(Below is the first part of Lost-TV's exclusive interview with Damon Lindelof, co-creator, writer, and producer of LOST. Damon spoke to us via telephone last August 13 for 45 minutes. If you wish to post this or portions of this elsewhere, please give credit to Lost-TV by posting a link to http://www.lost-tv.com/ . Email me at xander1600@yahoo.com if you reposted it.)
   Lost is the series that almost really did get lost.
   ABC exec Lloyd Braun called up whiz kid JJ Abrams (Felicity, Alias) and pitched an idea he had long been fond of: a plane crashes on a tropical island.
   JJ's response? A polite, "You must be kidding."
   "JJ got a call from Lloyd Braun who was the head of ABC, back at the every end of January 2004," Lost guru Damon Lindelof said. "Lloyd told JJ, 'I want to do a show about a plane that crashes on an island.' This is an idea I guess he'd had since last summer. Normally networks buy ideas in mid-summer, then the writers write during September and October, and they get scripts ready before Thanksgiving. The networks decide around December which shows they’re going to pick up and make pilots out of, and the pilot pickups are all after the first of the year in January. So that whole process had already gone by, and Lloyd called JJ at the very end of it and said, 'I want to do the show.' Most other pilots start production in early February which was a week later. JJ said, 'How can I possibly do another show this year? I'm running Alias and I've written this other show called The Catch (JJ's bounty hunter show slated for midseason) and I don't have time to do this island show. I don't even know what it is. What's the show? A plane crashes on an island? Is that it? What's the series?' But Lloyd was really attached to the idea, so JJ finally gave in and said, 'If you guys bring me a writer who I can bounce ideas around with and maybe I can supervise and they can write the script, maybe I’ll be involved."
   That's a whole lot of maybes. Time was running out. Other networks were going to start filming pilots the following week, and "this island series" was still in the "what if" stages. No writing staff, no scripts, no cast, nothing more than a one liner. "A plane crashes on a island." And the real kicker is finding someone else to work on the show.
   Enter Damon Lindelof. Damon (Nash Bridges, Crossing Jordan) had written a script the previous summer for a cop show, and while ABC executives were impressed and liked the script, they had decided against developing a pilot. Still, it put Damon in good graces with ABC. So when JJ asked for a collaborator, Damon got the call.
   "They brought me in to meet with JJ who I had been a huge fan of since Felicity and Alias," he said. "I was just happy to be in the same room with him. I didn't care what the idea was as long as it was JJ. So we had this amazing three hour meeting and started talking about ideas and the challenges attached to it. With this large a cast of survivors, the island itself has to be an interesting character otherwise all you have is people laying around in hammocks all day. If you don't have to go to work, you don't have to make money, fix your car, what do you do? After you solve the food and water problem, now what? What's going to create the drama?"
   Already behind the proverbial eight ball when Lloyd approached JJ with his idea, JJ and Damon were now under the gun to produce a pilot. Eleven weeks later, they had written the pilot, cast the pilot, filmed the pilot, edited the pilot and it was picked up by ABC. Given the usual time frame for television pilots – a leisurely 9 month lead time – that had to be a world record.
   They solved the problem by multi-tasking.
   "The casting process and the writing process were both happening at the same time," he told us. "We knew that there was going to be a doctor, that there was going to be a female lead, but we hadn't figured out what her background was going to be. We knew there was going to be the comic relief who was this musician, so we had sort of very vague ideas and started meeting with actors. And the first thing we wrote for the show before there was even a script were character outlines. Like Charlie, for instance. We constructed him as a has-been musician, late 40s who'd been in a band in the '80s and then Dominic Monaghan came in and read and it was like wow! He was so amazing we changed the character and write for him (Dominic).
   "Then JJ saw Jorge Garcia on television one night (in an episode of Curb Your Enthusiasm), and he said, 'Let's write a character for him,' because Jorge's character didn’t exist yet."
   "Yunjin Kim came in and read for the character of Kate. But then we thought, she speaks fluent Korean and we thought, wouldn't it be amazing if there was this Korean couple, a husband and wife, who don't speak the same language as every one else."
   There were other changes in the script as well. Lost-TV reminded Damon of the rumor that Matthew Fox's character was originally slated to be killed off in the second hour of the pilot.
   "Who told you that?" Damon asked. "Did Foxy tell you that?"
   Foxy. Damon has a nickname for Matthew Fox. Foxy. Matthew Fox fans out there, feel free to unite in a big squee.
   The real story is that the character was scheduled to die, Damon told us. But the writers grew to like him so much, they decided to let him live. Matthew Fox was cast after that decision was made.
   But why think of killing off such a key character in the first place?
   Damon said that the idea of killing off a "main character" was to throw the audience a curve ball. If you kill off a perceived hero, you set the audience up for the unpredictability of what is going to happen and who will live and who will die.
   "The thinking that the one person who can really help them, the doctor, the hero, for him to die would be so earth-shaking (for the other survivors), but it was so unsettling (for the writers), because you spent the first hour getting attached to this guy and then he was gone."
   This thinking makes you wonder: who of the 14 main characters will in fact survive? Or to whom will the writers get so attached that he or she will live, despite the diminishing odds against their survival?
   Because, in real life, heroes do die. The good guy doesn't always win.
   And sometimes they even die.
   To be continued... (7:35 AM)