Tagged: damon lindelof

Cast Away

Lindelof, on the other hand? He describes his response to those huge premiere ratings as “Terror, depression, anxiety, anxiety attacks. I’m not exaggerating. Everybody who was around me at the time knows I pretty much wanted to die, and knowing that wasn’t going to happen unless I took matters into my hands, I just wanted to quit. But there was literally no one to quit to.”

— This excerpt from “The Revolution Was Televised,” the new book from Alan Sepinwall, looks at the oft-discussed origins of “Lost.” Most of this isn’t new, but it’s still interesting to hear how the show came together (though the series did obviously end as a massive, grating disappointment, story-wise).

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“World War Z” is doing fine, don’t you worry about “World War Z”

A high-profile movie with a massive budget has run into pretty big problems, which means it’s time for Kim Masters to swoop in and do her thing. (Troubled would-be blockbusters are like the Masters Bat-Signal; she’s not the journalist they deserve, but she’s the journalist they need, etc.) Continue reading →

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Brad Bird might direct Damon Lindelof’s mysterious Disney script, which he wrote with a pro-”Lost” journalist

Human stress headache Damon Lindelof snagged a big deal last year to write a script for Disney. Because Lindelof operates by the J.J. Abrams code of “mysteriousness for the sake of mysteriousness, and also marketing,” we don’t know anything about this movie. We know it’s called “1952″ — at least that is the title right now — and we know Disney hopes it will be a big tentpole movie for them.

Now Brad Bird has gone and signed up to direct the movie, balancing out Lindelof’s raging Lindelof-ness with his sterling track record. Bird’s involvement gives me hope for this movie. The man behind “The Iron Giant,” “The Incredibles” and “Ratatouille” made his live-action debut with last year’s thrilling “Mission: Impossible – Ghost Protocol,” proving that he can make essentially anything excellent. The only hitch here is that Bird also has a couple of other projects he’s working on, like his movie about the 1906 earthquake in San Francisco. Disney wants this thing in production next year, so we will have to see what happens as development progresses.

Meanwhile, an interesting name appeared in the Toldja! Gazette story about Bird signing on to this movie: Jeff Jensen, Lindelof’s co-writer. Is this the same Jeff Jensen who writes for Entertainment Weekly – the very same Jensen who wrote glowingly about Lindelof’s “Lost” for so many years? Apparently yes, yes it is! (EW announced this last summer, but I didn’t see it at the time.) “The duo’s relationship began after ‘Lost’ ended in May 2010,” EW assures us. That still left plenty of opportunity for fun conflicts of interest.

EW says that per company policy (the magazine is published by Time Inc. and owned by Time Warner) Jensen can still write about movies and TV, he just can’t write about anything Disney related. Obviously EW is far from a bastion of journalistic integrity — take their shamelessness in pandering to “Twilight” fans, to offer one prominent example — and this is also something they have to deal with when they write about Warner Bros. movies, TV shows and the like.

But this is still interesting! Jensen wrote glowingly overwrought raves about “Lost” for years. A few months after the controversial/bad series finale (which he liked), he got Lindelof and Carlton Cuse to discuss the episode and fan reactions. This was a mere 10 months before it was announced that he was working with Lindelof on the “1952″ script. He also wrote two more glowing, ponderously wordy missives about “Lost” a year after the finale aired; he did not seem to make any mention of his collaboration with Lindelof, despite this being mere weeks before the “1952″ deal was announced. It seems likely that he knew he was working with Lindelof when he sat down with them a few months after the finale aired; he also had to know he was about to receive a big payday from Disney when he revisited the show a year after the finale.

So when, exactly, did his relationship with Lindelof turn into a business partnership? Was this something they discussed during the years Jensen was covering the show for a major magazine? This isn’t a huge deal in the big scheme of things; again, nobody goes to EW for incisive, honest commentary, and anybody reading Jensen’s “Lost” stuff knew he revered the show and wasn’t too critical. But what if he had a major critique late in the show’s run and he opted not to share it? What if knowing they might work together changed how he covered the show? What if he knew offending Lindelof meant potentially not working together later? What if his opinion of the finale was skewed by this, consciously or not? And what about in the weeks and months after the finale aired, where he and Lindelof were working on a script (Lindelof would go on to sign a seven-figure deal to write and produce it; no mention is made of Jensen’s compensation) while Jensen continued to defend “Lost” and received access to the show’s creators?

These are questions we can expect the journalists at Entertainment Weekly to tackle any day now, right?

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Damon Lindelof has some Damon Lindelof-y things to say about “The Killing”

Damon Lindelof is the co-creator of “Lost.” He has also done other things, but all he would like you to know is that he created “Lost” and cannot shut his goddamn mouth about that. I know what you’re thinking: Mark, if you had co-created “Lost,” wouldn’t you talk about it all the time? And the answer is probably, but I would also hopefully talk about the show in terms of lessons learned and overall experiences and artistic goals, rather than repeatedly whining because people didn’t like my finale. Which is what Damon Lindelof does seemingly every chance he gets.

(Damon Lindelof is also the kind of guy who will go to an event in Anaheim in March dressed like this – wearing a knit beanie! — because we all know how unseasonably cold it can be inside convention centers in southern California in March.)

His latest opportunity to talk about himself and the “Lost” finale? A guest column for the Hollywood Reporter defending “The Killing,” which was the Internet’s least favorite series after it failed to answer the central question of the show in the finale. (More accurately, it failed to answer that question with a last-second fakeout, and it was also dull and pointless, so there were really a lot of things wrong with it besides that season-ending failure.) I’m amazed he didn’t write this for Slate. Anyway, this sort of thing just demands the Fire Joe Morgan treatment so we can deal with his column point by point: Continue reading →

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Damon Lindelof wants to remind you that yep, he’s still the worst

Damon Lindelof co-created and ran “Lost,” a television show that lots of people used to like. The series ended last year (poorly) and you can bet it’ll be largely forgotten in another five or six years, because unlike “The Sopranos” and shows of that class, “Lost” ultimately wound up being a grand but failed experiment, though of course some poor souls will still roam the planet wondering why they wasted six years of their lives on the thing.

Anyway, Damon Lindelof co-created the show! And during a recent speech in New York, he admitted things that everyone already knew (that they made stuff up as they went along*, which was blatantly evident, and also confirmed by David Fury years ago) and revealed a few new tidbits (he tried to quit several times, he claims).

Someone ran with the “Hey, the guy from ‘Lost’ admitted they made stuff up as they went along” and Lindelof got snippy, taking to Twitter to share this garbage:

I particularly like the snippy joke about those “Lost” imitators that flamed out, because it’s hilarious that those shows failed miserably whereas “Lost” succeeded**. That’s just so witty! So that is your latest Damon Lindelof update: Still the worst.

* – I don’t particularly care that they made stuff up as they went along. For one thing: Duh. But that’s also the nature of television, where you can spend forever and a day on a pilot, make countless tweaks and changes along the way, and still not know if it’s making it to air, and even if it does make it to air you’re not sure if it will last for a week or a month or 12 seasons, and even then you’re not sure which stories will resonate with the audience or which cast members will decide to bail after two years or something. Planning every little thing in advance isn’t a necessity.

The annoying thing about this aspect of “Lost” wasn’t that they made it up as they went along. It was the fact that (1) They didn’t actually resolve all of the stories and mysteries, (2) The show’s creators claimed, over the years, to have it all planned out, to know what it all meant and promised that it would all be resolved and (3) Even now, Lindelof is still complaining that fans wanted to have input while also wanting them to have the whole thing sketched out, which is dumb because only a very small minority of fans actually wanted to dictate the storytelling process. Sure, some fans would have loved it if they predicted what the numbers meant or something. But most fans just wanted to watch a smart and comprehensible show. They didn’t think they were writing the thing. The fact that some “Lost” fans were very vocal about this or that over the years does not mean the show’s creators had to actually listen to it and assume that this vocal minority spoke for the majority. Did David Chase write A.J. out of “The Sopranos” because he was the worst? Of course not. Most fans understand that this is how television works. Now, Lindelof and his cohort, Carlton Cuse, were perhaps more fan-accessible than most show runners — because they seemed to be in love with the media attention and seemingly gave 30 interviews a day, leaving scant time to come up with a proper ending for the show — and on some things (i.e. Nikki and Paolo, minor characters introduced at the moment many fans were abandoning the show) they listend to the public outcry. That doesn’t mean the fans are responsible for Lindelof and Cuse’s inability to properly finish the show without whining about how all the audience kept offering their own thoughts and theories.

** – Of course, the main reason “Lost” even got onto the airwaves the way it did was because of J.J. Abrams, an established screenwriter and television producer known and respected for “Alias.” Abrams directed the pilot and gave the whole thing a cachet it wouldn’t have had if it was just “From the mind behind ‘Crossing Jordan’” or something.

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Damon Lindelof makes big money (yes, despite the final season of “Lost”)

Damon Lindelof, one of the driving forces behind “Lost” (and occasional target of this blog’s ire), has gone and hit it big. Deadline reports that Disney is giving him a lot of money to write something that will inevitably fall apart in the third act:

In its latest attempt to hatch a large-scale film that can play to a family audience, Disney has made a seven-figure deal with screenwriter and Lost exec producer Damon Lindelof to write and produce an original large-scale science fiction feature film.

I’m confused. Is it going to be medium-scale, or what?

Other than the fact that the project has a working title of 1952, I couldn’t pry plot details out of anybody.  I’m not sure if the title connotes a period the film is set in, or if it is a Lostreference. I’ve also heard that this project isn’t just being conceived for movies only, but that it has multiple platform aspirations.

I am just going to say right now that I would bet the entire yearly earnings of this blog that “1952,” which is apparently the working title for this movie, is not a “Lost” reference, and Fleming is probably just saying that for SEO purposes, the sly fox.

Anyway, Lindelof won’t work on this until after he’s finished the “Star Trek 2″ script, so expect this movie to be written sometime around 2019. (Yes, I pretty much wrote this post just to say that.)

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George R.R. Martin forced to discuss “Lost” and make more intelligent points about the show’s “terrible ending”

By the time we reached the finale, I was still hoping for the best, but expecting the worst. I still think ‘Lost’ told a terrific story… a terrific story with a terrible ending.

— That’s George R.R. Martin, author of “A Game of Thrones,” forced yet again to discuss “Lost” because he made an (astute) comment about that show’s ending and that show’s co-creator took offense. You’ve got to hand it to Martin: Even though this provoked a minor hubbub (because Damon Lindelof is as thin-skinned as they come and loves any media attention, apparently), and even though he’s out promoting “Game of Thrones” and talking to a lot of TV reporters and they are all still obsessed with anything “Lost,” he still says he only has “the most cursory awareness of these recent storms on the Internet.” He is actually very diplomatic about the whole thing, and discusses the problem with finales on television and in general. Also: In the quote above, Martin yet again makes an empirically correct statement, so he has that going for him.

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New Cultural Idioms: “Do a ‘Lost’”

“Do a ‘Lost’”
Refers to the fear that a long-running and popular story, or series of stories, will end poorly and therefore fail to satisfy the audience by self-destructing down the stretch and rendering the preceding narrative a colossal waste of time. Alt: “Pull a ‘Lost.’”
— Coined by fantasy writer George R. R. Martin, author of “A Game of Ice and Fire.”

I think we’re all good with this verbiage, yes? I mean, the “Lost” finale seems to be the preeminent modern pop cultural example of failing to stick the landing. You could make arguments for other, comprable pieces of culture, like “The Sopranos” or “The X-Files,” but they wouldn’t hold the same weight. “The Sopranos” ended ambiguously, rather than failing to justify the years of audience participation; “The X-Files” is a closer example, but that show simply puttered out and eventually collapsed in on itself like a dying star (and it was that show’s decline that was often cited as an example for why “Lost” had a set end date, thus allowing them to properly wrap up their story without puttering on for too long). So, yes, whenever a TV show (or similar series of novels, or comic book, or other piece of ongoing narrative storytelling) sets up countless threads and mysteries and promises resolution but utterly fails to provide anything resembling proper or sensible closure, that will now and for the foreseeable future be known as ”pulling a ‘Lost’.”

(To “pull a Lindelof” should be added to the lexicon as well. It refers to the reflexive and public defensiveness that only comes when someone insults you or your work in such an on-the-nose fashion that you try to argue, and you seek solace in the comfort of people who aren’t fiction writer George R.R. Martin, but in reality you make clear the fact that he touched a nerve by being 100 percent accurate. “Pulling a Lindelof” can also refer to tweeting relentlessly about an issue, drawing even more attention to it, followed by giving interviews about your tweets, which all winds up perpetuating the notion that you are actually just addicted to publicity and attention rather than creating substantive art.)

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The “Alien” prequel transforms into an original movie, decreasing its odds of sucking

The long-rumored “Alien” prequel is no more. From its ashes rises “Prometheus,” a sci-fi movie from Ridley Scott that will open on March 9, 2012.

BEGIN DIGRESSION THAT HAS NOTHING TO DO WITH THIS ACTUAL NEWS

This is very good news, because prequels are terrible. There’s no upside to a prequel. Your ending is already set, and the film is required to meet a series of strict and stringent story obligations in order to match up with what came before. The odd fascination with prequels has spawned the “X-Men” prequel series, which so far oozed out “X-Men Origins: Wolverine” and has “X-Men: First Class” due this summer (Darren Aronofsky’s “The Wolverine” is due next summer and will reportedly be a stand alone film, which means it might also not be awful), “Hannibal Rising” and idiotic attempts to preface “The Exorcist,” “Dumb and Dumber,” “The Flinstones” and “The Texas Chainsaw Massacre.”

There are two reasons for this: George Lucas and money. The former informs the latter; the most famous prequels in existence are the three “Star Wars” prequels Lucas released between 1999 and 2005, and they largely validate every negative stereotype and viewpoint of the prequel format. But they made SO much money that other studios decided to look into their vaults and see what they could dust off. That’s where money comes in. It’s the same logic behind why “X-Men” transformed a perfectly decent franchise into a prequel factory: Why pay all of the expensive stars of “X-Men” (or any other film) when you can just hire younger-looking actors and cash in on the brand name for a quick buck? In the case of “Wolverine,” they focused on the one star they wanted to keep; in the case of “Dumb and Dumberer,” they just gave two actors similar haircuts and costumes to Jim Carrey and Jeff Daniels.

The only prequels that have really worked are the ones that aren’t prequels at all. Reboots like “Batman Begins,” “Casino Royale” and “Star Trek” rewound their stories to the beginnings, but instead of bending over backwards to lock into what came later they instead started new franchises that progressed forward naturally (which was particularly important with “Star Trek,” given that franchise’s labyrinthine plotting and fanatical devotees). “The Godfather, Part II” was half-sequel, half-prequel, and the prequel bits actually served as a mirror to the modern day story, which is part of why it’s probably the best sequel ever made. (For my money, “Star Wars: Episode III” was also a good prequel, because it delivered enough of what people actually wanted to see from that trilogy, but I may view it more fondly than necessary because of what came before it.)

END OF THAT DIGRESSION; NOW HERE’S THE ACTUAL NEWS

Given that prequels are terrible, and particularly given the blatant needlessness surrounding this project in particular, I haven’t been awash in optimism for an “Alien” prequel. I mean, the first “Alien” was a classic, inspired countless knockoffs, innovative and terrific, put me to sleep when I was younger, et cetera, et cetera. Did we really need one (or two) movies just to explain how they found that initial alien? Apparently not.

The film’s script began with writer Jon Spaihts and is now a collaboration between eternally self-satisfied Damon Lindelof and Scott. It turned from an “Alien” prequel into “a new, grand mythology and universe in which this original story takes place,” Scott told Deadline. “The keen fan will recognize strands of ‘Alien’s' DNA, so to speak.” In other words, when there are people in space and aliens and things like that, you might suspect this thing started out as an “Alien” prequel.

The first actor in the cast is Noomi Rapace (she played Lisbeth Salander in the Swedish “Girl With The Dragon Tattoo” films and co-stars in December’s “Sherlock Holmes” sequel). Charlize Theron and Angelina Jolie are reportedly interested in the other female lead.

This is welcome news all around. An “Alien” prequel was unnecessary, while a new sci-fi film from Ridley Scott is actually a nifty prospect. And given that his two main characters are going to be played by women, it’ll be a welcome respite from the male-dominated big-budget sci-fi arena. There’s no word yet on what the rest of the story involves, so we’ll have to wait and see on that front.

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Check Out The Balls On This Guy: Damon Lindelof Edition

Apparently Damon Lindelof was not content with the “Lost” finale being the worst thing he wrote this year, so he crapped out this absolutely abominable review of the new “Harry Potter” for The Daily Newsbeast or whatever it’ll be called.

Seriously, you need to read the whole thing, if only to appreciate the sheer grandeur of Lindelof’s hubris. Apparently working with folks like J.J. Abrams, Steven Spielberg and Ridley Scott has given him some sort of delusions about his past successes. The guy who cashed checks for writing episodes of “Crossing Jordan” and “Nash Bridges” (and, yes, co-ran “Lost”), not to mention the show’s abysmal time waster of a final season, not to mention the particular egregiousness of the finale, which was apparently produced with the logic that it’s much more expensive to actually fly to each fan’s house and punch them in the brain rather than just trying to send that message out via the television, had the absolutely astonishing cojones to write this. Go, read (if you’ve seen the movie, obviously); I’ll wait right here.

I know, right? I particularly enjoyed his complaints that not a lot happened in the movie (I KNOW, hold that thought), he wrote this:

All of that should have happened in the first half-hour of the movie.

They should not have split the book into two halves. Order of the Phoenix had more pages and they did just fine with that one.

I felt dirty. I felt… taken advantage of. I know, I know, people in glass houses—but, still!

No. No “but, still!”. “But, still!” is not an argument you get to make if you are a highly-compensated writer. “But, still” does not accurately and adequately respond to the criticism he hints at but does not address: That somebody who created a show where nothing happened for long stretches, and things finally took place spaced out over multiple weeks and months and years that could have easily been condensed, and it seems like they took story-plotting lessons from somebody who had recently suffered a head injury and kept forgetting what they were talking about, does not have a single leg to stand on to complain about feeling taken advantage of when another filmmaker/storyteller/writer/producer/etc. does not tell their story in a crisp and prompt way. “But, still” is for a child who knows they are wrong and wants to get away with it anyway, which is probably the most accurate read of the damn thing (i.e. the closest we will ever get to Lindelof, or anyone associated with the show, finally admitting that when your entire show is oriented around big questions overarching plots, and when said show crashes and burns at the close instead of properly resolving them, your show was pretty much a failure, or at least an ambitious misfire, or at the very least the ending was not particularly good or worthy of what came before).

And there’s this. He finally “gets” how “Lost” fans could watch the show but complain about certain things.

And so I sincerely and genuinely apologize to all those whom I have stripped of their “Lost” fandom just for complaining about the stuff you didn’t like. It doesn’t make you any less a fan.

Hang on a good goddamned second here. Am I the only one who didn’t know that? I watched “Lost” from premiere to finale and complained about it almost every step of the way, and I had no idea that Lindelof stripped me of my fandom for my complaints. Did you know producers of television shows could do that? I didn’t either! But apparently he can, because the only other reasonable explanation for this statement is that he is an egomaniac with no actual concept of how the world works outside of his bubble of friends and associates and critical praise, and that’s just crazy talk, because none of his media tours or relentless self-promotion ever gave that indication at all.

But yes! Apparently if you complained about “Lost,” you stopped being a fan, which actually makes no goddamn sense when you think about it, because every single “Lost” fan ever had complained about the show at one point or another. Every fan. Ever. I have not met every “Lost” fan ever, nor will I ever meet every “Lost” fan ever, but I can guarantee you every single one of them had at least one complaint about the show over the course of its run, because for all of its positives and enjoyable episodes it was in many ways an aggravating and dispiriting serialized show to watch, not only but largely because you watched it with the assumption that It Was Going Somewhere and the hope, however dim, that They Knew What They Were Doing, and this resulted in prolonged stretches of wheel-spinning, catastrophically unrealistic dialogue, maddeningly lame “references” and an inability to properly gauge whether or not the show was any good because the show was, from start to finish, about the plot (despite their repeated protestations to the contrary), and it was impossible to truly know if you were enjoying the show because of this inherent uncertainty, to say nothing of all of the times the show wasted minutes and hours and weeks of our lives with callous indifference. And that, of course, says nothing about the six-year self-mythologizing media tour embarked upon by Mssrs. Cuse and Lindelof, wherein they reminded you, in no uncertain terms, that they had a plan, that they cared about pleasing the fans, that they would do anything to keep your attention and they generally acted like giant wads that were accepted by the fans because they (the fans) assumed they (the creators) knew what the holy hell they were doing and the show couldn’t possibly be a six year waste of time. (Spoiler alert: It was. It totally, truly was.) So my apologies to all those people who wanted to watch “Lost” over the past six years but were disheartened to learn that you couldn’t find episodes on TV or online because Damon Lindelof, the auteur behind “Nash Goddamn Bridges,” had revoked your fandom.

Anyway, the entire thing is actually not a review. It’s really a personal essay about how Damon Lindelof is super-awesome because he co-created “Lost,” and how he is just like J.K. Rowling (but call her Jo!) in that they created things people love, and how he found the movie disappointing but that made him realize he could get over being such a big baby about “Lost” fans complaining about his show’s crap attempts at anything resembling satisfactory resolution. He includes maybe two paragraphs of an actual review. The real point is that he, Damon Lindelof, finally understands what it’s like to be one of You People.

The worst part is that we will never experience the joy of seeing Lindelof fail on his own, because he will sign up for projects where he will be insulated by stronger filmmakers who can make changes (the “Alien” prequel) or surrounded by talent that will also make tweaks (“Cowboys and Aliens,” “Star Trek”), keeping us from watching as he understands what it’s like to put yourself out there and disappoint people and then find out hey, maybe it’s not the fault of the fans for not “getting” your genius.

Wait, scratch that. The worst part is that Damon Lindelof, who wrote the “Lost” finale and crapped out this truly magnificent piece of condescension, is a millionaire, and he gets to Tweet smug references to his own work without any sense of self-awareness. But it’s okay! Because he will always get to hang his hat on “Crossing Jordan.”

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