'Walking Dead' Creator's Abusive Emails Revealed by Lawsuit

The history of Hollywood is littered with legendary freak-outs — think David O. Russell's berating of Lily Tomlin on the set of 2004's I Heart Huckabees, or Christian Bale's Terminator Salvation tantrum in 2009. Now joining that ignominious list is Frank Darabont, whose spectacularly abusive emails to AMC executives and crew during the fraught production of the first season of The Walking Dead have surfaced amid his $280 million lawsuit against the network.

Darabont, who co-created the blockbuster cable hit, was fired as showrunner from the series early in its second season. He and his CAA team are suing AMC, claiming the network squeezed him out of of tens of millions of dollars in profits by negotiating a sweetheart licensing deal with itself. In its defense, AMC has released a cache of shocking emails sent by the Shawshank Redemption writer-director during production — vituperative missives meant to bolster their case that Darabont was justifiably terminated.

Reading through them, it's easy to see why. In what is arguably 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 "f**king lazy a**holes" 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 f**king killed them with a brick, then gone and burned down their homes."

Read the rest of this article at The Hollywood Reporter.

Frank Darabont directed The Shawshank Redemption but hasn't had a hit project since TWD.