Damon Lindelof, the head of Lost, always criticized that the experience had been so demanding, with an audience that demanded answers and was upset by the creative decisions of the writers, that he needed to distance himself from the public sphere and from contact with the media. communication. But, according to the journalist Maureen Ryan, there were those who had it even worse: the actors and screenwriters who suffered discrimination, bullying and directly racism by other team members. The hidden face of the island.
“All I wanted was to write really cool episodes of a really cool show. That was impossible on that team,” Monica Owusu-Breen explained to the journalist, who publishes Burn it down, power, complicity and a call for change in Hollywood where this chapter focused on the J.J. Abrams, Carlon Cuse, and Damon Lindelof. What problem did he have? “Part of it was that they didn’t like characters of color,” confessed the screenwriter, who worked on the third season of Lost.
The culture of Lost, according to the report that includes up to 20 sources of production workers (some of them anonymous), was based on racist comments that had to be tolerated if you wanted to fit in. Cuse and Lindelof, who were the showrunners, allowed this work environment: they hired writers belonging to racial minorities but, when it came to taking into account their opinion on the direction of the series or the characters, they were ignored or their suggestions were taken like an attack.
In front of the media, the passengers of Oceanic flight-815 were a role model: it was a diverse cast that included actors such as Naveen Andrew, Harold Perrineau, Daniel Dae-Kim, Yoon-Jin Kim or Jorge Garcia. But, behind the cameras, that harmony was conspicuous by its absence with some creative managers who, when push came to shove, always placed Caucasian actors at the center: Evangeline Lily (Kate), Matthew Fox (Jack), Josh Holloway (Sawyer) and Terry O’Quinn (Locke).
Harold Perrineau, who played Michael on the series, denounced his problems with the creative direction of the series. When he discovered that his character lost his son Walt, who was kidnapped, and hardly asked about him in fiction, he stood before the writers. “This just feeds the narrative that nobody cares about black kids, even black parents,†he explained. He did not want to contribute to the stereotype. This is how he discovered, among other experiences, that in Lost one could not talk about racial issues: if he did, the writers automatically believed that he treated them as racists.
In fact, there are discrepancies around the dismissal of Perrineau from the series, which at the time was justified as creative. Malcolm David Kelley, who played his fictional son Walt, had grown up too quickly: he didn’t fit into the series’ time frame, and as a result, both Kelley and Perrineau were cut from the plots. But, according to the actor, it was as a result of asking for character treatment similar to that of white actors. And, as revealed by Owusu-Breen, Lindelof one day appeared on the set and said: “he called me a racist, so I threw him out.” And everyone laughed, an anecdote that Lindelof denies is true.
To understand the work environment and the mentality of the scriptwriters, there is another representative anecdote. When actor Adewale Akinnuoye-Agbaje announced that he was leaving the series, Cuse said that he should be killed in the most cruel way possible, bringing up the idea of ​​”hanging him from the highest tree” and that, if they could, “he would cut off his dick and I would shove it down my throat.” When Owusu-Breen heard these ideas, he did not hesitate to contradict his boss: he overremembered the American racist imagery and multitudes of lynchings against the black community. Cuse, for the record, denies making these comments.
However, after the publication of the Burn it down chapter, the screenwriter Javier Grillo-Marxuach, who had also worked on the series, also wanted to join the critics: “If Perdidos was such a great work of art to continue being a topic of discussion after all these years, so it’s cruel to expect those of us there to remain silent about the way it was done.” He therefore validated Owusu-Breen’s experience, noting that many of the writers “were treated pretty badly and then disappeared in favor of the ‘authorial showrunner’ hagiography.”
Lindelof, who wrote The Leftovers after Lost, won the Emmy for Watchmen and now works at Mrs Davis, has not acknowledged the anecdotes communicated to the journalist Maureen Ryan but he did want to express a mea culpa in one aspect: his inability to create a work environment where all the professionals felt safe due to their level of “inexperience as manager and boss”.
