SEEING THE FUTURE

LegalDispatch 0.92

Mar 08, 2024

Howdy.

So much ground to cover this week…

LA ANNIVERSARY

This past Sunday (3/3), I celebrated (by not really doing anything special) the 24th anniversary of my move to Los Angeles. I’d been living in Boston, but traveled back to Long Island to drop a bunch of things at my parents’ house so I was flying out of JFK Airport on a one-way ticket. I still remember taxiing on the runway with my cat Brandy at my feet. I had a window seat and the gentleman next to me made smalltalk as the plane prepared for takeoff.

I told him the story — former lawyer, going out to Hollywood to break into TV, yadda yadda yadda — and he told me that what I was doing was “brave.” I maintain to this day that “brave” or “stupid” is very outcome determinative. But the main thing is that although I suffer from anxiety and was not, at this point, on medication, I didn’t feel any fear. I’d expected my heart to be galloping painfully in my chest, but it wasn’t. It’s impossible to state how unusual this was for me. Even more so, I felt the hand of destiny at my back, pushing me westward. It’s one of the only times in my life I can recall that feeling.

We took to the sky.

Q & A

Some more great questions from the comments. Thanks, as always, for these. Let’s dive in:

Tony Tower writes:

"Hello, Buckwheat" -

(For the uninitiated, this is a reference to one of my favorite shows, Wiseguy, something Tony and I bonded over.)

Since you've cracked the door open for CRISIS questions, would you be willing to discuss how the SMALLVILLE Lex Luthor appearance would have gone had Michael Rosenbaum been willing? Was it planned to be basically just the same scene that Jon Cryer played with Tom Welling? Or would Rosenbaum's Lex have appeared elsewhere in the story?

Well, here’s the thing. By the time we’d engaged with Michael about appearing in Crisis — thanks in huge part to Stephen Amell’s efforts — we’d already shot the Smallville reunion scene in Hour 2. Nevertheless, I was eager to get Michael’s Lex into the story if I could, so my brain started working on options that could be fit into the episodes that we were still shooting.

I forget the story impetus for them, but I noodled with a version where Michael’s Lex would interact with Jon Cryer’s Lex, which I think would’ve been quite entertaining had it come to pass.

Craig Byrne:

In retrospect, I think there would have been a way Crisis could have incorporated Dean Cain without actually having him in it. Or it’s just my fannish wishful thinking:
What if, in the Earth-75 sequence, the extra doubling for Superman had been wearing a Dean Cain costume and it was Teri Hatcher mourning him? That way. no credit can be given to that guy while at the same time, the show could have still been represented. Then again, maybe the budget was so high at that point, Teri Hatcher was not very affordable.

I totally love this idea. I know we’d discussed bringing Teri back to reprise her role as Lois. I forget, however, why this never went anywhere but, you’re probably right, it was likely lack of money on our part.

Three I will ask about, though:
Was there any reason (such as, maybe the movie people) that Helen Slater couldn’t/didn't reprise Supergirl in Crisis? It seemed like it would have been a great opportunity to homage the comic, bonus with a red headband.

If there was a reason, Craig, I’ve unfortunately forgotten it. I think it was just a matter of us picking our spots and there was certainly a desire to bring back actors who hadn’t been seen on an Arrowverse show previously.

The original press announcement for Erica Durance mentioned she was in “multiple chapters,” which technically there was, considering that she was Alura in Part 1. But was there any temptation to keep Smallville's Lois around for more than one scene?

Oh, there was absolutely a temptation for sure. As with most things, however, we were subject to the limit of a combination of screentime, story requirements, money, shooting schedule, and the actors’ personal schedules.

And then finally: If Michael Rosenbaum had been in Crisis, would the Lex storyline have had to be changed a bit? As it stood, I thought the team did a great job of having Jon Cryer's Lex interacting with Tom Welling.

See above!!!

Matt is back with another FlashForward question:

I’m glad to hear that Dyson Frost (Michael Massee) and his associates (“the bad guys”) were actually the good guys the whole time.

Thanks! Internally, I believe we called them “the cabal.”

That is my favorite kind of plot twist.

Mine too.

I always knew they were the good guys because they had had thousands of flashforwards and they could have easily used that to enrich themselves, take out Mark and Lloyd, etc. Plus, Dyson Frost said that the whole world was running out of time, so I figured that someone could justify causing a global blackout killing 20 million people in order to save the entire world...

You nailed it. I will say that one of the benefits of working out this kind of mythology so far in advance is that you can lay in these little nuggets that payoff with repeat viewings.

I love the idea of having the decreasing time horizons for each flashforward: great increase in tension. I can imagine if the series had continued that governments and corporations would try to engineer flashforwards to “print their own money” as Simon Campos (Dominic Monaghan) said or to manipulate geopolitics as CIA agent Mike Vogel (Michael Ealy) said. There's lots of different ways the show could have went with this... (like Minority Report). And I imagine Dyson Frost was staying in the shadows because he didn't want people to abuse this ability.

That’s the thing I loved so much about the show: There were just so many directions it could go in, even as we stuck to our over-arching plan.

To track the storylines in the first season alone, we created a “megaboard” at the beginning of the season that would always remind us where each character’s story was headed and which boxes we had to check off:

It survived even my firing and, to this day, remains my OCD magnum opus.

There was a single date written on Dyson Frost’s Garden of Forking Paths for “The End” so an event that happens within a day.

The Garden of Forking Paths was one of the seminal works that David Goyer had all the writers read.

Finally, Zack asks:

Having seen and read much of your TV, film and novel writings, I'm wondering how your non-writing life blends into and informs your concepts, dialog, descriptions, character development and characters’ relationships. How does your art imitate life?

Very early on in my career, I had a manager who discouraged me from drawing too much from my life and, like most things — and this will come as no surprise to you — I probably over-learned the lesson. Such that my first instinct would always be to say that my non-writing life didn’t really impact my writing at all. It’s probably even true to a certain extent.

However, when I look at the work I’ve generated since lockdown, a definite pattern begins to emerge: Both Too Dead to Die and Last Flight Out are about a father trying to reconcile with his daughter. There’s an element of father/daughter dynamics in PROJECT FEDERAL as well. And while the romance in In Any Lifetime is quite different from my relationship with my wife, the emotions involved are certainly informed by the feelings I have for Tara.

SEEING THE FUTURE

This past weekend, I demo’d the Apple Vision Pro, Apple’s “spatial computing” headset. It’s expensive, bulky, definitely a “Version 1” product but… it’s the future. The immersive and spatial video is a breathtaking game-changer. The hand-tracking system blows away that employed by the Meta headsets (I have a Meta Pro). And the eye-tracking system is, quite frankly, magical. Its ability to detect micro movements of your eyes conveys the feeling that the device is actually reading your mind.

The “killer app” for this device has yet to be discovered (though, for my money, it’s watching entertainment and sporting events) so it’s hard to say, but I don’t envision a future where we’re all walking down the street with iPhones strapped to our faces. Rather, this is a personal device that—once lighter, smaller, cheaper, etc.—will find purchase at the home and, if they’re still around in 5 years, office.

Credit to my daughter, Sara, for this unflattering photo.

One thing Apple has done a lousy job of is promoting the fact that the Vision Pro can be demo’d for 30 minutes at most Apple Stores. It’s a very curated (read: controlled) demo to be sure, but imagine getting a chance to demo the iPhone five years before its release. That’s what it’s like.

You can book a demo on Apple’s website by clicking here.

“EXCITING NEW STORY TREND”

Two days ago, I sent off my notes on the lettering for the fourth and final issue of Beware the Planet of the Apes. As I’ve mentioned in previous newsletters, Beware POTA utilizes pieces of the Marvel Comics Adventures on the Planet of the Apes run from the 1970s.

ScreenRant recently did a piece about how this approach might work well for Star Wars and, well, it tickled me, so I’m sharing it here.

FROM THE VAULT

I guess it’s a sign of just how much has changed in television, but believe it or not, they let us build half a ship for Arrow Ep. 215, “The Promise.” Here’s a look:

A NEW FEATURE

Rather than writing about upcoming releases or con appearances a week (or days, sometimes) beforehand, I thought I’d try just maintaining a running list of both at the end of each edition of the newsletter.