lost and lostpedia
The folks at Lostpedia have a great interview with Carlton Cuse and Damon Lindelof, the producers of Lost. I just loooove the fact that the writers / producers of the show actually rely on Lostpedia every once in a while for information about their own show…
You know, obviously one of the questions that Carlton and I get asked very often is like “Is there a Lost Bible that has all the details of the show? Is there a database?”, and our answer to that question is “Yeah we have this guy named Gregg Nations, who is the keeper of all the information”, but there is also a website that is like Wikipedia, that is sort of fan aggregated, that has sort of every little detail about the show … When we’ve visited the site we are incredibly impressed with sort of the level of detail. There are occasions where we basically say “What was Juliet’s husband’s first name?”, and if Gregg is not sitting in his office we will log into Lostpedia to get that answer.
One of my favorite meta-discussions with fellow Lost fans is debating just how much the show’s arc has been pre-determined by the producers and writing team, and how much they’re making it up as they go along. And yesterday a few of us at the office realized – if the Lost producers are relying on Lostpedia for information about their own show…is there an opportunity for Lostpedia to hack some misinformation into the show itself? And if that happened, would that information then become Lost canon, which would mean that Lostpedia then needs to treat their misinformation as real information?
Thinking through a self-referential hack like that hurts my head…it’s almost like trying to figure out how time travel works.