Jorge Garcia and J.J. Abrams at the 2012 Television Critics Association
A few days ago, in a talk at the 2012 TCA (Television Critics Association), J.J. Abrams said that Alcatraz would not be like LOST. Alcatraz, he said, would have storylines that were resolved every week, and questions would be answered quickly.
The TV critics in the room had their doubts about that, according to a critic who was there.
Alcatraz starts on Monday, January 16, at 8 p.m. (7 central) on FOX.
Posted in Alcatraz, Hurley (Jorge Garcia), J.J. Abrams
Update 11/30/2011 — I just checked the prices, and even though Black Friday is over, most of the items I listed here are now selling for less than they were during Black Friday week. The Big Lebowski
The LOST DVDs, while they weren’t originally on Amazon’s Black Friday list, have also come down a little in price — Lost: The Complete Collection
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Amazon is having a big Black Friday week sale that is going on all week, starting today, Monday, November 21, 2011. I looked through the virtual bins, and found several items featuring LOST actors that could make great gifts (or to give to yourself).
Lance Reddick had an all-too-brief role in LOST as the mysterious and creepy Matthew Abaddon. Here he is visiting Hurley in the mental hospital (this scene is in LOST episode 4×01 The Beginning of the End). I love this scene — it’s one of my favorite LOST scenes — it’s the kind of thing that LOST did so well, did so much better than any other show. At the end of the scene, I had chills in the back of my neck. Video embedding has been disabled for the clip, but you can watch it on YouTube here — and it’s very much worth (re)watching: Are you fine, Mr. Reyes?
(more after the jump) Continue reading
Damon Lindelof
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[After Damon met J.J. Abrams to talk about the show, he started coming up with ideas.]
“The biggest issue with a desert island show was the audience is going to get very frustrated that the characters were not getting off the island,” [Damon] said. “My solution was, hey, let’s get off the island every week. And the way we’re going to do that is we’re going to do these flashbacks.
We’ll do one character at a time and there’s gonna be like 70 characters on the show, so we’ll go really, really slow, and each one will basically say, here’s who they were before the crash and it’ll dramatize something that’s happening on the island and it will also make the show very character-centric.”
Abrams liked the idea, and also had another: “‘There should be a hatch on this island! They spend the entire season trying to get it open. And there should be these other people on the island,’” Lindelof recalled Abrams saying. “And I’m like, ”We can call them The Others.’ And he’s like, ‘They should hear this noise out there in the jungle.’ And I’m like, ‘What’s the noise?’ And he’s like, ‘I don’t fucking know. They’re never gonna pick this thing up anyway.’”
Posted in Damon and Carlton, Interviews, J.J. Abrams
Michael Emerson and Jim Caviezel in "Person of Interest"
Person of Interest, starring Michael Emerson (the late, great Benjamin Linus) and produced by J.J. Abrams, starts tonight (Thursday, September 22, 2011) on CBS at 9 pm (8 central).
More info: Official site, Facebook fan page
[Editing to add 9/23: The pilot is now online on the official site.]
Josh Holloway in Mission Impossible Ghost Protocol trailer
The “Bad Robot” logo made me feel nostalgic.
It’s hard to even see Josh in the clip. The picture at the top of this post is from when he flashed on the screen for a fraction of a second, around 1:04 on the trailer.
(Editing to add): Here’s a short clip of Josh Holloway talking about what it’s been like working on the film. He said it’s been “like Disneyland for men” because of all the stunts and the action, and that working with Tom Cruise was an honor. When it came to stunts, he said, Cruise was a stud.
Jim Caviezel and Michael Emerson filming "Person of Interest"
The good news is that Michael Emerson has been cast as the lead in another new J.J. Abrams show, Person of Interest. He’s going to play a billionaire who hires a presumed-dead ex-CIA agent to catch violent criminals in New York.
This, strangely, combines plot elements of two other planned LOST-alumni shows: Jorge Garcia’s Alcatraz, which will be about a group of prisoners and guards who mysteriously disappeared and then showed up again 30 years later, and Odd Jobs, where Emerson and O’Quinn were to be ex-black-ops agents.
I wonder what will happen to Odd Jobs if Person of Interest becomes a hit. It seems unlikely that Emerson could star in two shows at once. I’ll be glad to see him in anything, but I really wanted to see him reunited with Terry O’Quinn.
Co-starring with Emerson are Jim Caviezel (Jesus in Mel Gibson’s The Passion of the Christ), Taraji P. Henson (Queenie in The Curious Case of Benjamin Button), and Natalie Zea (Winona in Justified). The writer is Jonathan Nolan, who wrote the story on which the movie Memento was based, and the screenplay for Dark Knight.
New York Magazine listed it as one of the 20 most exciting pilots of the upcoming TV season, even though they gave it only a 50-50 chance of actually getting on the air.
Alcatraz at dawn
Jorge, who was the first actor cast for the show, will play the “hippy geek” Dr. Diego Soto, a world-class authority on Alcatraz. J.J. Abrams is co-executive producer. Filming will begin in January in San Francisco and Vancouver.
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Photo of Alcatraz by Ben Peoples, via Wikimedia
Posted in Alcatraz, Hurley (Jorge Garcia), J.J. Abrams
