By C. W. Oberleitner - June 14th 2005
Nothing sells newspapers, or drives eyeballs to
websites, like a little controversy and as columnist C. W. Oberleitner
tells us, you can find it in some of the darnedest places. He reports
today on last weekend's first-ever "Official LOST Fan Convention"
at which producers of the hit ABC TV series try to lay one controversy
to rest and artfully manage to start another one.
A Change of Plans
First off, for those of you patiently waiting for
the next edition of our grownup geeks' guide to Disneyland's 50th
Anniversary, let me offer my sincerest apologies. Today was the
day you were supposed to be reading the Disneyland installment of
that series, and last Saturday was the day I was supposed to be
at the Happiest Place on Earth nailing down some final details for
that report. Instead, I found myself spending the day at Burbank's
Bob Hope Airport Hilton Convention Center.
Last Saturday, as it turns out, was the first day
of the first-ever fan convention for one of the biggest hits of
the 2004 - 2005 TV season, LOST.
LOST, a show about a group of people stranded on a
seemingly unknown remote Pacific island after a plane crash, along
with ABC TV's other big hit, Desperate Housewives, is credited for
lifting the alphabet network out of the ratings cellar.
Day one of the first-ever "Official LOST Fan
Convention" was to feature on-stage appearance by Javier Grillo-Marxuach,
a writer and supervising producer on LOST. He would be joined by
stars Jorge Garcia, who plays Hugo "Hurley" Rayes, Mira
Furlan, mysterious French woman Danielle Rousseau, and William Mapother,
who played kidnapper Ethan Rom. I contacted Creation Entertainment,
producers of the convention, and asked for and received press credentials.
With the chance for some serious face time with some
of the folks from one of the biggest shows on TV…well, let's
just say there went the trip to Disneyland.
Harry Who?
As I approached the Burbank Hilton Convention Center,
I was curious about how big a crowd the first Official LOST Fan
Convention would attract. How would the attendees dress? Creation's
SciFi conventions are notorious for drawing huge crowds of people
in all manner of alien garb. But most of all, I wondered what kinds
of questions these folks would ask.
Unlike a Star Trek convention, where attendees can
debate the depth of the Romulan Neutral Zone for hours, LOST fans,
at least judging by their web posts, are obsessed with the subtly,
nuances, and hidden meaning of each episode.
LOST is a big fat hit, and when that happens, fans
also start talking about what goes on behind the scenes. Were LOST
fans going to be curious about the show's back stories, like the
one currently circulating around industry hangouts about the dust-up
between co-creator and executive producer J. J. Abrams and Harry
Knowles, webmaster of movie fanboy/spoiler site Ain't It Cool News?
The crux of which is that Abrams supposedly cast relative
newcomer Jorge Garcia as LOST's jinxed Super Lotto winner Hugo "Hurley"
Reyes, not just because he's a gifted actor, which Garcia is, but
also because he bears more than a passing resemblance to Knowles.
According to the chatter around town and on the Internet,
Knowles, a large, burly, some might say zaftig man with long, thick,
curly hair leaked an early draft outline of a proposed Superman
script that Abrams had submitted to Warner Brothers on his Ain't
It Cool News website. The resulting hue and cry by outraged fans
of the Man of Steel to what they saw as Abrams’ caviler treatment
of their hero forced Warner's to detach Abrams from the project.
Which is why Abrams, when asked after joining LOST's production
team who he'd like to see stranded on a dessert island, reportedly
said, "You mean besides Harry Knowles?”
By the time I arrived at the convention center, LOST
writer and supervising producer Javier Grillo-Marxuach was already
two thirds of the way through his Q&A session. Creation Entertainment
had requested that members of the media not ask questions during
a speaker's Q&A with the "paying" fans. Members of
the media were not permitted back stage either.
After just a few minutes of listening to Grillo-Marxuach's
responses to fan questions, it was obvious that he'd spent most
of the preceding half hour deftly and artfully refusing to answer
any questions that might even remotely provide a clue about any
of LOST's many mysteries.
I must have heard him humorously use the phrase, "If
we told you guys all of that, they're wouldn't be any show,"
about a half a dozen times.
With the easy-going, light-hearted manner of a seasoned
performer, Grillo-Marxuach unexpectedly bristled at a suggestion
from a member of the audience that LOST's two hour season finale
was in some way disappointing.
Seemingly reacting more to the criticism of others,
Grillo-Marxuach, still smiling, nonetheless raised his voice and
chided his audience saying, "Come on you guys! What more do
you want? I go on-line. You wanted to know about 'The Black Rock;'
we showed you what The Black Rock was."
Regaining his composure a bit, he continued, "You
wanted to see the monster slash security system. We showed you…some
of it." He then paused and laughed. "There was the smoke.
Now the question, for next season, is what does the smoke represent?
Is it a machine or animal of some kind?"
Grillo-Marxuach reminded the audience that the season
finale finally confirmed and revealed the existence of the often
referred to but never seen menacing characters known simply as "The
Others." And he asked how many of them noticed that two of
"The Others" were twins, a bit of news that flashed around
the Internet within seconds of the season finale's conclusion.
No one, it appeared, had asked or even cared about
the Harry Knowles/Hurley casting issue. Grillo-Marxuach answered
his last question by yet again politely refusing to answer the question,
and then quickly walked backstage.
In the vendor area, located in the concourse outside
the convention hall, I was actually thinking about asking one of
the convention attendees if I could give one of them a couple of
questions to ask during Jorge Garcia's Q&A session when a remarkable
thing happened. I spotted Javier Grillo-Marxuach and his wife touring
the exhibits.
I introduced myself and asked the writer and supervising
producer of LOST if he'd mind if I asked him a couple of questions.
He graciously said yes.
Since no one at the Q&A had asked a question about
Jorge Garcia's casting, or if he was hired to play Hugo Reyes because
of his resemblance to Harry Knowles, I did. With a knowing laugh
Grillo-Marxuach responded,
Grillo-Marxuach's response was pretty similar to what
LOST co-creator Damon Lindelof told Ain't Cool News writer “I
am -- Hercules!!” via email. Lindelof went one step further
saying, “If we were really trying to roast Mr. Knowles, wouldn't
we have named Dr. Arzt "Larry Moles" or something and
then blown him up?”
[There are links to all referenced stories and
sites at the end of this column.—Editor]
Now the question became: Would Jorge Garcia have anything
to say about his casting? And, he did.
On this the first day of the two-day "Offficial
LOST Fan Convention," there were somewhere between 250 and
300 people in attendance, none of whom, as far as I could see, arrived
in costume of any kind. They gave Jorge "Hurley" Garcia
an enthusiastic welcome as he walked on stage at the Burbank Hilton
Convention center.
Garcia only used Hurley's trademark expression "Dude"
once while telling a story about having to intone the expression
a dozen different ways during a dialogue recording session. During
the nearly forty minutes he was on stage, the subject of his casting
never came up, but he was asked about his audition.
Garcia said that he was amazed to discover that at
his audition he was the only actor reading for the part of Hurley.
"I don't know if you guys know how it works,"
he told the audience, "but usually you go in for an audition,
especially when you're like me and you haven't done a whole bunch
of work and there's a whole bunch of actors in a room all reading
for the same part. I got there, and I was the only one. I thought
to myself, how cool is this?"
Garcia then added that he was also asked to read the
part of Sawyer, a character later to be played by 6’1”
tall actor Josh Holloway who would emerge as LOST's sexy bad boy
heartthrob. The audience, all rabid LOST fans, got a big laugh out
of this.
I got lucky once again when Garcia remained on stage
following his Q&A to autograph the LOST cast banners hung on
either side of the stage. While he was waiting for a chair to stand
on, so that he could reach the picture of Hurley on one of the banners,
I was able to chat with him briefly.
During his Q&A, Garcia had said that during the
preceding week he'd done a marathon nationwide radio interview session.
"Basically, you go into this small room and they hook you up
with radio stations from all around the country. I must have done
95 interviews in one day."
During our chat, I asked him if the subject of his
resemblance to Harry Knowles ever came up during any of those interviews.
"Who?" the puzzled star asked.
I told him that Knowles was the webmaster of the popular
movie and television fan site Ain't Cool News.
"Oh yeah, that guy," Garcia said. "I
heard about it (the resemblance) once or twice back when we were
doing the pilot, but not much since. A couple people said something
but that was a while ago."
Which pretty much killed my next question, which was
going to be about reports that Garcia, following the appearance
on the Internet of the story about Abrams using Garcia's similarity
to Knowles to exact a little payback on the Ain't Cool webmaster,
had contacted Abrams and asked if his resemblance to Knowles was
the reason he was the only person to read for the part of Hurley.
Something that Abrams reportedly assured Garcia was not the case.
That might have been the end of the whole Harry/Jorge/Hurley
story if it weren't for a chat I had later with one of my industry
contacts. He said he found it curious that none of the parties involved
had come forward and denied it themselves.
He had a point; J. J. Abrams didn't respond to the
story LOST's co-creator Damon Lindelof had. And, Lindelof was questioned
by Ain't Cool writer I am -- Hercules!!, who never bothered to ask
the one guy closest to him and the story (Knowles) a single question.
My contact went on to say even the story LOST's producers
put out about how Jorge got the part did more to confirm the rumor
than it did to deny it. After all, he speculated, Hurley was gonna
be this Archie Bunker-like character, then all of the sudden just
seeing Jorge, who's not fiftyish or blue collar, on Larry David's
show and suddenly he's THE GUY.
It made sense in sort of a grand conspiracy way, but
LOST has plenty of other real mysteries to unravel. I decided to
move on.
Summer of Speculation
Javier Grillo-Marxuach and Jorge Garcia may have been
playing down one small LOST controversy, however…the folks
over at ABC, Touchstone Television, and Bad Robot seem to have been
doing their level best to stir up even more fan interest, if such
a thing is possible, by building a bigger mystery around what's
going to happen next season to the survivors of Oceanic Airlines
Flight 815.
Throughout the day between the celebrity sessions,
contests, and auctions, convention attendees were entertained with
behind the scenes video clips from season one of LOST. The clips,
furnished by Buena Vista Home Entertainment, are part of the special
features section of the soon be released complete first season of
LOST on DVD.
Among the featurettes shown to the fans was the teaser
for season two of LOST, which concludes with the cryptic lines,
"They survived on luck. They survived on instinct. But on the
other side of the island, they will discover THEY'RE NOT THE SURVIVORS
THEY THOUGHT THEY WERE."
[There are instructions on how to find this teaser
ad on the Internet at the conclusion of this column.—Editor]
Like everything else about this show, which really
is the embodiment of the expression ‘an enigma wrapped in
a riddle,’ the last line of this ad set tongues wagging and
imaginations racing.
Among this crowd of loyal LOST fans, I couldn't find
a soul who was willing to take the phrase at its most basic meaning;
i.e., that like you and I, everyone occasionally discovers they're
not the kind of person they thought they were. No, these folks truly
believe there's a deeper hidden meaning in this message. And they
didn't waste time setting out theories, either at the convention
or latter that evening on the Internet, as to what this ad might
be saying awaits the cast in season two.
Several folks were quick to point out that at different
times throughout the first season, heroic doctor Jack Shepard, played
by Matthew "Foxy" Fox, had attempted to make his fellow
castaways realize that they never should have survived the crash
of Flight 815. Still others mentioned that while many people did
loose their lives in the crash, none of the original 46 survivors
sustained any serious injuries. Hang on; this is where the LOSTestas
make the leap into the unknown.
One theorist hypothesized that the wreckage of Flight
815 was found and the 46 survivors were rushed, broken, battered,
and just barely clinging to life, to a secret government lab on,
yes, an uncharted Pacific island once used for nuclear testing.
There, as the theory goes, they've been hooked up to life support
systems while their bodies are repaired using (choose one) experimental
nannite technology, experimental stem cell technology, or experimental
DNA; well…you get the idea.
The interaction the survivors believe they are experiencing
comes from the fact that they are all wired together and their treatments
are being monitored by the same secret experimental…there's
that word again…supercomputer. The Mira Furlan and William
Mapother characters (Danielle and Ethan) are manifestations of the
nurses who are looking after the now Matrix-like victims of Oceanic
Airlines doomed flight. Oh, and did I mention the secretive and
almost never seen "Others" are supposed to represent the
nefarious doctors and scientists who just won't let these poor people
pass on to their reward?
The second hotly debated theory shares some elements
of the first, but doesn't quite cover as many of season one's plot
points. This theory also involves highly secretive and covert human
experimentation by an unnamed government agency or agencies.
In theory two, everybody dies in the crash of Flight
815; however, since the crash takes place very near a heretofore
unknown super secret military research facility located on a Pacific
island once used for nuclear testing. What is it with these people
and nuclear testing? Unspecified agents rush out and collect DNA
samples from all the now dead passengers. With no one's knowledge
or consent, doctors and scientists on the island then proceed to
clone all the passengers. Only 46 of the clones survive.
The 46 surviving clones undergo lengthy hypnotherapy
to make them believe they really came through a horrendous plane
crash with only minor cuts and bruises while everyone else on the
plane died. This also explains why John Locke, played by Terry O'Quinn,
can now walk when prior to the flight he was wheelchair bound.
The flashbacks that we, the audience, saw from each
of the major character’s lives during season one are supposed
to be some form of cellular memory connecting each clone with the
DNA donor he or she sprang from. Danielle, Ethan, and the “Others”
are government agents put on the island to challenge the clones
and force them to tap into their donor's previous mental and physical
skills and abilities, along with monitoring their progress.
As one fan said heading down this road, "That
would explain why Arzt (Daniel Roebuck) blew himself up even though
he was supposed to know what he was doing."
I couldn't follow his line of thinking; he went on
to explain, "Well, Arzt's clone body hadn't caught up with
his new mind. In his head, he knew what to do with old dynamite
but he couldn't make his new body do what it should to keep from
going kerrplooey."
At this point my head started spinning.
Both of these theories, while fascinating, failed
to explain some of LOST's biggest mysteries from season one. Questions
like why all the other plane and ship wreckage from various time
periods on the island? What's the meaning behind the numbers 4,
8, 15, 16, 23, and 42 on the side of the underground vault, which
Hurley used to win the lottery and that subsequently appear to have
brought him so much bad luck?
Most of the theorists said they would need more time
to figure these things out. After all, they reminded me, they had
only just seen the teaser for season two of LOST. They did, however,
quickly add that both of these theories could explain the polar
bears and mysterious quasi animal/mechanical people-grabbing security
system on the island.
"It's like Area 51," I was told. "They're
all part of the secret experimentation going on on the island."
And then the alien conspiracy theorists started to chime in, and
that's when I remembered…I still needed to make a trip to
Disneyland.
C'ya real soon!
Referenced Sites
Ain't
It Cool News, Did JJ Abrams Use LOST’s Hurley To Punish Harry
Knowles For SUPERMAN??
Creation
Entertainment
LOST
at ABC TV
Special LOST/Oceanic
Airlines website with season two teaser.
To access the video teaser for season two of LOST,
type the show's enigmatic numbers 4, 8, 15, 16, 23, and 42 in the
"Travellers"* section at the bottom of the page. Click
"Find," which will take you to the plane's seating chart.
Next, click those same numbers, in order, below the chart and the
teaser will load and play on your browser.
*Fictional Australian Oceanic Airlines may have been
dreamt up by an American television production company, but it still
manages to use standard British spelling on its website.—Editor