I guess most people who read this blog regularly know that I like history, and I like John Kennedy, and I like science fiction. I combined those into an alt.
history for the series and now it looks like I've done it again.
Yeah, I know, I know.
This is the classic what if and it's been done a few times. Historians love to speculate on this scenario, wondering even Watergate.
Knowing what we know now, it seems like they've missed the point. There's a new twist to the answer that wouldn't have been possible to even dream of until about a decade ago.
If he’d gotten out of Dallas alive, John Kennedy might easily have suffered the same fate as his arch-nemesis Richard Nixon -- humiliation and removal from office.
That's the premise of a novel I've been working on for over a year with Harry Turtledove who is pretty much the dean of alternative history novels. Our project is called:
And before you freak out and start calling me names, both Harry and I are life-long Democrats.
We don't hate JFK. We have been as compelled by his story as anyone. We just think that this is one of the best alt.
history ideas either of us has ever worked on. Our premise is pretty simple:
With the eyes of the world on the United States and the media in a frenzy, with JFK himself alive and not a martyr, an immediate investigation would have been launched into who might have been interested in killing our popular American President.
Starting with the Secret Service, the blame-game would have taken on a life of its own, forcing explosive revelations in mere months that have instead dribbled out over decades. Kennedy’s reckless conduct would have become public: the lies about his medical condition, contacts with mobsters, election money-laundering, numerous attempts to assassinate foreign leaders, and even the hundreds of high-risk sexual encounters that endangered Kennedy’s safety and, by extension, our country’s security.
This alternative history novel covers the period from the November 22, 1963 near-miss assassination attempt of President Kennedy in Dallas, Texas through the events of early 1966 when the fate of John F. Kennedy careers in the next election.
If you'd like to see the whole bit, just or on the BANNER ABOVE to visit the site.
Must be something in the water.
A few weeks ago, I got the news that my NBC series (co-created with Brent V. Friedman) would be released by SONY on DVD this October. Now comes the news that a series I developed and executive produced for Polygram TV will now be released by NBC-Universal this July.
Woo-hoo!
Apparently, it'll be a four-DVD box set released under the banner.
(And thanks to for knowing this before I did and telling me!) I've been waiting for some kind of news peg like this to hang this blog-post on because I loved that series and it was a terrific creative experience.
It started back in 1998 when I was asked to develop The Crow film and graphic novel franchise into a TV series by the now-defunct Polygram TV. It raised an interesting challenge:
What do you do when the incredibly violent film you are asked to adapt to a TV audience is based on cruelty, and the main character is driven by a thirst for revenge?
My answer?
You expand the premise to fully explore the nature of life after death, and you change the character quest from revenge to redemption.
And how do you handle the fact that the cult film was made infamous by the horrible on-set death of its star, Brandon Lee?
That was a tougher question because the idea behind the TV series was to use the Eric Draven character, the one who'd been in the comics and that Brandon Lee had played.
My take was that, tragic as Lee's death was, George Reeves' tragic death did not prevent Christopher Reeve or Dean Cain from playing Superman, and that we would just have to proceed and hope that our own version stood intact on its own. So, besides the conceptual changes, we also reached out to actor Mark Dacascos who created a Crow/Draven character that was unique itself.
In our 22 episodes, Eric Draven’s mission grew from simply wanting to murder the people who murdered both he and his girlfriend. He began to climb… that’s right… a Stairway to Heaven.
Although the concept of the Crow had history when I came aboard, this shift was no small challenge.
The comicbooks by James O’Barr which started it all were intensely violent, bloodsoaked revenge fantasies. Pretty cool in their own right, but impossible to sell to a mass TV audience. The films, brought to life by several different writers and directors, were dark, brooding mood pieces, also saturated by the blood of sadistic, drug-abusing, violent scumbags.
An equally difficult sell. Yet the films built upon the comics, changed the mythology to adapt to a new medium, and grew the premise in the process. That was the only way to go.
So the TV series had to become its own manifestation of the Crow. It, too, had to grow the mythology, and adapt to its own medium.
At first, a lot of fans who came to the concept by way of the comics and the movies were taken aback. They felt it was not true to the spirit of O’Barr’s creation or the performance of Brandon Lee. Yet we knew that even if every person who read a comic or saw the movie tuned into the series, it would still be cancelled.
We had to bring new people in.
We did.
We brought in women by making it a series with a love story as its central premise –- a love that survived even death. That started with our opening titles where we used the famous lines from the Crow movie (delivered only by Eric) about the soul can't rest and re-wrote it as a poem between Eric Draven and Shelly. This was my first draft:
We brought in others who found our new Crow’s mission to be more hopeful than the films and, therefore, more accessible to their lives. We cast as our lead the incredibly talented Mark Dacascos whose performance gave the Eric Draven character an entirely new dimension of sympathy and whose martial arts skills were crackling and theatrical. We wrote stories as smart as we could, expanding the mythology to include such twists as Draven being a suspect in his own murder to making literal the previously only mentioned Land of the Dead.Still, the last thing Sheldon said on the subject was a quote from Jill Tartar, an astrophysicist and Search for Extra-Terrestrial Intelligence (SETI) project scientist at NASA's Ames Research Center. She said:Basically, we tried not to pander to the audience, but to challenge them upward.
By the way, if you'd like to read the pilot script, here it is:
If you'd like to read the series bible created before we went on the air (and, thus, something that changed), here it is:
A number of people should be mentioned as having been part of this process. Ed Pressman and Jeff Most are the keepers of the Crow flame, especially in the feature world. Bob Sanitsky and Stephen Gelber were the Polygram execs who were smart enough to get us up and running, then support us creatively.The production wouldn’t have happened without Gregg Fienberg who came in as Polygram’s man on the ground, but quickly became my doppelganger, seeing my vision with me, and making it happen. Gordon Mark and Brad Markowitz took it from the page to the stage. The other staff writers and producers were Chad Hayes, Carey Hayes, Naomi Jantzen, John Turman and David Ransil.
A great team. It all worked.
The show found its rhythm. Although the action was always intense by virtue of Mark’s fighting talents, some of the most heartfelt scenes I’ve ever written or re-written are in this series. It worked, and it was good.
By the end of the season, we had a real friendship formed between Eric Draven and Detective Daryl Albrecht (played to awesome perfection by Marc Gomes) and Sarah (played so well by Katie Stuart).
The ratings were great by syndication levels (2.7 and above). Then Polygram was purchased by Universal, and it all fell apart. Universal, you see, wanted Polygram’s music division but, having gotten out of the TV business only the year before, had no desire to nurture a new series in the tough syndication market.
It was just business. The show died.
Maybe, like Eric Draven, the show will come back to life some day. I’d like that. Maybe the fact that the underlying rights are now owned by NBC-Universal (which also owns the Sci-Fi Channel) will mean something.At the very least, I'd like it if this DVD release could spark the fire that would allow me to wrap up our Eric Draven arc with a film or a limited series, using Mark Dacascos. Then, maybe, Eric Draven really could rest in peace. Anyway, as the Crow flies.
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I have only read one book authored by out in the desert at Rancho Mirage. It was his 1991 novel, The Doomsday Conspiracy, on the subject of UFOs. The plot and characters invovled the usual Sheldon formula applied to a global cover-up of a crashed UFO, complete with murdered witnesses and the like.Even though I hadn't read his other work, it still felt like maybe he'd stretched a little too far afield. But then, because I've done a lot of fiction-writing myself in the world of UFO's and aliens, I guess I'm a picky read.
In an author's note at the end of the book, he discusses the research he conducted in order to write the book.He really took no definitive position, preferring to couch most of his thoughts this way:
I have read a dozen books that prove conclusively that flying saucers exist. I have read a dozen books that prove conclusively that flying saucers do not exist.
There are 400 billion stars in the galaxy. We're made of stardust, really common stuff. In a universe filled with stardust, it's hard to believe that we are the only creatures who could be.Sheldon, in his writing career, preferred a more Earth-bound creature anyway. As the New York Times put it in today's obituary, he preferred to write about stalwart women who triumph in a hostile world of ruthless men.
Here's how Sheldon put it:
''I like to write about women who are talented and capable, but most important, retain their femininity. Women have tremendous power -- their femininity, because men can't do without it.One thing I always admired about Sheldon though was how he had achieved success in film and television and even on Broadway when, at the age of 50, he decided to try a life-change and turn his attention to writing novels. I guess by doing that he proved that you really are the author of your own life.''
The Smackdown. The apocalypse has gone post(al) in both of these films set in England.
The action in both starts in London then moves to the country where the living is not easier. In both of these sci-fi thrillers, man's command of science and control over his environment seems to have brought with it some terrifying and unexpected consequences.
D. James. I found its central premise thrilling then, that mankind suddenly and completely goes infertile.
I found the idea that if there are no people left in a few years that the sheer sadness that no one will ever hear Mozart or read Shakespeare again to be almost overwhelming. In the hands of director Alfonso Cuaron, this intellectual idea becomes gritty, dangerous and even more provocative. Clive Owen has been cast in one of his best roles here as Theo -- his face seems to register all the injustice and pain with a resignation to keep on living anyway finally giving way to a resignation to give it all up in a way that his life will have mattered.
When I said that being a bike messenger was a great way to meet people, this was not what I had in mind.
This film basically has animal activists setting some lab animals free from their cages only to set loose a rage virus that transmits to humans. It turns into a zombie movie then, but probably the best one I've ever seen. And I was blown away by how awesome the empty city shots of London were when Jim (Cillian Davis) first realizes that something has gone wildly and insanely wrong.
The Scorecard. Both of these films are structured similarly: the opening in London, important mission of survival takes them into the country, fighting off zombies or immigrants who stand in their way, giving us a black woman as a main character who seems to be the toughest of the bunch, and ending with a sense of small hope for society after scaring the crap out of us along the way.
Both were directed so intensely that they deliver their particular apocalyse believably and credibly. This is a close one. CHILDREN OF MEN, however, is a film that I could actually talk my wife into seeing while 28 DAYS LATER was dismissed by her as a genre movie she had no interest in seeing.
And she had a point. Although the truth is CHILDREN OF MEN is actually scarier because it feels like a lot of it could come to pass if we're not careful.
The Decision. Years from now, CHILDREN OF MEN is going to be included in the group of films that include BLADE RUNNER. 28 DAYS LATER, though, is going to be compared to films like DAWN OF THE DEAD.
Despite their structural similarities, this is still apples and oranges. I just hope there will be humans alive to listen to Mozart, read Shakespeare and watch CHILDREN OF MEN. It's a close decision on points.
.. The Smackdown. We've put a couple of major star vechicles in the ring together, both of them about traveling back in time to change the future, both directed by major directors with reputations for getting the action up there on the screen.
Using this thing to check out Pamela Anderson was a GREAT idea.
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The Challenger.
That would be the Denzel Washington starrer, DEJA VU, which posits that with all those nifty satellites we have scanning the globe that there's a way to use them to triangulate and snoop on anybody we want ...
only not in the present but four days and a few hours in the past. Okay, that's a stretch, but if you can get past it, the rest of the movie just charges ahead at full energy so that the whole thing still works.
With Kid Rock gone, maybe she's ready for a real half-man!
The Defending Champion. Remember how blown away you were when you first saw TERMINATOR II: JUDGMENT DAY? Granted, it's Arnold back as the Terminator, only he's playing a good robot in this one, and there's an even badder, improved model that's out to kill the boy who will grow up to save humanity.
All of this is a stretch, too, but what fun! Seeing Robert Patrick re-assemble himself out of a pool of liquid metal, well, that had the theater I saw it in screaming.
The Scorecard.
Both Tony Scott and James Cameron delivered big, intriguing films that are just plain fun to watch. Denzel is a better actor than Arnold. But the hooey-factor seems to be a little more in your face in DEJA-VU because in TERMINATOR II we just get the idea and move on.
Also, DEJA-VU asks you to think about the thriller-mystery aspect of the plot which only shines a light on the logic holes while TERMINATOR II makes it all about the action. One robot wants to kill the kid; and the other wants to save him. Simple.
The Decision. I liked DEJA VU as a great Thanksgiving weekend afternoon diversion. But fifteen years from now, we won't be thinking of it anymore.
TERMINATOR II: JUDGMENT DAY is a film for the ages that people will see multiple times, and talk about in film classes. This decision then goes to the rock-em, sock-em robots from the future..
.
The gang was all there under a hot early afternoon sun: Steven Spielberg, Robert Zemeckis and, of course, the guest of honor George Lucas.
The man behind Star Wars -- a 1966 graduate of USC's School of Cinema-Television -- has just !
As an adjunct professor there this fall term (I'm teaching ), I was there with several hundred others to hear the speeches and see the ceremonial lifting of shovels to break the ground on the new construction project.
That's producer and trustee Frank Price, Dean Elizabeth Daley and University President Steven Sample all sporting hard hats along with George. Buying naming rights is all the rage these days, of course, and Lucas got to give the school a brand new name for his chunk of change.
Unlike Doritos Bowls and Tostitos Centers and Burger King Stadiums and whatnot, Lucas chose to use his influence to simplify and clarify. The new name of the USC School of Cinema-Television, effective today, is:
That's right.
The USC School of Cinematic Arts. According to Lucas himself, here's the why of the name change.
“Though ‘cinematic’ was often understood in the 20th century as dealing with movies, in this century it is taking on a much broader context, looking beyond the media,” said Lucas. “I believe that the new name of the school embodies the movement of the industry and the art form, and positions all who learn here as leaders not just for the moment, but for generations to come.”Just for the record, this is the largest private donation ever received by the university, period. For that kind of cash, USC would probably have called it Lucasville or Lucas World if he'd asked them to, so you really do have to admire the man's restraint.
As an aside to all this, one of the guests in my producing class this term talked about the illegal practice of Block Booking -– where a big feature film is tied to a less desirable film, forcing theater owners to take both. Back in 1977, Fox was fined $25,000 for this practice. The big feature film was The Other Side of Midnight.
The less desireable film? The one that nobody wanted? The one that theater owners had to be forced to take?
Yeah, you guessed it. Some little thing called Star Wars. From what I've seen today, this Lucas guy has done alright with it.
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George Lucas has a lot on his mind about the industry. was probably more controversial and important than what he said during his time at the podium. For starters, he thinks the big tentpole mega-movie blockbuster strategy that studios are pursuing is exactly the wrong strategy.
He sees a future of many, many smaller films and he's moving his own company in that direction.
The USC SCA (School of Cinematic Arts) donation puts $75 million toward the building fund for a brand-new state-of-the-art complex to house the school.
The other $100 million portion of the gift will go toward support initiatives in four core areas: students, faculty and staff, technology and programming, and alumni outreach. The gift will also serve as a major catalyst for the school to reach the $200 million goal of its current endowment campaign.
Besides the obvious positive vibes, it was a fun outdoor event, too. We lunched at standing tables on chicken or beef sandwich rolls, french fries, pasta salad and cookies. The swag du jour included newly-minted hats with the new school name on them and t-shirts.
Directors -- past, present and future -- will be wearing them all over Hollywood in the weeks to come. And, yes, that's Lucas getting hatted by Spielberg. It reminds me that JFK had a no hats rule during his campaign.
People kept giving him hats but he never put them on because people take pictures of you wearing them -- you never look as good as you did when you arrived -- but the goofy hat picture is what gets printed. Having said that, I'm not giving back my hat, I love the damn thing.
USC's School of Cinematic Arts really is the best of the best when it comes to an education in film and TV and new media. My son is an undergraduate there now getting a major in Interactive Media. He's been getting a spectacular education and, now, many more students just like him are going to get an even better one.
The current class I teach, for example, is in another building besides the CNTV one, mine being described by staff as the ugliest building on campus. Maybe in a few years, we'll get to teach this thing in the hip new hacienda-style architecture of the new so-far unnamed Lucas building.
Bottom line: George Lucas has made a lot of money in his life but, even so, nobody writes a check like this one without a wince. Thanks, George. It really is a great thing you've done.
And we don't care what size movies you want to make from now on, just keep making them...
After Dark Skies went off NBC in May of 1997, it went into a very heavy rotation on the Sci-Fi Channel, stirring up a whole new set of fans who, frankly, had more going on in their lives than to stay home on Saturday night to watch a TV show. This was before TiVO, you have to understand.
Around 1999, though, went into hibernation. Last week, it reared its paranoid, conspiratorial head again when The Path to 9/11 started publicizing that mini-series with an ad campaign that looked about from the original Dark Skies campaign. This was duly noted on the Internet from everybody from The Huffington Post to Defamer to Salon.
It was a real Roswell in a rainstorm...
Now there's word that ! Here's what they have to say about the release on the Intrada web-site that's selling it:
Original music from TV series set during 1960's, featuring conspiracies, cover-ups, the FBI, extra-terrestrials, other sixties icons, created by Bryce Zabel, Brent Friedman. Michael Hoenig scores with assist from Mark Snow on un-aired pilot.Hoenig anchors with main title theme blending lonely Americana trumpet with furtive string, keyboard rhythms. Bulk of score creates tension through plethora of piano rhythms, synthesized string figures, other bristling activity. In contrast are quiet ideas with meld of mystery, menace.
Given limited scope of instrumental timbres, Hoenig works variety of material well, brings everything to a quiet, satisfying close. Snow gives unaired pilot score similar color via electronic string effects, keyboard ideas but highlights with interesting jabbing rhythm for synthesized brass, then balances with haunting minor-key theme for high strings over delicate piano arpeggios. Nicely-packaged with generous booklet offering notes about production, scoring.
CD is packaged as The 10th Anniversary Limited Edition Original Television Score . It was an interesting musical start.
Mark Snow, who was also working on X-Files, scored our pilot originally and that version aired around the world in early 1996. But Chris Carter, as I understand it, was not enthusiastic about Snow doing his show and our show, so Snow had to depart our project. In came the incredibly talent Michael Hoenig as his replacement and the pilot was even re-scored before it aired on NBC in September of 1996 (ten years ago).
And, for those Dark Skies fans out there (and I mean real fans), here is the rundown of what's on the CD.
The thing is, I remember all these songs because I was there and editing with them, etc., but I am really looking forward to hearing this CD. Especially since, I think, I'm quoted in the liner notes. But I'll never forget that, in addition to our sophisticated and memorable musical score, we also budgeted for the use of a lot of period music.
Our pilot, for example, ended with John Loengard and Kim Sayres on the run, after the Kennedy assassination they helped cause, as we heard the first strains of For What It's Worth by Buffalo Springfield. Now you know a bit about where this blog title came from. And, for the fans who to this day criticize that song as being out of time order, I offer the real explanation.
We were scrupulous about matching song release to actual story points through the series, and For What It's Worth (released in 1967) was used -- ON PURPOSE -- because we wanted it to be a precursor of the paranoia that existed for our characters on the road ahead.
Now, if only SONY would take heed here.We've had the Dark Skies poster re-exposed to the national audience in the last week, now we have a CD of the music out. Maybe -- just maybe -- it's time to put the series itself out on DVD so people can actually watch it again.
Light the candle.is a year old. Make a wish. Let's see now.
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This entire blog started out as an experiment to teach myself some higher level technical/computer skills, but it also evolved into a new form of writing.As a screenwriter, you have many freedoms, but you also are responsible for juggling many other considerations from production and casting issues to notes from the producer's girlfriend, etc. A blog allows you to write pretty much what you want. You still get notes, of course, but they come from your readers who post comments.
For What It's Worth touches on a lot of issues: entertainment, politics, culture, life -- and, whenever possible, I try to talk about these subjects while including personal references that will, hopefully, make them unique. I also violate standard blogging by going for the essay feel most often, rather than the tossed-off blurb of the moment. Something else I like to do is to get a lot of visual content into each post to make them pop off the screen more and to give them a greater sense of fun.
At the beginning, I had no clue whatsoever how to get an honest-to-God banner up top and the standard issue one looked so tacky, I could barely stand to post. Later this year, my design whiz friend Nancy Tokos ( ) designed a series of banners for me which I rotate. In fact, tell me which one you like the best:
That photo, BTW, is from an important day in my life., in the days after 9/11, we were forced to postpone the Emmy Awards twice. This picture was taken on October 7, the day we were supposed to beginning. CBS President Les Moonves, producer Don Mischer and myself Anyway, the whole thing (because it was free) but, as I say, it never looked right, and I switched to TypePad about four months into the experiment.
It never looked right on TypePad either, but it's less wrong. I'm not an HTML wizard so I have to live with the limitations of what's being offered rather than what I see happening in my mind. Still, good enough.
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I always loved and it seemed to work nicely when paired with the extra line, Dispatches from the Culture War.I'd used the song before on the to great effect, and it had a lot of personal meaning for me. Plus, it's so wonderfully paranoid ( There's something happening here, what it is ain't exactly clear, there's a man with a gun over there, telling me I got to beware..
. ). is a film review concept with a twist.
We review one film that is out in the theaters against a related film (by content, star, etc.) which is available on DVD or TV.
is all about reaching back into the back-stacks of Newsweek and Time for dramatic covers and then looking at their coverage of issues and events from the perspective of immediate journalism which must be written without the advantage of historical perspective.History as first draft. Over the year, For What It's Worth has evolved into the flagship blog, however, and both of the others into specialty acts whose content feeds onto FWIW.
At the beginning, the blog was called News!Views! Schmooze! for nearly eight months.
I Daily Variety or USA Today. Plus, there was another blog out there called News, Views and Shmooze ( ) run by a by me, but probably confusing if anybody looking for one blog found the As for hits..
. well, that's been an education, too. I remember when it first went up getting a dozen hits in a day.
I learned how to ping every post, and the hits had reached a pretty steady 100 a day most recently. Then I published a single post about a proposal that J. Michael Straczynski and I had made a few years ago with Kirk, Spock and McCoy, and the number of hits on that single day went to nearly 9,000!
As you can see from the Sitemeter grab above, the hits have come back to Earth, but they seem to have stabilized much higher than before. A lot of new visitors from all over the world seem to be dropping by. I guess this post is for them.
Also, for this first anniversary, we've added a page that lets you sort through the previous posts and you can access it by . It was built with iWeb but seems to be a lot more helpful than the way old posts are grouped by TypePad. At least here you can see for yourself, at a glance, what might interest you.
In any case, as we begin Year II of For What It's Worth , I'm sure there will be new changes to be made. Still, I want to thank all of you who have come by for spending the time, and making the comments, and being a part of this experience. Your opinions are always welcome and, as people used to say even before the Age of Blogs...
I'll keep you posted.
If you don't know the work of Kimmo Isokoski, and you like sci-fi, or the idea of space exploration, you should check him out.
Kimmo's body of work is just startling. I urge you to .Each picture is just beautiful, wonderfully executed. He's a free-lance commercial artist who lives in countryside in central parts of Finland. When he was ten-years-old he read the Finnish translation of Robert Heinlein's Space Cadet and found his life's passion.
It's a bit strange how I've discovered him. A few years ago when I was trying to teach myself a new computer and some new photo editing software, I'd stumbled across his art and saved a few pictures. Then, years later, in a post about I used one of the photos to spice it up.I'd cropped the photo and had no clue whose it was and where I got it. I figured that maybe I'd find out and credit it then.
Well, I found out the hard way.Cheryl Morgan from the set me straight about whose it was. Then Kimmo himself sent me an e-mail where he wrote:
As I understand, there was some misunderstanding concerning about my sci-fi art. It seems that some people were much more upset than I :) I just took it as an compliment that you liked the picture.So, all's well that ends well.I have no problems if You still want to use it. And if you need more illustrations to your interesting blogpage you have my permission to use my art as you like (non commercial purposes only).
Kimmo is credited, as he should be. And you know about his work which is, as I say, fantastic. By the way, if you want to learn more about ( Finndom ), check this out.
Meanwhile, here's a parting shot from Kimmo:
Anyway, the deal was, had started as a two-hour pilot, written by Sam Hamm (“Batman”) and directed by Sam Raimi (“Spider-Man”). The two Sams had a disagreement with Fox about how the series should go, and walked away from their own project.Fox still wanted to do the series, but somebody needed to make the changes and run the show. Both Hamm and Raimi were extremely gracious and understanding in the transition, nothing was made personal, and the series lived. We produced 22 episodes in the 1994-1995 season up in Vancouver, B.
C. Since the pilot had aired the previous spring, our first episode basically became a re-premising and de-facto new pilot. Some things were kept, others fine-tuned, and others outright changed.
The basic concept from Hamm and Raimi, however, never changed. The series was about an African-American super-hero, played by Carl Lumbly.
By the way, that's me and Carl that summer up in Canada. I always thought wearing a tie was uncomfortable but nothing in this world could compare to wearing the rubberized M.A.N.T.I.
S. suit on a muggy August afternoon. It was like being in a sauna.
Carl was a saint.
The premise, in case you missed it, was simple.Dr. Miles Hawkins, a brilliant scientist, had been paralyzed in a shooting incident. Confined to a wheelchair, he created a cutting edge, sophisticated exo-skeleton designed to allow him to walk again by transmitting his brain function through the suit, rather than through his body’s crippled nervous system.
Once in the suit, he was more than normal, he was super, but he couldn’t stay in it long without some serious consequences. Oh, and he had a flying car. Really…
Miles Hawkins, to be published in the event of my death.I know when the truth is known, people will wonder why I felt it necessary to asked his own creation and I could not refuse him. The copy above was the voice-over I’d written for the first episode.
The “scientific journal” aspect allowed Hawkins a degree of introspection we felt was appropriate for his character.
Ironically, nobody in the pilot had ever decided what M.A.N.T.
I.S. stood for, despite the periods.
One of my first jobs was to decide that burning issue. Frankly, I think originally my predecessors had thought of it more as Mantis, as in Preying, and wanted to fashion a super-hero in that image. Apparently, though, there had been at some point in history a not-very-widely read comicbook of the same name.
That’s how the periods came about. You see, NOW, it was completely different.
So, by the time I inherited the name and the periods, it had become an issue. I remember sitting at my desk with a pen and a piece of paper and playing with words. It came spilling out, on the first try, I believe.
There. Now you know.I'm not claiming genius or anything, but it worked, and we moved on to more pressing challenges. One of them was that while shooting that first episode, it became necessary to replace our line producer. Thankfully, Tim Iacafano came aboard on no notice, stayed the duration and did a fantastic job.
The show was pretty much a power-sharing thing between James McAdams and myself. He became executive producer because he was Universal's go-to production guy, having successfully taken them through The Equalizer. I got the co-executive producer title, but I ran the writing side of things and Jim pretty much left me alone to get the job done.
The rest of the team included supervising producer Mark Lisson, producer Paris Qualles, creative consultant Coleman Luck, co-producer Brad Markowitz and story editor David Ransil. We were on the Universal lot, breaking stories in a wonderful old building that was marked for the wrecking ball to make room for the Jurassic Park ride in the middle of our production order.
We started out the series with the idea that it was a very real world and M.A.N.T.I.
S. was the singular fantasy element. A half dozen or more episodes in, we realized that wasn’t working like it was supposed to, and we changed tactics mid-season.
For the final episodes, M.A.N.
T.I.S.
dealt with increasingly strange sci-fi type premises with my good friend Coleman Luck taking lead.
Unfortunately, that didn’t work either and Fox killed the series. Knowing cancellation was imminent, we even killed Hawkins off in the final episode.That scientific journal, it was now revealed, had told the story of his transformation and adventures from beyond the grave.
Well, actually, we left just a little bit of room for survival, maybe.After all, hope springs eternal in television.
A couple of years ago, when I was , I got to re-connect with Carl when we did an Alias panel.It was like seeing a friend who'd I'd been in battle with. Those kinds of memories only get better with the years.
the open sky was a great experience.So was the after-party at Le Deux in Hollywood. And, yes, Keanu Reeves, Winona Ryder, Woody Harrelson and Rory Cochrane were all on hand. I never saw Robert Downey Jr.
which was too bad because he nearly steals this movie in every scene he's in. Anyway, I was there as a guest of my friend, Steven Friedlander, who is VP of Distribution for Warner Independent Film. So much for full disclosure -- it's not like Roger Ebert has never had a truly great crab-cake cloud his judgment.
..
I am not a cartoon.I am an interpolated rotoscopic representation of me. I think.
The Smackdown | Prolific science-fiction writer Phillip K.Dick continues his streak as the hottest dead guy in all of Tinseltown. I'm expecting to read in Daily Variety next week that a napkin Dick used to blot up a ketchup stain has been optioned by Spielberg and Hanks and that HBO is turning it into a new mini-series with a budget in excess of $100 million. Anyway, both A Scanner Darkly and Total Recall spring from Dick's writing about the nature of consciousness, what's real and what's not, and whether or not the perception of truth is the same as truth.
I deal with these concepts every day because I'm the father of teenagers so I feel quite well qualified to weigh in on this one.
The Challenger | A Scanner Darkly is a complete head trip, both in content and in perception. Telling the story of a near-future dope-fueled paranoia, the irony is that it has an anti-drug message but is going to be watched by more than a few audience members while under the influence of one drug or another.Some critics who have seen it are slamming it for being talky but this strikes me as unfair given that many of these same critics also bemoan in their other reviews how Hollywood is all about special effects and action these days. There is a huge special effect in this movie, however, and it's the fact that through a complex interpolated rotoscoping process, live actors are turned into animated characters. It is, in all honesty, a real trip to watch.
I was sucked in and I'll probably see it again to see what I missed the first time around. Plus, it's a trip seeing Keanu Reeves in another movie where there are red pills and a huge underlying scam to reality as we know it.
Maybe I am the One, but my brain feels like maybe I'm the Two.
The Defending Champion | Total Recall is not about people who have lost a grip on reality because they're too stoned, but about characters who have lost their grip on reality because they have had false memories implanted into their minds. The main action takes place on Mars (or does it?) and it is wall-to-wall violence.But it also has some memorable moments like the time Schwarzenegger's character is being told he's simply experiencing a vivid dream and then wonders aloud why, if that's so, the person telling him is sweating from nervousness. Good question.
These implanted memories about being in politics are giving me a headache.
The Scorecard |It's probably easy to dismiss Total Recall today because it starred Arnold Schwarzenegger and it's an easy joke given his current political profile, but that's just not fair. This movie really is a nicely put together piece of science fiction. The story in Total Recall hangs together with a lot more clarity than the story in A Scanner Darkly which leaves you wondering whether the movie is just confusing or whether you're just easily confused.
The Decision | Total Recall for all its mind-expanding (and contracting) possibilities is still just a formula film. The main character is put in a tough position, he struggles against nearly overwhelming odds and he prevails in the end. That's why I have to go with A Scanner Darkly in a close decision.This is a movie that is fascinating to watch and, unlike many movies, leaves you mulling it over afterward really thinking about the ideas it presented. The fact that I don't honestly know with 100% certainty exactly what happened is okay by me. I think it has something to do with the War on Terrorism and the War on Drugs merging or something, but I'll have to give that a little more consideration before I want to commit myself.
Go see it yourself and let me know what you think.
{For more Movie Smackdown!reviews of current theatrical films reviewed against similar films on DVD or TV, please .}
Watching the bright new brought back so many great memories I have about the Man-of-Steel, it's hard to know where to start.Like...
being a six year old buying a Superman comic from a magazine rack in a drug store...
Running home to watch George Reeves in a syndicated re-run of the first TV series...
Standing in line for hours to watch Superman: The Movie starring Christopher Reeve.
Nothing compares, though, with working on the first season of It ranks as one of the greatest creative satisfactions I’ve had in the series TV business.
I had first worked with A gifted writer, she had written an exceptional pilot that ABC had picked up and, at the same time, ordered a half-dozen back-up scripts. So before film was even being shot on her pilot, Deborah Joy, her brother Dan and I were throwing “super” ideas around every day in a little trailer on the Warner Brothers lot. (she received the WGA “Developed By” credit) on a law series called
As the show's newly-minted supervising producer, getting in early allowed me the rare opportunity to put some of my own spin into the always-changing Superman mythos. During that first season, here are my favorite contributions to the 70 year mythology:
- Clark Kent and Lois Lane became partners.
Originally, in both the comics and the series, they were conceived as competitors. It felt to me, however, that if they were going to each chase the same story every episode, we would have to work too hard to get them on screen together. Solution: Perry White makes them a team.
Worked like a charm.
- In my first episode, “Strange Visitor (From Another Planet), Clark discovers for the first time he is an alien from the planet Krypton instead of some kind of failed Russian experiment as his parents had assumed.
It was during the Space race in our timeline when he crashed so what would you expect the Kents to think: here's a human baby in a rocketship that wasn't one of ours.
- Our Clark Kent was put on record as having crashed to Earth on May 17th (my birthday), and the event was tied in with UFO mythology dating back to Roswell.
I wrote Men-in-Black into that episode before the MIB movie ever wrote Fade In...
- In a later episode, “The Green, Green Glow of Home, Clark returns to Smallville with Lois Lane, allowing us to see the town through her eyes. In this same episode, Clark got a past that included a high school girlfriend besides Lana Lang.
- Kryptonite’s rules were also changed so that it erased his powers, temporarily, allowing him to experience the world as a “normal” person. (This change was undone in subsequent seasons.
) Clark was exposed to the dreaded Kryptonite by the person who loved him most – his father – rather than some arch-villain.
And, since people ask all the time, Dean Cain was and is one of the nicest actors I’ve worked with. He’s extremely hard-working and has a core character that is so likeable that it was a pleasure writing for him.
- In my third episode, “All Shook Up, Lex Luthor declares his love for Lois Lane and becomes almost likeable for a moment.
This episode was also a re-imagining of a classic original TV series episode, Panic in the Sky.
And Teri Hatcher, well, in my opinion, she was magic on screen from Day One. My first episode contained the first interview Lois Lane conducts with Superman.It was intimidating to write, mostly because it had been acted so brilliantly by Christopher Reeve and Margot Kidder in the first movie (remember the pink panties?). Teri made me feel more for her character than I ever got from the films, and that was just in our first episode.
You can download that scene by clicking here:
A good friend of mine during those days was actor Lane Smith who played Perry White. We'd met seven years earlier, on my first series Kay O'Brien for CBS, when I cast him as one of the lead surgeons. The Smackdown | These are two very high profile features that re-started the Superman franchise on the big-screen when released. Both starred unknown actors in the title role and looked to the Lex Luthor villain to provide the big-name star.He made Deborah Joy's catch-phrase come alive: Great Shades of Elvis! Sadly, a few years ago, but he was definitely a complete original. Now, of course, Lois Clark isn't even the newest Superman on TV what with the excellent CW series Smallville. And even that show isn't the newest Superman out there what with the blockbuster Superman Returns.
If the history of Superman intrigues you, another friend of mine, Gary Grossman, has even written a book about all the super-mania over the years. It's worth checking out, . Gary knows this world inside-out.
But at the end of the day (we LOVE to say that out here in Hollywood), I'll never forget Lois Clark, and you gotta let me get away with saying this once -- it was a super experience!
{ For What It's Worth offers a new way to search through previous posts. It's a one-stop-shop on a single page which you can access by . Thanks for visiting!}
MOVIE SMACKDOWN! -- Two films, One Review, No Holds Barred!Both achieved technical mastery for their times. And, oddly enough, both star Marlon Brando as the father of Superman!
Singer, mostly knows what it wants to do and that is to keep it real (as much as a Superman story can be).The story, the acting and the characters are all as grounded as is possible in a super-hero movie. This is a fan-boy's dream. I say this as a fan-boy whose first comicbook was a Superman.
.. who loved George Reeves.
.. who got the privilege of .
.. and who has watched most episodes of Smallville.
I guess you don't even mind that Lois is a brilliant reporter and can't tell that Clark is Superman -- but it was slightly more of a problem than usual in this film because both Clark and Superman disappear for five years and then re-appear in Metropolis on the same day, and nobody says boo about it. This just goes with the concept, I know we spent time debating it on Lois Clark and ultimately just decided to ignore it. And I don't want to post a spoiler but there's a whole new direction in the mythology now, based on the ending to this film.
was famous for the ad campaign: You'll believe a man can fly. On a personal level, this was actually the first movie I ever wrote a film review for at a TV station in Oregon. Also, as a young kid, I'd always run home from school to watch blew that away in terms of characterization, special effects, and story.But I also remember, at the time, being a little put off by the two wildly different tones that were held together in this film. At the beginning, when Kal-el fell to Earth and was adopted by the Kents and for. Mythological, respectful and making it real.
But there was an entirely different tone with Lex Luthor, for example, who was cartoony and over-the-top, and a lot of the Metropolis material was played for laughs. Reeve's Clark Kent was certainly a friendly, lovable guy, but he was not as real as Brandon Routh plays him.
The Scorecard | Superman Returns would not have existed as it does without Superman showing the way almost three decades ago. Still, its tonal leap forward is very much in step with the times. It's kind of the Batman Begins of the film franchise, only it doesn't start the story over with an origin, it just leaps (in a single bound, no less) toward an entirely different chapter.Brandon Routh, by the way, never looked right to me when I first got a glimpse of him, and the costume looked wrong, too. I think I was wrong in that judgment because he's great, and the deeper tones of the suit look more correct. Just compare the photos in this post.
Kevin Spacey does better than Gene Hackman as Lex Luthor, but not by much. I say if this franchise is starting up again, it's still time to give Lex a rest. Enough already, I'm done with him and the scene-chewing way that actors want to play him.
The Decision | I'll always dearly love what Christopher Reeve brought to that role, and respect him as an actor and a man, of course. But Superman Returns excels because it sees the flaws in that film and tries to rise above them.And even though this latest Superman is flawed itself in several key ways, it's still the best Superman film that's ever been made. Whether or not it stands out as a towering achievement in the world of comicbook characters brought to the big-screen is another matter. Placed in a chain with Spider-Man 2 and Batman Begins, Superman Returns is clearly the weakest link.
Not perfect, but better than what came before, this week belongs to the new man in tights. Last week, when I posted about the long-dormant proposal for a , written by J. Michael Straczynski and myself two years ago, I didn't appreciate how it would be such a classic lesson in the power of the web to get info out there quickly.
But it is.
You have to understand that this blog averages only about 100 hits a day. I'd started the blog to better understand the whole experience, teach myself some new computer skills, and so on.Anyway, the baseline: 100 hits a day. These are distinct visits from unique people and not just page views (we get about 180 of those).
Yesterday, For What It's Worth received 8,758 hits.Let's see: that's 87 times normal. Here's what it looks like on Site Meter:
You can see for yourself that it was cruising along in the 80-120 hits per day, 100 hits average. Then a couple of other blogs picked up on it and I had two 900 hits days in a row and I was astounded.I figured that was the big traffic and it would die down. But then the Sci-Fi Channel web-site picked up on it and it went through the roof. Yesterday, at its peak wave, the blog was hit by nearly 700 people in a single hour, something I thought was possible only on porn sites.
Here's a look at what the week looked like: I entertained the idea of re-writing that blog post to focus only on Star Trek but opted to keep it in its original state. What prompted me to put the treatment out there for download in the first place was no grand scheme but the comments of Stephen Hawking about needing to move out into the stars. I started writing about that, and suddenly I'd verged into Star Trek territory and just kind of went with that energy.
In retrospect, I guess I shouldn't be surprised. We all know how powerful the Star Trek franchise is and how deeply its fans care about it.
As a consequence, a lot of people have posted thoughtful comments both here and elsewhere on the web about the content of that blog and the proposal it described.I learned a lot. Thanks to everyone who took the time, and let's hope some good comes out of all this. Not everyone agrees on what should happen with Star Trek, of course.
Lots of different ideas. But the majority did seem to spark to the simplicity of what JMS and I were saying:
There is so damn much continuity to take into consideration in the Star Trek world that the best thing to do is a complete re-boot, to start over, and let a new generation of writers take a swing at it without the Old Guard wagging fingers pre-emptively on new takes and directions.People are still dropping in to read that post but, in a few days, things will probably return to normal.
Anyway, thanks for stopping by this blog, all of you from all around the world, and please do come back again.
The world's most famous scientist, , says humans need to move out into space in order to guarantee the survival of the species.This, of course, is something that has always seemed inevitable to space buffs and sci-fi fans, but it's about time somebody of Hawking's intellectual throw-weight has given voice to it. Carl Sagan's been gone too long. According to :
The British astrophysicist told a news conference in Hong Kong that humans could have a permanent base on the moon in 20 years and a colony on Mars in the next 40 years.Hawking says that we are in increasing danger of wiping ourselves out through nuclear war, sudden global warming or even a genetically engineered virus.Because of this growing threat, he believes it's time we get off our
asses and out of the cradle. We need to boldly go... wait a minute..
. that sounds familiar..
.
{Art by }
Thinking about these things may seem like a waste of time to most people with a mortgage and bills to pay, but I've got one of those great jobs where I can actually let my mind wander and convince myself I'm working.
The idea of moving out into and then beyond our own solar system is something I've been thinking about all my writing career.Back in the late 80s, my first writing partner Brad Markowitz and I sold a sci-fi feature to Warner Brothers with Silver Pictures -- The Face -- about the first manned mission to Mars. Our version never got made, although Mission to Mars back in 2000 was so close to what we wrote (down to a stranded astronaut from a failed mission, a rescue mission and the face on Mars) that the only difference was we never got to spend any of the residual checks.
Actually, this space thing's been a passion all my life. I got so that I could go home to see Neil Armstrong walk on the moon. Later, as a reporter, I covered the Viking Mars landings and the Voyager Saturn encounters for both PBS and CNN, plus I , and even applied for the Journalist-in-Space program before it was jettisoned after the Columbia disaster.
So, bottom line, Hawking letting loose with his nudge to get rocketing is welcome news to me, but it also makes my mind wander back two years to 2004.
Admittedly, it takes a lot of nerve to offer to resurrect the Star Trek franchise when nobody has asked you to do that, but that's just what prolific writer/producer and I did back in 2004. We were working together on a network pitch for a limited series, Cult , and we started talking about the state of the Trek universe and, before we could stop ourselves, we'd banged out a 14-page treatment called Star Trek: Re-Boot the Universe.
I know, I know. If you read the papers, you already know that the Star Trek flame has been passed, if you will, to an incalculably larger solar giant, J.J.Abrams ( Lost , MI3 ). You can read all about it in , but the bottom line is that Abrams and his writing posse appear to be going back in time to prequel status.
Project, to be penned by Abrams and MI3 scribes Alex Kurtzman and Roberto Orci, will center on the early days of seminal Trek characters James T. Kirk and Mr. Spock, including their first meeting at Starfleet Academy and first outer space mission.
What with this stellar creative team at work, there doesn't seem to be any upside in sitting on our own Trek fever-dream anymore. Might as well let the fans who'd heard about it and wanted to see it, see it, so you'll find the download link later in this post.There's no big agenda since it really was just a Hail Mary and we've long since moved on. These days, JMS is on fire, having just sold The Changeling to Imagine Films for Ron Howard to direct while also writing Spider-Man and Fantastic Four and several other titles over at Marvel Comics.
Our brush with this Star Trek story, though, starts back in 1999, I think, when Straczynski (I call him Joe ) and I met in the first class section of a flight between Los Angeles and Vancouver.
Back then, I was executive producing the TV series, and he was wrapping up a very successful run as the creator of .Running a series between Canada and the U.S. can be a pretty grueling pace and the first class tickets are one of the few perks to look forward to.
Except that as a writer/producer, you are usually writing next week's episode on a laptop only with more leg-room than you get when you're traveling for vacation.
Anyway, at that moment, we had a lot in common, both producing sci-fi series and, in particular, a devotion to five-year plans.JMS had crafted one for Babylon 5 and Brent Friedman and I had done the same for our NBC alien invasion series Dark Skies. By the time JMS and I reached our destination we'd traded contact info and said we'd get in touch.
That's what led to us agreeing to develop the Cult mini-series together, years later. I seem to recall having lunch at Art's Deli and our conversation veering off into the Trek situation. I have no real clue why we felt compelled to write what we wrote but, looking back, I think it's because we had all these ideas and being writers it just felt more natural to write them down than to let them go.Then, once that happened, we felt compelled to share them. Like buying lottery tickets, I guess.
Joe and I had something that everyone in Hollywood seems to pay lip service to and that's passion. We both love sci-fi, have worked different ends of the spectrum, and thought maybe, given the chance, we might combine briefly to spark a creative debate that could be useful.
Anyway, the take that JMS and I came up with included using the original characters as the new film will do, apparently, but not as young officers at Starfleet Academy. We wanted to do what they do in the world of comics, create a separate universe ( Universe A ) for all the past TV and film Trek continuity in order to free ourselves creatively so we could embrace the good stuff, banish the bad, and try some new things. In our re-boot ( Universe B ), we wanted to start over, use Kirk, Spock and McCoy and others in a powerful new origin story about what it was that bonded them in such strong friendship, and show them off as you'd never seen them before.It was, admittedly, pretty audacious but here it is if you want to take a look...
You may feel like, as I do re-reading it, that it leaves you wanting more specifics. My best defense is that we held back from putting everything we were thinking into it because, if we did, what would be the point of hiring us?So we suggested and prodded and explained and held some of the point-by-point work back for a meeting or an opportunity that never came. We don't think it's perfect, and with the passage of time, I have a whole new set of thoughts, but it is a snapshot, and offered in that spirit.
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