Since Frank Darabont, screenwriter and director of such classics as “The Shawshank Redemption” and “The Green Mile,” spent five years trying to bring “The Walking Dead” to television, his dismissal from the show by AMC executives after just one season was, he has said, devastating.
But even a month after the show he created left him behind, he would still check in on one plot development that was essential to his moving forward.
He had to make sure that rugged former police officer Shane, played by Jon Bernthal, was still set to die.
“Frank and I were in close contact, and maybe a month or so after he was gone, he told me that he had something for me, TV-wise,” says Bernthal, who calls The Post from London, where he’s shooting the film “Fury” with Brad Pitt.
“He wanted to make sure that Shane was gonna die in Season 2. I told him I was.”
The “something” Darabont had for him was “Mob City,” based on John Buntin’s nonfiction book, “LA Noir: The Struggle for the Soul of America’s Most Seductive City.” Its first season, consisting of two-hour installments over three consecutive weeks, premieres Wednesday at 9 p.m.
With “Mob City,” a work of film noir set in Los Angeles of 1947, Darabont is attempting to do for noir what he did for zombies with “The Walking Dead” — take a genre that hadn’t been explored much on television, and turn it into a massive hit.
Bernthal plays Joe Teague, a hard-boiled detective and ex-Marine, a fictitious character who interacts with fictionalized versions of real-life men from LA’s seamy history, including gangsters Bugsy Siegel and Mickey Cohen, and LAPD chief William Parker — played, respectively, by film director Ed Burns, Jeremy Luke (“Jersey Boys”) and Neal McDonough (“Desperate Housewives”).
“The show deals with a period of history that is very much in the shadows, which is the history of the LAPD and the mob in LA,” says Darabont. “It’s a very sexy era in many different ways, with the city growing so rapidly. Whenever there’s growth, there’s always corruption and crime.”
Darabont’s aspirations for the show become clear about 10 seconds into the opening credits — a time span that includes images of a fedora-clad Bernthal in shadow, cigarette-smoking men advancing down the street with Tommy guns, scantily clad showgirls feather-dancing, menacing eyes peering out from a confessional, and a gunshot victim sprawled out by a urinal, all of which plays out over a swingin’ jazz soundtrack.
The plot runs along these lines as well, as when a businessman named Hecky Nash (Simon Pegg) asks Teague to assist him in dealing with a mobster. This meeting sets the story in motion, including, in keeping with genre conventions, unforeseeable twists along the way.
The key actor was Bernthal, who represented everything Darabont could hope for in his lead actor.
“How many guys do you know in this business who have his face, and who aren’t a showboater, look-at-me type actors?” says Darabont, who compares Bernthal to Lee Marvin, Charles Bronson and Robert Mitchum.
“I don’t see anybody else out there who’d be able to carry a show like this as its lead. Even when I cast him in ‘The Walking Dead,’ I thought, if I ever do a noir show, Jon would be perfect.”
All of this was clear to Bernthal when he read the script.
“The very first introduction to Joe says that the guy’s equal parts handsome and brutal, and he’s got a big nose — a boxer’s nose,” says Bernthal. “I figured pretty quickly [Frank] had written the role for me.”
While Bernthal understood the vibe of the piece, he knew almost nothing about the genre, and underwent a crash course in Noir 101. But while he watched films of the era and read Raymond Chandler, he found that certain not-quite-noir influences best helped him define his character.
“I responded to Chandler, but I really dug reading [James] Ellroy, especially ‘White Jazz,’ with the Dave Klein character. I really felt that was Joe further down the road,” he says. “I liked a lot of Nick Nolte’s work, with cops he played in ‘Q&A’ and ‘48 Hours.’ It’s not necessarily film noir, but that sort of hard-boiled detective abiding by his own rules.”
Darabont also referred to Shane while helping Bernthal define the role.
“There’s a stillness to Joe, of having things be a slow burn,” says Bernthal. “The first time Frank and I talked about this character, he said, ‘What I asked you do to with Shane was, I wanted you to play a caged animal — a guy who’s going rabid in that cage. What I want you to do for this part is, I want you to play the cage.’ ”
While many of these touches could seem new to TV viewers, Darabont believes this is just the right time for the genre to re-emerge as part of television’s larger creative renaissance.
“If anybody ever suggested a show like this, I’m sure they got shot down by executives who perceived this as old fashioned,” says Darabont. “Of course, I got the same exact argument for five years while trying to convince people that a zombie show could be successful on television.”