I found this Hollywood Reporter piece on Gale Anne Hurd and her thoughts about The Walking Dead fascinating, in a grimly offensive sort of way.

Producer Gale Anne Hurd, who is billed here at NATPE as the queen of sci-fi, thinks zombies are just what’s needed to offset today’s real-life anxieties.

“Given the fears in the world today, a zombie apocalypse series was less scary than, say, the financial meltdown or a disease outbreak,” she half-joked to an audience of sci-fi fans and business execs in Miami on Tuesday.

Hurd was speaking during a Q&A at the NATPE confab in which she talked about what made the series The Walking Dead work and why zombies, as clumsy and unsexy as they are, have so caught on worldwide.

“And zombies can be fun,” Hurd said.

I think it’s a bit much for someone who produced ‘The Punisher’ and ‘Terminator 3′ to call anyone else *clumsy* but that’s just me.

It’s sad but Ms. Hurd provides us further evidence of how debased our capitalist system is becoming, vis a vis Walking Dead advertisers:

Asked if there was any resistance among advertisers to the level of violence and gore in the series, Hurd said advertisers had no real problems.

“AMC never gave us a note to tone anything down. An airline even approached us about product placement — but we just couldn’t make that work with our plot!”

Remember, boys and girls, if you see something on-screen in The Walking Dead, there’s a fair chance someone paid to put it there. Good to know they have creative integrity!

With that in mind, allow me to present this ZRC Exclusive* Sneak Peek at a scene from the second season:

Sheriff What’s His Face: If there’s one good thing about the Zombie Apocalypse, it’s that the Undead didn’t take all of the delicious Reese’s Peanut Butter cups

Generic and Interchangeable Kirkman Stock Character #1: I like to wash them down with Mountain Dew(tm) myself.

Kid: I just looted five pairs of Nikes from that shoe store!

Finally, I’ll leave you with this, which explains a lot about the process of making ‘high-brow’ Anti-Zombie entertainment:

Another reason for the success of the show was pre-production — which Hurd said she learned the importance of from her stint working years ago for Roger Corman.

For one thing, she pointed out, “We learned how bad zombie makeup looked in HD so we opted to shoot in super 16.”

Yes, pre-production, a radical and innovative concept.

And shooting lower quality video to hide your technical inability and unconvincing Greenface? Priceless.

With techniques like that, are we sure she didn’t also study under Ed Wood?

*Not really a sneak peek at anything (so far as I know). Get a sense of humor.

Tags: Comics, Greenface, Movies

This entry was posted by John Sears on Thursday, January 27th, 2011 at 11:11 pm and is filed under Zombie Media. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.