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WEEK IN SCI-FI #13 This week on Girls Kick Ass: Elvis mini has burning love for McGowan; "My mother is no fish"; Keira hurt on movie set; Jolie admits she would marry a woman; Alyssa's masturbation dates Abrams
taps Angel vets for Alias, Lost TV shows may die, but their writers lilve on. This thought was uppermost in J.J. Abrams' mind when he heard that The WB's vampire melodrama Angel had been cancelled after five seasons last spring. The creator of Alias, who was also working on a new pilot, Lost, at the time (Lost is now a solid hit for ABC on Wednesday, and Alias joins it there for its fourth season starting 5 January), saw an opportunity and put in a call to executive producer Joss Whedon, who had spun Angel off of Buffy the Vampire Slayer. "You desperately try to find the best people out there to work with," Abrams says. "I felt slightly like an ambulance chaser, but when I heard that Angel was sadly going down, the first thing was to call Joss to say 'My apologies,' and 'I have to be pragmatic here and ask you, what do I do?' I know he has an amazing ability to find these great writers. As a fan of those shows, these are people I've wanted to work with before, and I've talked to. They were either unavailable or loving what they were doing. "Obviously, as soon as Angel went down, we scrambled and were lucky enough to convince Jeff Bell and Drew Goddard to come to Alias, and David Fury on Lost. Also, not just as a writer, but director, because Jeff Bell directed an Alias episode called Ice, which is terrific. We scored." Asked what he hoped to bring to Alias, Bell says, "A strong visual sense and emotion. I'm a genre geek, and I really like being around genre geeks. I'm calling Mr. Abrams a geek as I'm looking around at his robots and toys in his office here. But, to me, genre is the best because you tell stories in metaphor that you can't tell otherwise. "Alias isn't real world, it's hyper-real. It allows us to tell stories that you can't tell other places. I have a history of working for shows that do that. I love that, and I feel real comfortable contributing in that world." And that world is bigger than Bell ever imagined. "One of the things I love about being here," he says, "is the writers' room is really interesting and smart, and it's a much larger room than I'm used to working with. They're specialists. You can go into the room with any problem in the world, and somebody in there can solve it. Whether that's, 'OK, we need a really cool action thing involving a Russian helicopter ...,' or it's a heartfelt emotional thing, or it's a tech thing, or it's a location issue. It's really amazing to watch the room solve problems. "There's really heartfelt stuff in Alias, and people are good at that, there's tech stuff. We have a guy who could probably break into any secure compound in the world." And aren't we glad he's working fo us? Bell laughs. "I'm not sure he is." Just as writers moved back and forth between Buffy and Angel in Whedon's Mutant Enemy production stable, the same seems to be true in Abrams' little corner of the Disney lot. "It's cool," Abrams says, "that the Lost writers building is right across the way from the Alias one. I'll be looking for Fury, and Fury will be in Bell's office, talking about an episode of Lost or Alias. I'll go over and be at Lost, and Drew Goddard wrote an episode of Lost, so Drew will be over there - crying, I think." "He's a very weepy man," Bell says. "He's tall and weepy," Abrams says. "Evidently," Bell says, "it's not easy being tall and handsome. There's a lot of weeping goin on." "I would know," Abrams says, "being as tall as I am and good-looking." Abrams has also maintained a feature career along with his TV work. He wrote one of the many scripts for the upcoming Superman, which was abandoned when new director Bryan Singer came on board. "I'm not really sad about it," Abrams says. "For some reason, I thought I would be, but I'm feeling such relief that I'm not in the grind of what that experience was. I'm just excited to see a good Superman movie. I'm proud of the work that we did. But I have to be totally honest, co-writing and directing Mission: Impossible III takes the sting off anything. Yeah, it feels pretty OK to me. I just hope that the movie turns out well. I hope Bryan Singer does a great job." "You know another cool thing about working for J.J.?" Bell says. "Tom Cruise comes in the office. I always said, 'Tom Cruise, yeah, sure ...' Then I met him. Total man-crush. I have a total man crush. Oh my God, Tom Cruise. I met Tom - suddenly I'm calling him 'Tom.' You go, 'Tom Cruise is in J.J.'s office.' We're hanging out, going 'Hey, Tom.' I get that." "That's what happens with Jeff Bell," Abrams says. back to the top Alias wants Rossellini back Isabella Rossellini told Sci Fi Wire that she's been asked to reprise her role as Katya on ABC's Alias, which kicks off a fourth season in January. "They called me the other day to see if I was available in January, so I hope they'll make me kill someone else soon," Rossellini said in an interview. "I did say that I was available, so hopefully [it will work out]." Rossellini guest starred three times last season as Katya, the sister of Irina Derevko. In her first episode, Crossings, Katya informed Jack that Sydney was still alive, and offered to do everything in her power to save Sydney, so long as Jack agreed to kill Sloane. Later, Katya tried to kill Sydney and made romantic advances toward Jack. "My character is pretty mysterious, and we're all very devious," Rossellini said. "So the moment you think you get your character - 'I'm bad at this, but good at that' - uh-uh. The next script arrives, and you're betraying [someone]. We're meaner than the public can even imagine." Rossellini added that playing so mysterious and devious a character wasn't unusual or difficult, as she's played dark characters before. But she said that perpetrating Katya's brand of violence did not come easily. "I had to take my chopsticks and put them [through] somebody's hands," Rossellini said, referring to a scene in Crossings. "There were all these special effects, and I wasn't hurting the person, but even just doing it I flinched a little bit. So the director said to me, 'Isabella, you have the accent. If you get the violence, you can be governor. So go. Go for it.' They're a great bunch of people. J.J. Abrams and Jennifer Garner, they're so great. It's fun to be with them." Alias begins its new season with a two-hour premiere on 5 January and moves to a new timeslot, Wednesday at 9pm ET/PT, following Abrams' other hit series, Lost. back to the top Whedon to helm Wonder Woman? Ain't It Cool News reports that Joss Whedon is in talks to write and direct a new Wonder Woman movie. Citing an anonymous source, the site claimed that Whedon is in final talks with producer Joel Silver and Warner Brothers to adapt the classic DC Comics superheroine for a summer 2006 release. The site reported that an announcement was imminent. The site added that the only obstacle is X-Men 3, which earlier rumours said Whedon was in talks to direct. (Whedon himself has denied that he has ever been approached to helm the third film in the Marvel Comics franchise.) Whedon, an avowed comic-book fan, is currently writing a series of X-Men comics for Marvel. Whedon is currently finishing up Serenity, the movie version of his cancelled TV series Firefly, for a 30 September 2005 release. back to the top War of the Doctors Thursday's Independent carried the shock revelation that audio CDs of Doctor Who are being released. The Indy's story concerned Big Finish's latest Eighth Doctor adventure, Caerdroia (mis-spelt Caerdoia in the story and a "rival version" to the new television series starring Christopher Eccleston), news of which "will not be welcomed" at the BBC. The ubiquitous "insider" is quoted as saying that BBC Worldwide's deal with Big Finish is "typical short-sightedness on our part". The reason for the story is unclear. It could simply be the case of the Indy seeing Caerdroia on the release schedules and making a story out of nothing (quotes from "insiders" are, after all, easy to make up), or it could be that the BBC are planning not to renew Big Finish's licence, either spelling the end for the audio stories or a move to in-house BBC production (although whether they'd actually be interested in putting in the effort for what must be a relatively small return is another story). back to the top |
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