To mark the 20th anniversary of Lost, we look back at screenwriter Jeffrey Lieber’s unused pilot script, Nowhere, and how it informed the hit show.
The journey to Lost, which turns 20 years old this week, begins from nowhere. Figuratively and literally.
In 2000, four years before Lost premiered, DreamWorks released Cast Away, directed by Robert Zemeckis. It starred Tom Hanks as Chuck, a FedEx analyst who crash lands on a deserted island and is stranded, alone, for years, his only friend a ball he names ‘Wilson’. It was an inspiring survival drama film with a tour de force performance from Hanks, and became one of the biggest commercial and critical hits of the year.
One man who loved it was Lloyd Braun, the chairman of ABC Entertainment, who on a vacation in Hawaii openly came to wonder if there was a television drama series which could use a similar concept. He believed Cast Away fused with Survivor, a popular reality series which saw contestants marooned in tropical locations, could make for exciting television.
As he recalled in Alan Sepinall’s book The Revolution Was Televised, “…I put it all together: What if there was a plane that crashed and a dozen people survived, and nobody knew each other. Your past was almost irrelevant. You could reinvent who you were. You had to figure out – how do you survive? What do you use for shelter, for water? How do we get off the island, how do you get home? And I start to get very excited about the idea.”
He also envisaged elements of Gilligan’s Island, a popular sitcom about castaways stranded on a deserted island, as well as William Golding’s classic novel Lord Of The Flies, in which a group of British boys stranded on an island struggle to govern themselves amidst tensions around morality, emotion and groupthink. Braun openly pitched the concept at a corporate retreat for other executives and claims he faced: “Deafening silence. I felt like I was the only Jewish guy at a Ku Klux Klan rally.”
He did, however, have one champion in ABC’s head of drama, Thom Sherman, who believed there was something to the idea. Braun suggested he quietly develop the concept. Sherman turned to Spelling Television, formerly Aaron Spelling Productions, which was responsible for innumerable hits in the 1980s and 1990s including Dynasty, Beverly Hills 90210 and Charmed.
Producer Ted Gold, who worked at Spelling, claims that Sherman was very clear: “Thom [Sherman] said to me, ‘We want to do Cast Away-the Series.’ That’s the only line that was ever pitched.”
Gold took the idea to a writer named Jeffrey Lieber, best known at that point as screenwriter of low budget movies Tuck Everlasting and Tangled (not the Disney animation), and with whom Gold had previously tried to put together a pilot. Spelling Television had considered its own variant on Survivor and Gold liked Lieber personally. Lieber believed the concept had potential as a “realistic show about a society putting itself back together after a catastrophe.”
He worked up the concept for a series he named ‘Nowhere’, pitching the idea to Sherman and ABC, with Gold present who admitted: “I won’t be so presumptuous as to say it was one of the best pitches ever … I will say it was one of the more well-thought-out pitches I’ve been in.”
Sherman, already keen on the idea Braun had approached him with, was happy, as Gold recalled in a piece published by Chicago magazine: “Thom called me and he told me, quote-unquote, ‘The best project of the year.’ He greenlights it enthusiastically.”
Lieber subsequently developed an outline for ABC, which Sherman liked – his only note being to delete a sequence where a shark killed one of the castaways, believing it to be too unrealistic. Given the show that would eventually emerge from these early plans, the irony shouldn’t be lost on anyone in hindsight. Undeterred, Lieber went away and wrote the pilot script of Nowhere over the next six weeks, delivering a draft dated January 5th, 2003.
Nowhere begins on United flight 1549 bound for Sydney. We’re introduced to a variety of characters who ultimately become the show’s survivors: Truman Graham, “twenty eight years old, bespectacled and rumpled, but instantly endearing.” Zach Tyne, “a nineteen year old with a heavily tattooed arm and surfer thrash metal music blasting through the earphones of his iPod.”
Sarah Hill, “an attractive, if not beautiful, brunette thirty-eight year old, who admires her wedding band along with her NEW HUSBAND”: Xander Britzke “a wiry, thirty two year old, his hands (hidden under a blanket) folded on his lap. As Xander shifts positions and the blanket is displaced to reveal a GLINT OF METAL (were those handcuffs?).”
Piper Brightman “the blonde haired, blue eyed, eighteen year old beauty in the row in front of Xander reads Lucky magazine and nervously fumbles with the silver cross around her neck.”
Lieber goes on to introduce the Sykes family: father Steve, mother Caroline, fourteen year-old daughter Tyke and six year-old Alexander. Jed Heinz, “a formidable, six foot-plus, 300 pound 38 year-old, who clutches a leather bag in thick hands. Nell Woods, “a very attractive 26 year-old woman with a textbook in her lap”. Frank White, “a grey haired gentleman in his fifties, fast asleep. He’s cool and collected, despite the chaos”; Ross Graham “In contrast to Truman, Ross is utterly polished. Thousand dollar suit… five thousand dollar watch… not a hair out of place.”
With the ensemble assembled, framing enmity between Ross and Truman, brothers on their way to the funeral of their father, as a central plot device, the plane crashes.
While Lost would ultimately chart a very different narrative course than Lieber’s pilot, the key characters and archetypes who would later become familiar to audiences have their genesis here. Elements of Jack can be found in Truman, especially as he immediately begins administering to survivors of the crash on the beach as they bleed, scream and cry. Xander being escorted by a Federal marshal will carry through into Kate, gender-swapped but with the same dark edge (shades of Kate and indeed Jack are also clear in Nell). Zach’s immersion in music and his grunge look evokes Charlie, even if his character is older.
Shannon’s facile beauty is apparent in Piper, while the enigmatic cool of the elder Frank is visible in Locke from the beginning. Even Ross, to an extent, has shades of the slick southern gentleman swagger imbued in Sawyer, whose penchant for larceny becomes clear in Jed. The supporting character of Rose, convinced her husband is not dead, is ported in from that of Sarah.
Nowhere establishes the dynamic between these characters in much the same manner Lost itself does. Some, such as Piper, query why nobody has arrived to find them yet. Truman and Ross clash over priorities. Frank reveals himself to be a retired US General, instantly giving him authority as he tries to take command. Where Lost differs is in how it inverts this archetype with Locke, as mentioned earlier. Nowhere chooses to play such a beat straight and Lieber’s script focuses on practicalities of survival entirely, rather than layering in core mysteries as Lost does, such as the polar bear or the monster in the jungle. It instead establishes what could have blossomed into a mystery, with General White found dead halfway into the script, thereby increasing the stakes for the remainder of survivors woefully unable to keep themselves alive.
Lieber’s script, however, is built on an examination of morality and underpinning political constructs, like Lord Of The Flies. Ross and Truman, both sons of a billionaire father, clash violently over the ethics of portioning out medication. Jed and Xander, the former a cop and the latter a criminal, find themselves to have more in common on a moral level than they might imagine. Nowhere is peppered with examples of character dynamics that pose fundamental human questions, but it lacks the scale, enigma, intensity or threat on the page that was apparent in Lost from the outset.
With the script complete, ABC was presented with the pilot and Sherman was delighted, offering only minor tweaks and suggestions. “If you don’t hand in blank pages on the rewrite, we’re shooting this thing,” Sherman said. Lieber couldn’t believe how quickly Nowhere seemed to be coming together: “Nobody tells you they’re shooting anything – ever. That’s the best news you can get.”
Only one person needed to sign off on Nowhere before it entered production: ABC’s Lloyd Braun, the person who wanted the project to succeed perhaps the most. He read the script and didn’t like it.
Lieber went back to rewrite and rework the script, but admitted that he “didn’t know what to do. I wasn’t being told really what the problem was—all I was being told was that Lloyd didn’t like it.”
Lieber had great feedback from Sherman, who was completely on board with his material, but the hammer eventually came down. Braun didn’t want to make Nowhere. Braun later said that it “did not live up to my expectations, and I felt, in fact, fell prey to many of the concerns that many people had when the first heard the idea. I was very disappointed.”
Just like that, Lieber was ousted.
What happened next – how Braun brought Lost to air, how he recruited two young, increasingly upcoming writers and filmmakers to transform the bones of Nowhere into the strange, cult sensation of the decade – is an even greater story. Lieber, once he saw the future of the series that became Lost, understandably felt hard done by.
“I was angry and depressed and confused,” he told Chicago magazine. “It’s the flip between ‘We love it’ to ‘There’s a problem’ that I’ve never really gotten over. Had somebody said, ‘Lloyd thinks it’s too real – maybe we need a monster or an otherworldly element’ – I would’ve said, ‘OK, no problem.’ But I just never got the chance.”
Lost was becoming a reality, under a whole new creative team, and Nowhere would be consigned to the myth-making of the series’ history. Though Jeffrey Lieber would never be involved in developing Lost, his role in its story was far from over.
You can find A J. on social media, including links to his Patreon and books, via Linktr.ee here. He co-created the Film Stories Podcast Network show, The Magic Box, devoted to Lost, which can be listened to here.
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