Bryce
Assistant Director
I heart Chuck and PB :)
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Post by Bryce on Aug 11, 2008 18:27:25 GMT -5
J.J. Abrams interview
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Bryce
Assistant Director
I heart Chuck and PB :)
Posts: 2,595
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Post by Bryce on Aug 11, 2008 18:32:28 GMT -5
Joshua Jackson
Anna Torv
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Post by ●..Chuck..● on Aug 11, 2008 20:23:28 GMT -5
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Post by ●..Chuck..● on Aug 11, 2008 20:25:11 GMT -5
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Bryce
Assistant Director
I heart Chuck and PB :)
Posts: 2,595
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Post by Bryce on Aug 12, 2008 21:13:46 GMT -5
Is J.J.'s Fringe the Next X-Files? Or Something Else? by Mickey O'Connor J.J. Abrams' new Fox drama Fringe follows the stories of government agents who investigate mysterious occurrences that exist in a slightly skewed reality. It certainly sounds like another X-Files... but is it?
"I would be a fool to say there are no influences," Abrams admitted during Fox's TCA press tour. "Yes, there's an FBI agent and some weird stuff. But I'd like to think the similarities end there."
Abrams unspooled a long list of other influences from "that place where medicine and science meet in real life," including Twin Peaks, The Twilight Zone, Nightstalker, the writings of Michael Crichton and Robin Cook, and even David Cronenberg films. If all these references give you cold-sweat flashbacks of that time you tried to finish reading A Tale of Two Cities before the next episode of Lost rolled around, fear not. Abrams is sympathetic.
He told a story about recently watching an old ep of Alias with his pal Greg Grunberg. "I was so confused. It was impenetrable," says Abrams, the, um, creator of Alias. "I was like, ‘Who the f--- is that guy?" In that respect, he says, Fringe is an experiment. "You don't have to watch episodes 1, 2 and 3 to understand 4. Each episode has a story, but over the course of the season there will be arcs. Hopefully you will want to see all the episodes." [Note: I saw the pilot last night. I'm guessing you will.] — Mickey O'Connorsource: community.tvguide.com/blog-entry/TVGuide-News-Blog/Todays-News/Fringe-New-X/800043158
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Post by {~}:Wendy:{~} on Aug 13, 2008 11:07:17 GMT -5
Joshua Jackson!!!
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Bryce
Assistant Director
I heart Chuck and PB :)
Posts: 2,595
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Post by Bryce on Aug 13, 2008 11:37:02 GMT -5
Joshua Jackson!!! My thoughts exactly! I love that he's coming back to television. he looks so changed from his old pacey days..
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Bryce
Assistant Director
I heart Chuck and PB :)
Posts: 2,595
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Post by Bryce on Aug 13, 2008 19:04:00 GMT -5
7 Reasons Fringe Will Rule TV
Here at SCI FI Wire, we pride ourselves on having our fingers on the bloody pulse of SF&F geekdom, especially the televised variety. That's why we think we're in the perfect position--i.e., out on a limb--to proclaim that Fox's upcoming SF drama Fringe will be this fall's breakout success: The show that will knock Heroes out of the sky and bury Lost like Nikki and Paulo on that irritatingly populated desert island.
From J.J. Abrams and his Star Trek writing team of Alex Kurtzman and Roberto Orci, Fringe centers on FBI special agent Olivia Dunham (Anna Torv), who finds herself drawn into an investigation of a mysterious aircraft disaster in Boston. Olivia's desperate search for help to save her gravely injured partner leads to brilliant scientist Dr. Walter Bishop (John Noble), who has been institutionalized for the last 17 years. And the only way to question him requires pulling his estranged son Peter (Joshua Jackson) in to help. The investigation gets weirder and weirder as Torv discovers that things--and science--are not what they seem.
Herewith seven reasons why Fringe will make you forget about Mulder and Scully and yearn for a cow of your own.
1. Anna Torv. This blond newcomer from Oz (Australia, not the Emerald City) radiates intelligence, spunk, anguish and drop-dead sexiness better than any federal agent since Gillian Anderson. And she's got one of those faces that morphs her into different people entirely, depending on the scene and scenario. One moment, she's as sunny as Without a Trace's Poppy Montgomery. Another, she's as somber as Galadriel. There's more going on in those blue eyes than in Teri Hatcher's entire body.
2. Creator J.J. Abrams. We know, we know. There's a mini-backlash against the Lost-abandoning, Tom-Cruise-loving Trek revisionist. But he's still our guy, and when he focuses his full creative powers on something, there's no one else who can better mash up genres, cook up truly scary scenarios or mix the mundane and the miraculous into such a funny, frightening, intriguing stew.
3. Mad scientist. When was the last time a show featured an honest-to-god raving evil genius? OK, Doctor Who doesn't count: Who can tell when an English person is being crazy or just English? In Fringe, the mad scientist is John Noble, another Aussie, who is best known to fanboys as the ill-fated Denethor in The Lord of the Rings: Return of the King. Here, he's Bishop, "the Einstein of his generation." (We thought Einstein was the Einstein of his generation, but whatever.) So how crazy is he? When we first meet him, he rambles about butterscotch pudding and peeing himself. When he gets sprung, he orders a live cow installed in his lab for reasons known mainly to himself. His deadpan non sequiturs boost Fringe into a lunar orbit of its own.
4. Altered States. Really? you ask. Who even remembers Altered States, the prototype of all hyper-verbal wacko science fiction to come? It's fitting that Fringe inserts its homage to the Ken Russell/Paddy Chayefsky classic in the middle of the pilot: Fringe is a worthy successor to the 1980 movie. It's whip-smart. It's got beautiful intellectuals arguing about insane science fiction with the gravitas of Shakespeare. It's psychedelic in a way that only Ivy League mushroom-eaters can be psychedelic. And it's not afraid to take the ridiculous and make it plausibly frightening. Oh, and Fringe even features Altered States star Blair Brown in its cast!
5. Pacey. Wonder what happened to Dawson's Creek's cougar-loving Joey stealer? Joshua Jackson has matured into a handsomely grizzled adult in sharp suits. In Fringe, he functions as the exasperated Greek chorus to Noble's mad scientist and gets many of the best punchlines as a result. We won't spoil the fun for you.
6. Supporting cast. Genre pieces like Fringe may live or die by their leads, but they soar on the strength of their supporting players. Abrams, always a canny discoverer of unknown talent, struck gold with the casts of his previous SF series Alias and Lost and again assembles a top-flight cast of relatively unknown character actors who bring their own quirkiness and reality to the otherworldly story. In addition to the sinister Brown, Fringe features Lost player Lance Reddick, prime-time soap fixture Mark Valley and all-purpose street cop Kirk Acevedo in its solid supporting cast.
7. Goo. The opening frames of Fringe may at first suggest Lost's Oceanic Flight 815, but that's only until the slime begins to flow. And it doesn't stop there: There's drool. There's cow poop. There's even an edematous body, like Scully's jelly-like fireman from The X-Files: Fight the Future. Abrams et al. don't soft-pedal the gross-outs, and Fox lets 'em go there, and that's why we love Fox.
See for yourself: Fringe premieres Sept. 9 and will air Tuesdays at 9 p.m. ET/PT.source: www.scifi.com/scifiwire/index.php?id=58570
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Bryce
Assistant Director
I heart Chuck and PB :)
Posts: 2,595
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Post by Bryce on Oct 25, 2008 17:12:30 GMT -5
Fringe: Jasika Nicole Hints at Astrid's Secrets When Jasika Nicole auditioned for J.J. Abrams' Fringe (Tuesdays, 9 pm/ET, Fox), she was told it was for a sci-fi series that incorporated humor. As FBI Special Agent Astrid Farnsworth, though, Nicole isn't exactly given a lot of the punchlines, saddled as she is with doing a lot of the heavy lifting in the lab of mad scientist Dr. Walter Bishop (John Noble). With a background in musical theater and a talent for drawing (check out her work, including an autobiographical comic, on her website), Jasika (it's pronounced jah-SEEK-uh) talks to us about being intimidated by Noble, why Astrid returned to work in the lab and her theory about the identity of the elusive William Bell.
TVGuide.com: What's a sensible gal like Astrid doing with this bunch of crazies? Jasika Nicole: I think Astrid is really riveted by Olivia Dunham [who is played by Anna Torv]. I think for any woman starting out in her career, Agent Dunham is an exceptional role model. On Fringe, she is juxtaposed with the doctor, who is also brilliant, but was in an institution. I imagine that Astrid is trying to learn the balance of going after what you want in your career without having it be your whole life. Literally 15 minutes ago I was talking with Anna Torv about needing a scene to show that Astrid has a life outside of this lab.
TVGuide.com: So what's coming up for Astrid? Will she have a larger role in future episodes? Nicole: She's always doing a lot of lab work, always doing a lot of filing and interjecting at appropriate moments. Episode 107 [which airs on Nov. 11] is really intense. Astrid has to commandeer this weird line that they're crossing. It involves one of the members of the team directly, and then someone outside of the team, and they're trying to bridge a gap. It's similar to when Olivia was in the tank and she [communicated with John].
TVGuide.com: Do you have a backstory for Astrid? Nicole: So far I've learned that she's really, really smart, has a brain for science even though that isn't what she studied. I found out recently that Astrid majored in music. I have a background in musical theater, and J.J. Abrams asked me about it once, and so now Astrid has it too. I was like, "Oh Lord, I'm going to be singing Broadway tunes." John Noble and I have been planning that since Day 1. We're so excited for that one.
TVGuide.com: Tell me about working with John. Nicole: John is the funniest guy. I thought he would be very serious, and I was intimidated when I first met him, and I'm pretty sure he made fun of me because, you know, he likes to keep the mood light. Seeing him work is fascinating; it's like taking a master class. I just like to sit back and watch how he processes information and take notes. He's able to do a scene a million different ways within the span of five minutes because he's so able to connect with the artistic vision everyone has for this show.
TVGuide.com: But why can't Dr. Bishop ever remember Astrid's name? Nicole: I wonder if it just started out as one joke, and it just ended up being so charming and funny that they kept it going. It's hard for me not to laugh; John's reading on it is so funny. We have this running joke where we're always trying to think of new names for Astrid. We were rehearsing a scene the other day and he called me "Afro," and I died. I fell on the floor laughing. He's also called me "Aspirin" and "Ostrich."
TVGuide.com: And when he finally does pay attention to her, he attacks and sedates her. Why do you think Astrid came back to the lab? Nicole: At first, it was discouraging that they didn't put anything in that told you why Astrid returned. But I think that it sets up something to happen later. You're going to find out exactly why she came back. She is integral to helping the team save these people's lives -- to save the world. Her heart tells her to keep doing it even though her brain is saying, "You've got to get out of here."
TVGuide.com: Personally, I think that Astrid is much more than she appears, that maybe she has some kind of special skill or power that's related to Dr. Bishop's work. Nicole: I think that is very, very possible. The best theory I heard so far is that I am William Bell.
TVGuide.com: Wanna hear the best William Bell theory that I heard? That he's Blair Brown's prosthetic arm! Nicole: [Laughs] That's beautiful. At night, it leaves her body and goes out and does bad things.Source
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Bryce
Assistant Director
I heart Chuck and PB :)
Posts: 2,595
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Post by Bryce on Oct 27, 2008 10:51:51 GMT -5
Q&A: The Creators of FringeVF Daily’s Q&A series features interviews with the top talent from television’s best shows. Fox’s new drama Fringe is about a top-secret government investigation into a chain of disturbing, unexplainable events called “The Pattern.” Think CSI meets X-Files. It airs Tuesday nights at nine p.m. E.S.T.
Alex Kurtzman and Roberto Orci, who co-created Fringe along with J.J. Abrams, have been a writing team ever since they graduated from Santa Monica’s Crossroads high school, in 1991. While they aren’t exactly married, Kurtzman and Orci have been inseparable for the past two decades, and have collaborated on both hit series (Alias) and big-budget blockbusters, including Transformers, Mission: Impossible III, and Abrams’s upcoming revival of Star Trek.
VF Daily: Can you describe how your team operates? Roberto Orci: We write every word together. Unlike some teams, we actually sit across the table from each other and our conversations are our scripts. We call each other our first marriage. We’ve been together now 17 years for Christ’s sakes, so that’s a long time. I don’t know how writers do it by themselves. We love being a team, and we can’t imagine ever doing it any other way.
Alex Kurtzman: Obviously, after 17 years you aren’t going to agree on everything, but that conflict is sometimes very good and healthy. By now, we certainly have learned how to use that as part of our secret sauce.
Have you found the perfect ingredients for your “secret sauce,” or will you continue to fine-tune it? Orci: We think of it like a band, so for any given album, we can team up with other people. We wrote Mission: Impossible III with J.J. [Abrams]. We wrote Transformers 2 with Ehren Kruger. It’s very natural for us to have another session player come in and do a gig once in a while.
Since you have been inseparable from high school on, how did you cope with attending different colleges? Kurtzman: There was a period of time when Bob took a year off and he was actually living on my floor in my dorm at Wesleyan. The room I lived in was almost not big enough for me, let alone the two of us, but even in college we had an extremely rigid writing regimen. I’d go to class, pick Bob up, and sit at the coffee shop for like four or five hours and just write. We wrote real badly, but we did it for four or five hours.
Orci: When I was at the University of Texas, we wrote over the phone. We were probably the first guys on our block with headsets. People would come over and see a headset phone, and be like, “What do you use that for?” I remember the phone bills being a struggle to pay, but it was for our art.
Kurtzman: Now it would literally be free. Back then, it was thousands of dollars when you’re on the phone. So we were actually working jobs during college to pay for our phone conversations to write.
Alex, in this year’s October issue, Vanity Fair discussed Wesleyan University’s bumper crop of filmmakers and film moguls. As a former film student there, can you tell us what’s going on? Kurtzman: I think [Corwin-Fuller Professor of Film Studies] Jeanine Basinger is what’s going on there. She’s been the head of the film department for a long time, and she’s just the den mother to all film students. She gives you such an amazing opportunity to love and explore movies, but she’s also like a very rigid parent. I literally never got an A in any of her classes in my life.
So you wrote poorly during school. When did it start clicking? Orci: We thought we were going to go the independent-film route. We met in a French-film class for God’s sakes! Our first gig was Hercules where we got a freelance episode, and then we did another, and then they hired us on staff. A year later, we were running the show at 24 years old. So it really started clicking as soon as we got together and both of us moved to L.A.
Kurtzman: We were so lucky to fall into those shows because at the time there was this air of snobbery about syndicated TV and genre. We learned very quickly that even if it’s perceived as B drama, you have to give it A treatment. I don’t know that we would’ve known that as instinctively had we not gone through the process on Hercules and Xena.
Did you live together after school? Kurtzman: No, weirdly. I was in L.A. working as an assistant to Rob Tapert and Sam Raimi on Xena, and that’s when they gave us our first shot at writing. I called Bob and said, “Guess what, dude? I think we have a job.” So he left school and came out, and we just started writing together. We had apartments two blocks away. Literally, I would pick Bob up at nine in the morning, we’d get a cup of coffee, we’d land in the office around 9:45, and we’d start writing.
Moving on to Fringe, what inspired you to create a show like this? Kurtzman: We always approach our projects by looking at what we would want to see as fans. In the television landscape, we felt like we were not seeing a procedural show rooted in genre. Usually people will say that procedurals, particularly cop procedurals, have to be devoid of characters and just about the main investigation; and if it’s going to be genre, then it has to be wild and fantastical. We thought, Why do these elements have to be mutually exclusive? Why can’t we do all these things at once?
In Fringe, you make references to devious corporations and cover-ups, not unlike modern-day Haliburton or Blackwater. How do current events influence your writing? Orci: Fringe is about looking behind the headlines, and having a show that’s a procedural with an ending. But if you want to see more, you can. If you’re a fan of extreme genre, you can accept what the F.B.I. concludes in its press release at the end of the show, or you can think there’s more to it. I think it’s just impossible to pick up a newspaper or any publication and not feel like somehow you’re missing something, and that’s one of the facets we love about Fringe.
Both Transformers: Revenge of the Fallen and Star Trek come out this summer. What are you most excited about? Kurtzman: We’re really excited about both of them in different ways. Trek is a crazy milestone. Aside from being handed a franchise that was incredibly significant to us as kids, it’s also the first time, in a weird way, that we’ve gotten to write about our friendship. Initially our friendship was very much about logic versus emotion, and that’s very Kirk and Spock. Over time, we’ve actually found out that we’re more similar than different. Transformers was really exciting because we resisted doing it for a long time. We opposed it until we had an idea that was as compelling as the first one, and once we figured that out, we decided to go for it.
Orci: Next summer is going to be an embarrassment of luck for us. It’s Star Trek in May; then we’ve executive produced The Proposal, starring Sandra Bullock, that comes out a few weeks later; and then we close out with Transformers. I’m not sure if we are ever going to have another summer like that in our lives.
Would you call your story together a power-friendship? Kurtzman: That’s a nice way to put it. Well, it’s been really fun. We never imagined that it was going to go where it went, but that’s obviously the joy of it.Source
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Bryce
Assistant Director
I heart Chuck and PB :)
Posts: 2,595
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Post by Bryce on Oct 27, 2008 10:54:14 GMT -5
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Bryce
Assistant Director
I heart Chuck and PB :)
Posts: 2,595
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Post by Bryce on Oct 27, 2008 10:55:01 GMT -5
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