Word: monsters
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There needed to??be??a??monster. That, in a nutshell, was what J.J. Abrams and his co-creator, Damon Lindelof, decided soon after Lloyd Braun, then ABC's entertainment chairman, gave them this assignment: Write a show about plane-crash castaways on a desert island. The parallel to a certain CBS series was obvious. If Survivor was Gilligan's Island with real people, Lost would be Survivor with fake people. But Abrams, who had raised the spy serial to new heights of cliff-hanging absurdity with Alias, knew that the series would need something extra, something weird, to sustain...
...Abrams and his partner gave the island a deadly (unseen) monster. Fine. A lot of writers might have done that. But with Abrams, there was also a polar bear in the jungle. There was a mad Frenchwoman marooned on the island for 16 years. There was a scary Canadian guy named Ethan living among the crash survivors, although he was not on the plane's manifest. "We were saying from the beginning, 'This is the level of reality we're dealing with,'" says Abrams. "If you're not up for that, you won't like where the show goes...
...street cred. Atwood and Joyce Carol Oates mingle with the likes of Stephen King and Poppy Z. Brite. The results are remarkably pleasing. Atwood contributes a delicious, melancholy first-person piece about what it's like to be a young girl who turns into a yellow-eyed, red-clawed monster. Mitchell, who was short-listed for this year's Booker Prize, spins a yarn about a man searching for the knife that killed Japanese writer Yukio Mishima. China Miéville--who, as a science-fiction writer, comes from the gangster side of the equation--chimes in with a gorgeously creepy...
...Laurence Olivier hid behind putty noses and funny accents. In Catch Me If You Can, DiCaprio's face was a blank check on which his character forged a career in duplicity. At other times, as in Gangs of New York, a rage can pop out like a monster in a lake. His face is too soft to be a tabula rasa; it is a pillow on which DiCaprio can embroider surprising emotions. That's why he is an actor, a gifted one, even more than he is a movie star...
...insulted by judges, it has exploded in its second season into a Top 10 hit by presenting itself less as a home-improvement show than a life-improvement show. Each week the design team meets a family with a heart-wrenching story--disability, death, debt--and tailors a monster renovation to its needs. For the Vardon family of Oak Park, Mich.--two deaf parents with a blind, autistic son named Lance, 12, and a sighted son Stefan, 14--the team built a house with high-tech aids, including flashing-light smoke alarms and Braille labels on the walls. The Vardons...