Reading · LegalDispatch · RSS Amplifier

Greetings from Encino.

I just hit ‘send’ on the latest draft of the screenplay for Last Flight Out.

Let’s get into it…

FEEDBACK

RIP FLASHFORWARD! Gone too soon.

Thanks, buddy. That one was a real labor of love — before it wasn’t. I ended up getting fired about halfway through the season. My first time getting canned!

Rick Ellis writes:

I really enjoyed FlashForward. But it was one of those frustrating situations as a viewer when you're left hanging and there are so many questions left unanswered.

Unsurprisingly, I stopped watching the show after I left it, so I don’t know how it ended. I think the producers — at least the one who had pushed me and series co-creator David Goyer out — had to have known that a second season was highly unlikely so they should have ended it in a satisfying way. It’s a shame that they didn’t.

We knew that Lost had — as I like to say — “worn out our welcome” so we had very specific answers for all of the show’s questions. It’s not like the remaining producers didn’t know which cards to turn over.

Leave a comment

SHOOTING MY MOUTH OFF: GREEN LANTERN EDITION

Earlier this week, I spoke with The Ankler about the ill-fated Green Lantern series I did with Greg Berlanti and Seth Grahame-Smith a few years back.

The article is paywalled, but here are my soundbites:

When [Greg] Berlanti first signed on to develop Green Lantern … he and Guggenheim viewed the opportunity as a “redemption story” after the duo’s 2011 feature film starring Reynolds was critically panned and grossed $237 million worldwide on a budget of $200 million.
“We let the movie get taken away from us, and we weren’t going to let this get taken away from us,” Guggenheim says of the series.

…

“One note we kept getting over and over again is could we go to Oa (the fictional planet where the Green Lantern Corps are headquartered) only at the end of the first season,” Guggenheim recalls. “It wasn’t a note that was borne [out of] or driven by budget. No one ever said, ‘Listen, we can’t afford to make the version of the show you’re talking about.’ I never got that note. It was always, ‘Do we have to go to Oa? Do we have to see aliens? Can’t it be a more grounded procedural?’”

Concept art by Francois Audouy of the Central Power Battery on Oa from our ill-fated *Green Lantern* series.

“We kept getting these notes saying they want True Detective with power rings,” Guggenheim tells me. “Ultimately, that wasn’t the show that we were interested in giving them.”

Our instincts on what HBO really wanted from a *Green Lantern* series weren’t wrong…

To be clear — lest anyone misinterpret — I don’t begrudge HBO for holding out for what they wanted. I’m grateful they had a clear vision for what they wanted to program. That’s incredibly rare. And, at the end of the day, it’s their money and their (parent company’s) characters. We serve at Warner Bros.’ pleasure, and that’s as true for our ill-fated GL series as it was for Arrow and everything else we did for WB.

One moment in the show I was very proud of was something I came up with for the season finale that I co-wrote with Geoff Johns. The series had established the concept of a “Prime Construct” — basically, the first thing a Green Lantern makes with their power ring, typically it’s from the worst moment of their life.

At the end of the season, the big bad corners an elderly Alan Scott, who became Earth’s first wielder of a power ring after finding one in the aftermath of a horrific train crash. Because Alan had never gone through training on Oa, he’d never manifested a Prime Construct. And when he finally does, it’s… A TRAIN.

And the big bad essentially laughs in his face, taunting him: “The worst moment in your life is when you got the powers of a god? You pathetic, fucking idiot…” (That wasn’t the actual dialogue but you get the idea.)

It isn’t until the end of the episode that we flashback to the moment when Alan’s boyfriend leaves Los Angeles and Alan forever.

On a train.

PREVIEW: LEVIATHAN FREEDOM #3

Next Tuesday (8/18) sees the release of Issue 3 of Leviathan Freedom, the Comixology series I’m doing with Tom Morello and Szymon Kurdanski. Monkeys Fighting Robots has a preview: