LOST Fan

The music on LOST is a crucial part of the show, more so than for any other show I can think of.

The man behind the music is Michael Giacchino. He was in the news recently when he was named musical director for the 2009 Oscars.

In addition to winning an Emmy in 2005 for composing the music for LOST, he was also nominated for an Oscar last year for the score of Ratatouille.

In the video podcast below, he talks about the way he works when he’s writing the music for LOST. He doesn’t watch an episode all the way through before he starts to compose, but instead watches, and writes for, one scene at a time. He says that feels like a more creative way of working.

On the podcast, he also introduces some of the members of the orchestra, who joke around or play short bits. A cello player plays the famous scary running-through-the-jungle music, and the percussionist shows off his strange instruments, including a piece of an airplane.

Giacchino says they only have three hours to get all the recording done! That’s just amazing.

In an interview at the Emmys in September, Michael Emerson (Ben) and Daniel Dae Kim (Jin) chatted a bit about the show. When asked if they knew the plots in advance, Emerson said “The actors are the last ones to know.” He said they usually get the scripts two days before they film.

Kim said, jokingly, that when you have to learn another language, a little advance notice would be nice. (Kim was born in Korea, but came to the U.S. when he was only two-years old. He did speak Korean at home with his parents, but then started speaking English when he entered elementary school. He has said that his “comprehension skills are still there but the actual formation of the sounds got rusty.”)

It’s a shame that Emerson did not win the Emmy. I guess it’s some compensation that he had already won an Emmy in 2001 for a guest role on The Practice.

(I don’t watch The Practice, and hadn’t seen him in this role, but just now I dug up the video and — whoa! — his performance gave me goosebumps) –>

Yesterday, LOST producers Damon Lindelof and Carlton Cuse answered questions at a Screenwriting Expo in Los Angeles.

They were asked if they knew the answers to questions raised by the plot in advance, or if they figured things out as they went along. IGN.com reports that the producers said:

… it was a combination of the two. Lindelof recalled how the entire pilot was put together – including writing, casting and production – in 12 weeks, which didn’t allow much time to come up with any long-term mythology. However, once the series was given a full season order, beyond the initial 12 episode order it received, Cuse said he and Lindelof sat down and discussed, “What the overall mythological underpinnings of the show would be. We quickly landed on the ending, and then constructed this broader road map of other mythological points we’d hit on this story.”

They say that now, they are planning it out: “Certainly since we got an end date, that sort of fly by the seat of your pants story is gone now. Showing scenes [set] three years from now, you can’t change it.”

They discussed some of the major changes that had been made earlier to the storyline:

The Ben Linus character was originally going to appear in only three episodes, but actor Michael Emerson was so good, the producers decided to make the character a regular, which in turn affected the storylines of some of the other characters.

While Ben Linus’ storyline got extended, Mr. Eko’s got cut short. He had been one of my favorite characters, and I was shocked and disappointed when the show killed him off so abruptly, just as his story was getting to its most interesting point. Well, it turns out, as this interview reveals, that it wasn’t the writers who wanted to kill Mr. Eko — it was the actor, Adewale Akinnuoye-Agbaje:

… Akinnuoye-Agbaje did not like living in Hawaii. Lindelof said, ” Our Mr. Eko plans very quickly derailed. Adawele’s unhappiness was almost instantaneous. On his second episode, he was expressing extreme dissatisfaction.” This led to them quickly changing Mr. Eko’s storyline to one that would only last one season. Asked what might have happened with Eko had he been the long term character he was going to be, Lindelof answered, “Originally he was going to be someone who challenged Locke for the spiritual leadership of the castaways.”

What a missed opportunity for the show!

A story in USA Today, though, from two years ago, gives a more charitable view of why the actor wanted to leave:

Akinnuoye-Agbaje asked to be written off the series. After losing both parents last year, he wanted to return to his London home and work on a film he’ll direct.

What hooked me most on the show during the first season was the way that characters kept on showing up in each other’s flashbacks. Here was a seemingly random collection of people and, bit by bit, we were shown that their all being on the same doomed flight couldn’t have been as random as it seemed.

What was it these people had in common? How many had crossed paths in the past? Why were they all on the island? Those were the questions that kept me coming back from the start, and that still have me hooked, more than four years later.

Of all the characters from Flight 815, Locke seems to be closest to knowing the answers. Here, in a significant moment in the Season 1 finale, he lectures a skeptical Jack:

LOCKE: … Do you really think all this is an accident? That we, a group of strangers, survived, many of us with just superficial injuries? You think we crashed on this place by coincidence? Especially this place? We were brought here for a purpose, for a reason — all of us. Each one of us was brought here for a reason.

JACK: Brought here. And who brought us here, John?

LOCKE: The island. The island brought us here. (Jack is having a difficult
time listening to this.) This is no ordinary place. You’ve seen that. I know
you have. The island chose you, too, Jack. It’s destiny.

Now, as we are approach the start of Season 5, the show’s producers are teasing us with references to destiny. The first Season 5 promo used the word “destiny” twice, once spoken (a short bit clipped from the dialogue above) and once written. Now, there is a new mini-promo, only 15 seconds long, where “destiny” is featured even more prominently:

So (fingers crossed) the show will, in the end, reveal the mystery of the characters’ destiny – and once we know that, we should know who they really are and what brought them all together to walk through Sydney Airport’s Gate 23.

The official ABC LOST site now shows that the premiere will be a 3-hour event starting at 8:00 (7 central) on Jan 21. According to EW, 8:00 will be a recap show, and then two new episodes will air back-to-back.

EW also says that the show’s regular time slot will probably be at 9:00. That would put it against a new crime-solving show from Fox, Lie to Me. This could be a good show, as it is coming from the producers of “24″ and “Arrested Development.” Even if it turns out to be a hit, it would be less formidable competition for LOST than what’s in the 8:00 slot — “American Idol.”

I suppose that no matter what the competition, and no matter what the ratings for LOST, the network wouldn’t dare to pull the plug on the show before its scheduled ending date. They’d have a riot on their hands if they tried! Though perhaps a mob of LOST fans wouldn’t be the scariest thing in the world.

The LOST premiere is going to be on Wednesday, January 21, at 8:00 (7:00 Central). Yay!

That’s 75 more days.

In other news, Reiko Aylesworth, who played CTU boss Michelle Dessler on “24″ until the character was killed off in the fifth season, will be joining the LOST cast as Amy, “a smart and successful professional woman with a love for the outdoors who is looking for the right man.”

A love for the outdoors will surely come in handy when running through the jungle, trying to escape from smoke monsters. As for the “right man” she is seeking — I wonder if that will be Jack, which would turn the show’s main romantic triangle into a square. Or would that be a parallelogram?