Chicagotribune interview with Darlton part1

In December, I interviewed "Lost" executive producers Carlton Cuse and Damon Lindelof over lunch on the Disney-ABC lot in Burbank, Calif. In a week or so, I'll be using that interview to write a feature for the print version of the Tribune (I'll post that "Lost" feature here too).

But with the anticipation of the "Lost" Season 6 premiere building -- the start of the final season is only two weeks away on Feb. 2 -- I thought I'd start posting the full transcript of the interview. It's looong. Check back here for additional installments (there should be two more installments over the next week or so).

Yes, what follows is only about a third of the interview. I know! But given that Lindelof and Cuse were kind enough to give me an hour of their time, I'm going to share everything they said with my fellow island fanatics. Casual fans might not want to read the whole thing; if that's the case, there are a few choice excepts here. All my other "Lost" coverage is here.

This interview contains no spoilers for Season 6. I didn't (and still don't) want to know any specifics about the season to come.

I was interested in finding out how Cuse and Lindelof approached Season 6 and how they feel about the fans' expectations for the last season. This section of the transcript also contains the first set of 'Star Wars references, and there are several "Battlestar Galactica" and "Sopranos" references too. Also, giraffes.

In the next exciting installment: Time travel!!! Later: Ewoks!!!

Here's Part 1 -- enjoy!


Ryan: Even as a hardcore “Battlestar Galactica” fan, I was taken aback at how impassioned people were about the last set of episodes of that show. And I was really unprepared for how harsh people could get over the smallest things and what they meant, and over what and wasn’t dealt with in those final set of episodes. It was as if everyone had a different checklist in their mind of what had to happen.

In approaching this last season, do you have the sense that it's going to be like that? Or did you just not think about the intensity of the fan reaction?

Lindelof: I’m sure we both have similar yet vastly verbose responses to that because we talk a lot about it and been talking a lot about the ending of the show for a long time. But I think that there is a disproportionate focus on a finale and there always has been. And this happens on a micro level, where the critically and fan-hated season, Season 3, also happens to have the greatest finale probably of the series. And the taste left in your mouth in the wake of the finale is really all that matters.

If the entire series is going to be judged based on our ability to execute the dive, you can’t do your job. Part of it is -- despite what people think or say, so much of it has been talked about and planned for years now that you’re just kind of executing the plan to the best of your ability. You're changing the plan when it’s not working, but otherwise, you’re kind of married to the inevitable -- the stuff that we want to do.

Cuse: We also spent a lot of time talking about how we don’t want the last season of the show to be didactic. It’s very dangerous to basically create a checklist of answers and then start trying to tick them off, because we want to make sure we’re telling engaging stories. For us really, while the mythology is important, for us it’s a story about these characters. And so most of our focus has been on, how are we going to resolve the character stories?

We really feel we are very committed to this notion of not stripping the show of its essential mystery. I mean, mystery exists in life and we kind of always go back to the midi-chlorians example [in the 'Star Wars' prequel films]. Your understanding the Force was not aided by knowing that there were little particles swimming around in the bloodstreams of Jedi.

There are sort of fundamental elements of mystery and magic to the show that are unexplainable, and any attempt to explain them would actually harm the show, and in our opinion, the legacy of the show. So we’re trying to find the right blend of answering questions, but also leaving the things that should be mysterious mysterious.

Ryan: Yeah. I did not need to know more about Boba Fett. He has a jet pack. He a ship named Slave 1. I don’t need to know more than that.

Cuse: Yeah, exactly.

Lindelof: And for us, there are questions that we’re clearly presenting. It’s not like Lucas ever presented in the first three “Star Wars” films, "What is The Force?"

And therefore, it’s like, when people ask us, "What is the island, what do the numbers mean?" You know, we don’t know how to answer the question, "What do the numbers mean?" We can tell you what the practical application of the numbers is in the series, but how do you answer a question like that?

It’s like, if you could have a sitdown with God and say, "Why is a giraffe’s neck so tall?" You know, because he can eat from large trees. And it’s like, "But you made all these other animals that don’t need tall necks to eat, so why?" So you get into a conversation where every answer you give only makes it more frustrating.

Cuse: Or that leads to the question of, did God in fact create that giraffe or not, which is also a very, very tricky question to attempt to answer.

Lindelof: Of course. Look, the franchise of “Lost” -- in addition to the primary franchise, which is the characters and the mysteries of the island that have always been in support of the characters -- there's this idea of, "What did they mean by that?" The zeitgeist of the show has developed around different iterations of that question. What do they mean by that?

Because the show isn’t like a traditional cop show where by the end of it somebody basically says, “Here’s who did it, here’s why they did it, and here is what is going to happen to them.” Or a law show with no ambiguity. There’s going to be an element of "What do they mean by that?" long after “Lost” is done and no matter what we did, there’s nothing we could do to prevent it.

Cuse: And also, we also are aware that answering questions inevitably raises other questions. We call it the Big Bang conundrum.

Lindelof: A.k.a, Kate’s plane.

Cuse: Yeah, if you go back and you say, "OK, Jacob is obviously someone who was of great significance to the mythology of the show, but who was before Jacob? And then but who created that person?" If you go back in the universe you can say, the universe was created in an event called the Big Bang, but then you can inevitably ask the question, "Well, what was before the Big Bang?"

I think the audience has to have a sort of respect for the fact that there is only a circumscribed set of answers that we can ever give. And we’re not sitting here trying to evade our responsibility to provide answers. We are going to answer the questions that, for us, feel like they need to be answered and we feel like we have some cool and satisfying answers for them.

Lindelof: One of which will be, we will answer what caused the Big Bang.

Ryan: It was giraffes.

Cuse: It was giraffes.

You know, ultimately, we’re excited though, because it does feel like we concocted the mythology of the show a long time ago and it’s like having a Christmas present and you kept it on the shelf a long time and people are finally going to get to open it and see it. So we’re finally getting to deploy the ending of the show and that is exciting to us. It is a story and I think as storytellers, that’s always what’s delicious -- you set up the audience and then you basically finish the story. There’s a payoff and we’re actually going to finally give the audience our payoff.

And we are going to go off the grid after the show is over to avoid the actual issue of having to interpret the ending. Again, we’ve always felt that one of the compelling elements of “Lost” is its intentional ambiguity. The fact is, it’s open for interpretation and discussion and we feel like we would be doing a disservice to the fans and the viewers to say, “No, you must only look at this in one way.” We don’t think that is really good for the show or for people’s ability to read into the show what they want. I mean, that’s what I like to do when I read a good book -- basically be able to debate what the real meaning and intention of that story is.

Ryan: So, what you’re saying is, you're going to France?

Cuse: We’re not saying. We’re not saying where we are.

Lindelof: It’s an undisclosed location.

Ryan: Is it Dick Cheney’s bunker?

Lindelof: Exactly. The one promise that we are making is that what we’re not going to do is leave the show hanging so we can pick up the ball and run with it two years from now in some other television project or movie. I think that we owe ourselves and the story and the audience a sense of finality.

Cuse: The most complete ending that we can give them.

Lindelof: Yeah, you can’t break up with somebody and say, "Let’s not go out anymore, but I still want to sleep together, I still want to live in the same house, and we should still go on dates all the time." No. If it’s over, it’s over.

We’re trying to create a season that really feels like it’s over as opposed to [left open-ended]. People keep saying, "Is there going to be a Sopranos movie?" And I actually feel the question in itself is offensive to anybody who likes the cut-to-black [ending] because it completely neutralizes the deftness. Carlton and I happen to be huge fans of the “Sopranos.” But to do a “Sopranos” movie, you could never watch that series finale again with any level of respect [if you know] know that something followed it.

Cuse: The other phenomenon which is interesting is that the immediate interpretation of the ending of “Lost” may not be the same as the ultimate interpretation of the ending of “Lost.”

I mean, you as a “Battlestar” fan probably have experienced the sensation that there was an immediate reaction to how “Battlestar” ended, and [now] it seems like there’s a bit of and evolving reaction to how “Battlestar” ended. And we anticipate that the same thing might happen with “Lost.”

There’s an instantaneous sense of loss, and using the “Sopranos,” again as an example -- a lot of people were sort of outraged because the story ended and it wasn’t conclusive, but then with some perspective and a little distance from the show, the metaphor of what Chase was doing there became clearer and that seemed to resonate better over time than in the immediate aftermath.

Lindelof: What was so impactful about that ending is, as a huge “Sopranos” fan myself, I can tell you almost nothing about that episode other than that Anthony Jr. was considering going into the military and then he got into a car accident. But the episode itself is like completely like sand through my fingers. I don’t remember anything about it. All I remember is that [last] scene...

Ryan: The only other thing I remember, apart from the final scene, is Meadow trying to park the car.

Lindelof: Right. All I remember is that Journey song. What are people going to take away from the final episode of “Lost?” Will it be the final image?

Cuse: Will it be the episode in its totality?

Lindelof: We keep getting asked about the final image and we’re like, "Yeah, sure, we know what it is." But people are acting like the final image of the show is revelatory in some way, as opposed to maybe [what's revelatory] is what happens in the first hour of the finale.

Cuse: But what’s happened is, I think people have expectations that have grown from other shows, where that last moment is such a sting. Whether it’s all of a sudden you see a snow globe [as in "St. Elsewhere"] or you cut to black or somebody wakes up and it’s all been a dream. Whatever it is, it’s like that final twist negates or completely overshines everything that’s come before it.

Lindelof: Which is amazing because the fact that people invested six years of their lives and over 120 hours on “Lost” and they’re going to pay it all off in this 30-second scene. "That is going to change the entire way that I feel about the show."

Cuse: We hope it doesn’t.

Lindelof: We’ll be riding either a wave of goodwill into the finale, or bad will, and it’s happened different ways in different seasons for us. Last year, [we had] the overt time travel story mechanism and the rise of characters like Faraday and the risk of putting Sawyer with Juliet. All of those things could have been [big problems] in any other world, and we were just fortuitous enough that it worked. But we really don’t have any sense of how this season is going to be received until it’s on the air.

Ryan: James Poniewozik [Time's television critic] has written about this, about how the finale of a sci-fi show can't just be a finale, it has to provide an Answer. It can't just be an ending, it has to solve the problem. And I felt like I definitely saw that split in the "Battlestar" fandom, between the people who wanted or feel they got character payoffs and the people who don't feel various solutions to the plot and the story were arrived at correctly.

Your show, if anything, has more fans and more different camps invested in different people and also in different parts of the mythology.

Cuse: I feel like there will be diverse opinions and again, we understand that the hardcore mythology fans might react differently than the people who are really waiting to find out if Kate ends up with Sawyer or with Jack. And for us, we feel that the story lines that ultimately will be the most satisfying are the character stories. In discussing the various conundrums of mythology answers, we are very well aware that for people who are really focused on the mythology, it’s hard to provide probably completely sufficient answers for those group of people. So there will be there’ll probably be different levels of satisfaction based on what it is that interested you about the show in the first place.

All we can do is trust our guts, which is kind of where we’ve been from the beginning. We started the show sitting in my office every morning having breakfast, talking about what we thought was cool. And whatever we both would get excited about would go into the show and that’s how we’ve approached it [all along] and that’s how we approached it at the end.

So, our barometer can only be: Does this ending feel satisfying to us and to the other writers? And if we can achieve that, we feel like we will have done what we can do and what we should do. Beyond that, I think every show – certainly a lot of people have rejected “Lost” along the way. We started with a 10.2 rating at the beginning of the second season and a certain group of people said, “You know what? This is too much to invest; this is too much mythological show to invest in."

People found a way to part with the show for various reasons, or they embraced it all the way down the line. So, we’re not trying to reverse-engineer the process, we’re basically committed to doing the best version that we feel we can do and that’s all we can do.

Lindelof: There’s a certain amount of security in the idea of saying the show was never supposed to work in the first place. In the wake of the pilot, to say, "This show is actually going to be on the air for over 120 episodes," we would have laughed in your face. So the idea that it sustained as long as it has and that some of our best episodes were in our fifth season as opposed to [earlier in the shows run], or that we were able to bounce back from some sub par episodes and sort of regain our momentum. That makes us kind of think -- it’s becoming a lot more about the journey for us than it is about the ending and we hope that that’s the show's ultimate legacy.

But I think the sci-fi distinction you make is an interesting one because, when you talk about the “Sopranos” ending or the last episode of “Seinfeld” or “Friends,” there’s only so many iterations of what can happen. The “Sopranos,” the only thing that people were talking about is, "Is Tony going to live, or is somebody going to kill him?"

With “Lost,” nobody can even guess what the ending is going to be. If you were to have a contest right now saying, "In one paragraph, summarize what you think the last episode of 'Lost' might be" -- if you say it to 100 people, you will get 100 paragraphs that have nothing to do with each other.

If you say that to somebody about the “Sopranos,” 50 people will say, "I think Tony’s going to get whacked," maybe 10 people will say, "Carmela is going to kill him, but he’s going to get whacked." But no one would have said, "They’re going to be eating in a friggin' restaurant -- onion rings." That's what was so brilliant about it -- how do you do the unexpected?

Ryan: You brought up in the first season and how you thought it would never last this long. As you look back, are there things you wish you could have done differently?

Cuse: No, I don’t think so. You could ask the same question about your life. I suppose everyone has regrets, but at the same time, you can either focus on your regrets as a path to nowhere. The journey of the show has been the absolutely right journey of the show. We had to take all the steps and the occasional missteps that we took in order to get where we are. So, everything that we’ve done has been sort of right in the larger karmic sense.

It’s interesting that you talk about this. One of the central themes of the show is free will versus predetermination and that same issue was very much in play in how the show was constructed. Yes, the mythological architecture was constructed back in the first season and between the first and second season, but the actual journey of these characters is something that evolves literally, episode by episode. We view the process of making the show as a very organic one. We watch what happens and how characters play off each other, what relationships are working, what aren’t working.

So there still is an element of discovery that is a part of getting into the finale. We sort of know what the Incident is, but how that’s going to play out with the characters is still something that we discover as we write each episode of the show.

We are not only the stewards of this journey, but we also have this wonderful process of discovery ourselves, which is, I think, the essence of the creative process. It's when you get into that transcendence where the show tells you what it wants to be and that’s something that we didn’t even anticipate. So, that to us is what’s fun.

Ryan: You guys have obviously a unique relationship with the fans. Have you ever changed what you wanted to do, or reconfigured what you thought you were going to do, based on good or bad fan reaction?

Lindelof: There hasn’t been an instance in the show where we disagreed with fan reaction, or were incredibly surprised by fan reaction. By the time fans saw Nikki and Paolo deliver their first lines of dialogue, we were already writing [their final episode,] 'Expose.' Had the fans said "We actually love these characters," maybe it would have given us pause, but by then we fundamentally acknowledged we had taken a shot and it didn’t work.

We did the Sawyer/Juliet thing last year. We were introducing Juliet into a relationship with Sawyer, [even though] the debate has been about whether Kate going to chose Sawyer or Jack. Now we’re changing it into a quadrangle for the first time, and it’s going to be it is a mature love at that – we don’t even see how [their relationship] really starts. When we introduced the audience to it, [the relationship] is already up and running for three years. That was the bold risk, but when we saw those dailies with Elizabeth [Mitchell as Juliet] and Josh [Holloway as Sawyer], they just sold it and we’re like, "This works."

If the audience doesn’t like the relationship, hopefully they won’t fault us for the idea and the good news is, “LaFleur” is Episode 8 and the season is only 16 episodes long and then Juliet falls into a hole. So, if they hate it, it’s only going to last for eight episodes, but it’s really going to govern every decision that Sawyer makes from here on out.

So, there are moments where we go, "What is the fan reaction going to be to this thing?" But especially since we started premiering in January [the season is mostly written by then]. On February 2 [when the final season premieres], Carlton and I and the writers are going to be writing Episode 15 of Season 6.

Cuse: Yeah, there will be no time for course correction. Last year we committed to this concept of time travel with a certain expectation that some people really might not respond to it. I think the most pleasant surprise was how much people embraced it, because it was difficult and it was much more overtly science fiction, and yet people really seemed to like the season.

But we have the same anxiety about what we’re doing this season. We kind of feel like the fundamental tenet that we’ve tried to follow as storytellers is "Be bold." But in being bold sometimes you fall on your face.

So we committed to a narrative approach this season which we feel is bold and it’s different than what we’ve done before. And if it works, it’ll be exciting, but it might not be everybody’s cup of tea either.

Next: I give them grief about the time travel in Season 5. I know, I know, some "Lost" fans loved it. Which we discussed.

source : chicagotribune.com

Lost bonus s5 : Building 23 Beyond With Michael Emerson

source :Benfantic

LOST news with kristin and carlton !

Scott in Halifax, Nova Scotia: Lost!
At the 35th Annual Saturn Awards in Burbank, Calif., we asked Lost's Michael Emerson how Ben (who once crushed hard on Juliet) would react to the news that she had nuked herself, and Emerson said: "Ben's no longer in a position to entertain romantic notions. I don't think there's room for romance in Ben's world right now. As much as he admires her on a lot of levels, I don't think he can do anything about it." We also asked, on a scale of one to 10, how he would rate Elizabeth Mitchell's awesomeness? "It would be a number higher than 10." Word.

Jill in Auckland, New Zealand: I need some new Lost news!
The best we can offer you on this fine afternoon is Lost show runner Carlton Cuse saying nothing about Lost at the Saturn Awards, but saying it darn well:

Watch With Kristin: How much of the speculation on the Internet about Lost season six is correct? Give us a percentage.
Carlton Cuse: I'm not really good at math, so no speculation about that.

WWK: You're the best stonewaller ever.
CC: This is what we like to call stonewalling season, where we try to preserve radio silence—but we'll be coming out of Comic-Con with some cool things, I think, so we're excited about that.

WWK: There is one very important question.
CC: OK.

WWK: Can you get Josh Holloway to come to Comic-Con?
CC: Mmmm...That's a good idea, which I will pitch to the appropriate parties. Josh is great. We would love it if Josh would come.

WWK: And here's a question you're not going to answer. Season one: Jack's the most important person ever. Season four: Ben's the key to everything. Season five: Jacob. If you had to pick a character who was the most central to what Lost is in the end, who would it be?
CC: You're right, I'm not going to answer that.

1. We tried.
2. Tell Holloway in the comments that he should appear on Lost's final Comic-Con panel.
source : kristin eoline

Lost masterminds Carlton Cuse and Damon Lindelof dop hints about how ABC hit drama will end

Lost masterminds Damon Lindelof and Carlton Cuse have been dropping hints about how the show will end next spring.

Among the mysteries unravelled in the very last episode will be the significance of the four-toed statue, what the Smoke Monster really is and who the skeletons in the cave were.

(We reckon Egyptian fertility goddess Taweret, conscience and Penny & Desmond respectively, for what it's worth!)

Says Cuse: "The end of the show will be a combination of trying to answer mysteries the audience still cares about, such as the statue and the Smoke Monster.

"We'll also be answering the skeletons in the cave question. We will answer the questions we feel are important and central to the plot.

"At the same time we will be trying to tell redemption stories about the characters. These characters do indeed have a destiny.[/quote]
source : http://www.sundaymercury.net=

Lost Kubrick Figurines at Meltdown Comics

source : laweekly.com

More infos about the Screenwriting Expo

I am from Vancouver, Canada, but I flew down to Los Angeles for the 2008 Screenwriting Expo. More specifically, I was there to see the writers of Lost and I sat front row, centre. Eric Goldman from IGN, who I shared a few words with in the audience, has done a pretty good job hitting most of the major points from the first ninety-minute panel with Damon Lindelof and Carlton Cuse at http://tv.ign.com/articles/930/930680p1.html, but for some reason, he did not stay for the second panel with Edward “Eddy” Kitsis and Adam Horowitz, so I can give you a rundown of what happened there, in addition to some things that the show runners said that is not at IGN.

Some notes:
* There were not a ton of people at these specific panels (300 maybe? definitely not 4000 like at Comic-Con) and the audience was less fanboy-ish than Comic-Con. The moderator even specifically said not to ask spoiler questions because they are a waste of a question. The only question that seemed to be from Comic-Con was the one from the teenage girl (she was the only other teenager than me in the room, I think) who was disappointed that Rousseau was killed not because of a promised flashback but because it killed her longtime fantasy of Locke-Rousseau love. Well, I guess there was one person more Comic-Con: the guy who won the life jacket signed by all the writers showed up to say that he could not read any of the signatures while holding the jacket up. Ha ha. Also, Damon and Carlton and Adam and Eddy were very funny. Later, I saw Tim Kring (Jesse Alexander and Jeph Loeb were originally scheduled to appear as well, but I think we know why they did not show up.)

Things that Goldman missed:

* One of the first questions that the moderator (Jeff Goldsmith, editor-in-chief of Creative Screenwriting magazine, which runs the Expo) asked was what were Damon and Carlton’s worst jobs that they have had in the television industry. Carlton told a humorous story in which he used to be a writers’ assistant. His boss was horrible and at one point, broke his mint green toilet seat so he decided that it was Carlton’s job to go across the city and find a new one, which Carlton did. (The moderator wondered how Carlton’s boss could have accidentally smashed a toilet seat in the first place. Damon’s worst job was when he was the official employee to pick up the business magazines (Variety, Hollywood Reporter) and take them to the executives. But sometimes it would rain and the magazines would be damp, leading Damon to put them up on a clothesline before delivering them to his employer. Damon also said that he had an antagonistic relationship with the delivery guy.
* It was while writing the pilot that J.J. told Damon that he was not going to be a show runner because he wanted to do movies. One day, Damon walked into the editing room to find Tom Cruise screening the pilot.
* Damon was shocked by the ratings and said “Now we have to tell them what the monster is!” That got a lot of laughs from the crowd.
* Goldman mentioned this, but I must repeat it. Damon said a couple times that the pilot cost “11 and a half million dollars”. Various websites have speculated between 10 and 14 and now we know that it was ~11.5.
* Damon and Carlton used to be different forms of studio executives and this helped them because they read so many scripts. They said that they were surprised by how many unemployed writers were unprepared for interviews (Damon would ask what the story was about and the guy trying to get hired would not really know).
* Damon learned that you need to think that whatever show you are working on is the BEST show ever, even though he said that there are probably better shows on television out there. The moderator corrected him.
* In the pilot when they introduced the polar bear, they knew that a group of people had brought it to the island for experiments, but they did not decide who these people specifically were until shortly after Carlton joined Lost for “Solitary” when he and Damon had a discussion about all the big mysteries that did not have answers yet. For example, Damon already knew what the monster and the island were, but they talked about question such as, what if the group of people is called the Dharma Initiative? What if the characters get off the island before the end because the audience would totally not expect that? What if the series becomes about the characters getting back together on the island at the end of the show? What is the final episode of the show? What is in the Hatch that is soon to be introduced?
* Did road map and Harry Potter analogies.
* They acknowledged that they stalled in the third season because they did not have an ending, pointed specifically to “Claire strapping a message to a frigging bird’s foot!” That also got laughs.
* They have written the first ten episodes of season 5.
* They never planned on Tom being the leader of the Others, when asked.
* They talked about how they kind of disguised/introduced the science fiction show as a character show and said that there is no subjectivity in the Heroes pilot, for example, it could not be debated that Nathan was flaying and that Claire went into a train.
* Four scenes from the first four seasons were not shot in Hawaii. (Based on past interviews, we know that the Widmore scenes in “The Shape of Things to Come” and “There’s No Place Like Home” and the hospital scenes in “Through the Looking Glass”, but what is the fourth?)
* Carlton used to travel between Oahu and California more often than now in the first and second season
* He (and sometimes, but less often, Damon) now talks on the phone to Oahu ten times a day for a combined ninety minutes
* Carlton and Damon’s day begins with them talking about what needs to be accomplished that day and how it should be accomplished (do both of them need to be there for editing or can one of them oversee what happens in the writers’ room?) over a ninety or forty-five minute (sorry, I did not write that part down) breakfast (in Damon’s office, I believe)
* Jack Bender, Jean Higgins and Stephen Williams are the three people who run the show in Hawaii
* There are three stories per episode: main island story, flashback and “C-story” (”ping-pong”, says Damon to more laughter)
* Newest script by Brian K. Vaughan and Paul Zbyszewski starts filming on Friday (based on what they said earlier, this would be 510, but that doesn’t seem right with postings on the DarkUFO website, so maybe 510 is not fully edited)
* Sawyer is a surrogate for the audience–if the audience asks a question then it is bad, but if Sawyer points out how ridiculous someting is, the audience accepts it
* Scenes in episodes get moved around, i.e. flashback is placed at different spots, but “The Constant” is pretty much the only episode that is exactly the same from script to final cut
* Normal episodes take two weeks to break/outline, but “The Constant” took five and would have taken longer but Adam Horowitz stepped in and said “stop”
* Sawyer is the Han Solo of Lost, so they named him (James Ford) after the actor who played Han Solo (Harrison Ford)
* “A Tale of Two Cities” originally began with a Talking Heads song but it did not fit the mood at all so they changed it in post-production
* Sometimes, Gregg Nations will come up to Damon and Carlton and say that there is a continuity error with flashbacks where a newspaper date will be inconsistent with the story and instead of trying to fix it through effects for the DVD, Damon just says “Fuck you”.
* And finally, the story of the scrapped Sawyer flashback and the Tampa job. Originally, a flashback story was written and shot for Sawyer in “Adrift”, in which Sawyer goes to Florida and falls in love with Jolene Blalock’s character, who he is conning, but it was apparently was absolutely horrible so they got rid of it.
* In “The Cost of Living”, the writers thought that it would be cool if the Others had a weird funeral service and the scene was much longer, but it was just so bad so they edited it down to its bare essentials
* When asked if they get writers’ block, they said not really, because most of the season is mapped out in a three week minicamp between the seasons. There is also a smaller minicamp halfway through the season to re-examine how the plot is progressing. Now that they have set an end date, they really do not get writers’ block because they know what needs to happen.
* We are never going to meet the DeGroots, but we are most likely going to see them.
* After making sure to sign everything that people wanted to get signed (I got a couple scripts and a poster signed), Damon and Carlton escaped out the back door with security guards to be escorted back to building 23

Second ninety-minute panel with Kitsis and Horowitz: “Anatomy of an Episode”

* The moderator asked some trivia questions, e.g. what is the name of Ben’s childhood sweetheart? what did Widmore bid on? and gave out prizes, such as a Dharma hat (which is what I was hoping to win, but was not chosen to answer), the season 3 DVD or the 2009 calendar (I picked up the 2008 yearbook magazine).
* The episode for them to analyze was voted on the the Expo website. “Greatest Hits”, which I voted for, won. Th other choices were “Dave”, “Tricia Tanaka is Dead”, “Exposé” and “Ji Yeon”. They ended up briefly going through these as well.
* Between the panel, they showed “Greatest Hits” on a gigantic screen
* The moderator also asked them what their worst jobs were and it seems that both Adam and Eddy worked their way up the television ladder like Damon and Carlton. Adam once had to bail a network executive’s son out of jail–the sixteen-year old had been driving without a license. Adam was not sure how it was his responsibility or why it should be his money, but he followed orders. One of Eddy’s employers made him obtain an obscure movie from Bulgaria just to see if he could (this was revealed once Eddy finally tracked it down and got it). On a more positive note, Eddy said that he used to work for Joel Silver (go look him up on Wikipedia or IMDb. A bit of trivia that I happen to know: He also invented the sport of ultimate Frisbee)
* They really like the casting of Nestor Carbonell (and Michael Emerson, of course)
* Eddy and Adam joined the show while “Numbers” was being written and they were immediately tasked with coming up with the episode’s C-story and they pitched Claire’s birthday to Damon and Carlton and that Locke would make her a crib and wrote that (I am not sure if they mean the outline or if they really did contribute dialogue to David Fury’s script while uncredited)
* Adam went home to his wife and said that he had come up with a Locke and Claire story and instead of being proud of or congratulating him, his wife got mad at him for ruining that Claire is okay because “Raised by Another” had just aired
* They were really surprised by how fans “universally hated” “Fire + Water” (which they pronounced “Fire and Water”). They thought that it was a good story and Dominc Monaghan gave a great performance. Then Adam corrected himself: His mom and his wife liked the episode so it was not “universally hated”
* They had a great time writing “Dave” (which was written because they knew that they were going to do a Hurley in the institution story eventually) and wrote the role of Dave specifically with Evan Handler in mind
* It was decided in the minicamp between seasons 2 and 3 that Charlie would die in “Greatest Hits”, but they decided in the midseason minicamp that Charlie should have one more victory and would die in the finale instead (great decision, I think)
* “Tricia Tanaka is Dead” is Eddy’s favourite episode that they have done. The idea was to do a hopeful episode because there had been a lot of bleak and heavy episodes at that time. They said that it was fun to stick a heavily mythological element, which was merely funny at the time, into what was pretty much the most character-driven episode of the season (”Roger Workman”)
* One time, Adam was discussing “Exposé” with Damon and went to give a thumbs up, when a tendon or something in his thumb suddenly snapped, and Eddy shrieked/yelled and fell over in pain as he was beginning to give his thumbs up. This is now something of a running gag in the writers’ room where Damon will give thumbs up and mock Adam
* Beginning in the first season when the writers would get writers’ block, they would come up with long and elaborate episodes of Exposé (the show about three strippers who solved crime with the Cobra secretly behind the murders), e.g. “I don’t know how we are going to reveal what is in the Hatch, but I do know that what happened that time that two of the strippers from Exposé solved the murder of the…” followed by details
* The chairs in the writers’ room now have Exposé seatbacks
* Damon and Carlton decided to prank Adam and Eddy in the final days before “Exposé” began shooting and Adam was extremely sad by the fake news that Billy Dee Williams had passed that it was not funny when Damon and Carlton realized that they should not have joked about this and told them that they were kidding
* The average Lost script is 57 pages and then they give it to Damon and Carlton for them to leave notes. They said that they and the other writers really try to avoid going past 59 pages because Damon and Carlton like the number 5 (even though it is not one of “the numbers”) and too many scenes will have to be cut. Before writing the script, a 30-page outline is written. Based on what other professional writers said in other panels and seminars at the Expo, I now know that this is ridiculously long. The script for “Exposé” was 65 pages long and they had to cut a lot of material. They wanted the episode to rewarding for the fans who had really been paying attention and tried to redo as many old scenes as they could.
* It was one of the most difficult episodes to do because they had to reconstruct the plane crash site and the editors had to search through archives for unused angles of footage from previous episodes
* They also tried to answer every minor mystery in the episode–their favourite one that got cut featured Paulo finding Shannon’s inhaler and saying “what’s this?” before tossing it aside into the jungle
* Adam thought about what he would need on the island and he is addicted to Nicorette since he quit smoking six years ago so they worked that into the story
* Damon and Carlton came up with the “Ji Yeon” plot device
* “Ji Yeon” happened to be written and outlined really smoothly
* They like how Michael never went back to the island, but had a huge influence on his fellow islanders. Also, Michael’s story was told just how they wanted it and was not affected by the strike
* They said something about the freighter people arriving at the end of season 3 (they have just been referring to Naomi, or they may have been referring to how Michael was originally supposed to return in “Through the Looking Glass”
* The “Born to Run” scene where Charlie and Kate talk and Charlie is really excited and confident that they will be rescued was a side that they wanted to explore
* Usually, Jack, Sawyer and Locke get the heroic moments and with “Greatest Hits”, they wanted to show that Charlie was also a hero and had always been something of one throughout his life
* Group speeches where Jack or somebody is talking to like fifteen people, such as the “we’re gonna blow ‘em all to hell” speech, are the hardest scenes to write
* But they are not as hard to write as the one with Sayid talking about the Looking Glass. That scene was originally several pages longer than it ended up being in the final product because they were so concerned with how the Looking Glass could still be working if it was flooded, which at that point in the episode, is what the audience is led to believe. Jack asked how it could be and then Sayid and the other characters came up with a variety of elaborate explanations for how. They finally fixed it by saying “who cares?” In the actual episode, Jack asks how it can still work and Sayid responds with “How it still works is irrelevant. What we do…” That was another funny story.
* In season 2, either Eddy or Adam (did not write down which) would burn CDs for the writing staff, saying that something like “here is what the Dharma Initiative is listening to this week!” and Shambala (”Tricia Tanaka is Dead” was one of them)
* The executives at ABC are great because they really are fans of the show and basically give suggestions only where something might be confusing to the audience, but the writing staff has an unusually large amount of leeway for network television with science fiction storylines and elements
* This year, Paul Zbyszewski (from Day Break) and Melinda Hsu Taylor (from Women’s Murder Club, Vanished and Medium) are new staff writers; Kyle Pennington (”Cabin Fever”) has worked his way up from post-production and is now a staff writer; it is never explicitly said, but strongly implied that Drew Goddard and Christina M. Kim are also no longer staff writers
* Eddy and Adam spent more time post-panel with fans before leaving before they also were escorted out the back door by security guards (I got them to also sign my poster, but I forgot to print off a script for them–I believe that “Fire + Water” is online.)

source : andy blog

2008 ABC Summer Press Tour

sorry i'm in late to add spoilers, i'll do tomorrow and i'll add photos promotionnal of the cast tomorrow too sorry but tonight it's darlton pics :) for ABC summer press tour !
Enjoy ^^

spoilers at comic con

not really so much but it was great to see darlton again ? tomorrow i'll give you link about vid that people took there but for now summary of Q&A game ^^
enjoy :)
Lost show runners Damon Lindelof and Carlton Cuse are here to take your fan questions and, apparently, give out relevant prizes, and it'll all be live-blogged here. Click in...

Q's and A's are paraphrased. This will be updated frequently, so check back often. Vids of key moments coming soon.

Q: When the hatch imploded and the sky turned purple—did the Island move then?
A: No. But something happened. Prize: Oceanic water bottle.

Q: What is the fate of Jin and Locke?
A: Jin will still be on the show in some form. You've not seen the last of either of those characters. Prize: Jin panda bear.

Q: Best episode and best season, in your opinion?
Cuse: "The Constant" is my favorite episode, and season one.
Lindelof: "Exodus" and the raft launch before the show disintegrated into utter despair. I also like season four. Prize: Apollo bar and Apollo bar T-shirt.

Q: What's up with the reflection in the season four promos where the city was in the reflection in the water?
A: That was all about the Oceanic Six getting off the Island. Prize: Heroes DVD.

Q: Will there be a Rousseau flashback?
Cuse: We will see Rousseau's story, to use the word "flashback" might be disingenious.
Lindelof: We're steering away from the flashes. Prize: I Am Lost luggage tags.

Q: What's up with the actors' strike?
A: We're supposed to start in three weeks, at least until further notice changes that plan. Prize: Photo of Nikki & Paolo.

Q: Any special guests this year?
A: No actors. Sorry. Prize: Actor-signed DVD box set.

Q: What happened to Vincent?
A: What about what happened the Island and Sawyer and Juliet? Vincent's okay and will appear in season five. Safe to say: Vincent's gonna make it to the end. Prize: Little polar bear.

Q: Are Jack and Kate your show's one true pariring?
Cuse: Personally I like those two, professionally I'm going to take the Fifth. Prize: Jack action figure.

Ah, we've been had again. MATTHEW FOX is so totally here. Photos coming soon!

Q: Will Kate ever see Sawyer again?
Lindelof: Not if Jack has anything to say about it.
Cuse: Yes. Kate will see Sawyer again. Prize: Signed poster.

Q: What happened to nonspeaking "beachies" who were ferried over to the blowed-up boat from the season four finale?
A: They dead. Faraday is probably gonna be okay. Prize: Authentic Faraday tie.

Lindelof Q to Matthew Fox: Do you know the meat-socks/redshirts, i.e. those who died on the boat?
A: Yep. They're always there and very professional.

Q: Is there a limit to how far the flashes can go back and forth in time?

Lindelof: We're going to tell stories in a new and exciting way. This year, when season five starts, you're not going to know when and where you are.
Cuse: There will be storytelling both on and off the Island and in different periods of time.
Lindelof: Guy who makes wooshing sound will remain employed. Prize: Hanso Foundation hat.

Q: Just between me and you, how does this show end?
A: It ends well, we hope.
Q: Can I have some Jin?
Lindelof: The alcohol or the character?
Prize: Dharma beer.

Q: How old is Richard Alpert and does he have six toes?
A: Not tellin'. We will see Richard Alpert barefoot in the very near future and that's pun-intended: the very near future. Prize: "I asked a Richard Alpert question and all I got was this lousy T-shirt" T-shirt.

Lindelof Q to Matthew Fox: How old do you think Richard Alpert is?
A: 125 years old.
Lindelof: Wrong.


Q: Regarding Locke's pseudonym of Jeremy Bentham, and one of his big things was the panopticon, are the people on the Island people being watched and by who?
A: Good question. [Interrupted by new Martin Candle video drama. That video? Coming soon, right here!]

That's all for now, kiddos. Check back soon for photos and video from the panel and in the not-too-distant future, my backstage interview with Mr. Matthew Fox himself! In the meantime, post your comments and Q's on the panel below, and we'll work on dragging more answers out of the powers that be in the very near future.

source : kristin at eonline

darlton talk about 2 Spectacular kiss !

darlton told about 2 spectacular kiss in finale season, we know the one but what is the second ?

enjoy !

Damon Lindelof: Everything's gonna come together in this final two hours. We're gonna see how the Oceanic Six get off the Island. We're gonna see why they start lying. We're gonna see who doesn't get off the Island and see why some of them choose to stay.
Carlton Cuse: And we're gonna see a big kiss—a really big juicy kiss—between two characters.
D.L.: A spectacular kiss.
C.C.: And it's gonna be very good for people who are very involved with the Jack-Kate-Sawyer romantic triangle. You're going to see a lot more about that in this finale.
D.L.: So you're saying that kiss is gonna happen between two of those characters. Jack and Sawyer perhaps?
C.C.: I'm gonna say not Jack and Sawyer. I'm gonna say you can probably pick two other sides of the triangle.
D.L.: I'm gonna go one better than "there's one spectacular kiss": There are two spectacular kisses in the show...between four different people—not kissing each other. They happen at different times in the show.
C.C.: And they aren't the same characters kissing each other twice, so that will be good.
D.L.: Separate kisses.

15 Questions for Lost Bosses Damon Lindelof and Carlton Cuse—and 40 Revealing Answers!

After a five-week hiatus induced by the Hollywood writer's strike, Lost finally returns this week with a new episode, "The Shape of Things to Come." Show runners Damon Lindelof and Carlton Cuse, who both produce and write episodes of the ABC drama, are self-professed geeks who haven't promised sci-fi entirely based in real-life science, but they still want to get it right—or at least right enough that the show's rabid fans will believe it. The duo took a break from editing Lost's three-hour season finale script to take us behind the scenes in the writer's room, talk physics and drop exclusive hints about what we can expect from the show's future. —Erin McCarthy

We fact-check the science and technology behind Lost every week and most of the time you guys get it right. How much time do you spend researching each episode, and where do you do your research? Do you have a panel of experts on speed dial?
Carlton Cuse: We do not have a panel of experts on speed dial, although we do have Greg Nations, who is our script coordinator, who is someone we will turn to who will track down specific facts. The internet is also a beautiful and wonderful thing, and we have our own areas of expertise. Damon is a real comic book geek and I'm a little bit more of a science geek. I took a couple of years of high school physics and my dad was an engineer. I think even though I maybe don't possess a deep science knowledge, I do feel like my brain kind of works a little bit in the way of, you know, does this seem like it makes sense or not, and then Damon and I will go and find an expert or some factual stuff to try to support what it is that we want to do narratively.
Damon Lindelof: We have an awesome production team in Hawaii, so if we send down a script that says "Faraday has equations scribbled all over the chalkboard behind him," that falls upon them and Jeremy Davies, the actor who plays Faraday—who is very method and has been reading a lot about physics and trying to understand it—[to execute] what it says on the script page.

How important is it for you to get the science right?
CC: The science needs to be right enough that we kind of create a sense of believability to the story telling.
DL: We function on Jurassic Park rules, which are, if you can convince me that a mosquito can bite a dinosaur and then get preserved in amber, and that the DNA will not degrade over all that period of time, then you can show me a cloned dinosaur and I won't call it a science-fiction movie. And, you know, we try to do the same thing on the show. If something highly unlikely occurs, we try to offer up some grounding in the actual physical world that we understand in an effort to explain it—except in the case of things that don't potentially have a scientific explanation, which is where the show begins to go into its own territory.
CC: But we're always trying to skirt that line between the two possible explanations, the scientific one or a mythical and magical one, and we are purposefully ambiguous about which one might be correct. Obviously, certain things fall into the science category and certain things fall more into the mystical category, and that just sort of depends on what story we're telling that week.

There's a lot of fan talk that any non-rational or fictional or magical explanation of the island's happenings is a completely unacceptable cop-out. So far, there are plausible scientific explanations for everything that's happening, so people have accepted what's going on. Does being called out by viewers (or the press) worry you?
DL: Well, first off, I would challenge that assertion, and say, how does Yemi walking out of the jungle, the deceased brother of Eko, have a scientific explanation? I guess you would argue that he doesn't walk out of the jungle, that this is all sort of happening in Eko's head, that it's a hallucination. Would that be the case, is that...

No, what I was thinking was the stuff that has been explained so far has a scientific explanation, whereas the other stuff, we're waiting, we don't really know.
DL: Right.
CC: I think the question kind of strikes right at the core of the central theme of the show, which is the notion of faith versus empiricism. Jack represents the empiricist camp, and Locke represents the faith camp, and, you know, who is right? Well, the show hasn't fully answered that question yet.
DL: Hopefully it won't feel like it's a cop out when the show does answer that question, because we never promised a show that was based entirely and grounded in science. It's nice that it's able to do that, but we reserve the right to go in the direction that the uber-plan directs us.

Desmond first time traveled in the third season, but it's not until season four that we see the scientific explanation for it. So this is a chicken-or-the-egg type question: Did you learn about the science first, then work it into the show? Or do you think of a plot element and then research different scientific theories that back it up?
DL: This is where, while Carlton has a much more practical background in science and engineering, I have a long and storied history in every single time travel story that's ever been written, and draw upon that to fundamentally provide our stories with what we want to do. In this case, we said the way that we want to do time travel on Lost is consciousness based, as opposed to somebody gets in a DeLorean or a HG Wells-like apparatus and zaps themself back in time where they can interact with an earlier version of themself. It's more interesting if your brain basically drops into your body at different points in your life, which is more consistent with the sort of Vonnegut, Slaughterhouse 5, paradigm, and also helps insulate you from paradox. So we decided to do that with Desmond. He felt like the logical person to do it with. We find an emotional core for the story—in his case, it's his desire to be reunited with Penny—so we tell time travel stories that sort of focus on the romantic element, which is why we think Peggy Sue in Back to the Future and Somewhere in Time all work. They're science-fiction stories, but they have an emotional core. And we go from there. And then we do the research.
CC: But the two aren't really separable, that's the thing. It's like, when we're actually talking about a story, and we're constructing elements, you know, we're always talking about the plausibility of any given beat. I think the danger that always exists on this kind of show is that the audience has to buy what you're doing. We use all sorts of different things to inspire our storytelling, but you're constantly weighing any sort of story beat against that criteria—will the audience believe it, will they buy it, particularly when we do something as out there as consciousness traveling. So we try to find a way to make it seem plausible, and yet, at the same time, clearly it's a real flight of fantasy kind of story.
DL: And the coolest thing about consciousness time travel is, you know, you're sort of a slave to your memory. So if Desmond travels back in time and he remembers that a certain team beat another team in a football game, and then something different happens, we're hinting at the idea that the future has changed, when in fact he just remembered it wrong, which is kinda cool for us.

What's the vibe like in the writer's room when you're putting together these really scientific and technical episodes? Is there a lot of back and forth, or is it ironed out ahead of time?
CC: The writer's room is a very lively place where every story point is debated and kicked around. We break the stories in their totality in the writer's room down to really the very very kind of minute details of scenes, so, you know, you're kind of harnessing the brain power of eight people in there, and that mind hive is very helpful in problem solving. And different people know more about various subjects, so, you know, one of our favorite pastimes in the room is we play this game...ah, what's the actual title...? It's Geek versus Jock.
DL: We have one writer, Brian K. Vaughn, who writes comic books, and then another writer, Adam Horowitz, who's like a die-hard sports fan.
CC: Yankees fan. He used to sell hot dogs at Yankees Stadium.
DL: We'll ask Vaughn an easy sports question, like how many innings are there in a baseball game...
CC: Or what is the color of the Carolina Panthers or what sport do the Carolina Panthers play...
DL: And then we'll ask Horowitz to name two of the Avengers. And they will face off, and it's fun to watch them, you know, try to answer questions outside of their specific area of expertise.

And what's the prize if they get it right?
DL: Bragging rights, and they avoid the scorn of the rest of the room. In fact, there's a lot of betting...once the questions are asked, all the other writers basically bet whether or not that person will get it right, so it's just, it's a face saving technique.

Is there a scientific explanation for the smoke monster?
CC: We can't answer that question without answering the question of what is the smoke monster or without giving too much away. So we have to pass on that one.
DL: We have ruled out that the smoke monster has a basis in nanotechnology, though, which is the most popular scientific explanation for the smoke monster.

When are we going to find out what the smoke monster is?
CC: Before the end of the show. That's one of the big questions, along with what is this island, and those are kinds of questions that get answered in the end run of episodes when the show is drawing to a conclusion in 2010. They're not, they're sort of foundational questions and I think those questions are the ones that we're building towards answers for.

What sort of science and techy stuff can we look forward to proving or debunking when the show comes back?
DL: We basically did an Orchid Darma orientation film for the Orchid for Comic Con last year, which is available online, I'm sure, and was set up for where we were going in our season finale. Our characters are in fact going to discover the Orchid and see a bit more of that film. There will be plenty to sort of fact check and debunk on that axis.
CC: We can say that we've been very interested in these physicists who have been building this particle accelerator in the Alps, and there's been a lot of debate and concern about what's going to happen when they start smashing these particles into each other. People who are following that will probably enjoy some of the stuff that we're doing in the upcoming run of episodes.

Obviously this piece is about the science behind Lost, but I wouldn't be a good fan if I didn't ask you to give me some scoop on what's going to the rest of the season.
CC: It just seems really appropriate that we tell Popular Mechanics that there's going to be a really juicy kiss coming up in the finale and that there's going to be a lot more on the Sawyer-Kate-Jack romantic triangle. I mean, that's the scoop that should really be in Popular Mechanics.
DL: Here's the scoop for Popular Mechanics: According to the rules of our show, a communication between sat phones is not affected by temporal distortion, but if you were to send a radio broadcast and/or a telegraph message, it would be affected by temporal distortion. That's the scoop for Popular Mechanics and Popular Mechanics only, and it will make a lot more sense after you've seen the first episode back.

Speaking of satellite phones, one of the tech things that didn't stand up was your satellite phone, and you guys got a lot of flack in the press for that. Why did you decide to go with that particular idea?
CC: I think one of the things that struck us is that [when] watch an old Julia Roberts movie and she's walking around New York holding a cell phone to her head that's the size of a toaster, we didn't really want to put ourselves in a position where we were literally married to everything that exists technologically. We decided that our satellite phone would be a very modern, high-tech version of it, and created one that we thought was cool.
DL: We have technical experts down in Hawaii on the production end, and I think that the thinking at the time was, that although these sat phones were built in 2004, that the people who had them had access to the latest technology. So it's sort of like when you travel to Japan, their cell phones are two years ahead of our cell phones. You can walk up to a vending machine with your cell phone and scan a barcode and it'll spit a bag of chips and a coke out at you. The technology existed to build a phone like that in 2004, they just weren't readily available in any American market.

How do you keep track of all the complicated plot angles? You've got characters in flashbacks and flashforwards and everyone's interconnected in some way...how do you even begin to keep track of that? CC: I don't think that Damon or me would win a Lost trivia contest, but we obviously know the general details of everything and we keep that in our brains. But Greg Nations keeps the sort of elaborate series of bibles and timelines and charts the number of days of stories and, you know, he's sort of the keeper of the wisdom of Lost. So whenever there's a question about continuity or where an event takes place in relation to another event, Greg can plot it in the overall kind of schema of the show. So he is an invaluable resource and he is the guy who makes sure that everything makes sense or at least makes as much sense as we can make it make sense.
DL: You know, the chronology of the show has become very intricate, especially since we just started doing flash forwards. Before it was which happened first: Sawyer met Jack's dad in a bar in Australia, or, Walt and Michael get on Oceanic 815? Now that we're in the future, and we're telling future stories out of order, so last year's finale you got bearded, pill-popping Jack screaming at Kate "We've gotta go back!" And this year you're seeing Jack in other people's flash forwards obviously before that series of events took place, so...he's testifying at Kate's trial, or he's visiting Hurley at the mental institution and we need to sort of plot out when in time are those events happening in relation to each other. It's not an easy job.

One of the things that the fans really love is assigning meaning to things that they see in the show, and sometimes they assign meaning to things that have no meaning. So do you ever place a scientific name or an Easter Egg that's a joke or meant to confuse people?
CC: I think it's more a question of how much meaning do things have. I mean, sometimes names, like Minkowsky, that's meaningful. Sometimes we name characters and they're named after somebody's friend but it also turns out that they're a famous person. So, you know, without kind of detailing which are which, we have a spectrum of meanings that we assign to things, and it's just sort of circumstantial or narratively we get to a place where somebody has to be named something that's really important for the story, but it really does vary...
DL: If you look at the freighter folk, Charlotte Staples Lewis is named after C.S. Lewis. Miles Strom is named after a pun because his name sounds like maelstrom, you know, when you pronounce it very quickly, and...
CC: Oh, Faraday is obviously a famous scientist...
DL: Yeah, and Frank Lapidus is a name that Eddie Kitsis, Adam Horowitz's writing partner, actually, and one of our other writer/producers, has just been saying for years, "There's gotta be a character on the show named Frank Lapidus."
CC: And he has a buddy whose name is Lapidus.
DL: So if there's anyone out there going, oh, you know...
CC: Working on the Lapidus anagram...
DL: That would be somebody finding something we did not intend.

Does it amaze you the lengths that people go to to research the show?
CC: It does, in fact. And it's kind of flattering and it kind of boggles our minds, actually. We actually really just set out to make a show that we thought was kind of cool and entertaining, and we never imagined that people would get wrapped up in the intricacies of it to the degree that they have. I think Lost was really a pioneer in the use of the kind of connection between a television show and the internet, and the internet really gave fans an opportunity to create a community around the show. That was something that wasn't really planned, it just sort of grew up in the wake of the show.

source : popularmechanics.com

Jimmy Kimmel Grills the Lost Bosses part 1 &2

When it comes to Lost, Jimmy Kimmel's not f--king around.

On a Monday morning earlier this month, the late-night talk-show host arrived on the Disney Studio lot in Burbank tasked with a mission: Grill Lost's executive producers, Damon Lindelof and Carlton Cuse, about their massively dissected drama, which returns April 24 to round out its critically hailed fourth season. (We were lucky enough to tag along!) Kimmel, a diehard fan since the pilot, has frequently championed the series on Jimmy Kimmel Live! — interviewing cast members, trekking to Hawaii for a set visit and coining a catchphrase for Hurley ("Hey, ladies, it's Hurley time!"). He's even given the world "Lost: The Musical," a parody skit featuring a Riverdancing polar bear. (And you thought you were obsessed.)

As Kimmel greeted Lindelof and Cuse — there were initially few signs of the funnyman who recently fired up YouTube with his A-list viral video "I'm F--king Ben Affleck" (a retaliation to girlfriend Sarah Silverman's "I'm F--king Matt Damon"). He not only arrived 10 minutes early with a writer from his show in tow, but also came armed with a two-inch-thick stack of research, which he'd diligently printed out the night before after roasting Simon Cowell at Idol Gives Back. As Cuse would later note, Kimmel had "the laser-sharp focus of Mike Wallace."

After a tour of the writers' room — which, sadly, had been stripped of any visible top-secret scribblings –– the producers settled onto a sofa in Cuse's sunlit office and noshed on a breakfast of fruit and pastries. Kimmel, meanwhile, took a seat across from them and painstakingly laid out his research on a table in front of him. "Don't be alarmed," he said, "but I want answers." — Shawna Malcom

Kimmel: The island heals some people and doesn't heal others. For instance, Ben needed an operation from Jack to beat cancer, but it seems like Sawyer gets injured every sixth episode and by the next, he's fine. Is that just a TV thing?
Carlton Cuse: Wow. [Laughs] Where are the softball questions, Jimmy? What about the warm-up?
Damon Lindelof: The short answer is, it's not arbitrary. Yes, there is a certain degree of compressing story. The idea that everything you've seen has really happened in 110 days of real time feels fantastical, but that's the convention of the show. However, who gets sick and how fast they heal is something we talk about. In the second episode back [airing May 1], that becomes a major issue in the story. One character gets sick and another who has had experience being healed voices exactly that question: Is there any rhyme or reason to it?
Cuse: The healing is related to the degree to which you are in communion with the island at any given moment. Perhaps Ben getting sick and needing surgery had to do with the fact that he had fallen out of favor, that his connection with the island was maybe not what it had been in the past.

Kimmel: How do cast members find out they're getting killed off?
Cuse: We call them ahead of the publishing of the script. So whenever we actually call a cast member, they're always panicked. Even if it's like, "No, we're just calling to say you were great in this episode."

Kimmel: Did you call Mr. Friendly beforehand to tell him he was gay?
Lindelof: [Laughs] No.

Kimmel: Do all the show's writers know Lost's overarching secret, if there is one?
Lindelof: They all know what the island is and what the history of the island is. But if Carlton and I were kidnapped, and the kidnappers said, "We will not release them until you divulge the last episode of Lost," I don't know if the writers would be able to provide that.

Kimmel: I see. So you don't trust your writers. [Laughs] But you do actually know the final specific scene?
Lindelof: We absolutely, 100 percent know what the last scene of the show is and could put [the pages] in a safe deposit box. But there is an asterisk next to that, which is that we're slaves to fluctuations in reality. If one of the actors in that scene decided to stop being in Lost…
Cuse: Or, perchance, got a DUI, the entire ending of the show could change. Basically, the show is in the hands of Hawaii law enforcement. [Laughs]

Kimmel: People come up to you all the time with theories. Has anyone come close to cracking the code?
Cuse: I think there are two assumptions that people make that are incorrect. One is that the whole answer to Lost reduces down to a sentence. It's not like searching for Einstein's Unified Field Theory. And the second is that you have enough information to "crack the code." The flash-forwards completely changed your notion of the show. So how could you do some accurate theorizing before you even knew those existed?

Kimmel: Has anyone made a really lucky guess?
Lindelof: In certain areas. Last season, when we showed what happened when Desmond turned the key in the hatch and he went on this little jaunt back in England, people started saying, "Maybe the electromagnetism on the island is related to space and time." But that's just one road on the map that is ultimately gonna be the entire show. The longer it goes on, the harder it is to construct a theory that basically answers everything you've seen so far.
Cuse: Even though we get asked a lot of questions about the mythology, Jimmy, we're really trying to write a character show. We spend about 80-90 percent of our time talking about how the characters are lost in their own lives as people. The mythology is kind of the frosting on the cake.

Kimmel: Do you have one jerk on staff whose job it is to come up with all of Sawyer's nicknames?
Cuse: I wouldn't call him a jerk. [Laughs] I'd call him one of our most valued writers, and his name is Eddy Kitsis.
Lindelof: And Adam [Horowitz], too. They both come up with a whole cavalcade of them.

Kimmel: What happened to the smoke monster? High winds?
Cuse: We'll see the smoke monster in the April 24 episode.

Kimmel: [Laughs] Do people find clues that surprise you guys?
Lindelof: In the pilot, there's a still frame of Walt, and behind him, burnt into the fuselage wreckage, is what looks like a Dharma symbol. We'd talked about the idea that there had been a group of hippies on the island, but the phrase "The Dharma Initiative" or the design for the logo didn't come along until much later. But it's there and it's not Photoshopped. Suddenly, you understand how hundreds of people can show up and see…
Cuse: The Virgin Mary in a piece of toast. It's a mystery that's even greater than our understanding.
Lindelof: We would love in moments like that to go, "Yes. We knew we'd be introducing the idea of the Dharma Initiative in the second season premiere and we wanted people to go back to the pilot and see that the symbol had been burned into the fuselage." But if we had known, we wouldn't have done it in such an oblique way. Sawyer would've went [adopts Southern twang], "Hey, what's this?" We want people to see our Easter eggs.

Kimmel: Something I noticed early on is that many of the characters have issues with their lousy fathers.
Cuse: Is this the part where we have to cry?

Kimmel: Jack obviously. Locke. Sun's father is a killer. Kate killed hers.
Cuse: You'd be better off just listing the people who have healthy relationships with their fathers.

Kimmel: Is that a coincidence?
Cuse: No. We're sort of working out our own psychological traumas in front of 15 million people.
Lindelof: Look, there's a certain aspect of the hero's journey, whether it's Luke Skywalker or Hercules or Harry Potter, where they're either orphans or have incredibly dysfunctional relationships with their fathers. They haven't been told what to do. They have to find a mentor character outside of their own family. The show's called Lostand we always imagined it from the beginning as a show about characters trying to be better people and evolve past their own petty insecurities and problems. And if you're gonna do flashbacks, some of them are gonna be about stuff that was put on them by their parents.

Kimmel: Is the person in the coffin someone who's not from the island?
Lindelof: [To Cuse] Tread lightly.
Cuse: You will know who's in the coffin before the season is over, and it will not be like, "Who's that person?"
Lindelof: The only people you can rule out, based on what you saw in last year's finale, are Kate and Jack.

Kimmel: And the baby, just based on the size.
Cuse: Yeah, it's too big a coffin for a baby.

************************



This is part two of funnyman Jimmy Kimmel's interview with Lost producers Carlton Cuse and Damon Lindelof. TV Guide was able to sit in on the Q&A as the talk show host grilled the show's masterminds with his burning questions about how the season — and series — will end.

Jimmy Kimmel: Will Walt continue to grow until he's 9, 10, 11 feet tall?
Carlton Cuse: That's one of our favorite lines of the whole show: " Who told you that, Taller Ghost Walt?" You know, we went and had lunch at Arnie Morton's with Malcolm David Kelley, the actor who plays Walt.
Damon Lindelof: This was before the finale last year.
Cuse: And he was still the same size. We were like, "Thank God!" So we wrote him into the finale and then somehow, in that intervening six weeks, he hit puberty hardcore. He shows up [to shoot the episode] and it's like, "Wow, can he slam dunk?"

Kimmel: See, you should've gone for an Emmanuel Lewis or a Gary Coleman. [Laughs] In my opinion, the episode where Nikki and Paolo were buried alive was the most different of all the episodes. It almost seemed like a Twilight Zone with a little Romeo & Juliet thrown in or something.
Cuse: I think what you're responding to is that it was the one episode that sort of acknowledged that this is just a TV show. We were responding very directly to the fans' criticism of those characters. I think some people really appreciated it as a satiric exercise and some were kind of offended that we would —
Lindelof: Break the fourth wall.
Cuse: We take the show very seriously, but we do so with a spirit of fun. And I think we have to acknowledge that sometimes we make mistakes. Nikki and Paolo were a mistake. I mean, we're trying to push the envelope — some things work, others crash.

Kimmel: I doubt there's ever been a show more responsive to its audience.
Lindelof: It has to be. Because Lost is highly-serialized, we can jump the shark in such a way that people would stop watching forever. And some people have. If you were to poll them all, the common answer would be it got too complicated. People are constantly threatening to leave the show. It's not the most stable relationship. [Laughs] At a certain point, you go, "Come on! You're four years in. We're almost home. Just stick it out with us!"

Kimmel: By the final season [in 2010], it may get down to like 175 really hard-core viewers.
Lindelof: [Laughs] As long as you're one of them.

Kimmel: I will be. I've never wavered. Some episodes blow me away more than other ones, but I try to look at the big picture. I defend it when people say, "Oh, this episode's not as good." Maybe it's because I have to do a show every night and I know it can't knock your head off every single time.
Lindelof: Do you feel like there's a creative decision we could make that would make you stop watching?

Kimmel: I mean, if the Globetrotters sailed up on to the island or if Tony Danza became a castaway….
Lindelof and Cuse: Uh-oh. [Laugh]

Kimmel: Is everyone on the island from the planet Earth?
Cuse: [Long pause] Yes. That may be one of the best Lost questions we've ever been asked.
Lindelof: When you get asked questions like that, you have to be very careful how you answer.

Kimmel: Will we see the process of the Oceanic Six coming home and becoming international celebrities?
Cuse: We will probably not see them hanging out with Paris Hilton.
Lindelof: But you will see that period of excitement when they first come back before the end of the year. We really thought about, what would happen if there was a plane crash and everyone was believed dead and then six survivors turned up?

Kimmel: Someone would probably write a book. They'd do Good Morning America. And they'd get a big settlement from the airline.
Cuse: The settlement does actually come into play. That's a big plot point in the finale.
Lindelof: Would you book the Oceanic Six on Jimmy Kimmel Live!?

Kimmel: Absolutely. No question about it.
Cuse: The overriding goal of the characters in Season 5 is to get on Jimmy Kimmel Live!
Lindelof: That's what Jack is talking about in the flash-forward. He's not talking about the island.

Cuse: [Laughs] "We've gotta go back…on Kimmel!" And Kate's like, "No!"

TV Guide: Do you feel pressure to live up to last year's finale? How do you beat the flash forwards?
Cuse: I don't know if you beat it. But the audience has been waiting to find out what happens after that scene between Jack and Kate [at the end of Season 3], and we're gonna deliver on that in the finale. We're doing some pretty cool s--t. It's just gonna be on a different bandwidth than last year. It's not about the M. Night Shyamalan trick.
Lindelof: Jimmy, that's actually a question I wanted to ask you. Do you find now that you've done the Ben [Affleck] and Matt [Damon] videos, everyone's saying, "How are you gonna top yourself?"
Kimmel: Yeah, but because that's a departure from my usual show, I have the luxury of not doing anything. So we're just gonna leave it alone. Certainly, if there were some spectacular idea, we'd do it. But there isn't anything better than what we did the last time.
Lindelof: That's the way we feel about last year's finale — that it's a special moment in time. That moment when Kate gets out of the car is a once-in-a-lifetime show experience.


TV Guide: The Internet has played a role in the buzz surrounding both of your shows.
Cuse: I don't think Lost could've existed in the pre-Internet era. Now you have the ability to both catch up with the show and also discuss and explain it. The camaraderie of the fans that come together over the Internet to discuss Lost is a huge factor in its success.
Lindelof: Lost has always been a cult show in its DNA. It started out as being the band that everybody was listening to and is sort of migrating down to the people who are just fans of punk rock.

Kimmel: When the series wraps, is there any chance of a Lost movie?
Cuse: Our goal is to finish the show and have it feel satisfying. We have no plans at this point to do a movie.
Lindelof: We don't wanna do "and then" storytelling. Like, "Yes, that's the entire thing. And then the one thing we didn't tell you was this."
Cuse: When the show ends, it's over.
Lindelof: But I think it goes without being said that [until then], the show is gonna get weird. Weirder.
Cuse: [Laughs] I'm glad you added that amplification. Recently, we were doing [an interview for] a clip show and after about two hours of explaining plot, I was like, "This show is insane! We are certifiably insane people."

Kimmel: Then I'm insane, too, because I'm all in.

Source:

tv guide part1

tv guide part2

Lost tv guide scan !

Thank my dear gertie for your scan on LM !
omg the promo pic with ben and co look awesome !! i want the episode !

lost vidcast with darlton !

my men are back and it's so cool to see them once again :D
they answered fan's questions here !
watch it !

EW interview part 4

Darlon's interview

Some highlight's from this morning's Q&A at the National Assn. of Broadcasters confab with "Lost" stewards Damon Lindelof and Carlton Cuse.

We will find out more back story as to why the late Libby was in the same mental hospital with Hurley, prior to the plane crash, and presumably after she gave her boat to Desmond for the race.

Will we at some point catch up with Emma and Zack, the two kids from the tail section group of survivors who were kidnapped by the Others in season 2's "The Other 48 Days."

To the question of whether we'll ever see Katey Sagal's Helen character (Locke's former flame) again, Darlton indicated that they hoped so.

To the question of whether the DeGroots, the hirsute couple who founded the Dharma Initiative, are still alive, Cuse and Lindelof paused a bit and then pressed for more specificity on the time frame of the question. As of where the time line of "Lost" will be when the series returns on April 24, Darlton would only say: "One of them is."

Lindelof let it be known that in a recent episode when one of the castaways (Locke? Hurley? Sawyer? I can't remember offhand) asked Ben if he knew what the island's smoke monster really was and Ben responded that he didn't know -- big lie. "Ben was lying about the smoke monster," Lindelof said.

And once again, Darlton made it clear that they do in fact have a blueprint for the series, stem to stern, and that "the last scene has been in our heads for a long period of time."

More to come from the sesh, which mostly focused on big-picture business issues and production processes, once I transcribe the tape.

In the meantime, above and below are some pics from the upcoming April 24 seg "The Shape of Things to Come."


Source : lost article