After the surprise firing of Frank Darabont from his AMC hit, The Walking Dead, the jack-of-all trades producer, writer, and director didn’t sit around doing nothing. Instead, he moved on to shopping his next project, L.A. Noir. Not that you had to guess, but AMC and its sister channels were not the buyers.
As reported by Deadline, TNT has ordered a pilot for the drama, which focuses on the true story of a decades-long conflict between the Los Angeles Police Department and a criminal ring in the forties and fifties. At the head of the LAPD is Police Chief William Parker. His intimate rival is boxer-turned-mobster Mickey Cohen. The program will be based on L.A. Noir: The Struggle For The Soul Of America’s Most Seductive City, a nonfiction title by John Buntin.
While that description doesn’t sound overly glamorous, Darabont himself is quick to point out L.A. Noir will be a sweeping, stunning, and passionate affair.
“Noir is a passion of mine, so I feel blessed to delve into a project that speaks in the hardboiled vernacular. John Buntin’s superb book, though non-fiction, is our touchstone and inspiration for the stories we’ll be telling, weaving fiction throughout the facts and facts throughout the fiction…The goal is to deliver on the tone that the title L.A. Noir promises: a smart, gritty, authentic, period noir drama.”
Darabont’s hands-on approach to discussing his pilot shows how invested he is in the L.A. Noir project. According to Deadline, Darabont is set to not only write the pilot for L.A. Noir but also to direct it. Additionally, he will be on board as an executive producer with Michael De Luca. If there’s anything we learned from Darabont’s The Walking Dead experience, it is that the man my be hard to work with, but in the end, his results really do come out as pay dirt. With TNT’s mega hit The Closer ending after this season, the network could use another highly rated program. With Darabont in TNT’s back pocket, the stakes are looking pretty good.
