IESB.net reported a rumor that Transformers star Megan Fox has signed on to appear in a film adaptation of Michael Turner's Fathom comic series. Turner died in June, throwing the film project into doubt.
Citing an anonymous source, the site reported that the live-action movie is still at 20th Century Fox but has officially been handed over to the "genre" arm of the studio, Fox Atomic.
The studio is currently out to several writers to revamp the script as a vehicle for Fox, who officially signed on to the project this week, the site reported. Fox is set to play the lead character, Aspen.
The comic book centers on Aspen Matthews, who continues to search for clues from her past in order to balance the turmoil between the two worlds she inhabits. An adopted failed Olympic swimmer and marine biologist, Aspen finds herself involved with an aquatic humanoid race called the Blue.
Megan Fox showed up at the Eagle Eye world premiere on Sept. 16. (Eric Charbonneau/Le Studio/Wireimage)
Warner Readies Legend Prequel
Warner Brothers is developing a prequel to the Will Smith SF movie I Am Legend, with Smith to reprise his role as scientist Robert Neville, Variety reported.
Francis Lawrence will return to direct, and Akiva Goldsman and his Weed Road banner will produce with James Lassiter, Smith's partner in Overbrook Entertainment.
The studio has set D.B. Weiss to write a script that is based on a detailed outline that was hatched over the past few months by Smith, Goldsman, Lassiter and Lawrence.
The prequel will chronicle the final days of humanity in New York before a man-made virus caused a plague that left Smith's character the lone survivor among a mutated mob in the city.
Making a prequel was the only way to extend a franchise, which grossed $584 million worldwide for Warner, and keep Smith in the lead role. His character was killed in the first film after extracting a potential cure for the virus for the scattered survivors.
Battlestar Raiders On Sale!
NBC Universal Television will sell a high-quality, limited-edition replica of a Cylon Raider from SCI FI Channel's original series Battlestar Galactica, starting Sept. 28.
Developed by Quantum Mechanix through a licensing agreement with NBC Universal, the Cylon Raider replicas will be available online for $949.95.
Measuring 15 inches by 9 inches, the Cylon Raider replicas are based on a computer-generated model and come assembled and painted from The FX Company, based in Ocala, Fla. The ships feature custom electronics with light displays, including the scanning/sweeping red LED eye and flaring white engine lights. The Raider's lighting system runs on a 12-volt transformer.
Only 500 of the replicas will be sold, each with a brass plaque signed by either Battlestar Galactica executive producers Ronald D. Moore and David Eick, director Michael Rymer or one of the cast members, including Jamie Bamber (Apollo), James Callis (Baltar), Tricia Helfer (Number Six), Michael Hogan (Tigh), Edward James Olmos (Adama), Grace Park (Athena) or Katee Sackhoff (Starbuck).
TV's Colbert In Spidey's Web?
New Emmy winner and satirical talk-show host Stephen Colbert will join forces with ... Spider-Man??
Marvel announced that a two-dimensional version of Colbert will appear in an eight-page story featured in the extra-sized Amazing Spider-Man, number 573.
Writer Mark Waid and artist Patrick Olliffe will feature Colbert as a candidate for the presidency in the Marvel Universe, teaming up with the wallcrawler himself.
The issue also features a special Colbert variant by Marvel EiC and industry Joe Quesada.
Q&A: Chuck's Gomez Spills
Joshua Gomez, one of the stars of NBC's Chuck, is ready to spend lots more time on the SF spy comedy's Buy More set.
And that's a good thing, because Gomez--who plays Morgan Grimes, the best friend to nerd-turned-spy Chuck Bartowski (Zachary Levi)--will likely be on that set often now that NBC has committed to a 22-episode second season of Chuck.
Talking to reporters during a Sept. 18 conference call, Gomez revealed that Morgan will be as lazy as ever, that he'll be covering for Chuck while Chuck heads off on his misadventures and that viewers can expect to see a cameo appearance by retired New York Giants football star Michael Strahan.
Following are edited portions of the interview with Gomez.
What's your take on Morgan? Who is he? What's his place in the Chuck mix?
Gomez: I think he's just, at heart, he's just a good kid. He's sweet-natured, but he's a little bit, ... he's not so goal-oriented. He's a little lazy, and I think it's just like he wants to do as little work as possible, hang out with his buddy, play some video games and, you know, not cause too much trouble. The simple things make Morgan happy, like a sandwich, a nice video game.
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The cast of Chuck (from left): Joshua Gomez as Morgan Grimes, Vik Sahay as Lester, Julia Ling as Anna, Zachary Levi as Chuck Bartowski, Scott Krinsky as Jeff, Mark Christopher Lawrence as Big Mike. (Mitchell Haaseth for NBC)
And he's lusted for Chuck’s sister, Ellie [Sarah Lancaster], his whole life, right?
Gomez: Yeah, and I look at that as like that's his best friend's older sister and, ... I don't know, I feel like there's a lot of guys that can relate to that. It's just that first love, kind of. I think sometimes Morgan's affection for Ellie is a very sweet, almost like a little boy's infatuation kind of thing that's just carried on a little way too long.
Give us a little sense of what Morgan's going to be up to in this season and how he's going to fit into all of the action and romance. Or will his scenes take place mostly at the Buy More when Chuck’s life overlaps into the store from the spy end of the equation?
Gomez: I think it's the latter. I think that it's going to be very Buy More-centric. Morgan's very heavy in the Buy More and the B story, and it's sort of him taking a little bit of the reins over there at the store, because, as you said, Chuck finds himself, I think, more and more wrapped up in the spy world. He becomes less and less present at the store, which actually is one of the side stories, where we have this new guy, Emmett Milbars--who is played by the very, very funny and very talented Tony Hale--come in, and he's just like, "How come I hear all this great stuff about this Chuck Bartowski and yet he's never here?" kind of thing. And then I don't know why exactly I'm covering for Chuck, but as a friend it's my job to cover for him, so I have to cover for him.
And all these things happen at the Buy More for this season, obviously for the first time. Even in a B story we had a great guest star like Michael Strahan come in. It was sort of a David-and-Goliath-type scenario of Morgan having to face off against this mammoth human being who works next door at this Sports Chalet-type of place called the Mighty Jocks. And he just keeps coming in, and he just keeps using our video games, and him and his jock friends are playing games in our home theater room. I have to kick them out, and it doesn't go well. So it's definitely heavily featured in the Buy More stuff, I think, this season.
Chuck just recently got an order for nine additional episodes, even before season two begins. You know you've got a full 22 to play with. You can develop the characters. You know you can pay your bills for the next however long ...
Gomez
: Ding, ding, ding. Yeah, we couldn't be happier. When I got the call I was just really, ... I mean, you can't hear better news, and it's sort of unprecedented, which I thought was really, really cool. To get it this early just based off of what the network had seen and the studio had seen, it feels really good. It just gives you that confidence. You go, "OK, we're doing something right," you know? So we kind of go forward now with hopefully a little swagger in our steps and feel confident and know that we're on the right path.
Chuck returns for its second season on Sept. 29 at 8 p.m. ET/PT with the episode "Chuck vs. the First Date." (NBC is owned by NBC Universal, which also owns SCIFI.COM.) --Ian Spelling
Q&A: Tapping On Sanctuary
Amanda Tapping, who produces and stars in SCI FI Channel's upcoming original series Sanctuary, told reporters that she had made the decision to focus on the new show even before SCI FI renewed Stargate Atlantis, on which she was a regular cast member.
Tapping spent more than a decade playing her Stargate character, Lt. Col. Samantha Carter, and also appeared in two direct-to-DVD movies.
In Sanctuary, she plays Dr. Helen Magnus, an enigmatic 157-year-old scientist out to protect mankind from monsters of all kinds, including the monsters within. Tapping spoke with reporters during a Sept. 23 conference call. Following is an edited version of the conversation. Sanctuary will premiere with a two-hour episode on Oct. 3 at 9 p.m. ET/PT.
You'd already done the Web-based version of Sanctuary while you were on Stargate, but take us through the process of leaving Stargate behind in order to do Sanctuary as a TV series.
Tapping: When I first got approached with Sanctuary, I didn't know what the future of me and the Stargate franchise was going to be. And so--this was January of 2006 that initially the script was brought to me--at that time I didn't know I was going to be doing Atlantis, and I didn't know what was going to happen with SG-1. So we shot this little test scene, and ... we got the funding, and in January 2007 decided to do a Web series, which didn't seem at all to conflict with Stargate or how that was going to work. The timing worked out perfectly. And then when it came down to [it], ... I had finished season four of Atlantis, and I got offered season five, and it was a really lovely contract. And it would've been very easy to say yes. But I had to sort of make this enormous leap of faith, because Sanctuary was waiting in the wings.
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Dr. Helen Magnus (Amanda Tapping) introduces herself to Dr. Will Zimmerman (Robin Dunne) in "Sanctuary for All," the first episode. (Jeff Weddell for SCI FI)
We didn't have a broadcast deal yet. We had a lot of interest from different broadcasters around the world, and we were hoping that we would get picked up. And so had I said yes to Atlantis, I would've basically killed Sanctuary where it stood, because I wouldn't have been available to do it, and it would've gone away. And I felt really strongly ... so many people had put their time and effort and money and support behind it that I thought, "It’s time to make this leap. And I love the character. I love this show."
Stargate was very gracious and understood my need to sort of move on. The fact that there was still the possibility of Stargate movies and that I would definitely be involved in them made it sort of a soft landing, because I wasn't actually saying goodbye. I was saying, "See you later." But I did make this enormous leap of faith whereby I said, "OK, I have to stand beyond this project. I put my money in it. I put my name attached to it, and I'm executive-producing it. And here I go." So I took the leap, and shortly after turning down the Atlantis contract, Sanctuary started to get its broadcasts picked up around the world. So "phew!" was basically the word of the week.
Everything about Magnus is different from Carter, including the look, the clothes, the accent, the footwear. How conscious a choice was that?
Tapping: It was a really conscious choice. When I first decided to do Helen Magnus, it was a real conscious choice to have absolutely no vestige of Sam Carter in this character, in terms of everything from her appearance to her voice, t
o her walk, to her wardrobe, everything. I just felt the need to completely reinvent. Partly, as a woman, I just felt it was time, and as an actress, I just felt it was time to just try something completely different. And it's kind of great, because I go places and people don't recognize me; people that I've worked with for 10 years don’t recognize me.
You're an old hat now at dealing with visual effects, but Sanctuary is taking it to the extreme. It's pretty much all green screen, with the actors working in front of a backdrop. How has that experience been?
Tapping: It feels more like doing theater than anything else. And that was my training, so it actually feels like you're putting on a play half the time, because you don't have a huge set to play with, and you really do definitely have the fourth wall. So it does feel a bit more like theater. ... The hardest thing with shooting an almost entirely virtual show is getting a sense of the scale. We've "shot" in the catacombs under Rome, and we've shot in huge chapels. ... The Sanctuary itself is this massive structure. And it's really hard to get a sense of just how big it all is. And so when we're starting to see now the fully finished effects, you're like, "Oh, my, wow. The Sanctuary really is huge. Whoa, OK." But that's the hardest thing. The hardest thing is just getting a sense of the scope.
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The cast of SCI FI Channel's Sanctuary (from left): Christopher Heyerdahl as John Druitt, Amanda Tapping as Dr. Helen Magnus, Emilie Ullerep as Ashley Magnus and Robin Dunne as Dr. Will Zimmerman.
How would you set the show up for someone who is coming in blind to it, who hasn't seen the webisodes? What would you say is Sanctuary's tone?
Tapping: Wow. You know, we've been asking ourselves that same question. I keep going to [executive producer] Damian [Kindler] and saying, "What's the logline for our show? Come on, come on." How would I describe it? It's centered around my character, Helen Magnus, who is a 157-year-old doctor from Victorian England who runs a sanctuary for all manner of abnormal creatures. She pulls into the fray a young forensic psychiatrist named Will Zimmerman [Robin Dunne], who has always sort of thought outside of the box and has therefore been shunned by regular law-enforcement agencies, but in fact now realizes that the things that he's tried to investigate are real.
So you're kind of seeing a lot of the Sanctuary and a lot of the creatures and a lot of the mythologies through his eyes as sort of the everyman. But the show has a very graphic-novel feel to it. We're shooting almost photo-real. Half the time you're not sure if what you're looking at really exists or whether it's a visual effect, and sometimes it's very obvious that it's a visual effect, and we're shooting with a real graphic style. So it's got a real edgy look to it. So that's [the] tone, a bit of the plot. I have this really kick-ass daughter, Ashley [Emilie Ullerup], who is a weapons expert and a martial artist. And, you know, she's kind of the cool factor. And we draw from characters in history and from this incredible mythology of my backstory.
How hands-on are you as an executive producer, and what kind of appreciation has being a producer given you for what it actually it takes to put on a show like this?
Tapping: Well, I'm very hands-on, more so than I probably should be. But I'm very hands-on. I took the mantle very seriously. So part of my job, I felt, was to go out and try to get us the funding to continue to make the show. I'm in touch with our financial guys on a regular basis, and that's kind of my job, is to go and get beaten up. "Why does television cost so much money?" And I have to answer those questions. I'm involved in the casting and editing and maki
ng sure that the crew is all put together. Now I'm doing post-production, mixing shows, color-correcting and the sound and everything.
So this is a whole new learning curve for me. And I literally found that I do not have a spare minute in my day. As soon as I get to work, which is usually a couple of hours before crew call, if I'm not sitting in the makeup chair or actually acting on set, then I'm in a meeting or a conference call. So my appreciation is that I think actors are wimps. Now, I used to think that I had the hardest job in the world. Sam Carter was a really intense character in terms of the volume of dialogue that I had. And I used to think, "Oh, my God, I've got 10 pages of technobabble today. I'm working so hard." And now I just laugh at that and go, "Oh, my God, there are days where I just want to be an actor again."
You've already wrapped all 13 first-season episodes of Sanctuary. How satisfied are you with how it's come together?
Tapping: Totally, totally proud of it. I'm really thrilled. I think we have some really killer episodes, and I'm proud of the fact that our crew stuck around. We wanted to start in February. We didn't end up starting to shoot until May. A lot of the people we have are feature-quality crew members, and features have tried to lure them away, and they stayed with the show. I think it speaks volumes about how much faith people have in this project. So I'm proud of the look of the show and the feel of it and the attitude on set and the fun that we had. But I'm really proud of the product. And I think there's some shows coming up ... there’s an episode called "Requiem" which, for me personally, was the bravest work I've ever done as an actor. And I don't think I would've been able to do that had I not felt so safe. So I credit the crew and the cast. ... It was a phenomenal experience. --Ian Spelling
TV Smackdown V: Sanctuary Vs. Blood
This week, SCI FI Wire will run a daily series of stories looking at the competition among new television series we like to call our Fall TV Smackdown. We'll pit two fall shows against each other and see which one comes out the winner. Are the comparisons fair? Of course not. It's about as fair as Sylar cutting open Claire's brain in the Heroes season premiere.
It's all about the ladies in this sci-fi-vs.-fantasy feature matchup as SCI FI Channel's new original series Sanctuary takes on HBO's True Blood. It's a monster mash that has a cool, virtual world with Amanda Tapping in one corner and hot, randy vamps with Anna Paquin in the other ... with accents.
True Blood.HBO, Sundays, 9 p.m. ET/PT. Premiered Sept. 7. After the invention of synthetic blood allows vampires to "come out of the coffin"--they don't have to feed off humans anymore--they've managed to gain rights as citizens. In the small town of Bon Temps, La., local waitress Sookie Stackhouse (Paquin) can't wait to meet her first vampire. Sookie knows something about being different: She's been able to read minds since she was a little girl. Knowing what everyone around her thinks has been a curse to her. But when vampire Bill Compton (Stephen Moyer) walks into the bar where Sookie works, she discovers she can't read his mind. Her attraction to him is strong, and she doesn't care that he's a 173-year-old vampire, despite what her friends and the people of the town think. But as Sookie soon discovers, Bill's arrival is only the beginning of the changes that are about to happen in her life.
True Blood's Secret Weapon: With Academy Award-winning actress Paquin (and her Southern accent) and Academy and Emmy Award winner Alan Ball as the creator, there's a whole lot of Oscars running around here. But the real star is the material. True Blood is based on the Southern Vampire series of books by Charlaine Harris.
The Outlook: In this faithful re-creation of the novel series, Ball does a good job bringing Sookie's world alive. Paquin embodies Sookie nicely, and Stephen Moyer is just right as Bill. Ball has updated the material appropriately, but it does feel a bit flat without Sookie's internal dialogue, something you can only get by reading the books. The big problem, however, is that the people who don't know anything about Sookie Stackhouse will find the series difficult to follow if they miss an episode. Luckily, being on HBO, the episodes will be run many times. And Ball makes full use of its HBO status with plenty of sex, colorful language and violence. And for fans of the book series, the good news is that the 12 episodes that loosely make up the events of the first novel will air, even though the first few episodes prove Ball isn't afraid to change things up a bit. It all adds up to happy times for HBO. True Blood has been renewed for a second season already. Production is set to begin in early January 2009, with the second season set for the summer.
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Rutina Wesley (left) plays Tara, the best friend to Anna Paquin's Sookie. (John P. Johnson for HBO)
Sanctuary.SCI FI, Fridays, 9 p.m. ET/PT. Premieres Oct. 3.Sanctuary is billed by SCI FI as the first television series to feature live actors against primarily virtual sets, along the lines of 300 and Sin City. While it began life as an eight-episode Web series, the television show features a two-hour premiere that starts at the beginning of the story. While investigating a murder case, forensic psychiatrist Dr. Will Zimmerman (Robin Dunne) begins to suspect the explanation offered at a murder scene. Will soon discovers that his suspicions are right. When a woman named Dr.
Helen Magnus (Tapping) approaches him, she takes Will to a place she calls the Sanctuary and tells him an amazing tale. According to Magnus, the world is filled with Abnormals, fantastic creatures that are the stuff of fairy-tale books and incredible legends. The world needs to be protected from some of them, while others need to be protected from the world. Magnus has made it her mission to find and study these creatures and to offer them sanctuary if they want it. She is joined on her mission by her fearless daughter, Ashley (Emilie Ullerup), a loyal butler who looks a lot like Bigfoot and their technical wizard, Henry. As Will learns more about Magnus' world and her nemesis, John Druitt (Christopher Heyerdahl), he must decide whether he can "dare to believe in the unbelievable."
Sanctuary's Secret Weapon: With an incredible virtual world and a brunette Tapping with an English accent, who needs reality? Sanctuary is executive-produced by Tapping, creator Damian Kindler, Martin Wood and Sam Egan.
The Outlook: SCI FI's big new SF entry, Sanctuary, offers to put Tapping back in action in a role very different role from Stargate SG-1's Lt. Col. Samantha Carter, and that's a good thing. Beyond that, it's dripping with mythology and has loads of action and extremely cool visuals, not to mention some nicely drawn characters. Along with Fringe, Sanctuary has more of a fully realized world than any of the other fall offerings. Taking up residence on Friday nights, the series should be an excellent match for Stargate Atlantis. With 13 episodes ordered, look for Sanctuary to do very well for SCI FI.
The Winner: It's going to be a knock-down, drag-out marathon, with True Blood already being renewed for a second season and Sanctuary a shoo-in, considering that Battlestar Galactica and Stargate Atlantis are headed out. Let's call this one a draw, with virtual fangs. --Kathie Huddleston
The cast of SCI FI Channel's Sanctuary (from left): Christopher Heyerdahl as John Druitt, Amanda Tapping as Dr. Helen Magnus, Emilie Ullerep as Ashley Magnus and Robin Dunne as Dr. Will Zimmerman.
New Look For Carter Of Mars?
Andrew Stanton, who is writing and directing John Carter of Mars, based on Edgar Rice Burroughs' books, told SCI FI Wire that he and co-writer Mark Andrews will be putting their own spin on the iconic story, and a Pixar manager added that the film will have a unique look as well.
"I'm going to do what I remember more than what they exactly do" in the books, Stanton said cryptically in a group interview at the Emeryville, Calif., headquarters of Pixar on Sept. 25.
Stanton (WALL*E) added that he is currently deep in writing with partner Andrews, a storyboard artist at Pixar, on the script for Carter. "John Carter of Mars is what I'm writing right now with Mark Andrews," Stanton said. "Writing, it's all about writing this year."
Jim Morris, general manager at Pixar Animation, promised that the movie will not look like previous attempts to adapt the franchise for the screen. "Everything that's been out there has been an attempt to kind of capture this Deco-esque [Frank] Frazetta vision of John Carter, which I think feels old and stale," he said. "And where Stanton is going--from what we've seen so far--is very different than that. And I think that the people who really love the essence of the books will really dig it, but so will audiences in general."
Asked whether the film would be in 3-D, Morris added, "I hope not!"
The film is based on the early-20th-century Barsoom series of books by Burroughs, the California author of the Tarzan series. It centers on a Civil War veteran who finds himself transported to the Red Planet and caught up in various battles and intrigues involving giant green creatures and an alluring princess.
It's been reported that Carter may incorporate live-action elements amid animation. Stanton's WALL*E was the first Pixar production to incorporate live action. Morris declined to discuss the matter.
"John Carter is in its very early stages, and there is much to figure out about that, so we'd be premature," Morris said. "We are looking at a variety of different approaches and techniques for that ... We're kind of a bit early in the development of that."
Morris added: "I'm sure I speak for all of the science fiction geeks, fans and aficionados when I say it's finally time to see that movie. And I, for one, am delighted that Andrew Stanton is the guy that's making the movie, because he's a story-driven guy." --Patrick Lee, News Editor
Blood Promotes Cast
HBO's True Blood is promoting cast members for its upcoming second season, according to The Hollywood Reporter.
Guest stars Mehcad Brooks, Todd Lowe, Deborah Ann Woll and Michelle Forbes have been upped to regulars for the show's recently ordered second season.
All will appear in the first-season finale later this fall.
The season closer of Alan Ball's vampire drama will mark Brooks' first showing as Benedict "Eggs" Talley, a mellow, guitar-strumming refugee from a hard life.
Gilmore Girls alumnus Lowe debuted his character, Terry Bellefleur, in Episode 2.
Woll plays Jessica, while Forbes plays Maryann.
Yoda Stars In Clone Premiere
Yoda takes on an entire droid army in the first-season premiere of Star Wars: The Clone Wars, the new Cartoon Network animated series, which premieres at 9 p.m. Oct. 3.
In the first episode, "Ambush," Jedi Master Yoda and three clone troopers must face off against Count Dooku's dreaded assassin, Asajj Ventress, and the massive Separatist droid army to prove the Jedi are strong enough to protect a strategic planet and forge a treaty for the Republic.
The episode is directed by David Bullock (Justice League: The New Frontier) from a script by Steve Melching (The Batman). Dave Filoni is supervising director; George Lucas is the series' creator and serves as executive producer, and Catherine Winder is producer.
Yoda wreaks havoc on an army of battle droids in "Ambush," the series premiere of Star Wars: The Clone Wars.
Knight Debuts In Third
NBC's Knight Rider finished in third place in the ratings in its Sept. 24 premiere, according to The Hollywood Reporter.
Despite having the highest level of viewer awareness of NBC's new fall shows, Knight Rider reached 7.4 million viewers in the 8 p.m. hour, slightly less than Deal or No Deal in the slot last year and half the rating the Knight Rider movie pulled down last February.
Knight Rider faced the debut of CBS' new comedy hour, featuring a transplanted New Adventures of Old Christine and the debut of Gary Unmarried.
(NBC is owned by NBC Universal, which also owns SCIFI.COM.)
TV Smackdown IV: Mars Vs. Enemy
This week, SCI FI Wire will run a daily series of stories looking at the competition among new television series we like to call our Fall TV Smackdown. We'll pit two fall shows against each other and see which one comes out the winner. Are the comparisons fair? Of course not. It's about as fair as only getting a five-episode season of Torchwood next year. What's that about?!!!
Next up for our fourth matchup, it's the clash of the Really Confused Guys as ABC's Life on Mars goes up against My Own Worst Enemy. One guy can't figure out why he's suddenly stuck in 1973, and the other one has two personalities trapped in one body. Talk about a body-slamming battle of the titans! Now if only they could figure out what what their name is, what year it is, and where they are ...
Life on Mars.ABC, Thursdays, 10 p.m. ET/PT. Premieres Oct. 9. NYPD detective Sam Tyler (Jason O'Mara) is on the trail of a serial killer when he's hit by a car. When Sam comes to, the David Bowie song "Life on Mars" is playing on the radio, and he's somehow gone back in time to 1973. As Sam struggles to figure out what's going on, the cops at the station assume he's a new transfer. While it may be the 1970s, Sam has a murder to solve that looks a lot like the one he was investigating in 2008. As he has to deal with politically incorrect fellow cops and solve crimes in a world before DNA analysis, Sam attempts to find a way back home to the woman he loves, Maya (Lisa Bonet).
Life on Mars' Secret Weapon. The cast is top-notch, and O'Mara looks like a star. And with Harvey Keitel as the gruff Lt. Hunt, that performance will be an Emmy nomination waiting to happen. The cast also includes Bonet, Michael Imperioli as the resentful fellow detective Ray and Gretchen Mol as Sam's ally in the department, Annie. Life on Mars is based on the British limited series of the same name. Josh Appelbaum, Andre Nemec and Scott Rosenberg executive-produce.
The Outlook: As the biggest wild card of the season, Life on Mars has the potential to be great. The early pilot took place in L.A. and had a mostly different cast. The move to New York City seems to be a good one, and anything with Harvey Keitel can't be bad. Beyond that, Jason O'Mara is really good. But whether the new production team can pull Life on Mars together remains to be seen, especially considering it's landed in the most challenging timeslot of the season. The battle between this series and CBS' Eleventh Hour will be a difficult one, since the premise is a tough sell. Is it time travel or not? If not, what is it? (Possible spoiler ahead!)
In the British version, the main character was in a coma. Producers have said that that is not necessarily the case with this American version. But if viewers can sit back and enjoy the ride and embrace how much the world has changed, they just might like this successor to NYPD Blue. Best guess for success: If Life on Mars can win over critics, ABC will give the series time to grow an audience.
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Jason O'Mara (left) is NYPD Detective Sam Tyler opposite Harvey Keitel as Lt. Gene Hunt in ABC's Life on Mars. (Eric Liebowitz for ABC)
My Own Worst Enemy.NBC, Mondays, 10 p.m. ET/PT. Premieres Oct. 13. Henry Spivey (Christian Slater) is an average guy who has a good job as an efficiency expert and a nice home in the suburbs with a wife, two kids, a dog and a minivan. Edward Albright is a cold-blooded spy who speaks 13 languages, can run a four-minute mile and can kill a man with his teeth. Unfortunately, Henry and Edward share the same body. A secret government organization called the Janus Collective has put an implant in Henry/Edward's brain that gives them the ability to switch between the two personali
ties, ensuring the safety of their secrets if Edward gets captured. But when the chip malfunctions, the two personalities begin to learn about each other, and each man finds himself in unfamiliar territory. And if the company finds out, they'll both be history.
My Own Worst Enemy's Secret Weapon: Not one, but two Christian Slaters! The series also stars Alfre Woodard as Mavis Heller and Madchen Amick as Henry's wife, Angie. My Own Worst Enemy was created by Jason Smilovic, and the pilot was directed by David Semel.
The Outlook: No pilot has been available, but the previews look great. Slater certainly has the range to play the mild-mannered Henry and the calculating Edward. Producers promise that My Own Worst Enemy will spend equal time as a family drama and a spy thriller, as Henry and Edward have to deal with each other's worlds. As for the timeslot, Enemy airs after Heroes. While that didn't work out well for last season's Journeyman, Enemy appears to be a better fit. The series will have to take on two proven shows on opposite networks: ABC's Boston Legal and CBS' CSI: Miami. It will be a tough job. But if Slater's Jekyll-and-Hyde character get some meaty material to play, he just might find a home on Mondays.
The Winner: There's no doubt Mars looks like it's going to be a fighter, and it has great potential. But you've also got to love a show that stars Christian Slater and Christian Slater. The only thing better would be three Christian Slaters! The decision goes to ... My Own Worst Enemy. –-Kathie Huddleston
Coming Friday: True Blood vs. Sanctuary
Christian Slater as Edward Albright in NBC's My Own Worst Enemy. (Paul Drinkwater for NBC)
Disney Unveils Ambitious Slate
Walt Disney Co. previewed a sequel to its 1982 SF movie Tron, a 3-D motion-capture remake of A Christmas Carol and a Tim Burton remake of Alice Wonderland, with Johhny Depp as the Mad Hatter, in a presentation in Hollywood on Sept. 24, the Associated Press reported.
Depp will also reprise the role of Captain Jack Sparrow in a fourth Pirates of the Caribbean movie.
The daylong presentation at the Kodak Theatre, home of the Oscars, delivered repeated surprises as actors emerged onstage to tout animated 3-D movies, live-action thrillers and comedies--with animal co-stars ranging from guinea pigs and chihuahuas to humpback whales, the wire service reported.
Jim Carrey will star in his first Disney film, a 3-D motion-capture remake of Charles Dickens' A Christmas Carol.
Disney made a similar presentation of its animated films to investors in April in New York, but held its last live-action movie showcase three years ago.
Among other casting announcements, Disney said Oprah Winfrey will be the voice of the character of Eudora in the hand-drawn animated movie set in New Orleans, The Princess and the Frog.
The film features an African-American heroine, Tiana, played by Anika Noni Rose. Winfrey plays Tiana's mother in the movie, set for release on Christmas in 2009.
A brief snippet from Tron 2 featured a louder, crisper and more thrilling bike race and a cameo by an older Jeff Bridges, who starred in the original version.
Dwayne Johnson was on hand to tout Race to Witch Mountain.
Pixar and Disney animation studios' chief creative officer, John Lasseter, also broke the news that Cars 2, the sequel to the blockbuster he directed for Pixar Animation Studios, would be released in the summer of 2011, a year earlier than once planned.
Knight's Poitier Still Lesbian?
NBC's Knight Rider threw viewers for a loop when FBI agent Carrie Ruvai (Sydney Tamiia Poitier) was introduced in a February television movie/pilot: She was shown climbing out of the bed she had just shared with a blond woman.
"There was a girl lying there when she was getting out bed, and I went through it like 10 times and watched it and wondered, 'Are they friends? Is that her roommate? Are they saying she's bisexual or she's gay or what?' I had to go to them and ask," said new Knight Rider executive producer Gary Scott Thompson in an interview. (He wasn't involved in the making of the TV pilot movie.)
Thompson said that, at the time, the studio was angry that a possible bisexual scene was used early on in a family TV movie. But Thompson says now that he won't change the character's possible orientation for the new TV series based on the movie and the 1980s TV show of the same name.
"It was clear to the gay, lesbian and bi community that they knew what it was supposed to be," Thompson said in an interview from the show's Santa Clarita, Calif., set. "Others didn't get it. I knew it. They got a lot of flak about doing that, but in some ways it sets a precedent."
Thompson added: "My inclination is to leave her as she was. Why change it? But the thing about my argument is that, in the case of Anne Heche, she was straight, then bi, then a lesbian, then bi, then straight. If [Poitier's character] is actually bisexual, she would appear different ways, depending on the situation. Of course, in my book, that would make her a much more interesting character, much like Capt. Jack Harkness in Torchwood. If I could use Jack in Torchwood as a role model--I would absolutely use him as a role model--I love his conflictedness about ... everybody. He's real cool."
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Knight Rider cast (from left): Sydney Tamiia Poitier as Carrie Ruvai, Justin Bruening as Mike Tracer/Traceur/Knight, Deanna Russo as Sarah Graiman.
For her part, Poitier--the 34-year-old daughter of Oscar-winning actor Sidney Poitier--shrugs off the issue about her character, who is now head of security for the team that operates the superpowered transforming Mustang, K.I.T.T.
"It's such a non-issue for my generation at this point," Poitier said. "I was really surprised that people were thinking about it and that they were so concerned. Bottom line, to be honest, I don't think you are going to see her have a personal life. She literally lives here [in the underground headquarters], and she is head of security, watching everyone 24/7, and has responsibilities. You're not going to see her out on a date with someone or see her wink at somebody. ... I don't think you're going to see her have any kind of life, unfortunately, but you never know."
Any sexual tension on the new series will smolder mainly between Mike (Justin Bruening) and Sarah (Deanna Russo), with the talking car K.I.T.T. providing commentary (voiced by Val Kilmer). "Mike and Sarah have brought their sexuality inside the headquarters, but no one else has," Poitier said. "I know it's very trend-setting, but we do have a major family show, and I'm thrown in the middle of it."
As much as he admires the British series Doctor Who and Torchwood, Thompson said, "We can't get away with what they do. ... America is extremely [prudish], and we're living in a Republican regime, where it becomes even more [so]. The reality is that there are people who are out there who are bisexual. There are people who are gay, that's the reality out there. It's, like, deal with it. I mean, trying to shove people back in the closet isn't correct."
The TV series, which debuted on Sept. 24, kicks off in real time about half a year after the events of the TV movie. "Right now, we have not dealt with Sydney's character in
that way," Thompson said. "Her character is very professional and responsible. She is in charge and can shut down operations. As far as who she's dating, we have not even thought about it." Knight Rider airs Wednesdays at 8 p.m. ET/PT. (NBC is owned by NBC Universal, which also owns SCIFI.COM.) --Mike Szymanski
Spielberg Mulls Chocky
DreamWorks has acquired the dramatic rights to the science fiction novel Chocky from Pollinger Ltd., the U.K. agency that handles the literary estate of the late author John Wyndham, and Steven Spielberg is said to be keen to make the adaptation his next directing project, according to The Hollywood Reporter.
Chocky tells the story of a boy who has a mysterious imaginary friend with whom he frequently argues. As the boy's father gets increasingly suspicious, it becomes clear that an alien entity has taken up residence in the boy's consciousness.
Now that DreamWorks has severed its relationship with Paramount, it's unclear which studio will co-develop the film.
Chocky is a 1968 novel written by Wyndham (officially John Wyndham Parkes Lucas Beynon Harris), a British science fiction writer who wrote the well-known The Day of the Triffids.
Ember Gets Author's Blessing
Gil Kenan--director of City of Ember, the upcoming big-screen adaptation of Jeanne DuPrau's youth fantasy novel--told SCI FI Wire that the author was supportive of him even as she came to terms with the fact that a film can be vastly different from its source material.
In the film, two 12-year-olds (Saoirse Ronan and Harry Treadaway) race the clock to save themselves, their city and mankind as the generator in their underground world fails, threatening to snuff all the lights. City of Ember is Kenan's first live-action film, following his Oscar-nominated animated movie Monster House.
"I met Jeanne just recently," Kenan said in an interview. "We had talked on the phone and exchanged e-mails during the production. I would send her photographs of the sets being built and keep her in the loop. It's a very strange experience for her. It's her first novel being turned into the first film out of one of her works. So she's been really supportive, and she's really had to also come to grips with the fact that a movie is a movie. It's not bound to words on a page."
Kenan explained that, based on reading DuPrau's book, he doodled a design for the city, and the design is "not exactly how" DuPrau imagined it. "But she loves it and thinks that it's Ember," he said. "It's all part of that relationship of 'Where does a film adaptation breathe? Where does it grow from what's on the page?' So she's been great, and when I met with her recently and showed her a bunch of the film, she was very enthusiastic."
Up next for Kenan is Airman, an adventure-fantasy based on the young-adult novel by Artemis Fowl scribe Eoin Colfer. Kenan will direct the performance-capture animated film and in the process re-team with his Monster House producer, Robert Zemeckis, who himself directed the performance-capture films The Polar Express and Beowulf. Once he completes Airman it's possible that--assuming City of Ember lights up the box office--Kenan could return to direct a sequel based on DuPrau's second book in the series, The People of Sparks.
"The core dramatic punch of that story is almost Orwellian," Kenan said. "It's a classic device that I haven't seen on film before. I'm really interested in the way that that story is handled. I love seeing a sort of post-apocalyptic Mayberry, in a way. It's this town that was created and built organically out of the ashes of what survived on the surface rather than this master-plan utopia that became a dystopia, which is what Ember is. So, as a foil to the first film, I think it's a really clever one, and that's interesting to me." City of Ember opens on Oct. 10. --Ian Spelling
Cloverfield's Reeves Vamps
Cloverfield director Matt Reeves will write and direct the vampire tale Let the Right One In for Overture Films and Hammer Films, Variety reported.
The movie is the first in a two-picture co-production, financing and distribution pact between Overture and HS Media, parent of Hammer and Spitfire Films.
The project is a remake of Tomas Alfredson's Swedish film Lat Den Ratte Komma In, based on a novel by Swedish author John Ajvide Lindqvist. It centers on a young boy who befriends a female neighbor who moves to town.
Overture is planning to release the remake next year.
Del Toro Co-Writing Vampire Books
Filmmaker Guillermo del Toro has signed a publishing deal with HarperCollins imprint William Morrow to pen a trilogy of vampire thrillers with Chuck Hogan, Variety reported. The first book, The Strain, hits bookstores next summer.
The story will revolve around an invasion of New York City by a vampiric virus. The series will trace the roots of the vampiric race back to its Old Testament origins.
The books will be published by HarperCollins in the United Kingdom, and a special edition will be published simultaneously by the company's Spanish-language imprint, Rayo, in the United States.
Del Toro is currently getting ready to direct New Line and MGM's The Hobbit, to which he has committed the next five years.
Through 2017, he's also attached to helm a remake of Frankenstein, Dr. Jekyll and Mr. Hyde and Slaughterhouse-Five at Universal, as well as Drood, based on Dan Simmons' novel. (Universal is owned by NBC Universal, which also owns SCIFI.COM.)
We Play Naruto--And Lose
It's kind of unfair for people who work on a video game to demo the upcoming title by beating a journalist at it. Kit Ellis, public relations manager for Bandai Namco Games, showed me the upcoming Naruto Ultimate Ninja Storm game by fighting me as characters from the anime show. He gave me about half a round to figure out the controls before slaughtering me in animated combat. At least I got the scoop on the new game by learning how not to play it.
Ultimate Ninja Storm is the first PlayStation 3 title in the Naruto franchise. Leaping from PS2, fans of the Naruto series will get to become the manga and anime show's title character, a ninja boy with the spirit of the Nine-Tailed Fox. Players will explore the show's town of Hidden Leaf Village and fight as its myriad characters, utilizing all of their special powers.
With 3-D environments and free-roaming missions, the PS3 version allows a deeper Naruto immersion than previous systems could, according to Ellis. He called the fighting component "the meat of the game," as two-thirds of the game's missions are combat.
Two Naruto characters square off in 3-D environments, but each character chooses two support characters who can jump in to throw a punch or two.
"It's not like a tag team," Ellis said. "They just come in for a quick burst to help you in a pinch. You've got [an opponent] who's just combo-ing you, they can break it up. They can act as a buffer while you charge up your special abilities."
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One of Naruto's moves is to project two clones of himself to attack while he stands back. It must be a basic move, because it's the one that kept happening every time I pushed a button.
When the player's health is low, he or she can actually activate a transformation into a more powerful version. It is a last-ditch effort to score some big combos and win the round.
The controls were simple enough that I could launch some ninja stars, jump around and initiate some minor special attacks. Combining buttons activates a more impressive display of combat, as Ellis demonstrated.
"If you jump once and then hold down the button, you can do all these sorts of flips as you move around, move a bit more nimble around the environment," Ellis said. "The controls are actually fairly close to what they were on the PS2, but those games were strictly 2-D. Just the function of each button is pretty much the same, but the way everybody moves is going to be totally different."
During the fight, if a character is knocked against the wall, the screen turns sideways and players continue fighting while standing sideways, parallel to the ground.
After a particularly hard strike, the game cuts to anime-style inserts of the character taking a punch in slow motion. My poor Naruto made a lot of animated Raging Bull reactions as my poor skills couldn't stand up to Ellis.
"I know they did put a lot of emphasis on facial expressions in the game," Ellis said. "Some games, when you're fighting you always have the same expression. With the show, they're so expressive with the faces. That's something I think this game is very good at."
In the game's story mission, players will roam around Hidden Leaf Village, Naruto's home. Naruto will talk to villagers and accept missions, two-thirds of which are fights but one-third of which are quests and mini-games. Naruto Ultimate Ninja Storm is due in stores in November. --Fred Topel
Can Skinned's Machine Be Human?
Young-adult author Robin Wasserman told SCI FI Wire that her new novel, Skinned, grew out of her graduate studies into automata--mechanical replicas of life.
"We search for qualities that machines don't and cannot possess and label those qualities as uniquely human, but as technology improves, machines continue encroaching on our territory, giving us a narrower and narrower scope of possibilities for something uniquely ours," Wasserman said in an interview. "I think emotion (and the irrationality inherent in it) is, at the moment, the prime candidate for a defining human condition--while it's at the forefront of AI research, it's still hard for us to imagine a machine truly 'feeling.'"
Wasserman didn't explicitly set out to explore these issues in Skinned. "At the beginning I was more interested in the general question of what it would feel like to be a machine," she said. "But as I wrote, I realized that concept--feeling--is what draws everything together: How you feel temperature, how you feel pain, how you feel joy. The physical and the emotional, wrapped up in one. Which means that even if your brain is identical, a new body--especially a mechanical body--is inevitably going to change the way you experience the world and yourself."
Skinned tells the story of a world only a few decades removed from our own, ripped to shreds by religious extremism, poverty and catastrophic climate change. "Lia Kahn is one of the lucky ones: genetically tailored, like all her wealthy peers, to possess the qualities she'll need to one day run the show--beauty, intelligence, grace--she has it all," Wasserman said. "Until the car crash that nearly kills her. She wakes up to discover that her life has been saved with a risky new technology, the download procedure."
Lia's brain has been mapped onto a quantum computer and inserted into a mechanical body that looks almost human. "Almost," Wasserman said. "Branded an inhuman freak, she's rejected by her friends and family and forced to question her own identity. Is she really Lia Kahn, resurrected from the dead? Or just a pathetic copy, a computer program duped into believing it's real?" --John Joseph Adams
Battlestar's Billy Is Knight's, Too
Fans of SCI FI Channel's Battlestar Galactica may be forgiven for doing a double take when viewing the premiere of NBC's Knight Rider on Sept. 24: There's a character named Billy, and he's played by Paul Campbell.
"I do seem to be the record-holder for characters named 'Billy' in re-imagined television shows," Campbell said in an interview.
The coincidence--or is it?--is not lost on producers of the show, who promise to have some fun with it in an upcoming Halloween-themed episode that is aimed at fans of Battlestar and Torchwood.
In Knight Rider, Campbell plays Billy Morgan, a goofy computer technician who works on the talking car K.I.T.T. "By nature, I'm an idiot, and I was cast in this role as the comic relief, so I hope this works," Campbell said.
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Paul Campbell plays Billy Morgan in NBC's upcoming Knight Rider. (Mitchell Haaseth for NBC)
In Battlestar, Campbell played Billy Keikeya, the moony, ill-fated assistant to President Laura Roslin.
Knight Rider executive producer Gary Scott Thompson promised to play around with the coincidence. (Spoilers ahead!)
"Hopefully I can pull this off, but it's planned for our Halloween episode, and it involves Billy," Thompson said in interview this month on the show's set in Santa Clarita, Calif., north of Los Angeles.
Campbell explained: "I come into this Halloween party, and I'm dressed as Capt. Jack Harkness from Torchwood, and nobody recognizes me."
Zoe (Cho Smith), the girl Billy's interested in, does recognize the costume. "Oh, yeah, he's the gay time-travel character," she tells him.
"No, no, he's bisexual," Billy says.
Another cast member suggests that he dress up as Billy from Battlestar Galactica.
"I say, 'Oh, I'm not anything like that character in Battlestar. Did you watch that show?'" Campbell said. "I thought it was a hilarious gag. I don't know if it is too insider, ... but it is funny, and little things like the connection to Battlestar will set the blogs ablaze."
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In SCI FI Channel's Battlestar Galactica, Paul Campbell played Billy Keikeya.
Thompson copped to being a fan of both Doctor Who and Torchwood. "We will try to put little inside nods here and there that only the fans may get," he promised.
Campbell added: "It's only the character that I kind of flirt with, Zoe, who gets my costume, but doesn't understand I'm trying to be cool and open-minded."
Will Knight Rider's Billy be anything like Battlestar's? "I don't think I left much of a mark with the [Battlestar] character," Campbell said. "He was so humorless. Now I play something much different." (NBC is owned by NBC Universal, which also owns SCIFI.COM.) --Mike Szymanski
Exclusive! New Clip From Ember
SCI FI Wire has obtained an exclusive clip from Fox Walden's upcoming fantasy film City of Ember.
In the clip, "So Far, So Good," Sul (Martin Landau) shows young Doon Harrow (Harry Treadaway) how to work in the Pipeworks below the title city.
City of Ember, based on the children's book by Jeanne Duprau, stars Saoirse Ronan and Bill Murray. It opens Oct. 10.
Harry Treadaway, who co-stars in the upcoming adaptation of the fantasy children's book City of Ember by Jeanne Duprau, said that the film's imaginative production design helped his performance.
"The kind of visual manifestation of the script has been stronger than anything else I've ever done," Treadaway said in an interview on the set in Belfast, Northern Ireland, in September of 2007. "The whole world is like it is in the book. The first scene was turning up with this contraption that [my character's] dad had made that we kind of fight. And you turn up, and it's there. It really is there. And kind of as you imagined it, or better, normally in more detail."
In the film, Treadaway plays Doon Harrow, a curious young pipeworks laborer who lives with his inventor father (played by Tim Robbins) in a self-contained, underground city powered by a dying generator. Together with his friend, Lina Mayfleet (Oscar nominee Saoirse Ronan), Doon tries to decipher the clues that point the way to the city's salvation.
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Lina Mayfleet (Saoirse Ronan) and Doon Harrow (Harry Treadaway) enter the generating room in City of Ember.
Production designer Martin Laing and director Gil Kenan worked together to create the entire city inside a warehouse in Belfast that once housed the RMS Titanic. Designed with utility in mind, every detail of the sets--from the lampposts to the manhole covers--was carefully thought through and made in practical, working order wherever possible.
"I think Martin Laing deserves a mention for the set that he's done, which I've just been constantly amazed by," Treadaway said. "And every room you turn up into, you're just blown away. And you go, 'Nice one, mate. Thank you.' It kind of makes your job easier, because it's there. You see the control room, the little buttons are flashing, and it's all there."
Treadaway said that it was also really helpful to be able to work in a contiguous location, with working buildings and real streets, rather than on isolated sets.
"It is amazing, because every day you come through the main square, and it's amazing that it's all connected, as opposed to little bits around a studio," he said. "It's wonderful." City of Ember opens Oct. 10. --Cindy White
Stars Behind The Scenes At Eleventh
In the second half of SCI FI Wire's interview from the set of CBS' upcoming Eleventh Hour, stars Rufus Sewell and Marley Shelton talk about their characters' relationship and whether they will get, um, closer.
Sewell, who has appeared in such films as Dark City and, more recently, Amazing Grace and The Illusionist, spoke about his frustrations about being cast in certain types of roles and how that helped him make the choice to commit to a TV series.
In Eleventh Hour, Sewell plays Dr. Jacob Hood, a brilliant biophysicist and special science advisor to the government, and Shelton plays his FBI handler. The duo travel the country, investigating scientific crises and oddities. Along the way, audiences will hopefully gain insight into Hood's quirky approach to science and Shelton's by-the-book law enforcement, with a bit of humorous banter thrown in for flavor. The show debuts Oct. 9.
Shelton and Sewell spoke in a news conference on Sept. 22 from the show's set at the Warner Ranch studio lot in Burbank, Calif.
Is there an inevitable love storyline?
Sewell: It's only inevitable that it be brought up in situations like this. No, but honestly, there's nothing inevitable in it. You know, there are possibilities, always. These things are open to development in one direction or another, depending on so many different factors, but I don't think I’d describe it as an inevitability at all.
Do you think, though, that viewers seeing two very attractive people working together in stressful situations are going to want them to get together?
Sewell: People can want what they want. Who knows? It's not always interesting to give people what they want, because, as you find in real life, sometimes people don't want what they think they want. I think what's interesting is the possibility. The possibility is what makes things watchable. So the idea of finding out where that's going to go is something that can be left for a long time.
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Rufus Sewell, who plays Dr. Jacob Hood in CBS' Eleventh Hour, between takes on the show's set at Warner Brothers on Sept. 22. (Enzo Giobbe)
Does it affect the way you two play your relationship with each other?
Sewell: Does what affect it?
The possibility of something ever happening between you two?
Sewell: You mean the trembling level of desire? It permeates every moment. (Laughter.)
Yes, exactly that.
Sewell: In fact, they’ve asked me to bring it down a little. (Continued laughter.)
Have you sketched out the limits of Jacob Hood's knowledge? In the first two episodes, it certainly appears as if he's going to have the answer to absolutely any intellectual question.
Sewell: That's the way I like it. (Smiles.) He has limitless enthusiasm and limitless love and charm--like, wonder and limitless interest. It doesn't mean he knows all the answers, but in some kind of shambolic way, he's deeply interested enough. You know, really hungry for knowledge in such a way that, hopefully, if you're watching it, you can discover with him rather than him being some sort of automaton that just has the answers. He has a thirst for discovery.
Can I ask the two of you the thought process of committing to a television series that could possibly go on for years, given your movie careers?
Shelton: I think it's a matter of diving into the deep end and not getting too ahead of yourself. It's really an exercise in just being committed to the moment--to the now of now. I think what's interesting in the process was that it's a continuum rather than having a beginning, middle and end. It's probing this sort of continuum, so it's more like a marathon than a sprint. That's been an adjustment, but a welcome cha
llenge.
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Marley Shelton, who plays FBI agent Rachel Young on CBS' Eleventh Hour, on the set at Warner Brothers on Sept. 22. (Enzo Giobbe)
And you were looking for something to do like that?
Shelton: Yeah, because the one thing, of course, is you're able to go deeper with the character, theoretically. You get to spend that much more time, hopefully, with this person that you're playing.
Sewell: With me, I'm not sure it was something I was looking for, but I wasn't really conscious of what I was looking for. It wasn't actually what I was expecting. I was doing a play when it came up, but for me, you know, most big decisions I've had in my career have been weighing out certain pros and cons. For me, the fear would be being associated with one particular thing, but I think, especially with me, there's a danger of that in what dresses itself up as a varied film career.
I've found myself coming up against people who see me in a specific way that's not accurate. It doesn't accurately reflect what I'm capable of. Because of a couple of things I've done in the past, people tended to see me as a kind of upper-class villain on a horse, blah, blah, blah, blah, blah, which has been fun to do a couple of times, but, as far as I'm concerned, I made the decision a while ago that I'd rather not work than do it [again], because enough is enough. I am, primarily, I always thought, a character actor, and a comic character actor, if anything. I didn't want to get bored with myself, and in the process bore other people. So the opportunity to show people, for a start, playing a relatively good guy, quite complex, American, not on a horse, on a boat ... even if that becomes a stereotype that I'm stuck with for a while, there's so much more play in it. There's more play in it than the stereotype that I was in danger of being caught with. And, also, I have no intention of giving up my theater career or my film career. It might give up on me, but I'm not the one who's going to give up on it. ...
For Marley, in the original British pilot, Rachel does come very, very close to sleeping with the local law enforcement official, which seems like something that's an important thing in the introduction of that character. That's sort of the way she operates. In this American version, she doesn't, obviously, and that's not even hinted at.
Shelton: I know what you're saying. I do think that that is our hope. As we do get to know Rachel more, ... we will see more of that dimension of her character. That is a part of her. She is aggressive, and it may come out that way, and it may come out other ways. She's a modern woman, and I think that we will be exploring all sides of her. --Patrick Lee, News Editor
Cast and producers of CBS' Eleventh Hour (from left): Ethan Reiff, Cyrus Voris, Rufus Sewell, Marley Shelton, Jonathan Littman and Mick Davis. (Enzo Giobbe)
Arias Reveals Legion Details
Yancey Arias (NBC's Knight Rider) told SCI FI Wire that he will play a Los Angeles cop in the upcoming apocalyptic movie Legion.
"It looks like Legion is going to be really good," Arias said in an interview from the set of Knight Rider. "There are a lot of effects, because, after all, it is an apocalyptic movie. It is the archangel Gabriel, and the archangel Michael doing battle--again."
Legion stars Paul Bettany as the destructive angel, Michael, and Kevin Durand as Gabriel. The film also stars Dennis Quaid, Tyrese Gibson, Doug Jones and Kate Walsh. The movie is directed by Scott Charles Stewart, who worked in visual effects for Iron Man, Superman Returns and Harry Potter and the Goblet of Fire.
"He is an awesome director. He really knew what he was doing," Arias said.
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Yancey Arias plays Alex Torres in NBC's Knight Rider. (Byron Cohen for NBC)
In Legion, a group of people are trapped at a desert truck stop when demons open the gates of hell and try to fulfill an ancient prophecy. "I play a Los Angeles police officer who witnesses archangel Michael arriving to the planet and wreaking havoc. Yeah, L.A. gets destroyed again, and you might say I have a short-lived situation."
Arias added: "I'm tired of playing characters that get knocked off so quickly. I like another movie I'm in that's coming up, Behind Enemy Lines: Colombia, because I survive in that one." Legion is slated to open in January 2010.
In Knight Rider, Arias plays the liaison with agencies such as Homeland Security and the CIA. "My job is to protect and serve my country and keep our world safer from terrorist attacks and assess collateral damage," Arias said.
Arias' character, Alex Torres, finds himself at odds with Knight Rider's other characters. "Certain secrets can only be given out on a need-to-know basis, and the number-one objective for my character is to get the bad guy," Arias said. Knight Rider debuts Sept. 24. (NBC is owned by NBC Universal, which also owns SCIFI.COM.) --Mike Szymanski
TV Smackdown III: Valentine Vs. Ex
This week, SCI FI Wire will run a daily series of stories looking at the competition among new television series we like to call our Fall TV Smackdown. We'll pit two fall shows against each other and see which one comes out the winner. Are the comparisons fair? Of course not. It's about as fair as having to wait six more months for Fox's Dollhouse.
It's time for the featherweight division as The CW's Valentine battles CBS' The Ex List. Day three's clash is all about love ... and how screwed up it makes us. With tag teams from a dysfunctional family of Greek gods and a dysfunctional group of thirtysomething friends, it's gonna be a bloodbath.
Valentine.The CW, Sundays, 8 p.m. ET/PT. Premieres Oct. 5. The Greek gods are alive and well and living in a mansion high up in the Hollywood Hills. They call themselves the Valentines, and their mission is to help bring mortal soulmates together. Grace Valentine (Jaime Murray), also known as Aphrodite, is the matriarch of the family. She applies a firm hand when it comes to her son, Danny (Kristoffer Polaha), or Eros, the god of erotic love. There's also Leo (Robert Baker), or Hercules, and Phoebe (Autumn Reeser), the family seer. When Grace realizes that the modern world is making their job harder, she decides she needs a modern expert who also believes in the power of love. The Fates bring Kate Providence (Christine Lakin), a romance novelist, into their lives, and before they know it, Kate becomes an invaluable part of the team. In fact, Kate's arrived just in time. The gods' power is starting to fade, and only by creating true love in the world can they keep their powers intact.
Valentine's Secret Weapon: The bungling Eros (Danny) and Hercules (Leo) as they resort to plumbing and kidnapping to force their clients into "chance" meetings with their soulmates. Valentine was created by Kevin Murphy (Desperate Housewives).
The Outlook: Considering the trouble The CW has had on Sunday nights, it's no surprise that the network made a deal with Media Rights Capital to produce original shows for the night. And making Valentine one of those new shows also makes sense, especially since the last series the network had success with on Sundays was Charmed. Once again we have a family of magical beings dealing with the real world and getting into trouble because of it. While Valentine isn't as clever or charming as Charmed (which had eight years to get it right), it has some funny moments. And there's nothing else comparable on during its timeslot. Considering that the expectations for Valentine are low, there's a good chance this series could do well enough to get a full-year pickup.
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Jaime Murray, late of Showtime's Dexter, stars in The CW's Valentine.
The Ex List.CBS, Fridays, 9 p.m. ET/PT. Premieres Oct. 3. Based on the 2007 Israeli dramedy Mythological X, this romantic dramedy follows Bella Bloom (Elizabeth Reaser), a single, thirtysomething woman who owns her own floral business. During a bachelorette party for her sister, Daphne, a psychic tells Bella that she has already met her soulmate and that she has only one year to hook up with him again or she'll never find true love. At first it seems ridiculous to Bella. But when some of the psychic's other predictions seem to come true, she begins to open herself up to the possibility. And when her exes start showing up in her life again, Bella pays attention and begins a list of all the men she's dated or been interested in in the past. While her friends don't quite buy the psychic's prediction, Bella's not going to take the chance.
The Ex List's Secret Weapon: Elizabeth Reaser turned Alex's head on Grey's Anatomy last season as
patient Jane Doe. She's just as needy in The Ex List, but she has some snappy dialogue thanks to creator Diane Ruggiero (Veronica Mars). As for the rest of the cast, Rachel Boston plays Bella's sister, Daphne, and Alexandra Breckenridge, Adam Rothenberg and Amir Talai star as her friends.
The Outlook: With a bright star leading the cast in Reaser and the talented Ruggiero running the series behind the scenes, The Ex List offers viewers something different, if sometimes a bit too different. The 30-ish characters sound and act like they're still in high school. The very youth-oriented series seems like an odd choice to sit between the older-skewing Ghost Whisperer and Numb3rs on Friday nights. Beyond that, CBS hasn't had any luck in that time period, with a series of shows being canceled after landing there. If it doesn't break out with great ratings quickly, The Ex List's best chance for survival is another timeslot on a different night.
The Winner: Let's see ... Valentine needs 2 million viewers to justify its existence on The CW, while Ex List needs 10 million on CBS. ... *Drumming my fingers* ... Hmm ... Thanks to low expectations, it's Valentine, by a nose. When it comes to Ex List, that timeslot's going to be a killer. --Kathie Huddleston
Coming Thursday: Life on Mars vs. My Own Worst Enemy
In CBS' The Ex List, Bella Bloom (Elizabeth Reaser, left) is surprised to learn from a psychic (Anne Bedian) that she's already dated her future husband.
Crystal Joins Johnson's Fairy
Billy Crystal will join Dwayne Johnson in the cast of Tooth Fairy, the Fox fantasy comedy that begins shooting Monday in Vancouver, Canada, Variety reported. Michael Lembeck is directing.
Johnson stars with Ashley Judd, Julie Andrews, Stephen Merchant and Ryan Sheckler. Johnson plays a minor league hockey player known for loosening dental work with physical play and is sentenced to serve as the real Tooth Fairy for a week.
Randi Mayem Singer (Mrs. Doubtfire) has written the latest draft of the script. Previous drafts were by Lowell Ganz & Babaloo Mandel and Joshua Sternin & Jeffrey Ventimilia.
Brisingr Breaks Record
Brisingr, the third volume in Christopher Paolini's Inheritance cycle of fantasy books, sold 550,000 hardcover copies on its first day of release on Sept. 20, making it the best-selling Random House Children's Books title ever, the publisher announced.
Brisingr was published by Random House's Alfred A. Knopf Books for Young Readers imprint in the United States and Canada, with a first printing of 2.5 million copies, the largest first-print run in the publisher's history.
Paolini kicked off a 10-city book tour in New York over the weekend and will meet fans in Toronto; Washington; Miami; Detroit; Chicago; Austin, Texas; Seattle; San Francisco; and Los Angeles in coming weeks.
Paolini will write a fourth book to conclude the Inheritance cycle. A publication date has not yet been planned.
Riders Finishes Stranger Ideas
SF author Julie E. Czerneda told SCI FI Wire that her latest novel, Riders of the Storm, further explores and expands the milieu she created for her first novel, A Thousand Words for Stranger, more than 11 years ago.
"A Thousand Words for Stranger was an exploration of biology; namely, the role of sexual selection in the evolution of behavior," Czerneda said in an interview. "How might sentience--and being aware of what's happening to you--affect the process? How far could a species be willing to go?"
To explore the idea, Czerneda made up aliens--the Clan--and came up with a benefit of great value--teleportation--then tied it to their mating behavior. "The more power an individual female of this species had, the fewer mates could survive her testing--fewer mates, fewer births," she said. "Yet the power itself would be of such value to the Clan, they kept trying to increase it in their population."
Thousand focused on one character, Sira di Sarc, the most powerful female the Clan had yet produced, and her efforts to find a way to save her kind. "It was, however, more a romp through a future I enjoyed than a resolution of the initial problem," Czerneda said.
The unresolved problem of the Clan has remained in the back of Czerneda's mind all these years. "I wrote two sequels to Thousand and realized then the scope of the thing, if I was to do it justice: huge, scarily so," she said. "What was once a stand-alone first novel became the pivot point for my most ambitious undertaking yet: the nine-book Clan Chronicles."
With each book Czerneda has written, she has moved further and further toward the hard-SF end of the genre spectrum. "While the science always mattered to me, and started the story, there wasn't much chance to put it front and center in [earlier books in the series]," she said. "Oh, there's some fun biology, like the Drapsk and other aliens. String theory--readers likely didn't notice. But the underlying question was fairly simple and never resolved. ... That bothered me more and more. So it's been satisfying to have the opportunity to develop the biology of the Clan, to show that they are much more than they seem, to offer that credible and wonderful big idea that, to me, is what science fiction should do." --John Joseph Adams
Set Report: Eleventh's Time Comes
Stage 33 at the Warner Ranch studio lot in Burbank, Calif., is empty except for one small set for CBS' upcoming Eleventh Hour, an SF-tinged drama based on a British miniseries. That set is a dank cave-like crypt with horizontal wall niches containing skeletal remains.
Blond, perky Marley Shelton--who plays FBI special agent Rachel Young--is joking with a TV crew on Sept. 22. "I just want to welcome you to my dressing room," she says, touching a skeletal arm. "These are the people who stayed here before me. Nice of them to clean it up before I moved in."
Levity in the midst of darkness: It's an apt metaphor for the show itself, which pairs Shelton with British actor Rufus Sewell, playing Dr. Jacob Hood, a brilliant biophysicist and special science advisor to the government. The duo travel the country, investigating scientific crises and oddities. Along the way, audiences will hopefully gain insight into Hood's quirky approach to science and Shelton's by-the-book law enforcement, with a bit of humorous banter thrown in for flavor.
Later in the day, SCI FI Wire looked on as the show's crew filmed scenes for the sixth episode, "Containment," in which Hood and Young look into a smallpox outbreak in Pittsburgh. (The episode is based on one of the original British installments.)
In the scene--shot on Stage 32, right next door--Shelton is dressed in Rachel's black pantsuit and wears a cotton face mask as she goes through the mail in the dingy apartment of a victim. Beyond, Sewell--in Hood's tweed jacket and jeans--has pulled his own cotton mask down and finds a fortune cookie amid the empty Chinese-food boxes on a messy counter.
"Good fortune is the result of good planning," he reads. It's more like a statement than a prediction of the future, he observes to no one in particular.
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Marley Shelton (left) is special agent Rachel Young and Rufus Sewell is Dr. Jacob Hood in CBS' Eleventh Hour.
Shelton and Sewell joined executive producers Jonathan Littman, Danny Cannon, Cyrus Voris, Ethan Reiff and Mick Davis to talk about the show, which premieres Oct. 9.
Can you talk about how you adapted the British series and how different this is in tone or in style?
Reiff: Well, Mick is actually the guy who adapted it.
Davis: [speaking in a Scottish brogue] Don't ask me! What do you want to know? Ask me anything.
What changed significantly?
Davis: Everything. The first word is "Americanized," because the thing was made in Britain initially, so we just tried to make it more slick and more ... the word is "Bruckheimer." [Jerry Bruckheimer is an executive producer.] It's cooler, but it has a soul.
Shelton: We don't have British accents.
Davis: Just more time for character development, I think, as well, because the way the original was shot, it was all kind of one camera and very quick, whereas we've had the luxury of spending more time in allowing Rufus and Marley to develop their characters. I think that's the big difference.
Reiff: Another big difference is that the original British series was a miniseries. It was only four episodes that were ever made. In fact, I remember when we first came on to do this job or were considering doing it, I remember my partner, Cyrus, being really excited, almost to the point of gleeful, saying, "It's a British show! It will be, like, 400 episodes! All we have to do is copy them all! It will be the easiest gig we've ever had!" And then we looked into it, and we watched four episodes, and that was it.
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The British version of Eleventh Hour starred Ashley Jensen (left) as Rache
l and Patrick Stewart as Dr. Hood.
Sewell: That was also the way it was designed. It was only ever going to be four episodes.
Voris: You know, there [are] two things. One thing, in terms of the difference between the English version and the American, there are certain things that you are able to pull off, because--[to Sewell] and I hope you don't take this as a pejorative--there's just a certain parochial nature of the U.K. in terms of, ... like, if you go to the English countryside, you can buy more that people are cut off from stuff in terms of some of the scientific crisis and ideas. We went through a whole thing on an episode that they're shooting now, which has to do with an outbreak of a smallpox hybrid. The big thing was "Where do you set it?" Because if you set it in New York City, it's unbelievable that the entire city wouldn't come to a stop and be shut down in, like, four or five hours. It became, like, "OK, we have to find someplace in the U.S. [where] it's a little more believable that the story can play out in the way it needs to for drama. I think they had a little easier time in the British version of doing that. If there's some little town, some coal-mining town out in the middle of the British countryside, you can believe a little bit more that stuff can get a little crazier, as opposed to some part in the U.S.
The other thing is also just the age difference, because Patrick Stewart played Rufus' part in the original. ...
Sewell: He's only four years older than me. (Laughter.)
Voris: ... But there was a little bit more of a father-daughter relationship between Dr. Hood and Rachel Young. So that clearly changed, and that dynamic has changed going forward.
Rufus and Marley, can you two talk about the nature of your relationship and talk about your characters a little bit?
Shelton: No. (Laughter.)
Sewell: We don't know where to start.
Shelton: I think one fundamental thing is that we both want the same result, but we go about things dramatically differently. I'm more of a pragmatist, I think, and sort of a straight shooter, and Rufus' character ...
Sewell: Yeah, I mean, what's important, I think, and what's interesting for me about Jacob Hood, is that he's not trained in this area. He's not a cop. He's not a detective. He's a scientist, and he's not used to living in this environment or dealing with these people in high-stakes situations, so he brings what he brings. He's got a certain way about him. He doesn't have great antennae for danger, for example. Not that he's very brave; ... he just doesn't see when he's about to be hit on the head. And he can have a manner with people that might not be the best way of dealing with them. He doesn't really understand the procedures, which, for me, is much more interesting. But it means he needs help, and he needs help so that he doesn't make things worse [or] he doesn't upset people [or] he doesn't get killed. ...
Shelton: His genius is that he's kind of unorthodox and thinks outside of the box, but that's where I come in, to sort of help finesse that.
Sewell: Yeah. There's slightly two different ways of looking at the world. There's a meeting [of minds], which is more about humor than anything else, but they both have quite a lot to help each other with.
When you have two characters like this in the kinds of situations you're going to be in, there will be inevitable comparisons to other characters who are in similar situations and similar kind of relationships, and I think you know what I'm talking about [The X-Files].
Sewell: But, yes, that's the thing. I think when you see the show, those comparisons will kind of wither out, because I think it's quite distinctive. Other shows, maybe, may seem similar to [this show]. No, there are quite a few that it may seem similar to, but they will evaporate once you actually see it. Once you see any of
This week, SCI FI Wire will run a daily series of stories looking at the competition among new television series we like to call our Fall TV Smackdown. We'll pit two fall shows against each other and see which one comes out the winner. Are the comparisons fair? Of course not. It’s about as fair as calling wresting sci-fi.
For Round Two, NBC's Knight Rider takes on the syndicated Legend of the Seeker. These middleweights come from very different backgrounds, with one hailing from television and the other from books. But they both feature really hot dudes who travel a lot and look cool doing it.
And if neither one of these shows ends up as a hit, how about Legend of the Night Riding Seeker? That's always a possibility.
Knight Rider.NBC, Wednesdays, 8 p.m. ET/PT. Premieres Sept. 24. After the events of NBC's 1982 television series starring David Hasselhoff, and last spring's TV movie, the Hoff's television son, Michael Traceur (or Tracer, as it's sometimes spelled, played by Justin Bruening), is back to take over for his daddy, driving a new and improved K.I.T.T. (Knight Industries Three Thousand). For those who've been in a cave for the last 20-plus years, K.I.T.T. is an artificially intelligent car that for some reason needs a hunky guy to sit in it while it chases bad guys and saves the day. Mike and K.I.T.T. have an incredibly good-looking team to back them up. They all hang out in the K.I.T.T. Cave, including Mike's old girlfriend, Sarah Graiman (Deanna Russo), and her father, Charles Graiman (Bruce Davison), who happens to be K.I.T.T.'s creator.
Knight Rider's Secret Weapon: K.I.T.T. (voiced by Val Kilmer), a tricked-out Ford Mustang GT500KR complete with turbo boost, as it embraces its inner Transformer. While this might seem like a trip down memory lane, producers promise some high-octane fun. K.I.T.T. is capable of hacking computer systems, turning into other vehicles, taking out bad guys with jet-fighter-grade weapons and using sophisticated holographic imagery. Knight Rider is from Gary Scott Thompson (Las Vegas) and is based on Glen Larson's characters from the original series.
The Outlook: After getting great ratings with Knight Rider's TV movie last spring, it's no surprise NBC decided to go forth with a new series. Executive producer Gary Scott Thompson has said that he has plans to take the new series far beyond the TV movie and yet revisit some of the things that made the original series such a hit, by amping up the special effects and bringing back the turbo boost from the 1982 series. There is plenty of competition to face in the 8 p.m. Wednesday timeslot, with Fox's Bones and ABC's Pushing Daisies, but this new Knight Rider may appeal to the entire family, considering its early timeslot. While NBC's take on the Bionic Woman is a reminder that not all iconic television shows were meant to be remade, if Thompson can achieve the right mix of fun and drama (with lots of car special effects and action), the series will find an audience. (Check out the season premiere online.)
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Knight Rider cast (from left): Sydney Tamiia Poitier as Carrie Ruvai, Justin Bruening as Mike Tracer/Traceur/Knight, Deanna Russo as Sarah Graiman.
Legend of the Seeker.Syndication, Saturdays primarily, but check local stations. Premieres Nov. 1. Richard Cypher (Craig Horner) is a woodsman and tracker who lives the simple life in a world without magic. After his father is tragically murdered, into his life comes Kahlan (Bridget Regan), a mysterious woman who introduces Richard to a world filled with magic. Traveling with an old wizard and Kahlan, Richard finds himself both the hunt
er and the hunted. As the Seeker he is the one person, it is prophesied, who can stop the evil tyrant Darken Rahl from unleashing an ancient evil and enslaving mankind.
Legend of the Seeker's Secret Weapon: Hot cast, swords and magic. What's not to love? Syndication comes blazing back as the team that brought us Hercules: The Legendary Journeys and Xena: Warrior Princess takes on another fantasy series. Based on the first book in the Terry Goodkind Sword of Truth series, Wizard's First Rule, this show takes on a much more serious hero's journey than the producers have explored in the past. The series is executive-produced by Sam Raimi, Robert Tapert, Joshua Donen and Kenneth Biller.
The Outlook: Since Hercules and Xena left the small screen, syndication hasn't been a viable option for scripted drama. Originally titled Wizard's First Rule, Legend of the Seeker won't wink at the audience in the way that the earlier shows did. But the series does have a rich universe to draw on, thanks to Goodkind. While the pilot hasn't been available for review, the producers promise plenty of action, romance and stand-alone episodes, not to mention two very pretty leads who play with swords. Thanks to its syndicated status, Legend of the Seeker has been cleared in 95 percent of the country, including the top 50 markets. What that means is that Seeker will have a 22-episode first season.
The winner: This one's a no-brainer. According to NBC's publicity, "K.I.T.T. happens." But, unfortunately, so does the Bionic Woman. It's too early to tell if Legend of the Seeker is a better show, but expectations won't be as high since the show is syndicated. Legend will have a complete first season, and its 22 episodes will air. – Kathie Huddleston
Coming Wednesday: Valentine vs. The Ex List
Craig Horner and Bridget Regan star in Legend of the Seeker.
Ember's Ronan Matched Murray
Saoirse Ronan, who stars in the upcoming fantasy film City of Ember, said that some of her favorite moments from the production were the scenes she shared with co-star Bill Murray.
"I had, I don't know, maybe four scenes with Bill Murray," Ronan said in an interview on the set in Belfast, Northern Ireland, in September of 2007. "But those four scenes you just kind of remember for the rest of your life, because he continuously makes people laugh. And whenever he's on set he kind of puts everyone on a high, and he's really funny, and he's really talented. He learns his lines but then adds things on, and it makes them even better."
The 14-year-old actress, who was nominated for an Oscar for her supporting role in the World War II drama Atonement, admitted that she had some trouble keeping up with Murray's improvising during their scenes.
"For the first time, I was a little lost," she said. "We were in this room, actually, and we were doing a scene, and we did Bill's shot first, and then they turned around on me. And Bill decided to make his own script and try to make me laugh the whole way through. We did about four takes, and he was trying to make me laugh basically the whole way through. And I actually didn't. I'm very proud of that."
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Harken Square, the center of the City of Ember.
In Ember, based on the book by Jeanne Duprau, Ronan plays Lina Mayfleet, a young girl who lives in a self-contained city run by electricity. What Lina and the rest of the residents don't know is that the city is underground and was only meant to support life for a limited amount of time. When Lina stumbles upon information that could save the city, she is thwarted by the mayor (Murray), who is interested only in maintaining the status quo.
"I think she's a very responsible girl," Ronan said of her character. "I mean, for her age. She's only 12, 13. And she has to look after her young sister, Poppy, and her granny, who isn't at a good stage to look after them. So she has to take care of them [and] meanwhile go to school, then start her new job as a messenger. And she's very responsible and very determined. And I think when she sees something and knows that it could be important, then she'll drive through to the end to find the answer.
Ronan seems to be attracted to films based on literary works. Besides Atonement and City of Ember, she can also be seen in Peter Jackson's upcoming adaptation of the best-selling novel The Lovely Bones, by Alice Sebold. City of Ember opens Oct. 10. --Cindy White
Cast Hasn't Met Knight's Kilmer
Val Kilmer, who voices K.I.T.T. in NBC's upcoming reboot of Knight Rider, has yet to meet the other cast members in the television show.
"No, I haven't met Val Kilmer yet," said star Justin Bruening, who becomes Michael Knight, in an interview on the show's set in Los Angeles. "It would be an honor to meet him sometime. Maybe he will show up at the season-five Christmas party."
Kilmer, who was out of the country filming for the first five episodes of the new series, recorded his voice-over part later, wisecracks and all. The cast was delighted to hear that Kilmer would be doing the voice.
Bruening didn't cite Kilmer's roles in Batman Forever, Red Planet or Deja Vu. "The first movie I thought of that I thought made him perfect for the role was Real Genius," Bruening said. "I thought if he played the voice that way, like he did in that movie, it would be frigging brilliant."
Kilmer's 1984 Real Genius--which the writers of Fox's Fringe also cite as an influence--centers on his character, who helps his roommate develop a high-powered laser that then gets stolen by the military. "It probably is not a movie he would pick, and he was a lot younger then, but that character was highly intelligent, quick-witted and [has] a lot of the characteristics that K.I.T.T. sort of has, without the logic. He comes back with the robotic quick wit and has his own kind of banter."
On the Knight Rider set, Bruening works opposite another voice actor, John Burdell, who "captures the cadence and rhythm of Val's style and plays off us well," Bruening said. "He says things in ways that he would imagine how he [Kilmer] would answer. We knew we needed an actor who brings something to the role. The emotion is huge."
Knight Rider also stars Deanna Russo, Bruce Davison, Sydney Tamiia Poitier and Smith Cho and premieres Sept. 24. (NBC is owned by NBC Universal, which also owns SCIFI.COM.) --Mike Szymanski
Heroes' Rose Back In Power
Cristine Rose, who plays the puppetmaster mom Angela Petrelli on NBC's Heroes, told SCI FI Wire that she will return to a position of power in the just-started third season, with major developments coming in the eighth episode.
"This volume, she gets her own back," Rose said in a red-carpet interview at an NBC premiere event earlier this month in Hollywood. "She gets her strength back, and she means business. Then everything falls apart--or maybe it doesn't. It's all a really cool story, so it's exciting."
The strike-truncated second season of Heroes ended with Angela on the phone after her flying son, Nathan (Adrian Pasdar), was shot. With whom she was speaking was revealed in the Sept. 22 third-season premiere.
Rose said her character is "no longer down in the dumps. I'm up, I'm down, I'm up, and then right smack in the middle of this volume, around episode eight, you get to find out a lot about how her heart is the way it is," she said. "I get chills just thinking about it. I love episode eight."
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Cristine Rose plays Angela Petrelli on NBC's Heroes.
Meanwhile, Jimmy Jean-Louis, who plays the mysterious character known only as the Haitian, shared a scoop with SCI FI Wire about his upcoming episodes.
Viewers will get to follow the Haitian back to his homeland. Of course, the Heroes crew did not travel to Haiti to film. "We shot Haiti in Hollywood, Sunset and Gower," said Jean-Louis, referring to the famous Sunset Gower Studios.
Teasing the plotline of the Haitian's homecoming story, Jean-Louis may have accidentally let a spoiler slip. "We know he goes there, because he has to take care of his brother. Oops, did I say brother? Anyway, he will be taking care of business in Haiti."
Heroes airs Mondays at 9 p.m. ET/PT. (NBC is owned by NBC Universal, which also owns SCIFI.COM.) --Fred Topel
Revival Hoped For Collider Film
Worried about the Large Hadron Collider? Screenwriters David Koepp and John Kamps are way ahead of you: They told SCI FI Wire that they hope to revive a science fiction movie script about a particle accelerator that takes over a small town.
"I had this idea about a particle accelerator after I read about this one that they were going to put in Waxahachie, Texas. Did you remember that?" Kamps said in an interview. "It was during the Clinton administration, and they cut funding. But I wondered, 'What if they fired it up, and all of the laws of physics went crazy?' It was an idea that we didn't do anything with for about 10 years, and then David [Koepp] and I got together and wrote a script, and it was a great experience. We sold it to Disney, and eventually they didn't want to make it, but hopefully someday it will get made."
Their tentative title for the script was The Superconducting Supercollider of Sparkle Creek, Wisconsin, and they decided to move the setting to a smaller town.
"It's a very funny movie, but it's expensive to make--it may happen someday," Koepp said.
The project started and stopped twice, and then many of the Disney executives left the company before it could get revived again.
Koepp and Kamps worked together on Zathura: A Space Adventure and began working together on Apartment Zero in 1989. "We banter around ideas every so often, and David liked the idea of the particle accelerator," Kamps said. "There were so many urban myths of what can happen, such as creating a black hole and the massive amounts of energy that it would generate. It's very fertile territory for [an SF] film. I really want to see it get done."
The writers' most recent collaboration is Ghost Town, which opened last week. --Mike Szymanski
Current state of the defunct Superconducting Super Collider site in Waxahachie, Texas. This is a view of the Magnet Development Laboratory building, with other buildings visible in the background. (Wikipedia)
Terminator's Jones Reveals Spoilers
Richard T. Jones, who plays FBI agent James Ellison on Fox's Terminator: The Sarah Connor Chronicles, told SCI FI Wire (spoilers ahead!) that his character will take the job as private security for Zeira Corp., the company run by Catherine Weaver (Shirley Manson) and a precursor to Skynet.
Weaver was revealed to be a liquid-metal Terminator in the season premiere and approached Ellison in the most recent episode, "The Mousetrap," which aired Sept. 22.
"I end up working with Shirley Manson, for her [character]'s company, which is a lot better for me, because they have money," Jones said in an interview at Fox's party to celebrate the fall season in Hollywood earlier this month. "They pay me with nice stuff. I get nice suits. I sell out for the money. No, but I sell out for better resources so I can find out a little bit more about what Terminators are, how they run and why they're here."
Jones added that Ellison does not know he is in fact working for a Terminator. In a separate interview that night, series creator Josh Friedman said that he wanted to twist audience expectations that Ellison would team up with the good guys.
"It sort of came out of where we were at the end of last season," Friedman said. "We were like, 'OK, what are we going to do with him now that he knows what he knows?' I think everybody sort of assumed now that he knows there are Terminators, he's just going to go team up with the Connors and become more of a student to them, which is why I really didn't want to do that. I figured that's what we all expect. There are other ways for him to get through the day and other motivations for him and curiosities."
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Richard T. Jones plays James Ellison on Fox's Terminator: The Sarah Connor Chronicles. (Frank Ockenfels for Fox)
When Ellison meets up with the Connors in subsequent episodes, it makes for a more exciting confrontation. "The first meeting is with John [Thomas Dekker], actually, and it's not what you would call a good meeting," Jones said. "He comes with Cameron [the cyborg played by Summer Glau]. Put it this way: He comes with someone. He's not just coming by himself to say hi, so it's an interesting meeting, and I get the worse end of it."
Ellison has already dealt with the Terminator Cromartie (Garret Dillahunt) and will face more. "Before I meet Cameron, I come to meet a couple more Terminators," Jones said. "I met Garrett, and I meet another Terminator before I meet Cameron."
Friedman added that upcoming episodes will focus more on the Terminator characters. "Episode four we'll find out a lot about Cameron's backstory," Friedman said. "We've got some good future stuff coming up. It's all very intense action episodes with Garret Dillahunt's character, Cromartie, stepping up the hunt." Terminator: The Sarah Connor Chronicles airs Mondays at 8 p.m. ET/PT. --Fred Topel
Astro Boy Gets '09 Release
Summit Entertainment announced that it will release Astro Boy in North America on Oct. 23, 2009. Summit and Imagi are putting together the final details on a marketing plan designed to reach both the family movie-going audience and adult fans of Astro Boy.
Produced by Imagi Studios, the computer-animated movie features the voices of Nicolas Cage, Donald Sutherland, Nathan Lane, Bill Nighy and Eugene Levy, with Freddie Highmore in the title role. David Bowers is directing from a screenplay written by Timothy Harris, with Maryann Garger producing.
The film is based on the Japanese manga created in the early 1950s by Osamu Tezuka.
Set in the future, the new Astro Boy is a classic superhero origin story about a young robot with incredible powers, created by a brilliant scientist, and his adventure-filled journey in search of his identity and destiny, taking him into a netherworld of robot gladiators before he returns to save Metro City.
Bell Rings Up Magical House
World Fantasy Award-winning author Patricia A. McKillip told SCI FI Wire that her latest novel, The Bell at Sealey Head, is a bit like the British drama Upstairs, Downstairs crossed with a Jane Austen novel ... with magic.
"A stranger comes to town--a young, rather wealthy scholar--whose desire to stay for an indefinite time in a local inn atop a cliff saves [a] young innkeeper from financial disaster," McKillip said. "The scholar is quite interested both in magic and in legends about the strange bell that rings daily just at the moment when the sun vanishes into the sea."
The townspeople think the bell is the ghostly echo of the bell of a ship that foundered off the coast centuries before. "To the innkeeper's surprise, the scholar's suspicions about it lead him to the moldering mansion overlooking the town, Aislinn House," McKillip said.
The book follows four main characters. "The innkeeper, Judd Cauley, who runs the inn his grandfather built and takes care of his blind father; ... Gwyneth Blair, the shipping merchant's daughter, ... who is trying to become a writer; Emma Wood, the young maid in Aislinn House, who, when she was young, discovered the secret, ancient, magical realm within the walls of Aislinn House; and Princess Ysabo, who lives in the magical part of Aislinn House," McKillip said.
The magical realm is found behind doors that Emma opens, and it is always unexpected. "Across the threshold of the linen closet, or the staircase cupboard, the maid and the princess have become friends through the years," McKillip said. "Emma's mother, who is aware of the mystery, has been doing her own research about it for years, but only Emma sees into the world with any clarity or consistency."
It is basically a medieval "shadow" of the house, full of noisy knights, strange flocks of crows, highborn ladies and tales that take the place of life, for no one except the knights ever leaves the house. "[The out-of-town scholar,] Ridley Dow, doing his own research, realizes not only that the secret Aislinn House is under a powerful and wicked enchantment, but also that his own ancestor has worked the spell," McKillip said. "Since his ancestor has cheated death for generations and is part of the grand entourage around the rich and beautiful Miranda Beryl, Ridley also knows what kind of danger the heir of Aislinn House must be in." --John Joseph Adams
TV Smackdown I: Hour Vs. Fringe
This week, SCI FI Wire will run a daily series of stories looking at the competition among new television series: Call it the Fall TV Smackdown. We'll pit two fall shows against each other and see which one comes out the winner. Are the comparisons fair? Of course not. It’s about as fair as canceling CBS's Moonlight just as Mick finally kissed the girl.
Our first matchup features two new heavyweight contenders: Fox's Fringe and CBS' Eleventh Hour. There's more than a little irony here. Considering it takes years to get a series on the air, it's odd that we end up with two shows in the same year about cutting-edge science gone wrong.
They are very different series, but both shows offer one thing in common beyond a search into scientific excesses. Their main characters know that "the truth is out there."
Eleventh Hour. CBS, Thursdays, 10 p.m. ET/PT. Premieres Oct. 9 Uberproducer Jerry Bruckheimer (CSI) tackles science in his latest procedural. Based on the British limited series of the same name, starring Patrick Stewart, Eleventh Hour explores the world of Dr. Jacob Hood (Rufus Sewell) and his protector, FBI special agent Rachel Young (Marley Shelton). Hood, a brilliant biophysicist who is a science advisor to the government, investigates scientific mysteries that often lead him to those who attempt to misuse science. A true believer in the possibilities that science offers, Hood is often called in at the "11th hour" to stop abuses from being unleashed on the world. From human cloning to cryogenics to extreme rapid weight loss, Hood and Young are on the case.
Eleventh Hour's Secret Weapon: While producers have gone out of their way to say Eleventh Hour is NOT science fiction and that there is no real mythology, the series is certainly of interested to sci-fi fans. Stephen Gallagher created the original British series; Bruckheimer, Jonathan Littman, Danny Cannon, Cyrus Voris, Ethan Reiff and Mick Davis produce the new American version.
The Outlook: Expectations are high for this show, which has lead-ins from Survivor and CSI on Thursday nights. After all, this is the timeslot that made Without a Trace a hit. Sewell adds charm to the eccentric Hood, and Shelton is believable as his FBI protector. But whether or not Eleventh Hour can become Bruckheimer's latest hit remains to be seen. Thursday night has shaped up to be sci fi's biggest battle, thanks to another British-inspired series, ABC's Life on Mars. Both shows are well done and worthy of interest. While Eleventh Hour wants to be the next House, Fox's Fringe got to the scientific frontier first, with an early and showy premiere. Unless Hour can stand out, it may well have a decent but unexceptional run along the lines of CBS' Shark. Still, look for enough interest to keep this series going through the year.
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Marley Shelton (left) is special agent Rachel Young, and Rufus Sewell is Dr. Jacob Hood in CBS' Eleventh Hour.
Fringe. Fox, Tuesdays, 8 p.m. ET/PT. Premiered Sept. 9 In the season premiere, international Flight 627 was targeted and all aboard were killed due to a mysterious toxin. FBI special agent Olivia Dunham (Anna Torv) discovered that it was just part of a "Pattern" of experiments performed on human beings involving fringe science. When her partner and lover, John Scott (Mark Valley), was gravely injured, Olivia enlisted the help of Dr. Walter Bishop (John Noble), our generation's Einstein, who spearheaded experiments in fringe science 17 years earlier, before he was locked away in a mental institution. To get to Walter, Olivia needed his brilliant but reluctant son, Peter (Joshua Jackson).
Fringe's Secret Weapon: E
xecutive producer J.J. Abrams, whose middle name is mythology. OK, it's not really his middle name, but it should be. The events of the pilot are just the beginning for Olivia, Walter and Peter as they join together to learn what the Pattern is and who is experimenting on the human race. The second episode dealt with spontaneous birth, cloning and a bad guy with a nasty habit involving young women's pituitary glands. Fringe comes from Abrams, Alex Kurtzman and Roberto Orci, the team behind Alias and Mission Impossible III.
The Outlook: With a tone and subject matter that will remind you of The X-Files, Fox's latest conspiracy-theory SF series quickly charts its own course. Hailed by many as the best new show of the season, Fringe certainly has loads of potential and has a star-making performance by newcomer Torv as Olivia. With Abrams, Kurtzman and Orci behind the scenes, there's little doubt that Fringe will be quite a ride. Now hopefully it won't get too bogged down in mythology. Ratings for the pilot were good but not great. As expected, a second outing with House as the lead-in improved the ratings considerably. While there's plenty of competition in the Tuesday night 9 p.m. timeslot, Dancing With the Stars and The Mentalist should skew older. Look for Fringe to do well this season.
The Winner: This one's gonna be close. But we're going to have to give the nod to Fringe, since we like mythology. --Kathie Huddleston
Coming Tuesday: Knight Rider vs. Legend of the Seeker
Mark Valley (left) and Ann Torv in Fox's Fringe.
Twists In Store For Heroes' Ando
This week's season premiere of NBC's Heroes seems to suggest big changes for James Kyson Lee's character, Ando Masahashi. (Spoilers ahead!)
In the episode, Hiro (Masi Oka) visits the future and sees his future self squaring off against a now superpowered Ando. Lee told SCI FI Wire that this glimpse might not have been the betrayal it appeared to be.
"I don't think it was more of a betrayal, but a misunderstanding," Lee said in an interview at the show's fall premiere party in Los Angeles earlier this month. "There's obviously a lot of mystery involving that scene. I think that's part of it, that we don't really know how the future plays out. In this show, you can never assume, because what seems to be doesn't turn out to be, [and, in fact,] turns out to be completely different."
Now that Hiro has seen the possible future, he and Ando are trying to prevent it in the present. "We'll see if they go there, how it gets there," Lee said. "But it was a nice little preview of what could be in the future."
Lee is ready for Ando to get superpowers. He's paid his dues playing the sidekick. "I think it would be fun," he said. "I've had a couple seasons as the mortal, and he's sort of been used to [being] the guide to the audience, I think, in some ways. That's been cool. But I think this character seems to be growing every season. I think that would just add another element and a layer to play with. So it'd be interesting."
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James Kyson Lee as Ando Masahashi.
By season three, audiences hardly need a guide: Heroes viewers are pretty good at following along. "Not so much a guide, but I think he always sort of represented the loyalty and the honor that sort of [lay] in all of us," Lee said. "So he was a character that I think a lot of people could relate to. But to throw in a little bad boy in there, that's always fun."
Either way, the third season of Heroes should allow Ando to come into his own. "I think he's on a personal journey this year to find his own wings," Lee said. "So he and Hiro, I think, will go through some really interesting arcs." Season three of Heroes kicks off on Sept. 22 at 9 p.m. ET/PT. (NBC is owned by NBC Universal, which also owns SCFI.COM.) --Fred Topel
Trek's Henke On Kirk's Uncle
Brad William Henke, who plays a character named Uncle Frank in J.J. Abrams' upcoming Star Trek movie, talked with reporters a bit more about his character, a relative of James T. Kirk.
It's been reported that he plays Kirk's uncle in a flashback sequence and that he is abusive to the future captain as a boy.
"I play Captain Kirk's alcoholic, abusive uncle when he's a kid," Henke said in a group interview in Beverly Hills, Calif., on Sept. 13. "I treat him very badly, which forces him to go off and do what he does."
Abrams' Star Trek deals with the original crew of the first starship Enterprise. That apparently includes scenes of Kirk as a boy, when he lived with Uncle Frank.
Chris Pine, who plays the adult Kirk, does not share scenes with Henke; Jimmy Bennett plays Kirk as a child.
"It was fun," Henke said. "It was fun to play such an a--hole, such a bad character."
Does this abusive past explain why Kirk pauses awkwardly between phrases? "No, I think that he doesn't do that now, for some reason," Henke said, with tongue in cheek.
Uncle Frank is a new character introduced to the Star Trek canon for the first time in Abrams' prequel movie.
As secrecy surrounded the film's storyline, Henke had to insist on seeing his own script pages in advance of filming. "First of all, I was offered the role, so I never saw the script," he said. "Then it was about three days before I was supposed to shoot, and I still hadn't gotten my scenes. They said, 'Well, they're giving some people the scenes when they get there.' I said, 'Well, I'm not that type of actor. So if you want it to be kind of good, you should give it to me now.' So they had to messenger it over, and then I got to work on it."
Once he read the script, Henke found the dialogue too specific for his tastes. Abrams accommodated him to make the scenes his own.
"Each line, some words were underlined, so it was kind of telling you exactly how to say it," Henke said. "So I was like, 'Oh, s--t. This is exactly how I'm supposed to do it?' Again, that's not one of my fortes either. So I got there, and [Abrams] is like, 'Just do it however you want to do it. Let's just play with this.' And we just shot these scenes. Because they had the money, we would shoot one scene all day long from all these different angles. He was so positive; he was awesome. He was such a nice guy and so into it, running around, just really into it." Star Trek opens May 8, 2009. --Fred Topel
Daisies Wins Big Emmy
ABC's Pushing Daisies was the only science fiction/fantasy program that took home a prime-time Emmy Award on Sept. 21 in ceremonies at Los Angeles' Nokia Theatre.
The fantasy series won the award for outstanding directing for a comedy series, which was given to Barry Sonnenfeld for the pilot, "Pie-Lette."
A week earlier, at the 2007-'08 Creative Arts Prime-Time Emmys, which were handed out on Sept. 13, Pushing Daisies won two technical awards, for outstanding picture editing for a comedy series (single or multi-camera) for "Pie-Lette" and for outstanding music composition for a series (original dramatic score) for the episdoe "Pigeon."
SCI FI Channel's original series Battlestar Galactica, meanwhile, took home two creative arts Emmys: one for outstanding special visual effects for a series for the episode "He That Believeth in Me" and one for outstanding special class--short-format live-action entertainment programs for the SCIFI.COM Razor featurette number four.
SCI FI Channel's original miniseries Tin Man took home a creative-arts Emmy for outstanding makeup for a miniseries or a movie (non-prosthetic).
Among other SF&F TV shows, NBC's Chuck won a creative-arts Emmy for outstanding stunt coordination, ABC's Lost won a similar award for outstanding sound mixing for a comedy or drama series (one-hour), and The CW's Smallville won an award for outstanding sound editing for a series.
Bourne Inspires Knight Stunts
The cast members of NBC's upcoming Knight Rider reboot series will do as much of the stunt work as allowed, following in the footsteps of Matt Damon in The Bourne Identity, and that's no coincidence: That film's director, Doug Liman, is an executive producer of the new show.
Liman, who also directed Jumper and Mr. & Mrs. Smith, pushed the actors to do as much of the stunt work as they felt comfortable performing, and that required some special training.
"Justin [Bruening] and I are doing a fight scene later today," said star Deanna Russo (Believers) during a break in shooting on the show's set recently. "I did a ton of fight training, a few months of it, before we started filming. I got stronger and learned more tricks myself to make my character more interesting to watch. When I did a few of the stunts, people said not many of the girls could do that."
The show, which has filmed several episodes already, has already placed Bruening's Michael Knight character in peril: He's already been shot, stabbed and poisoned, Bruening said. But Bruening, a college athlete, also gets to play basketball in the private court in the team's secret underground hideout.
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Knight Rider cast (from left): Sydney Tamiia Poitier as Carrie Ruvai, Justin Bruening as Mike Tracer/Traceur/Knight, Deanna Russo as Sarah Graiman.
"Bourne was PG-13, and that's the kind of fights we have in this," Bruening said. He added: "The physical fighting, when you're honestly fighting, is as close and intimate as it can get. ... My character has been in the Special Forces unit and is highly trained, and it has to look that way."
Bruening studied meditation and a martial-arts stick-fighting technique from Thailand. "I've always been athletic all my life, but this special training helped me a lot," Bruening said. "And Deanna learned a lot, too. To borrow a phrase, I pity the fool who ever tries to hurt her."
Meanwhile, Bruening said, "I like to use Bourne Identity as the template for what I can do, because it looked real when Matt Damon did his own stunts and fights. Right now, I do about 98 percent, but some things they will not let me do."
Such as? Racing the $75,000 K.I.T.T. car, a tricked-out Ford Mustang GT500KR, on the open road. It's more likely that stunt driver Corey Eubanks, not Bruening, is behind the wheel. Knight Rider premieres on Sept. 24 and will air Wednesdays at 8 p.m. (NBC is owned by NBC Universal, which also owns SCIFI.COM.) --Mike Szymanski
Cage Conjures Up Witch
Nicolas Cage will reteam with director Dominic Sena for the supernatural thriller Season of the Witch for Relativity Media, Variety reported.
The story chronicles the journey of 14th-century knights transporting a girl suspected of being the witch responsible for spreading the Black Plague. Bragi Schut Jr. penned the screenplay.
Shooting is scheduled to begin in early November in Austria and Hungary.
Cage previously worked with Sena on Gone in Sixty Seconds.
Chow To Star In, Helm Hornet
Columbia Pictures announced that Stephen Chow (Kung Fu Hustle) will co-star in and helm The Green Hornet, a reboot of the crime-fighter franchise, to star Seth Rogen.
Chow will play Kato, the martial-arts master who is the sidekick to Rogen's title character. The studio also announced a release date of June 25, 2010.
Columbia's parent company, Sony, co-produced and released Chow's Kung Fu Hustle.
Ghost Writers Adapt Engine
David Koepp and John Kamps, who teamed up to write Ghost Town together, have also written a script that adapts The Little Engine That Could as a charity project to benefit the Starlight Children's Foundation.
"I have small kids, so I read, like, 16,000 books all the time and always wonder how we can adapt them into [movies] possibly, but there are not that many," Kamps said with a laugh in an interview at the Toronto International Film Festival.
"David and I wrote the script for charity based on The Little Engine that Could for the Starlight Foundation, and some of the artwork came back for the project, and it was something that my son could relate to, so I showed it to him, and he became an instant critic," Kamps added. "He said, 'I don't think I understand the motivation for the clown. Nix the clown.' And this is coming from a 7-year-old!"
Kamps and Koepp earlier teamed up to adapt Zathura: A Space Adventure for the big screen for director Jon Favreau, who later did Iron Man.
"I'm always looking for something small and doable that my children can relate to, but it's not that easy to find," Kamps said. "I don't want to leave my children and work 20 hours a day, but I'd like to do something small in scale, and, of course, directing your own material gives you complete artistic satisfaction and control." --Mike Szymanski
Trek Fan Winston Is Dead
Joan Winston, the New York Star Trek fan who was instrumental in organizing the first Trek convention, died on Sept. 11 of Alzheimer's disease, The New York Times reported. She was 77.
Winston earned the love of Star Trek fans everywhere by helping to orchestrate an afterlife for the series beyond the television set--initially by organizing conventions and persuading stars from the series to attend, and later by appearing at the conventions as a star in her own right, a superfan whose undying devotion inspired awe among Star Trek devotees, the newspaper reported.
The first convention took place in January 1972 at the Statler Hilton in Manhattan. The organizers had expected a crowd of about 500. In the end, more than 3,000 fans turned up.
Winston was born in Washington and grew up in Brooklyn, where she attended public schools. After her father decided to send her younger brother to college instead of her, she went to work at Bonwit Teller as a merchandiser. She later worked in the contracts departments of CBS and ABC in New York.
In the late 1960s, when NBC threatened to cancel the low-rated Star Trek TV series, she picketed NBC. She sent story ideas to series creator Gene Roddenberry. In 1968 she pulled strings to attend the taping of a Star Trek episode, the last one, as it turned out. (Betty Jo Trimble, or Bjo [pronounced Beejoe], another ardent fan, led the campaign to keep the series on the air.)
In his book about Star Trek fandom, Get a Life, franchise star William Shatner described Winston as "bright, bubbly and energetic beyond every law of human physiology and comprehension."
Winston and her associates, known to fellow aficionados simply as the Committee, presented four more conventions before withdrawing from the field, exhausted, in 1976. By that time more than 40 Star Trek conventions were competing for Winston's presence as a guest speaker.
British Fantasy Winners Announced
Winners of this year's British Fantasy Awards were announced this weekend at the Fantasycon 2008 in Nottingham, United Kingdom. The BFAs are presented annually to works of fantasy art and literature. A complete list of nominees follows.
Novel (The August Derleth Award): The Grin of the Dark by Ramsey Campbell
Novella: The Scalding Rooms by Conrad Williams
Short Fiction: "My Stone Desire" by Joel Lane
Collection: Old Devil Moon by Christopher Fowler
Anthology: The Mammoth Book of Best New Horror 18 by Stephen Jones
Small Press: Peter Crowther, PS Publishing
Artist: Vincent Chong
Nonfiction: Peter Tennant, for the Whispers of Wickedness Web site
The Karl Edward Wagner Special Award: Ray Harryhausen
The Sydney J. Bounds Best Newcomer Award: Scott Lynch --John Joseph Adams
New Moon Wins Sunburst
Nalo Hopkinson's fantasy novel The New Moon's Arms has been named the winner of this year's Sunburst Award for Canadian Literature of the Fantastic.
The award, which is named in honor of the Phyllis Gotlieb novel, is presented annually to the best speculative fiction novel or story collection by a Canadian writer.
The other finalists for this year's award were Double-blind by Michelle Butler Hallett, Darkness of the God by Amber Hayward, Wonderfull by William Neil Scott and Axis by Robert Charles Wilson.
This year also marks the debut of the Sunburst's award for young-adult speculative fiction by a Canadian writer. The inaugural young-adult award went to Joanne Proulx for her debut novel, Anthem of a Reluctant Prophet.
The other finalists for the young-adult award were Choices by Deborah Lynn Jacobs, Retribution by Carrie Mac, Darkwing by Kenneth Oppel and The Night Wanderer by Drew Hayden Taylor. --John Joseph Adams
BRIEFLY NOTED
Warner Brothers will offer Academy members the option of receiving Oscar screeners in the high-definition Blu-ray format, which could benefit Christopher Nolan's The Dark Knight, which was shot partly in the IMAX big-screen format, according to The Hollywood Reporter.
Transformers: Revenge of the Fallen star Shia LaBeouf will not be charged with drunken driving for his involvement in a traffic accident that badly injured his hand, but he could have his license suspended because sheriff's officials said he refused a Breathalyzer test, the Associated Press reported.
Hellboy II: The Golden Army drops Nov. 11 in a three-disc special-edition DVD and two-disc Blu-ray disc, with features that allow fans to create their own downloadable comic book using scenes from the movie, as well as BD Live, which allows the viewer to host a text chat with friends while watching the movie in synchronization.
The two-hour premiere of NBC's Heroes on Sept. 22 was down 25 percent, compared with last year's one-hour opener, taking an expected hit following a creatively middling second season and an extended nine-month hiatus prompted by the writers' strike, according to The Hollywood Reporter.
A court in India has thrown out a lawsuit by Warner Brothers seeking to stop the release of the Bollywood comedy Hari Puttar: A Comedy of Terrors, about a 10-year-old Indian boy who moves to England, because of the title's similarity to its blockbuster Harry Potter franchise, BBC News reported.
LatinoReview has posted images of what might be the new Megatron from the upcoming Transformers: Revenge of the Fallen sequel film.
Collider.com posted a report about producer John Davis' upcoming projects, including a film adaptation of The Sims, another Predator movie after Arnold Schwarzenegger leaves the California governor's mansion and Jason and the Argonauts.
ComingSoon.net reported that 25 minutes of the upcoming Harry Potter and the Half-Blood Prince may be screened in the IMAX 3-D format, possibly split between the opening sequence of the film and the finale.
