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Post by Sue on Nov 11, 2004 17:48:48 GMT -5
Hey Folks,
You have found it! The place to post LOST related articles, interviews and links.
Information on the characters, the actors, talk-show appearances, and the like.
If you copy an article or interview, please be sure to credit the source.
If you find an interesting website, post the URL link and consider posting at their site inviting people here. Be sure to read up on their etiquette first or IM the site-master.
Please be sure to remove spoilers or post a **Spoiler Warning** on any articles with suspicious information. Better be safe than sorry. There is a spoiler thread now available for the show.
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Post by Sara on Nov 14, 2004 18:51:08 GMT -5
How 'Lost' Careered Into Being a Hit Show By Joe Rhodes LOS ANGELES, Nov. 9 - The speed with which ABC's Wednesday night breakout hit drama "Lost" went from a network executive's half-baked suggestion to one of the most elaborate and expensive pilots ever filmed was brain blurring.
Determined to see his idea into the fall lineup, Lloyd Braun, then head of ABC Entertainment, brought together J. J. Abrams, the producer of the funhouse-mirror spy drama "Alias,'' and Damon Lindelof, a writer for "Crossing Jordan,'' to kick around his idea about plane crash survivors stranded on an island, a notion that he freely admitted was inspired by the reality show "Survivor.'' The result has been a show among the top 10 this season.
"I met Damon for the first time on a Monday," Mr. Abrams remembered. "By that Friday we had written a 20-page outline. And they green-lit the pilot on Saturday. At that point, we didn't even have a script, but in less than 12 weeks we had to start shooting."
That wasn't the hard part. And transporting the wreckage of an L-1011 jetliner to the show's location on Oahu may have been daunting, but doable. But of all the logistical nightmares that deadline represented none were more daunting than finding actors for the unusually large and internationally diverse ensemble cast - as the parts were still being written.
"It was insanity," said the casting director, April Webster, who had worked with Mr. Abrams on "Alias." "The characters kept changing. Every few days they'd call up and say, 'It looks like there's another one.' "
Because there were so many parts to cast - 14 major characters and dozens of background actors whose primary job is to walk around dazed on the beach until their story line comes to the fore - and only a three-week window to cast them, Ms. Webster put out the equivalent of an all-points bulletin. Calls were made to agencies in London, Sydney, New York, Toronto and points between.
"We were looking at tapes from all over,'' she said, and complicating the matter was the need to put together a cast at a time when most network pilots were already shooting. And whoever signed on for "Lost'' had to commit to working and living on Oahu for the duration of the series.
Working off their original 20-page outline, Mr. Abrams and Mr. Lindelof had ideas about the show's vibe - "Gilligan" meets "X Files," strangers on a plane, mysterious island - and who the characters would be: the hero with a secret, the plucky-but-haunted heroine, the stuck-up girl, the affable dude, the menacing rogue. But everything else was still up in the air, even as actors were auditioning.
"We were writing audition scenes because we hadn't had time to finish the actual script," Mr. Abrams said.
But as actors came in to audition, something fascinating happened, he recalled. "They would inspire us to take characters in a direction that we wouldn't have come up with on our own," he said.
The result was a radical reimagining of some of the original characters. Charlie, the burned-out English rocker played by Dominic Monaghan, was originally envisioned as a middle-aged businessman with a drug problem. Sawyer, the troublesome American played by Josh Holloway, was going to be a New Zealander. And Jack, the heroic (so far) spinal surgeon played by Matthew Fox, was going to be much older. And since he was also meant to die in the first episode, a one-shot appearance, high-priced movie stars like Michael Keaton and Aaron Eckhardt were being considered for the part.
Some well-known actors not usually associated with prime-time television, Ms. Webster said, were attracted by Mr. Abrams's reputation and intrigued by the nontraditional premise, which is how they managed to get Mr. Monaghan, a hot property after playing Merry Brandybuck in the "Lord of the Rings" films; Naveen Andrews, best known for his performance as Lt. Kip Singh in "The English Patient"; and Harold Perrineau, coming off his appearance as Link in "The Matrix" trilogy and critical raves for his stage performance in "Top Dog/Underdog."
The cast also includes Terry O'Quinn, a frequent "Alias" guest star, as the philosopher-hunter Locke, and Jorge Garcia, whom Mr. Abrams and Ms. Webster happened to see on an episode of "Curb Your Enthusiasm" the night before his audition, as the imperturbably mellow Hurley. For the executives of the show, the most intriguing breakout star may turn out to be Yunjin Kim, who grew up on Staten Island and attended the High School of Performing Arts in Manhattan but then returned to her South Korean homeland to become a major Asian cinema star.
Ms. Kim originally auditioned for the part of Kate, the female lead, but Mr. Abrams decided immediately he wanted to write another part just for her. "We had thought about having a couple that didn't speak English before she came in," Mr. Abrams said, "but when she came in, we knew we had to have her on the show. And we started coming up with a story for this woman and then her husband."
"I walked in and, obviously, I speak Korean, and the next day they said they were going to write a role for me," said Ms. Kim, who plays Sun, a seemingly timid woman who planned to leave her husband on the day they boarded the ill-fated plane. "I was, like, 'Hey, I don't even need to read a script.' The fact that they would be so open and excited about me, that was a huge compliment."
The most difficult role to cast, in fact, turned out to be Kate. "We had master lists on the Kate character that were 12 to 13 pages long," Ms. Webster said, "which translates to more than 200 actresses who we least checked on their availability."
"We had seen some incredible actresses," said Bryan Burk, who shares the executive producer credit with Mr. Abrams and Mr. Lindelof. "'But J. J. kept saying, 'You're gonna know when she comes in, you're gonna know.' Which I thought was just his craziness. But then she came in. And we knew."
"She" was Evangeline Lilly, a virtually unknown Canadian actress who got the part, on a last-minute audition tape, almost out of nowhere.
Mr. Abrams seemed particularly pleased that the cast is not all perfect cheekbones and "Baywatch" bodies, although there are certainly plenty of those. "The show is about an international flight that crashes somewhere in the Pacific," he said, "so the cast is going to look more like the world looks and less like 'Beverly Hills 90210.' "
Not that they're done with the casting, even now. There are flashback episodes that have to be populated, and most of the 46 characters who survived the crash haven't been seen. The longer "Lost" stays on the air - and with an average of 18 million viewers per episode so far, it will undoubtedly be around for a while - the more likely it is that new faces will appear.
In other words, Mr. Abrams said, there's plenty of room to develop more characters without a need for outrageous plot turns. There's no need, for instance, to have another plane crash.
"No," he said, laughing. "Although I wouldn't rule that out."
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Post by Sara on Nov 15, 2004 11:30:47 GMT -5
Former Hobbit Is Far from 'Lost' By Daniel Fienberg
Dominic Monaghan, an actor best known as one of the guardians of the ring in the Oscar-winning "Lord of the Rings" movies, is on the phone from Hawaii, where he's just embarked on another jewelry quest, this time searching for earrings to send his mother for her birthday. There doesn't have to be anything mystical about the earrings, but they can't be too dangly.
Along the way, there are certainly myriad obstacles. Over the course of a 25-minute interview, Monaghan is stopped repeatedly for autographs and pictures. He's also accosted by one person who knows the unassuming thespian looks familiar, but can't identify him. Monaghan cops to being an actor, but notes only that he's filming "Lost" on the island for ABC.
A minute later, the same person returns, more confident.
"Were you in that hobbit thing?"
"Yeah, that's right, I was one of the hobbits," Monaghan says, only slightly drawn out. "I was at the shop across the street looking for earrings for my mum, but do you know any other craft-y shops?"
Safely away from his semi-fan and back on the streets, Monaghan laughs at the exchange.
"I think it's the cheesiest thing in the world to be saying 'Oh, I'm an actor' and for people to go 'Oh, yeah?' and for you to say 'Yes, you may have seen me in such films as blah, blah blah,'" he explains. "I help them along the way, but at no point do I say, 'Oh, I'm in 'Lord of the Rings'' because that's like saying 'Oh, I'm a Los Angeles Laker.'"
As good-spirited and occasionally resourceful hobbit Merry Brandybuck, Monaghan was part of a trilogy that earned billions, but also roared through the Oscars, running the table at this year's ceremony. In addition to coming away from the experience with fame and adoration, Monaghan quickly discovered he had been typecast.
"Generally the more pixie-type, Mogwai-kind, Furby-variety of characters," the 26-year-old says, explaining the roles he was offered. "There's been an assumption from a lot of casting directors that I'm a very sweet, cute, cuddly, non-threatening, non-offensive type of person. I think generally I am and I do have that inside me ... but there are other things about me that I want to show people."
For many viewers, "Lost" will provide the first chance to see the German-born, Manchester, England-raised Monaghan outside of Middle Earth. Monaghan plays Charlie, a member of a once-popular rock band which had a flourish of fame before vanishing into obscurity. Charlie is skittish and needy and has a host of other problems that are either revealed in the pilot or as the series progresses.
"He's evolving as we speak," says the actor, who has completed shooting seven episodes of the highly secretive series. "I'm trying to play him as a bad good guy. I see him as essentially a good guy, but he's got some really f***ed up elements to get through."
It's almost impossible not to read a healthy dose of Monaghan onto his character. Caught up in the "Lord of the Rings" phenomenon, but not as inextricably linked to it as an Elijah Wood or Viggo Mortensen, he's still trying to deal with the fact that fans feel that it's acceptable to come up to him in public and start touching him. Also, between lengthy location shoots for "LotR" in New Zealand and his new gig in Hawaii, Monaghan is used to a certain sense of dislocation.
"There's a lot of stuff that goes on when you leave your home," Monaghan notes with a sigh. "There're a lot of situations when you'd like to sit down with people and explain to them why you've not been around or why you've not been able to make certain events or birthdays. The bottom line is that I made the decision when I was 18 that my main drive for the foreseeable future was going to be my career. It's the thing that drives me."
A veteran of British television, including the long-running "Hetty Wainthropp Investigates," Monaghan initially had reservations about returning to the small screen and making a potentially lengthy commitment to a series. He quickly realized that "Lost" creators J.J. Abrams ("Alias") and Damon Lindelof were making a character that would let him stretch.
"I think we find Charlie at a crossroads in his life and I would like to see him struggle to work out who he's going to be and how he's going to contribute to the group," he says.
Monaghan knows what he contributes to the "Lost" group. With dozens of mysteries still unresolved after the two-part pilot, "Lost" has potential to become a cult favorite with fans every bit as passionate as the devotees of Abrams' spy drama. If that happens, Monaghan is ready to help.
"I'm in this nice position of being aware of it and being able to tell some of the younger cast members or some of the less experienced cast members that this potentially could be a life changing thing," he says. "It can get very crazy very quickly and if you don't have your wits about you, you can really start to get lost."
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Post by Sara on Nov 19, 2004 8:28:32 GMT -5
Fans find all manner of theories about 'Lost' By Ann Oldenburg, USA TODAY
Sometimes it starts at 9:01 p.m. Wednesday. Sometimes it doesn't happen until Thursday morning.
But each week, at some point after the credits start rolling on ABC's hit drama Lost, fans start in.
On the Internet, on radio shows, in the office or at home with friends and family, they assess and obsess about the latest episode of the mystery about plane crash survivors on a mysterious island.
"My husband and I discuss theories throughout the viewing of the show so much that sometimes I have to shush him so I can hear what is happening," says Michelle Horan, 36, of Atlanta.
"If we had a water cooler, that's where we'd talk about it, but we end up talking about it in the lab," says Karen Schroeder, 35, of Taylor Mill, Ky., who works in a research and development lab for a company that formulates coatings for various products.
Lost averages more than 17 million viewers each week. Speculation already is running high about Episode 9, which airs tonight at 8 ET/PT: Is Iraqi survivor Sayid captured by a Frenchwoman, the source of the bizarre 16-year-old radio transmission?
Also tonight, Tom Cruise's cousin William Mapother plays Ethan, another plane crash survivor — or is he?
Details get viewers buzzing. For example, what was the significance of bad boy Sawyer reading the book Watership Down? And what is the connection between the polar bear in the comic youngster Walt was reading and the polar bear found on the island?
The focus on minutiae is all part of the larger question: What's really going on? Viewers know an airplane left Sydney bound for Los Angeles, got off course and crashed on a tropical island. But where are they, and how can some of the strange things be explained?
Some fans think it's a giant "ant farm" being observed by aliens; others suggest it's a government project; still others figure it must be a Jurassic Park type of scientific compound, although show co-creator Damon Lindelof has said the unseen monster on the island is "not a dinosaur."
So what's going on? Here are some of the most popular theories:
•Purgatory. Jeffrey Field, 34, of Overland Park, Kan., says maybe they're trapped "between heaven and hell — forced to look back on the decisions of their lives. It's a fascinating concept, though now that I've spent so much time contemplating that idea, I almost hope they've got something better up their sleeves."
Beverly Bruce, 30, of Phoenix, isn't convinced that it's purgatory, even though that has been one of the earliest and most popular theories. "I'm not sure any show is brave enough to pretend heaven is not utopia, and hell is not relentless torture, and this show depicts neither of the two. There's good and bad, but not sainthood or evilness."
•Time travel/science testing. "As for theories, my favorite is that they flew through a worm hole," says Rob Bingham, 33, of St. Peters, Mo., an admitted Star Trek "geek."
The survivors "have been captured on an island for scientific observation. This would answer a lot of questions: They are not dead; the weird creatures are independent variables introduced by the scientists to test their adaptability and stamina." Survivalist Locke is working for the scientists — "thus the ability to walk (Locke had been in a wheelchair before the crash) and the level of understanding he seems to have."
•A dream planet. "My favorite theory is that the island is a place that creates out of whole cloth the thoughts and dreams of these people. Wish you could walk? You walk. Wish everyone hated you? They do. Want your cold dead father to be alive? Done," says Julian South, 46, of Portland, Ore.
•Terrorists. "These people are not dead," says Jack Groshans, 51, of Pinckney, Mich. Lost is a regular topic of conversation at his weekly Monday Night Football get-together. Best theory: "It's a military research project funded by Euro-terrorists. They are testing genetic changes to animals (hence the polar bear) in hopes of creating ways to make people immune to cold and heat, cutting down on their need for food and water and lightening the amount of stuff they would have to carry in an invasion or coup d' état. Their ultimate goal is control of the OPEC oil fields, and they are hoping to create small forces capable of striking multiple targets at once."
And some are just along for the ride. "I don't have any theory as to what the overall plot is," says Rozan Caculitan, 31, of Ashburn, Va. "But it's a great exploration into human behavior when forced into an unexpected situation."
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Post by Sara on Nov 19, 2004 8:32:24 GMT -5
This was the sidebar in the above article: Besides the theories behind the mysterious island of Lost, there are even theories that LOST might be an acronym. Among suggestions at www.lost-tv.com, where there are more than 4,000 posts under the "Theories and Speculation" forum: Long Overblown Survivor Tragedy Land Of Strange Theories Lost On Sunny Tropics Lust Our Sexual Temptations Losing Our Sanity Together
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Post by Sara on Nov 22, 2004 8:27:55 GMT -5
Turning Brawny Action Drama Into Sensitive Soap Opera By Laura Miller
To learn why J. J. Abrams has recently won a reputation as one of the most exhilarating storytellers in television, see the fourth episode of "Lost," the new hit castaway series Mr. Abrams co-created. The show follows the survivors of a plane crash on a tropical island, and at first it seems to feature the instantly recognizable types you'd expect in any ensemble drama, or any television show whatsoever. There's the stout-hearted hero, the plucky girl, the malcontent, the adorable child. But then there's Locke, a balding, middle-aged loner with a suitcase full of hunting knives and a penchant for making creepy pronouncements about the providential nature of the crash. He's the what - the half-unhinged survivalist, perhaps?
While Locke narrowly avoids being eaten on a hunting expedition, flashbacks show us that - hold on - he's really just a gentle office drone who has long dreamed of trekking through the Australian bush. But when Locke finally arranges his trip, the guide tells him that because of his " condition," he can't set out after all. As the camera pulls back, we discover that - cue the big dramatic flourish - Locke must use a wheelchair. But, wait a minute, the crash has miraculously restored the use of his legs. Cut to commercial!
The intentional misrepresentation of a character, the piquant revelation that makes you think you have the real story, then the unapologetically melodramatic twist, all set within a do-or-die face-off with menacing foes: these are the trademarks of a J. J. Abrams show. And Locke isn't the only character with an omigod back story: everyone in "Lost" turns out to harbor deep secrets. The plucky girl, for instance, is actually a mysterious outlaw in the custody of a sinister United States marshal who died after the crash.
It's a big, splashy vision, full of death and drama, that fuses the intrigues and revelations of the soap opera genre to the expensive stunts and exotic sets of a lavish action movie. Mr. Abrams's other ABC series, "Alias," which follows the outlandish adventures of a C.I.A. agent played by Jennifer Garner, has earned a devoted if cultish following for its similar blend of interpersonal travails and derring-do. And now that "Lost" is up and running, Mr. Abrams has returned to writing "The Catch," the pilot he was working on when ABC persuaded him to develop the castaway show. There's also the little matter of "Mission: Impossible 3," the megabudget Tom Cruise vehicle, which Mr. Abrams will rewrite and direct, with shooting set to begin next June. Mr. Abrams, who got his start writing unremarkable feel-good films and earned his big break with an earnest television series about a pretty but nerdy college girl, has become an unlikely and somewhat subversive keeper of the action-suspense form.
On a rainy day in October, pinging around the Disney ABC lot in Burbank, Calif., Mr. Abrams, 38, resembled the Tasmanian Devil of the old Warner Brothers cartoons, but instead of destruction, he left a trail of episodes, pilots and screenplays in his wake. In addition to his immediate projects, he is planning a half-hour comedy starring Cheri Oteri, and is supervising the development of two more dramatic series, one about con artists hired by the government to catch criminals and another that he describes as a "next-generation 'thirtysomething.' "
Mr. Abrams may be the most interruptible human being alive. Visit his office, and you're likely to see him switch from untangling the intricate plot problems of an unwritten "Alias" episode with the producers Jeff Pinkner and Jesse Alexander, to tinkering with the sound mix of a "Lost" episode to be broadcast in less than 36 hours, to finagling a product-placement deal for the last candy bar left on the "Lost" island, and then back to the "Alias" conundrum. Subdivide the average human being's attention and it frays; Mr. Abrams's seems only to sharpen.
In the middle of fine-tuning post-production work for some bee special effects for "Lost," Mr. Abrams jumped up to play back a joke voice-mail message left by the actor Greg Grunberg, expertly impersonating an aged doctor calling with some very unfortunate test results. Mr. Grunberg, who has been Mr. Abrams's best friend since kindergarten, has appeared in all of his television series, beginning with "Felicity" in 1998, and he'll star in "The Catch."
At first, the bounty-hunter premise of "The Catch" didn't appeal to Mr. Abrams, but then neither did the premises of "Alias" or "Lost." "People who crashed trying to survive on a desert island didn't interest me," Mr. Abrams says. "But once we start talking about the specifics of context and characters and situation, where they are and what they're going through, I thought O.K., this could be amazing."
Likewise, "the idea of doing a spy show didn't interest me," he said. "The idea of doing a show about this wildly dysfunctional group of people who happen to live in a world of espionage and intrigue, that was really cool."
Mr. Abrams's current strategy for winning over audiences is deceptively simple: lure in viewers with an old-fashioned adventure scenario, one that has more grandeur than television's usual lawyers' offices and police precincts. Keep the pace fast and the action thick, with reversals, revelations and cliffhangers at every commercial break. And hook viewers on the characters, who despite their over-the-top, cinematic lives, experience everyday yearnings and flaws. In "Alias," says Damon Lindelof, the co-creator of "Lost," "Sydney is running around karate-chopping people, and blowing things up and saving the world like a superheroine, but it still feels like she's a real person. If she shoots someone, she goes home and cries." (Ms. Garner describes her work on the show as "Five pages of fantastic dialogue with [co-star]Carl Lumbly and in the same day be hanging off the roof of the building.")
Jordan Levin, the former chief executive of the WB network and the man who signed Mr. Abrams up for "Felicity," says: "J. J. has strong commercial instincts. At the same time he's very good at slowly peeling back the layers of the onion and revealing character. And his characters are very rich, with very strong internal lives. That keeps you with it."
Mr. Abrams's series are notably well-cast, a quality he attributes in part to his wife, Katie McGrath. (Ms. McGrath "has this crazy ability to know when actors on TV shows are going to be famous," Mr. Abrams says. She saw Ms. Garner in a minor role on "Felicity" and said, "She's going to be a big star.") It's the consistent grounding in character that makes working with Mr. Abrams so satisfying for actors, says Victor Garber, who plays Jack, father of Ms. Garner's Sydney Bristow. " 'Alias' requires us to do these elaborate missions," Mr. Garber says. "But the relationships are so complex, and there will always be one of these little scenes between Jack and Sydney that shows you that."
Mr. Abrams grew up in Los Angeles, the son of a television movie producer, Gerald W. Abrams ( "Nuremberg") and Carol Abrams, a law professor who occasionally tries her hand at producing, too.
Mr. Grunberg starred in Mr. Abrams's earliest cinematic efforts. "There's one super-8 movie we made when we were 9 years old," Mr. Grunberg says. "In it, I wake up, go to the sink and bend down to wash my face, and all of a sudden, this arm with a knife comes up behind me and stabs me in the back. That's the whole movie. J. J. was holding the camera with his left hand and stabbing me with the right one. There's another one where a doll flies across the room and attacks my neck. I still don't know how he did that one."
continued in the next post...
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Post by Sara on Nov 22, 2004 8:28:46 GMT -5
...continued from the above post
Despite the vast resources now at his disposal, Mr. Abrams still has the air of a hobbyist whipping up things in his basement: he can draw and animate, and play and compose music (including the theme songs for "Felicity" and "Alias"), and produce all sorts of physical objects; he once made a candy bar for his wife. His office looks like a high-end playroom, furnished with monster masks, toys (including a figurine of Ms. Garner in a pink wig), colored pencils and paper, musical instruments and a glass-covered cake pedestal containing a medical model of a flayed human head. Pride of place belongs to a fully stocked rotating sales rack of magic tricks and pranks: dribble glasses, disappearing ink and cans of "mixed nuts" with cloth-covered springs coiled inside.
Magic is one of several dozen things Mr. Abrams refers to as "my favorite thing." The childhood hobby taught him how to manipulate an audience, he says, distracting it from what's really going on and eking out the trick's revelations for maximum effect. Ask about his customary jaw-dropping plot twists, and out comes a quarter, which he expertly palms, then reproduces seemingly out of thin air. "It's all misdirection," he says. "You get everybody to look over here, but that's not where the trick really happens." The quarter vanishes again.
"There's this great thing magicians do, where they force a card," he says. "They get you to pick the card they want." Once a magician can do that, he continues, "you can paint that five of diamonds on the side of a building or tattoo it on your arm, whatever you want. I look at stories that way. There's that one moment where you want to control the audience, make them believe as much as possible in a certain reality. Then, when you make the reveal," the point when the audience's understanding of the situation is overturned, "you can do it with a flourish."
The analogy is so perfect, it almost makes you forget how little of this dexterity shows up in Mr. Abrams's early Hollywood work as a screenwriter. While still a senior at Sarah Lawrence, he sold a treatment with an old friend, Paul Mazursky's daughter Jill. Later, he wrote scripts for "Regarding Henry," starring Harrison Ford, and "Forever Young," starring Mel Gibson. These were sentimental films, with little of the ingenuity that would later win Mr. Abrams so many ardent fans. After that, Mr. Abrams did rewrites for Jerry Bruckheimer and received a writing credit on "Armageddon." A couple of years of working with another idol, James L. Brooks, didn't lead to any films at all.
Then Mr. Abrams and his friend Matt Reeves had the idea for a story about a young woman who jettisons her plans to follow a boy she hardly knows to college in New York. The WB took "Felicity" immediately. Although it might seem an odd starting point for a producer now associated with espionage and adventure shows, the show capitalized on another of Mr. Abrams's fascinations: relationships within groups. Though the stakes are higher and there are monsters in the jungle, the castaways of "Lost," like the college students of "Felicity," have to cobble together a workable community.
"Even as a kid," Mr. Abrams says, "I was very aware of what was going on socially. It felt like the other kids, at least the boys, were much more interested in whatever they were doing and didn't care as much as I did about the social stuff." "Felicity" was all "social stuff," but even so, it had a surprising number of plot twists and cliffhangers. And like "Alias," it began with a bright young woman coping with what Mr. Levin, the former network executive, calls "a powerful precipitating incident." All of Mr. Abrams's shows begin with a cataclysmic event that forces characters to remake their lives entirely. On "Lost," it's a plane crash; for Sydney Bristow, it's her fiancée's murder after she reveals to him that she works for what she mistakenly believes is a division of the C.I.A. (she'll later discover it's a rogue unit).
Betrayal, suspense, wildly heightened stakes: Mr. Abrams understands that thrillers and soap operas have a lot more in common than we realize. There's also an audience that would never tune in for the undergraduate angst of "Felicity" yet will eat up a show about a female spy with many of the same troubles. One reason for "Lost's" impressive ratings may be the show's near-universal appeal: its characters are young, middle-aged, white, black, and Asian, and their stories speak to fans of both action-adventure series and nighttime soaps.
There's one kind of viewer Mr. Abrams has neglected: anyone with less than total dedication to following his shows' intricately constructed, speedily thickening plots. Dramatic series must walk the line between the modular, stand-alone episode approach that makes them accessible to novices (and viable as reruns) and the serialized storytelling that often makes for the most inventive, suspenseful television. Mr. Abrams is an unapologetic devotee of the second approach. This is probably why the ratings for "Alias" have never matched the network's hopes for it. The first season was notoriously impenetrable to newcomers: full of hidden agendas, double agents and triple crosses. (Since then, the story arc has become easier to follow, but also more absurd: it now revolves around a prophecy concerning Sydney made by a mysterious 15th-century Italian inventor.) ABC is insisting on more stand-alone episodes, and the series will be broadcast on Wednesdays directly after the successful "Lost" when "Alias" returns in January.
That's when Mr. Abrams will be finishing a new script for the "Mission: Impossible" sequel, which will start shooting in the summer. Mr. Abrams was a late choice; the original director, Joe Carnahan, left the project a month before shooting was set to begin. But he's also a natural one: "Mission: Impossible" started out as a television series, and "Alias" with its far-flung missions, adorable disguises, and slight campiness, is in many ways a younger gloss on the older franchise. Meanwhile, Mr. Abrams's work in television has steadily become more movielike (the "Lost" pilot's budget was around $12 million, larger than for some films). Ken Olin, executive producer of "Alias" and a director of shows like "thirtysomething" and "The West Wing," says that "Alias" is infused with a cinematic sensibility. "In the pilot, Jennifer comes marching back through the office with this device she needed to get, and as people see her, they stand," he says. "It's so dramatic and shameless. Coming from TV, my first instinct would be to go under that. But J. J.'s taught me about creating that boldness."
If Mr. Abrams has succeeded in bringing some of the movies' grandeur to television, he will now try to bring some of the texture of television characters to the large screen. "Mission: Impossible" has almost no characters, at least not in the intimate, involving sense Mr. Abrams loves. The previous incarnations of the franchise have been pure procedurals, minutely focused on the planning and execution of each mission.
But as the director, Mr. Abrams, who is plainly less than enthusiastic about the earlier films, will have much more control over the finished product than he ever enjoyed as a screenwriter. "There are sequels that can rival or improve upon the original," he insists. He promises plot twists, yes, but also personal intrigue. Referring to Tom Cruise's role, he observes: "In the first two movies you've learned almost nothing about who the character is. That's not going to be the case with this movie."
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Post by Sara on Dec 10, 2004 14:53:27 GMT -5
Abrams Taps 'Angel' Vets for 'Alias,' 'Lost' By Kate O'Hare
TV shows may die, but their writers live on. This thought was uppermost in J.J. Abrams' mind when he heard that The WB's vampire melodrama "Angel" had been canceled after five seasons last spring.
The creator of "Alias," who was also working on a new pilot, "Lost," at the time ("Lost" is a now solid hit for ABC on Wednesday, and "Alias" joins it there for its fourth season starting Jan. 5), saw an opportunity and put in a call to executive producer Joss Whedon, who had spun "Angel" off of "Buffy the Vampire Slayer."
"You desperately try to find the best people out there to work with," Abrams says. "I felt slightly like an ambulance chaser, but when I heard that 'Angel' was sadly going down, the first thing was to call Joss to say 'My apologies,' and 'I have to be pragmatic here and ask you, what do I do?' I know he has an amazing ability to find these great writers. As a fan of those shows, these are people I've wanted to work with before, and I've talked to. They were either unavailable or loving what they were doing.
"Obviously, as soon as 'Angel' went down, we scrambled and were lucky enough to convince Jeff Bell and Drew Goddard to come to 'Alias,' and David Fury on 'Lost.' Also, not just as a writer, but director, because Jeff Bell directed an 'Alias' episode called 'Ice,' which is terrific. We scored."
Asked what he hoped to bring to "Alias," Bell says, "A strong visual sense and emotion. I'm a genre geek, and I really like being around genre geeks. I'm calling Mr. Abrams a geek as I'm looking around at his robots and toys in his office here. But, to me, genre is the best because you tell stories in metaphor that you can't tell otherwise.
"'Alias' isn't real world, it's hyper-real. It allows us to tell stories that you can't tell other places. I have a history of working for shows that do that. I love that, and I feel real comfortable contributing in that world."
And that world is bigger than Bell ever imagined.
"One of the things I love about being here," he says, " is the writers' room is really interesting and smart, and it's a much larger room that I'm used to working with. They're specialists. You can go into the room with any problem in the world, and somebody in there can solve it. Whether that's, 'OK, we need a really cool action thing involving a Russian helicopter ...,' or it's a heartfelt emotional thing, or it's a tech thing, or it's a location issue. It's really amazing to watch the room solve problems.
"There's really heartfelt stuff in 'Alias,' and people are good at that, there's tech stuff. We have a guy who could probably break into any secure compound in the world."
And aren't we glad he's working for us? Bell laughs. "I'm not sure he is."
Just as writers moved back and forth between "Buffy" and "Angel" in Whedon's Mutant Enemy production stable, the same seems to be true in Abrams' little corner of the Disney lot.
"It's cool," Abrams says, "that the 'Lost' writers' building is right across the way from the 'Alias' one. I'll be looking for Fury, and Fury will be in Bell's office, talking about an episode of 'Lost' or 'Alias.' I'll go over and be at 'Lost,' and Drew Goddard wrote an episode of 'Lost,' so Drew will be over there -- crying, I think."
"He's a very weepy man," Bell says.
"He's tall and weepy," Abrams says.
"Evidently," Bell says, "it's not easy being tall and handsome. There's a lot of weeping going on."
"I would know," Abrams says, "being as tall as I am and good-looking."
Abrams has also maintained a feature career along with his TV work. He wrote one of the many scripts for the upcoming "Superman," which was abandoned when new director Bryan Singer ("X-Men" franchise) came on board.
"I'm not really sad about it," Abrams says. "For some reason, I thought I would be, but I'm feeling such relief that I'm not in the grind of what that experience was. I'm just excited to see a good 'Superman' movie. I'm proud of the work that we did. But I have to be totally honest, co-writing and directing 'Mission: Impossible III' takes the sting off anything. Yeah, it feels pretty OK to me. I just hope that the movie turns out well. I hope Bryan Singer does a great job."
"You know another cool thing about working for J.J.?" Bell says. "Tom Cruise comes in the office. I always said, 'Tom Cruise, yeah, sure ...' Then I met him. Total man-crush. I have a total man-crush. Oh my God, Tom Cruise. I met Tom -- suddenly I'm calling him 'Tom.' You go, 'Tom Cruise is in J.J.'s office.' We're hanging out, going 'Hey, Tom.' I get that."
"That's what happens with Jeff Bell," Abrams says.
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Post by Sara on Jan 18, 2005 15:42:25 GMT -5
WARNING--MINOR SPOILER FOR THE 1/19/05 EPISODE OF LOST
Lost Helps Viewers Find Perrineau by Daniel Fienberg
LOS ANGELES (Zap2it.com) Every week, the cast of ABC's "Lost" gathers for a viewing party, generally hosted by the performer whose backstory makes up the night's episode. This Wednesday (Jan. 19), the episode focuses on Harold Perrineau Jr.'s Michael, but the actor is expecting to be Stateside doing promotion for the show. It's fitting that Perrineau, a familiar face, but hardly a household name, should miss his own party.
"I'm one of those guys that whenever I'm doing a project, people will notice me then," laughs the unassuming actor. "People will walk up to me and go 'Oh my God, you're the guy from 'O,z'' or 'Oh my God, 'The Matrix'' or something like that, so now it's just 'Oh, 'Lost.'' It stays the same, which is fortunate for me, because I guess I'm working."
Since obfuscating his age to play a 16-year-old in 1995's "Smoke," the 36-year-old Perrineau has built up a resume characterized by its unpredictability. He's alternated between gritty and independent projects like HBO's prison drama "Oz" and blockbusters like the "Matrix" trilogy. He's gone macho in films like the David Mamet survival drama "The Edge" and he's wore a dress in both "Romeo and Juliet" and "Woman on Top."
"On one hand, it's really the thing I set out to do," Perrineau says of his eclectic choices. "I've always been interested in being an actor. That's the thing that I really love to do. On the other hand, it makes it hard to identify me, so it means I have to keep proving myself. That's the part that becomes a little difficult. Clearly I can do many things, but because I do so many things, I always have to prove I can do the next thing as well."
A theater-trained actor, Perrineau admits that he's occasionally been frustrated playing a character seemingly without a background. Usually he prepares for parts by working up a full biography on his character, but "Lost" has forced him to fly without a net.
"You move this way or that way because of your past, your present and where you're going," he explains. "I like to know where he's been and why he talks the way he talks and walks the way he walks and why he relates to people the way he relates to people. In the absence of that, all I have to rely on are my instincts. Michael winds up being a lot more like me."
One of the greatest challenges of Perrineau's "Lost" role has been his interactions with Malcolm David Kelley's Walt, the son Michael has never connected with.
"Michael's not a father," Perrineau emphasizes. "Michael's a dad. He has a son. But he's not a father."
In the real world, though, Perrineau is a dedicated father. In fact, as this interview is being conducted, he's preparing for Freaky Hair Day at his 10-year-old daughter's school.
"For them it would have been easier to have somebody who had no idea how to handle kids," he admits. "In the pilot, J.J. [Abrams] would say to me, 'You know too much about kids. The way you speak to him is too much like you know what you're doing.' I would have to go, 'Oh, right.'"
Like the rest of the "Lost" ensemble, Perrineau is sworn to secrecy when it comes to his character's upcoming twists and to what Wednesday's episode will reveal about his past. Even if he bound by the show's cryptic code, though, Perrineau is in the dark as to which aspects of the script will end up in the episode.
"We'll get to understand a little bit more about this father and son and why the dynamic is the way it is and the reasons for that are really," he says, trying his hardest to remain vague. "How do you say something without saying anything at all? The thing I think is the best about it is the thing about Walt. There's something about Walt that nobody realized yet. That's about it."
Given that Abrams has said that Michael is one of his favorite characters, big surprises may be in store.
Perrineau resists the temptation to speculate on the show's myriad oft-debated mysteries. While many of his colleagues have taken to the Internet to enter into debates about the mystical nature of the island or the exact identity of the creatures in the jungle, Perrineau is having none of it.
"I'm not so into the guessing games," maintains Perrineau. "For me, the writers are smarter than I'm ever going to be. They've got an idea and I'm just going to sit back and enjoy and watch their idea and unfold.
He adds, "If we are in Purgatory, I'm really confused. If that's what this has been about, then I'm like, 'Dang, you've got me, man.'"
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Post by Sara on Feb 18, 2005 14:59:46 GMT -5
Lost Looks Ahead
J.J. Abrams, who co-created ABC's hit SF series Lost, told SCI FI Wire that he's already coming up with ideas for a second season. "We obviously know what we're doing for the rest of this year," Abrams said in an interview at ABC's winter press preview in Universal City, Calif. "We definitely have big ideas about what we want to do down the line, past just the second season, and a lot of ideas for the second season already."
But Abrams remained coy about his plans, though he promised to reveal some of the secrets about the island where 48 survivors of a plane crash—including Jack (Matthew Fox) and Kate (Evangeline Lilly)—have found themselves stranded. "There isn't one answer to everything," Abrams said. "It's, like, this island has an amazing history that we've talked about, and things will change as we go, it always does. ... [But] you don't have the time or the energy to figure out everything in the first season of a show that, ... if you're lucky, [you] get five, six, seven, eight years [to do]. But we have a few really big ideas that we hope we're on long enough to tell."
Abrams added: "The thing about Lost is that the show is not just about ... the mysteries of the island. This island has a lot of complex sort of mythology and stuff that we've discussed, and will over time be revealed. ... In order to do the story right, you need time. ... Each of these characters has a handful or ... more of important stories that you want to see told over time as well."
Abrams offered one hint for attentive viewers. "I don't know if you can see this yet, [but every flashback] makes reference to something else," he said. "So you'll get a beginning, middle and end of that flashback story, but you'll wonder, 'Wait, what the hell was he there for? That's weird.' And that will help prompt the next flashback. At the end of the day, what I think is cool about it is you'll be able to take the Sawyer [Josh Holloway] flashbacks, all of them, and you could cut them together so you see them as an entire sort of movie of this person's life. See where they started, see what happened to them over time, and make a sort of linear thing. And yet, we're seeing them every eight, 10 episodes, you'll see that person's story. ... If we get to do the story that we anticipate doing, there's a big thing and a big payoff. Whether we get to that at the very end or we get to that earlier, and it becomes the start of the next chapter, is part of the evolution of telling the story."
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Post by Sara on Mar 25, 2005 9:24:07 GMT -5
Josh Holloway Is 'Lost' at Long Last By Kate O'Hare
With the meteoric success of ABC's castaway drama "Lost" -- which returns with new episodes on Wednesday, March 30 -- the career of journeyman actor Josh Holloway, who plays bad-boy con artist Sawyer, has gone from near-zero to off the charts in a few short months. The 35-year-old former model is still coping with all this newfound attention.
"It's been fun," he says in his deep, Georgia drawl, "but it's still shocking at times. I still enjoy it a bit. I haven't been in it long enough to get jaded. Nothing in my life has ever just happened. I've had to seek out my directions in life, and they normally are long and arduous before it gets fun and exciting.
"This was the same, and I expected it to be so. I think it's human nature, we need the pain to enjoy the glory."
Holloway's experience on "Lost" is hardly the first time that an actor in his mid-30s has suddenly catapulted to stardom. George Clooney did it in "ER," and more recently, Julian McMahon did it in "Nip/Tuck." And while he's now a confirmed movie star, Harrison Ford was about that age -- and making ends meet by working as a carpenter -- when he got the role of Han Solo in "Star Wars" in 1977.
"Really?" Holloway says when told this. "He's a big inspiration for the character of Sawyer. I love him, Harrison Ford. That's what I used for my prep. I wanted Sawyer to be a cross between Han Solo and maybe Wolverine -- a little more edge and anger to him, but with the lovable scoundrel that Han Solo was.
"It's such a brilliant character. I love playing, not a bad guy, but a scoundrel. That's the key, to be the guy that you love to hate, not the guy you hate, or else, in the nature of this show, I would have been dead already."
And, since series co-creators J.J. Abrams ("Alias") and Damon Lindelof keep hinting a major character will die at season's end, Sawyer could be dead yet.
"And I still could be," Holloway says. "They remind us of that constantly."
It's not that Sawyer hasn't had his close calls, though. When he's not reading such books as "Watership Down," annoying physician and self-appointed castaway leader Jack (Matthew Fox) or exchanging double entendres with enigmatic fugitive-from-the-law Kate (Evangeline Lilly), Sawyer busies himself with stashing away whatever usable items he can salvage from the wreckage of the show's doomed Australia-to-Los Angeles flight.
This hoarding got Sawyer into trouble with Jack when, just out of spite, he refused to say whether or not he had needed medicine. Jack then turned to castaway Sayid (Naveen Andrews), a former Iraqi Republican Guardsman, to employ torture to get Sawyer to talk.
"I really liked it," says Holloway about filming the scene. "I knew it was going to be difficult physically, but I like that kind of stuff. I like getting beat up a little bit. It's normal. I grew up in the country with three brothers, and gosh, all we ever did was to come home with something my mom had to fix.
"So the torture was great, but it was torture, because I'm 35, and I spent 14 hours, two days in a row, on my knees. It was grueling, yelling, I lost my voice. At one point, I hyperventilated a little bit. It was very interesting, as an actor, to go there."
Regarding the question of whether there are any more like him at home, Holloway says, "They're all computer heads. They're very intelligent. The brother right under me is a nuclear physics major from Georgia Tech, so they're all brainy. I can barely send an e-mail."
He does, though, get a taste of home when he's hanging out with Fox, who, according to fellow cast members, likes to let it all hang out.
"Oh, Matt is unafraid," Holloway says. "He's just secure with himself and his family, and he is not afraid to be nude -- not out in public, but if he's around his house, he don't care, and I love him for that.
"He reminds me of my dad, because my dad was a total nudist. We grew up on a dirt road, way out in the country, no one can see you, so Dad was just walking around naked all the time. So Foxy reminds me of Dad."
While Holloway may get a little nostalgic for home, he doesn't miss modeling. "I have nothing bad to say about the industry, because it provided me with exactly what I wanted it for. I traveled extensively and made some cash. But it's just not fulfilling work.
"Oh, Lord, we made a joke that you carry around your modeling stick, so you could whack yourself on the head a few times right before they shoot, so you don't have a thought and get that far-off look in your eyes. It's really just from being smacked, that's all."
When Sawyer gets that look in his eyes, it's usually because Kate is around. In the torture scene, she took him up on his offer of information in exchange for a kiss that seemed to go on longer than strictly necessary.
"I was looking at that," Holloway says, "going, 'Well, shoot, Hollywood kissing's supposed to have tongue in it -- or is it?' I liked it. It went well. When I watched it and saw the tongue action, I was like, 'Oooh, maybe we shouldn't do that,' but my character, of course he's going to go for it."
As for the big, two-part finale in May (the final part is reported to be 90 minutes, with the last 30 almost commercial-free) and the mysterious death, Holloway says, "The last three episodes, they're going to answer some questions and create more, but they're going to move the story forward. In the season finale, they're not even giving us a script. We only get our scenes.
"We work for the CIA, I swear."
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Post by Sara on Apr 3, 2005 20:03:29 GMT -5
Undergoing a Sea Change on Prospero's Isle By VIRGINIA HEFFERNAN
Published: April 3, 2005
"I WAS broke a year ago," the actor Terry O'Quinn said recently. "And I fully expect to be broke again."
Something in Mr. O'Quinn's prophetic tone did not invite contradiction, though for now he's flush. Since September, Mr. O'Quinn, 52, has appeared on "Lost," ABC's hit drama, as one of that uncanny show's most uncanny characters, a Prospero figure named John Locke, like the Enlightenment philosopher. In the first episode, Locke survived a plane crash that left him and dozens of others marooned on a tropical island, where - as if ordinary man-versus-man perils weren't enough - an obscure, seemingly supernatural menace also resides. But the island also abounds with opportunities for redemption and courage, and Locke, a freshly healed paraplegic, now professes that everyone receives a new life on the island.
The island has also given the actor new life. During a career in film characterized by critical praise (for "The Stepfather," 1987, and "The Rocketeer," 1991) and notable missteps ("Heaven's Gate," 1980), Mr. O'Quinn became recognizable in solemn television roles - many of them martial - on dramas like "JAG," "The West Wing" and "Alias." ("Alias," like "Lost," was created by J. J. Abrams.)
But the character of John Locke is a radical departure from the admirals and generals that were becoming Mr. O'Quinn's stock-in-trade. A onetime clerical worker with Outward Bound-style fantasies, Locke has distinguished himself as the island's mastermind, a step ahead of the others in their journeys of self-discovery. "He may well know more about other people than he knows about himself," Mr. O'Quinn says.
Locke's efforts to reform the young men on the island, and thereby win adherents - he broke one of an addiction, another of a twisted fixation on his sister - also border on sadistic.
The unpredictability inspires Mr. O'Quinn, who sees it as Locke's defining feature. "I don't look forward to the day when someone says, 'This guy's a good guy,' or 'This guy's a bad guy.' I won't accept it."
Ambiguity is power, potentially, for an actor - and the power has come as a revelation to Mr. O'Quinn. "That's the gift that they've given me on this set - the time to explore the depth. Some actors get it when they're 12; they feel strong enough. But some of us feel, as functionaries, that we don't really have the power. We're not important enough on a set, or to throw our weight behind something, because we don't feel we have the weight. That's terrible. I let myself be that way for way too long in my career."
So how does the once-fearful Terry O'Quinn become the fearsome John Locke?
"When I wake up in the morning, and I don't feel like I have anything special to offer, it used to scare me," Mr. O'Quinn explained. "But now I show up at work, get dressed, get some breakfast, and go to makeup - and 30 minutes later, I will look different. A sharpness. When I come in, I can be myself, and kind of dull of sleepy. But as Locke, there's sharpness, depth, something that comes alive in my head, behind my eyes."
Mr. O'Quinn, who recently auctioned off property in Maryland to live full time with his wife in Hawaii, where the series is filmed, has increasingly given himself over to Locke and his sharpness.
"This person can't be a weak sister. And the actor who plays him can't be. He can't let himself be pushed. I remember when we first started, coming on the set and thinking, I'm going to be consciously aloof to protect myself, to protect the character. Until I know where he stands, and where I stand. I'm going to keep my distance. I got more comfortable, but I still find myself keeping aloof - out of respect for the character."
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Post by Anne, Old S'cubie Cat on May 1, 2005 21:24:53 GMT -5
Good interview from the "Los Angeles Times" with Yunjin Kim (Sun). No spoilers, although she does speculate about the season finale.
She found her voice With English now in her arsenal, Yunjin Kim's Sun is speaking up on 'Lost.'
Susan King
The hit ABC series "Lost" is threaded through with story lines — there are more than 13 characters in the ensemble portraying crash survivors on an island in the Pacific — and Yunjin Kim's demure Sun has been one of the highlights. At the outset, Sun and her possessive husband, Jin-Soo (Daniel Dae Kim), spoke only in Korean and isolated themselves from the rest of the survivors. Recently, though, Sun revealed that she speaks English and proved that she possessed more inner strength than anyone, including her husband, had imagined.
Kim, 31, grew up on Staten Island but has called Seoul, South Korea, home for the past eight years. She's appeared in numerous miniseries and movies, including the international hit Korean thriller "Shiri." Before reporting to work on "Lost," Kim was on a popular reality show in which celebrities foster orphan babies to help them get adopted. Kim, who is single, fostered a 10-month-old boy for two weeks before a family was found for him. Will all the secrets of the island be revealed on the finale of "Lost" on May 25?
I think the writers will give us something, but I think it will be another cliffhanger. You have to come back for the second season. For us it's frustrating too. We are just as much in the dark as the rest of the audience. We get our scripts pretty late. Sometimes we get them the day before we go to shoot, which is fine because you are only doing eight pages a day, and I don't say very much.
But now, with Sun speaking English, you have a lot more dialogue.
Thank God everyone knows now [that the character can speak English]. I can mingle with others. I can get involved in other people's crises. There are some characters Sun has never even talked to! Still, I get this fan mail from all over the world that says they kind of wish that Sun doesn't speak English or just speaks Korean. They liked the fact I didn't say much. They said sometimes they didn't need to read the subtitles to understand what was going on.
Wasn't the reaction from the Asian community rather negative to Sun and Jin-Soo?
In the very beginning, we were sort of portrayed as a bad stereotype of an Asian couple — the subservient wife and domineering husband. But I kept on saying that you have to watch the characters because they will continue to grow, and you will see the reason why he is treating her that way and why she is reacting that way. In the beginning I was really concerned that the whole Asian community would be turned off.
Every character on "Lost" is an archetype, and … once they are in motion they break away [from the archetype].
Sun's defining moment was defying Jin-Soo by wearing the bikini.
I got more response from coming out in a bikini. I thought it was really silly. They thought it was very symbolic, and I thought it wasn't like just a girl in a bikini — it had a meaning. It was Sun finally putting her foot down and saying, "I am going to go and take a swim."
You were born in South Korea but attended the High School of Music & Art and Performing Arts in New York. How did you end up back in Korea as a working actress? Was it just lack of decent roles in America?
No. When I graduated from Boston University, colorblind casting was in fashion, so I didn't have too many problems getting roles onstage. I was always constantly busy, and then back in 1997 I got cast in a Korean miniseries. It was just a random thing. I was in New York, and I had a friend who knew a producer who was coming to New York to shoot a miniseries. It was like 15 episodes, and they were going to shoot three episodes in New York and then go back to Korea. I got cast on the spot. Before I knew it, I was in Korea shooting this miniseries. And it took off. It was crazy. If you can believe it, half of Korea was glued to the TV.
What was the miniseries about?
It was a very kind of trendy miniseries about a cosmetics company. I played this sassy woman. I sort of had an American accent in my Korean, but it kind of worked with the character. People responded to the character. And then I got cast in this movie called "Shiri." That was my first feature film, and it came over here. It was a big hit.
Was your character in the film anything like Sun?
I was playing a "La Femme Nikita"-type role — a North Korean spy who falls in love with her enemy. From then on I played every cool girl with a gun. My nickname in Korean is "Woman Warrior."
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Post by Anne, Old S'cubie Cat on May 27, 2005 9:42:59 GMT -5
A Los Angeles Times TV reviewer's rant thoughts about the Lost first season finale: 'Lost' in endless mysteryA few choice exerpts: Four characters poised over a hole as a summer talker? I mean, it's a mysterious hole, well constructed and darkly suggestive, but here's a safe bet: When "Lost" resumes after the long summer months, someone — or some party of someones — will go down that hole after an interval of deliberation about whose life journey has brought them to this moment. This will take an episode or two or three. Then, sometime during November sweeps, the person or persons who go down that hole will discover another strange creature/human being/vortex/the most amazing entry point to a shopping mall the modern world has ever known.
Perhaps, alternatively, whoever goes down the hole will never come back. I'm rooting for the shopping mall, because "Lost" needs to go David Lynch already; as things stand, the gimmicky horror movie gyrations and thriller buildups don't produce either exhalations or, as in Lynch, newer, richer mysteries that deepen the storytelling and add to an overall mood or texture.************************* On "Lost," kidnapping is a favorite pastime, as is running through the jungle, panting, sweating, and the deep, meaningful exchange, seen in tight close-up. Kate (insisting on carrying the backpack of explosives): "I need to do this." Jack: "Kate, no one here owes anyone anything."*************************** But with its good ratings, it's as if the show has become too protective of its own mystery, holding on to cards that were always somehow too valuable to play. Now it can all seem to me like an awful lot of schlepping to one side of the island and back again.I'm hoping for the shopping mall. Shannon must be dying for a good shop. Anne, evil
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Post by Sara on Jun 6, 2005 15:36:01 GMT -5
Holloway Muses on 'Lost' Finale By Kate O'Hare
LOS ANGELES (Zap2it.com) Calling in from the set of his new movie, "Whisper," in Vancouver, B.C., Josh Holloway has a few thoughts on the finale of ABC's "Lost."
"I was a little disappointed in the finale," says Holloway, who plays con man Sawyer on the hit series. "I liked it, but I didn't love it. The script was one thing, but they tried to do so much, I feel like that some things lost the power they had. But that's okay; it was still good."
After a season full of dangling plot threads and tantalizing clues, fans were hoping for some solid revelations at the end. What they got in the May 25 finale were some hints and a few surprises, but in the end, more questions than answers. And that goes for the actors as well.
"We don't get answers either," Holloway says. "So I'm like, 'Aaaarrrgh!' I'm assuming that's the way TV is. I'm excited personally to quit asking questions about the writers and what they do and just do my job." "Lost" follows survivors of Oceanic Airlines Flight 815 from Sydney to Los Angeles, crashed on a tropical island a thousand miles off-course.
In their month or so on the island, the castaways have discovered that it's no ordinary place, with polar bears, an invisible "security system," and the unseen "Others" whispering in the jungle.
They've also learned they're not alone. Mira Furlan plays Danielle Rousseau, survivor of a boat accident, who's been on her own for 16 years, and William Mapother played Ethan Rom, who faked being a crash survivor in order to pursue his own nefarious ends before being killed by one of the castaways. Both Danielle and Ethan showed a lot of interest in pregnant castaway Claire (Emilie de Ravin), both before and after she had her baby.
In the finale, Danielle stole the baby, hoping to trade it to "The Others" for a child stolen from her 16 years ago, but they had other plans. The Others -- or at least their scruffy, seagoing minions -- tracked Sawyer and fellow survivors Jin (Daniel Dae Kim) and Michael (Harold Perrineau) as they set sail on a raft. They ultimately snatched Michael's young son, Walt (Malcolm David Kelley), instead of the baby, shooting Sawyer and leaving the raft ablaze.
Sharp-eyed viewers may have noticed something about the people on the boat, but if not, Holloway says, "There were twins, which I don't know if you could tell. They were identical twins, which was really spooky. There again, that wasn't emphasized."
There also may be more footage showing what happened everyone was forced off the raft. "They filmed some stuff of us in the water that they cut out," Holloway says. "I'm wondering if they're saving that for the premiere. I'm hoping that it wasn't for no reason, because it was cold and it was three in the morning when we got there."
Loyal Sawyer fans probably noted that he had a new hairstyle on the raft, trading in his free-flowing locks for a samurai-style ponytail.
"I've been really having a hard time just with the logistics of the frickin' hair," Holloway says, "and trying to work with the hair whipping in your face all the time, because we shoot outside on the beach, right? I was thinking about that, on the raft, God, it's going to be coming from all directions! So I came up with that little idea. It worked great. I could actually see."
In one of the episode's unexpected moments, high-school science teacher Arzt (Daniel Roebuck) was helping the castaways deal with some old, unstable dynamite when he was suddenly blown to pieces.
"That was one of the best deaths I've seen," Holloway says. "'A shower of meat,' as it was described in the script. We were like, 'Oooh, God!,' but even that could have been a little more Tarantino-ish, if you will. It needed a little more blood."
Since he went to work on "Whisper" the day after "Lost" wrapped in late April, Holloway didn't exactly get to have a viewing party for the finale. "I watched it in my hotel room after we wrapped at three in the morning here," he says. "That's how I've seen the last four episodes, actually, because I've been working every day."
Since Sawyer is currently underwater and his fate unknown, fans may have to wait a bit to see another scene between him and Jack Shepard (Matthew Fox), the neurosurgeon who has become the castaways' de facto leader. That would be a shame, since the fireworks between them is one of the show's most entertaining elements.
"They're like two brothers who were separated at birth," Holloway says. "They're two sides of the same thing. Sawyer's just had a different life experience. He was raised more on the darker side of life. I find it really interesting because Matthew and I work kind of similar. He's the kind of person I can sit next to and not have to say a word to and just get it. We really don't have to talk that much, like brothers.
"When we've got a big scene to do, we're not all joking with each other. We don't even talk to each other. Then after the scene, we give each other a big hug. That chemistry, and the way we work, comes through on screen. So I find a scene with Foxy to be very intense, but easy to do, because he's right there, on fire, and I'm right there. It just works."
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