4/18/2023 0 Comments One day at a time pilot episode![]() ![]() And now we understand why, because it's.Ī PLANE CRASH. His eyes welling up as he processes what he's looking at. We had 11 weeks to write it, cast it, shoot it, cut it and turn it in. They were greenlighting a two-hour pilot. ![]() I threw the outline on his table and said, "See this? It's E.R."ĪBRAMS: On the Saturday morning, we got a call. I guess if you pitch the gritty ugliness of people, the studio might not go for it!īRAUN: I got the outline on a Friday night, took my daughter horseback riding, then went to see my friend Marc Gurvitz, a big manager. The other was about the gritty ugliness of people. LIEBER: I always joke that I was doing Lord Of The Flies and they were doing Lord Of The Rings. He felt that the island they crash onto should be really insane. He pitched the hatch and the Others, among many other things, in our first meeting. So the answer is to populate it with people who don't want to leave." What JJ brought was the mystery. I said, "If they get off the island, the show's over. LINDELOF: I was energised by the character ideas. JJ and I collapsed the action into a day: we wanted the show to feel like it was in real time.īRAUN: They came up with the idea for flashbacks, which is ingenious, because it gets us off the island a little bit. By the end they'd already built Swiss Family Robinson-type structures and were starting to ease into the long-term mechanisms of being stranded. LINDELOF: Jeff Lieber's pilot was pretty straight-up plane-crashes-on-island. And then we wrote an outline in five days. We started riffing on what this thing could be. JJ ABRAMS (co-writer/ director): He was wearing a Star Wars shirt. JJ immediately pointed at it and said, 'Bantha Tracks!" I was very nervous and wearing a Bantha Tracks fan-club T-shirt, which I've owned since I was a kid. Our paths had crossed before backstage at a Bruce Springsteen concert, but I was too starstruck to introduce myself to him at that point: my wife and I were huge fans of Alias. So JJ agreed to meet me, as a possible partner. But he was very busy with Alias and another pilot called The Catch. And there's only one guy who can save this." "Who?" "JJ."ĭAMON LINDELOF (co-writer): ABC were trying to cajole JJ into writing the pilot. So I say to Thom, "We have to do this now. It represented, to me, all the pitfalls people were worried about. The horror and revulsion of that was the end of Act 3.īRAUN: I start reading the script and I hate it. At one point in the pilot, a kid runs up and says, "Look! There are people swimming in the water!" And it's all these bodies of people who have drowned. "Where the fuck are we?" "Nowhere." My show was darker, emotionally. LIEBER: I thought Nowhere was a perfect title. Finally I get to a script called Nowhere. Thom had told me Lost was among them, but I couldn't find it. Finally, around Christmas time, I was on holiday and had a pack of scripts to read. At one point I pitched a shark attack, but I was told, "No, no, no! That's not realistic!"īRAUN: Over the course of the year, I'd get updates on my pet project. The rule structure I was told was: "This has to be hyper-real." I was hooked up with National Geographic to figure out whether it was an islet or an archipegelo. The less affluent one takes hold on the beach. After the plane crash, the rich one takes hold inland, in a fortress. At the centre were two brothers, like Kane and Abel. JEFF LIEBER (writer, original draft): I got a call saying, 'Would you be interested?' I said yes and created a pitch that was all about world-building, society, survival. HEATHER KADIN (former VP of Drama, ABC): Lloyd stepped up and said, "I want to do Cast Away: The Series." All of us assumed, I think, that he meant, "I want to do a series about a guy and a volleyball." I sat there with a drink, thinking, "Boy, I wish I could figure out how to do a show like that." Shortly thereafter, we had a big ABC retreat, about 100 to 200 people, and everybody had to pitch something. The next day, there was a clam-bake for dinner on the beach. Cut to two or three years later: I'm in Hawaii with my family at the Mauna Kea Beach Hotel. I remember thinking, "That's the best title for a show ever." The show got cancelled and I stuck the title in a corner of my brain. I was watching a reality TV show that Conan O'Brien produced called Lost. LLOYD BRAUN (former chairman of ABC Entertainment): The story begins in 2001. ("LOST" ABC OUTLINE - JJ Abrams/ Damon Lindelof. THE BEACHĪ handsome man in his late thirties slowly opens his eyes. Here, Empire talks to the cast and crew of this landmark show as they look back back at the making of that epic first episode. Indeed, back in 2004, Lost was the wildest, costliest gamble in TV history. But fifteen years ago, this hugely ambitious undertaking was anything but a sure thing. As one of the shows leading the vanguard of Peak TV, Lost now looks like it was always destined for success. ![]()
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