Hoax alert: AMC is not filming an episode of The Walking Dead in Maine

Watch your step. There’s a lot of BS on the Internet.

You may see the news on Twitter or your Facebook feed that AMC is planning to film an episode of The Walking Dead in the Maine woods. The news is attributed to a blog written by a screenwriter purportedly living in Maine. The blog’s author, Austin Hodgens, even quotes a spokesperson from Gov. LePage’s office as confirming the news.

Unfortunately, it’s a hoax.

The first red flag is in the first sentence, when it mentions the “Maine Department of Film and Television Production.” There’s no such thing. Maine has the Maine Film Office, which is contained within the Department of Economic and Community Development. Also, that LePage spokesperson … Nancy Kovacs … she doesn’t exist.

The second red flag — a dead giveaway that it’s a hoax, really — is a just far enough into the piece that many people who don’t read the whole post will miss it. The post’s author mentions AMC will save money by not having to hire extras to play zombies because Maine’s north woods has live zombies.

“As for those live Zombies,” the blog post reads, “AMC plans to film in the North Woods where the Zombie population is not as dense and can be easily controlled by Maine Zombie Hunters and Maine Zombie Census Bureau Agents, who will always be just off camera to ensure that the actors are never in danger.”

“It’s good fiction,” Doug Ray, a spokesperson for Maine’s DECD, told me this morning. “If we don’t get contacted by these big productions, we would have heard about them through Karen [Carberry Warhola, director of the Maine Film Office]’s contacts in the business. Not all productions go through us, but the ones this size that would want to take advantage of our incentives would.”

This Austin is obviously having a bit of fun. It’s not the first time. In response to reader comment, he also bragged about a post he wrote in January about Survivor filming in Maine had already garnered “55,000 views.”

 

 

 

Whit Richardson

About Whit Richardson

Whit Richardson is Business Editor at the Bangor Daily News. He blogs about Maine business, entrepreneurs and the economy.