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LIVEBLOG: LOST 10TH ANNIVERSARY REUNION PANEL AT PALEYFEST

(Liveblog over! I just went through looking for typos and fixed a few things. Enjoy!)

Here’s a video of the entire hour-long panel!

Thanks to Anna, HERE we have an mp3 of the audio taken right from the livestream!

And now, my liveblog:

@paleycenter: “Tonight’s Lost program was the FASTEST SELLING EVENT in PaleyFest history! Thank you #Losties!”
Moderator Paul Scheer on Lost: “How many of you were watching the show from the very beginning? Congratulations you’re old.”
Scheer: #Lost spanned both space & time. It made you read books the characters referenced, like The Third Policeman. #PaleyFest
Scheer: everyone had #Lost theories. Freeze frames were analyzed. Even binge-watching goes back to #Lost.
Scheer: The root of #Lost was the characters. It was about faith, science & becoming better people than we were.
Lindelof: we consider ourselves fans first. You’re the ones who inspire us. Cuse: we want to thank Paley Festival for caring about #Lost
Cuse: we also want to thank our friends at ABC for helping make this happen.
Maggie and Ian.
Damon: "We debated about whether to show you the REAL finale.” Carlton: “Too soon.”
(the audience at the theatre is now watching “Exodus Part 1”)
@maggiefurlong: Apparently people were actually asking the #Lost cast and creators questions about the Malaysia Airlines news. Ugh.
via Jorge: the cast watching the episode
11:06pm EST - the live stream begins!
Paul Scheer on stage to introduce the cast and crew. “I know what you guys want, you want to talk about the show, you want me to go to you guys for questions, we’re gonna do it! Let’s keep all our questions focused on LOST-centric things! That’s why we’re here tonight. Also, I know recent events, a mysterious plane disappearance, let’s not ask questions about that, it won’t be in good taste!”
Malcolm David Kelley, Henry Ian Cusick, Maggie Grace, Ian Somerhalder, Yunjin Kim, Jorge Garcia, Josh Holloway, Carlton Cuse, Damon Lindelof, introduced. Scheer jokes that Vincent the dog can’t be here, just got a part in Air Bud 4.
Ian on when he knew it was a hit show: not the first episode, but the second, when millions of people were still watching it. Josh was out shopping, sweaty after going to the gym, and some girls noticed him and said “ewww!” then he knew he was famous.
Malcolm was 14 when he shot the pilot. He loved being able to move to Hawaii with the cast to shoot this show as a kid.
“What did you steal from the set when you left?” Damon: “Since ABC execs are here tonight…Maybe the cover of the hatch fell off a truck? SO it was there…so I took it and made it into a coffee table.”
Carlton: a package came from FedEx and hey, it was the countdown clock from the hatch!
Josh: “I kept my boots, they were my own boots. I had them for 12 years before the show.”
Jorge took Hurley’s paintings from the mental institution. Yunjin took some dresses. Ian: “I took my dignity and a lot of amazing memories.” Maggie: “I think an outfit that looks like someone was heading to a tennis-themed prom.” HIC: “A couple blue shirts. Then the costume guy found out and phoned me to bring them back.”
Question from Scheer: did you ever wish you just worked in an office somewhere while out shooting in Hawaii in the elements? “The harsher the elements the more fun to me. We sailed that raft way out there, there was supposed to be a chopper shot and we were waiting for it and we never saw it!” - Josh. Maggie says the guys out on the raft (in Exodus) all mooned her at once.
The first raft sank, the second one was too fast. The camera boat couldn’t keep up with it.
Carlton: “Vincent improvised, he just swam out!” Damon: “She! She always went off script!"
Carlton: "Usually when you make TV, you have an idea in your head but what comes back is not as good as that mental idea. But with LOST the film that came back was better than what we imagined on the page.” Damon: “The idea that we sent these blueprints to Hawaii and then the actors fully realized them, the show would have been worse if we micromanaged. The show became bigger than what we put on the page, hawaii and the fans were really doing something bigger to the show.”
Sept 2004: Damon and Carlton got lost driving in the rain trying to find the set in Hawaii.
Josh on fans: “I had a fan, who I saw too many times, who offered me a chicken dinner…” Damon: “that’s code for sex!” Josh: “Is it a 4 piece or 69?”
Carlton: “Terry O'Quinn lived on the north shore, and on his walk home from the set, he hitched a ride from this woman, she asked him to sit in the back, they drove past his street and he got nervous, and she took him to her house and said ‘I have to show you to my husband’”
Scheer: “Around the finale…” Damon jokes: “I have to go pee!”
Scheer: “what was one of your favorite theories from a fan?” Jorge: “I had a guy once say that when the plane was in the air we were all cloned…” Josh: “I remember once, I looked at Damon/Carlton and said 'the island is like the death star, it moves!’ and you looked at me weird."
Ian knew Boone would die 3-4 weeks before it happened. "Enough to cushion the blow.” What did the actors do when a character died? “Mai tais and skinny dipping,” laughs Ian.
Malcolm always watched the show even after his time on the show was over.
Scheer: “Desmond really was important, tied the last season together…how much did you know?” HIC: “I knew nothing, Damon and Carlton were reluctant to tell me the ending. I told them I needed to know to help me do my job but I don’t remember them telling me anything! I was always trying to figure out between the lines and hope I was not too far off.”
Yunjin knew none of Sun’s backstory, so when a script came out they dropped everything to read through it. “All I remember is, I remember I was in a good place when Sun got pregnant and I knew they wouldn’t kill me off! I relaxed from then on.” Yunjin told JJ Abrams that what Daniel Dae Kim was saying was not actually Korean. (Josh: “It was country Korean!”) She was fluent before the show. Damon says Yunjin read for Kate originally, and there was no Sun character yet. Jorge read for Sawyer at once point because Hurley didn’t exist yet. Yunjin’s popularity in Korea led Damon to create the character of Sun for her. And then Jin came out of that, Sun needed a husband.
Damon and JJ saw Jorge on Curb Your Enthusiasm, loved him, knew they had to make a character for him.
“We thought that withholding information about the characters from the actors” would benefit the show, with the actors were working episode to episode.
Terry O'Quinn went down the beach to listen to his iPod (Damon/JJ bought iPods for everyone) and JJ said to Damon “that guy’s got a secret. Figure it out!” And then Locke’s secret was invented for his character.
With Boone the idea was we wanted to defy the convention that you can’t kill a main character, like if you watch CSI you know someone isn’t going to kill David Caruso even if there’s a gun to his head. - Carlton
Spoiler culture wasn’t really around then, we thought if we could kill Jack in the pilot we’d be pulling a huge surprise Psycho-style, but ABC gave us the note “the audience will never trust you again if you kill this character in the pilot” so they kept Jack.
“It’s a hard call, for an actor to get, and you use the third person, like 'so Ian, Boone…’” - Damon on telling Ian that Boone would die. Ian said “okay, I can play it, thanks for the opportunity…”
DDK, in the third season, called Damon and Carlton, said he was thinking about buying a house but asked if he should buy the house, worried that he might be killed.
Something they would have liked to see more of…Carlton: Miles and Sawyer as cops would have been fun. “Corrupt cops!” - Josh
Damon: character we got the most questions on was Walt. “So Malcolm, while you’re here, what was up with Walt???”
Paul Scheer: “They were not dead the entire time, right? That’s the dumbest theory but it needs to be definitively debunked.” Carlton: “No, no, no. They were not dead the entire time.”
Carlton: “At the end of the series finale, [an ABC exec] thought it would be good to have a buffer between when you have the end of the show and when they cut to say, a Clorox commercial. We didn’t have a lot of extra footage lying around, but we had footage of the plane wreckage on the beach,” which they shot when the plane needed to be moved or it would have been washed out to sea. “We thought, let’s put those shots at the end of the show and it will be a little buffer and lull. And when people saw the footage of the plane with no survivors, it exacerbated the problem.”
audience questions time….
“If the show had premiered now, with shorter seasons for many shows now, do you think that would have changed the arc of the show?” - Damon: “The idea than doing it any differently than we did it would have resulted in a different show. We were on network TV, every break had to have an omg can’t change the channel moment, I’m grateful the show was on network, it would have been a different show on cable and probably not as good.” Scheer notes a show like this has never been done on network TV since.
(Joke about balls. Why did I include this?)
Outrigger question! Damon: “I have to give you some level of satisfaction without answering the question, which is the LOST way. We wrote that scene, it’s on paper, and all the writers, we all looked at it and said, this is a cool answer, but what is much cooler, and we all looked at each other and said, I shit you not, 'someone is gonna stand up and beg and ask us about this,’ and we will have to say 'no sir’ - we decline, that is the truth. Years from now, probably for some excellent charity, we will auction that off.”
The characters concerned us, the characters journeys, we cared much more about that (than the mysteries). - Carlton
There were many Easter eggs on LOST, which were the favorites? Carlton: people found the Dharma logo on the shark. Damon: I remember when someone found a screencap of a burn mark on the fuselage behind Walt that looked like the Dharma logo. (The Dharma Initiative had not been created yet.)
What was the most memorable moment from the show that you carry to this day? (Silence…) Josh: I can’t answer that, next! Scheer asks for favorite scenes. Ian: I made out with my sister once. (He kisses Maggie on the cheek.) Josh: Well you are from the south. Ian: We had been doing that scene all day, and ugh, take after take making out with this beautiful woman, heavy day for me. And then I’m leaving the set, whoa whoa, had to do one more take. (Maggie: excuse me, I’m right here!) I go to kiss this beautiful woman, the whole crew was in on this, she had a mouthful of mint garlic. Maggie laughs, “one of the proudest moment of my career!” Josh: on a show like this, with the material and group, when people ask me that question I feel like I’ve been run over by a truck. So many moments come up, it’s impossible to answer that. It was an amazing magical creative experience from start to finish. That is something in this business, we read a lot of material, but when you are given such amazing material that these two geniuses created, you suck it up and hunger for it and when you get that, to be able to perform it was amazing and there were so many of those moments so thank you both (DL/CC)
Ever a point where they changed their mind about something on the show? Carlton: Nikki and Paulo. (Josh: They were amazing at karaoke by the way!) Carlton: We had a season of material for them but condensed it to one episode where we buried them alive. Damon: Well the audience was asking about the people behind the main cast who were just carrying shit around in the background, Nikki and Paulo will give a voice to those people. So we wrote these characters and as soon as we got into the editing room we were like 'uh-oh this is not working!’ We heard the audience hating them so we killed them off, but we were already hating them ourselves, we asked if we should pretend it never happened or spend an episode acknowledging this and kill them off?“ (The cast is temporarily distracted by a man in Matthew Fox mask)
Matthew Fox mask man has a question. He’s wearing the original Dharma outfit that he bought at the auction. He asks if it’s Sawyer’s blood on it. He asks Josh to sign it, Josh says if it’s really his blood then he’s already signed it with his DNA. He asks: Who is the real alpha male of the LOST show, Sawyer, Jack, someone else? Josh: It’s either the dog or Malcolm, you can’t win a scene with a dog or a kid. Damon: In terms of the set, I can’t answer the question but in terms of the show, I guess we can point to who ended up running the island." (Jorge points to himself and smiles)
What was it like when Jorge found out he’d be the new protector of the island? "It’s on the final DVD, you can see me reading it and then a tear comes down. I was honored.” He felt pressure while filming the transfer scene because Damon and Carlton were on set.
They told Paul Scheer not to let anyone in the top section of the theatre ask a question, but he wants someone to yell down. “I love the ending. Who’s idea was the 'afterlife’ ending?” the man yells. Carlton: We decided early that the show metaphorically is about people lost in their lives looking for redemption, it became clear the ending needed to be spiritual talking about journey and destiny, it was not a single conversation or idea, it was a series of long discussions between Damon and I about lifting each other up in our lives and we wanted the show to reflect our own personal hopes, dreams, desires. Damon: The ongoing conversation with the audience, there was an early perception early on that this was purgatory, and we were always saying no, this is real, we’re not gonna Sixth Sense you, and we felt it too, the show had to be meta in this way. Writers tend to get pretentious among ourselves and we started saying okay there are these mysteries what if in the final episode we answer a mystery it never asked, what’s the meaning of life and what happens when you die? This conversation happened between season 3 and 4.
Paul Scheer: “Thank you to everyone, and now attack the cast!” (Everyone in the theatre rushes forward for photos and autographs. The end!)
BONUS STUFF! (More to come…maybe!)
Jorge took his phone out when he sat down on stage and filmed this short video.
Here’s a nice shot of the cast on stage.
Here’s the EOnline article about the panel.
Yahoo! interviewed the cast members on the red carpet before the panel.
HitFix talked to Damon and Carlton on the red carpet.
Also via HitFix: Ian Somerhalder says LOST changed the landscape of television.
Give Me My Remote talked to Damon, Carlton, Jorge, and Henry on the red carpet about the legacy of the show.