Although it’s difficult to know what this means for his long-gestating adaptation of Ray Bradbury’s Fahrenheit 451, Shawhank Redemption writer/director Frank Darabont is working on a TV adaptation of the comic book series, The Walking Dead.
The comics are set during the aftermath of a zombie apocalypse, and rather than just concentrating on the horror, it tries to deal with how a small groups of people, led by a Kentuckian police officer called Rick Grimes, would realistically handle the fall of civilisation and the return of the dead. It sounds like a similar idea to what Darabont tried to do with his film version of Stephen King’s The Mist, which took a lot of horror movie staple plot devices (and some other, bloody bizarre ones ) and tried to turn it into a character piece about people dealing with events they have absolutely no frame of reference for.
The Walking Dead adaptation has been sold to the US TV channel AMC (American Movie Classics). From the Variety report that announded the deal, it isn’t precisely clear whether this will be a one-off TV movie, a mini-series or whether Darabont will be writing and directing the opening instalment of a projected series.
Either way it would seem that if Darabont has the time to devote to this, his Fahrenheit adaptation still hasn’t come together. A couple of months ago he said negotations over the film were at a make or break point, and relied on getting a big star attached. We doubt he’s given up on the movie, but it does appear we won’t be seeing it for a while yet.