Spacey's gone, Trump steals its moves, but 'House of Cards' plays out
"There was a giant, wall-sized clock staring at us."
Inside a sun-soaked Beverly Hills hotel room, Melissa James Gibson, co-showrunner of Netflix's "House of Cards," is seated across from her counterpart, Frank Pugliese, recounting the race to salvage the streaming giant's flagship series last fall.
The political thriller was two weeks into production in Baltimore, on its sixth and final season - planned but not yet announced as such - when the cards collapsed.
As the Harvey Weinstein scandal deepened and spread, actor Anthony Rapp accused Kevin Spacey, the show's lead and executive producer, of making unwanted sexual advances on him when Rapp was a teen in the mid-1980s. Spacey issued a statement that pivoted from an apology for the incident, which he said he couldn't remember, to a declaration that he chooses now to "live as a gay man" - but other accusers would soon come forward. Production on the show shut down. Spacey was fired. And producers were left scrambling to figure out
