Why don't they listen when I TELL them the way to do it? … [I]t's in one ear and out the other... It's almost as if they're intentionally telling me to fuck myself."
The rhetoric gets even more heated in a series of emails sent to the show's core below-the-line team one year later, as the delivery date rapidly approaches and Darabont is frantic, feeling the footage is unusable.
In the first, dated June 13, 2011, Darabont is furious over what he deems to be an overreliance on handheld footage. "You MUST calm down the camera operating," it begins. "This is turning out WAY more shaky-cam than I want. When I said please limit the handheld, it wasn't a random suggestion... And the operators MUST be told to HOLD THE FUCKING SHOT!"
He goes on to wonder if the camera operator had "an epileptic seizure" and deems his footage to be "utterly demented and unusable shit."
"Tell these operators that if they cannot provide us footage that works, we need to replace them with people who can. What the fuck are we paying them for? Ray Charles could operate better," Darabont writes.
