Dark Skies (2)

                  Taken from the Internet

"My name is John Loengard.  This program is being presented as
fiction to protect those people fighting in the Resistance.  But I
will tell you the truth now, if you will listen..."

The pilot episode of Dark Skies isn't at all mysterious or
teasing; the very first sequence of the show is a visual effects
highlight, as a pilot in a U-2 aircraft (an experimental
reconnaissance plane of the early sixties) gets blasted out of the
sky by a UFO. The pilot, we learn, is Francis Gary Powers -- who,
according to all the history books, was shot down by Russians
during the Eisenhower presidency.

That's just the beginning of a never-ending stream of historic
revisionism that the series promises, in the unfolding story of a
surreptitious invasion of the planet Earth that began in the
1940s, if not earlier. John Loengard (Eric Close) and Kimberly
Sayers (Megan Ward), are a "modern" 1961 couple, unmarried but
living together in Washington, D.C., where they have arrived to
become lower-echelon government staffers at the beginning of the
Kennedy administration. When a budget-cutting congressman assigns
Loengard to investigate "Project Blue Book" (the Air Force's
saucer investigations division), the young man is impressed by the
testimony of saucer witnesses Betty and Barney Hill, and is ready
to press for a Congressional investigation of saucer phenomena.
But Loengard's ambitions are thwarted by Navy Captain Frank Bach
-- number three man in a military organization code-named
"Majestic-12." In their first encounter, Bach threatens Loengard's
life, and destroys his taped saucer testimony.  When Loengard
persists, Bach makes an about-face, and recruits Loengard as an
operative of Majestic -- a top-secret outfit that is charged with
gathering information, and maintaining a cover-up, on the alien
invaders.

By chronicling Loengard's career with Majestic, Dark Skies will be
offering something that many fans hoped to see in the X-Files,
but has never satisfactorily emerged -- a continuing storyline
that makes fictional sense out of the diverse lore of UFO
phenomenon and government secrets. While many fans will no doubt
continue to favor the soft-focus approach of "Brand X," Dark Skies
doesn't just confront you with mysteries.  In this world, the
Truth isn't "out there," it's right in your face.

The show's mix of historical fact (the U-2 incident, the Kennedy
assassination), saucer legend (Betty and Barney Hill, the
almost-surely bogus "Majestic" project), and fiction compares to
nothing else in film or television; in literature, it is probably
most closely related to Wilson and Shea's The Illuminatus Trilogy,
which similarly attempted to recast all of history as a struggle
between secret powers. According to executive producer Bryce
Zabel, who, with supervising producer Brent Friedman, is also the
series' co-creator, Dark Skies contains more truth than some
viewers may suspect.

"I don't see Dark Skies as just a series," says Zabel. "It's a
blend of fact, informed speculation, and dramatic license. The
series premise is simply this: that our future is happening in our
past." Zabel, well known as a writer and executive producer for
ABC's Lois and Clark and Fox's M.A.N.T.I.S., also has a background
in hard news, as part of the team that launched Ted Turner's Cable
News Network in 1980. Dark Skies is the culmination of the
ex-reporter's long-held belief that the U.S. government, on at
least one occasion, was not entirely truthful with the American
people.

While the UFO material is the flashier part of the story, Dark
Skies is equally concerned with the legendary machinations of
America's "secret government" -- faceless, unelected men who wield
powers never granted to them, or to anyone, by the U.S.
Constitution. Since all of this is the sort of stuff that most
newsmen spend their lifetimes avoiding, one has to wonder what
former newsman Zabel really believes.

"I believe that the evidence indicates that a UFO did crash
outside of Roswell in 1947," he says. "This has been backed up by
numerous servicemen who were there at the time, and who later
participated in some kind of cover-up. I personally have talked to
servicemen who have served at Roswell who vouched for the
authenticity of such reports.

"Roswell offered an answer to the question of whether we are alone
in the universe -- that's the big cosmic riddle, isn't it?  This
isn't the same as withholding information about Iran-Contra. "If
you believe, as I do, that this event at Roswell actually
happened, it seems obvious that a piece of major, life-changing
news has been withheld from the American public for fifty years.
And nothing happens in isolation; if a Roswell cover-up happened,
that implies all sorts of things. Which of the people in power
really know what happened at Roswell?  Any reasonable answer to
that leads to questions about secret governments, 'black budget'
operations -- all of that.

"My job is to write a TV series," Zabel points out, "and come up
with good stories. But do I believe there's truth at the core of
this? Yes, I do.


"I've been interested in UFOs since I was a kid," Zabel recalls,
"reading the original UFO books by people like Donald Kehoe, and
later Betty and Barney Hill's Interrupted Journey. I didn't really
believe in flying saucers, but I found the topic interesting. I
became interested in saucers again in the mid-eighties and,
during the writer's strike in 1988, I wrote a 'spec' script called
Progenitor, which later became the Sci-Fi Channel's first original
movie, Official Denial. That was my effort to make sense of what I
thought of the saucer phenomenon at that time.

"The script got me noticed, and Amblin approached me to develop a
UFO TV series, which we called Sightings [unrelated to the
existing program, recently signed to the Sci-Fi Channel]. We
pitched it to all four networks, who didn't want to hear about
UFOs at the time, even with Steven Spielberg, 'Mr. ET,' involved,
which shocked the hell out of me. The main character in that was
named John Loengard."

Which leads us to 1993, when Zabel became involved as a writer and
executive producer on Lois and Clark. Zabel's fascination with
saucers invaded the series with the second show, when Zabel's
script "Strange Visitor From Another Planet," wrapped an entire
UFO mythology around Superman's arrival on Earth.

"Around the same time, I was doing final rewrites on Official
Denial, and I was contacted by a guy who wanted to give me notes
on the script. I asked the guy who he was, and he said, 'It
doesn't work that way -- you give me a name.' Scrambling for a
name, I said 'you're John Loengard,' and that's the name that he
used on the few occasions when we talked."

According to Zabel, this anonymous informant, claiming first-hand
knowledge of a government cover-up of saucer activity, was a
catalyst that helped spark the core concept of Dark Skies. Zabel
didn't find "Loengard's" story particular credible, and suspects
that he may have been a saucer enthusiast so desperate to be
listened to, that he felt compelled to make up a good story. Zabel
even considers the possibility that his informant may have been
giving false information in order to further muddy the waters, as

many UFO experts believe is sometimes done by the government as
part of a continuing cover-up effort.

"At the time of Roswell," Zabel says, "we were emerging from World
War 2, and entering the Cold War. I think they made a decision
that is quite understandable when you look at it through the prism
of that period's national security concerns.  But fifty years have
passed, and now it's impossible for them to reverse that decision,
because they'll be revealed to have lied for a long time. And they
can't do that."

The nature of secrets is that, as long as secrets are kept, we can
only guess at their dimensions. The science fiction element of
Dark Skies -- the "what if?" that drives the story -- is the
supposition that the secrets held by the government, and the
secrets of the UFOs, are big secrets.

If there is any truth to the very heavy matters addressed in Dark
Skies, isn't there some risk of trivializing these matters by
making them part of an entertaining drama? Zabel doesn't think so.
"All the media trivializes everything, in some sense.  My highest
priority is to entertain, but if, along the way, it causes people
to ask some questions, if it raises some people's awareness, I
think that's a healthy thing. Especially if there is a reality
behind UFO phenomenon.

"If there is no such reality, the question remains whether, for
instance, the implication that JFK was assassinated due to
knowledge that he had about UFOs trivializes his death, or demeans
his family and memory. Well, JFK and his life have been thoroughly
mythologized already. He's increasingly a figure of history. No
one would question a similar dramatic use of, for instance,
Abraham Lincoln. It makes it a bit edgier to have JFK, but the
principal is entirely the same. The harder ones will be further
along in the series -- like the fourth season, when we will have
George Bush collaborating with the Hive."

The Hive, in case you can't guess, is the "group mind" of the
alien invaders, a growing collective that will grow more forceful
as more of the invaders gather in our own little corner of the
universe; eventually, the power of the Hive collective will reach
a certain "critical mass," at which time the invasion force will
announce its presence to the world-at-large.

Though the show is currently set in the mid-1960s, Zabel and
Friedman don't plan on remaining in that era for long. As Zabel
explains, "We are going to move the show forward in such a way
that our show's time will catch up with real time in 1999,
because, in the show, the alien Hive has an announcement to make
at the start of the Millennium. We want to catch up with that, and
be part of that in real time."

One of the most peculiar aspects of Dark Skies is this proposal to
radically change the show after its first seasons.  Even assuming
the show endures, Zabel is aware that there may be pitfalls on his
route to the year 2000. "I can't tell you what is likely to happen
if we are a big success and, at the end of season two, I tell [NBC
Entertainment President] Warren Littlefield that we want to jump
ahead ten years, and have Eric Close play his own son -- or
whatever device we come up with at that time. The response might
be, 'gee, the sixties really work, and everyone identifies this
show as being about the sixties.' A lot of things could happen.

"But we have been clear with the network about the concept from
the beginning, although there remain some questions that we don't
have answers for right now. We want to paint on a canvas that is
all of modern history, and bring all of that tension to bear on a
focal point at the start of the Millennium."

While Zabel has been itching to do a saucer series for years, he
credits the ambitious scope of Dark Skies to a fruitful writing
partnership with Brent Friedman, a young screenwriter with several
"B-movie" credits, including the recent horror film Ticks. "I was
preparing to pitch ideas for the season, and was planning to again
pitch a UFO show to the networks. By this time, I was co-executive
producer of M.A.N.T.I.S., and my assistant was Brent Friedman's
wife, Patricia; she brought us together when she learned of my
interest in UFOs.


"When I met Brent, we started throwing things around. He tossed in
the title Dark Skies; we locked into this particular idea, and we
just couldn't stop developing it -- once we realized we had more
than enough, we'd still be coming up with things, because we
wanted to understand the entire universe of this particular idea.

"In terms of our respective roles, Brent has never worked in
television before, so I was his entree into the field, and, given
my background as a newsman, and since Brent was probably just a
few months old when Kennedy was killed, I have a better grasp on
the authentic history of that time; and Brent's background in the
genre allowed him to work more on insuring that this worked as an
exciting alien invasion piece. It's a great working relationship,
because on a project as large in scope as this, it's great to have
someone else who understands things as you do, on an almost
molecular level, someone you can talk to about it."

Joining the team as a series producer is James D. Parriott,
well-known to fans as the co-creator and guiding light of Forever
Knight. "And it's amazing to see the continued fan support that
show gets," says Zabel. "The fans got word that James was here,
and people actually sent flowers. I won't mind at all if Dark
Skies gets that kind of energy behind it."

Zabel is delighted with the big push Dark Skies is getting from
NBC, though he wasn't exactly thrilled when NBC rejected the
script that was to be the first episode of the series, following
the two-hour pilot.

"I did feel very attached to the material in 'Paranoia Strikes
Deep,' which was to bring John Loengard to Dallas in the aftermath
of the Kennedy assassination," he says. "But when you make a
television series, your production money comes from the people who
are broadcasting it, and they have a right to their say."

Contrary to reports elsewhere, "there was no 'political
repression' involved in NBC's decision against our script. They
simply felt it was too much JFK, too early in the series -- that
people coming in for the first couple of shows might think it was
a series about JFK. We were never told that we couldn't use that
material, and it may re-emerge -- perhaps when we get to the
period of the Warren Commission, for instance.

"NBC in general has been great, so far. One of my favorite
comments came from Warren Littlefield, who said, 'If this isn't
Must-See-TV, then what is?'"

And Dark Skies does seem to have "TV hit" written all over it.
Comments Zabel, "I'm a radical optimist. Every time something's on
the launching pad, I'm the one saying, 'hey this is good, I think
we're going to connect with this.' And occasionally I've been
disappointed. The difference with Dark Skies is that, on the
others, I never felt they would open big -- there's too much out
there, and it can take a while for a good show to get noticed. I
think Dark Skies is going to cut through the noise and open big.
Certainly, NBC is doing all they can to get it noticed."



                              - o -