THE DEADBOLT: Given the cult aspect within the third TV movie, Millennium, was it directly inspired by the Waco fiasco?

JOHNSON: No, not really, I mean, certainly I was aware of all of those things and I wanted to touch on those. But again, if you examine Millennium carefully, everybody in it - Matt is looking for the fast track to get his detective’s degree and Lauren wants to make time with the boyfriend and she just wants new stuff and she needs it now. We always called Buck’s character [to be] the alien without a cause, because he was a troubled youth that was really struggling to try to find himself and understand his place here on the planet. So I thought the perfect way is for him to be looking for a shortcut, "I don’t want to take the time to become a Zen master. Can’t I just become a Zen master by dialing a phone number or maybe joining this group?" And I realized that it was an ideal way to show how people like him could be exploited the same way that cults exploit people and take their money and, in some cases, cause irreparable damage, even death to the people that they suck in. To me, it’s the one. I don’t know. Do I have a favorite? People ask, "What’s your favorite?" I don’t know. I have five children, so which one is my favorite? But, I guess partly because I wrote Millennium, as well as produced and directed it, it’s the one that rises to the top for me in terms of all of them.

THE DEADBOLT: Both Alien Nation and V seemed to have a tough time sticking around, but they were hugely popular. Why didn't they work the way they should have?

JOHNSON: Well, in the case of Alien Nation as a series, it was because Barry Diller thought he could get bigger numbers with comedy and was wrong. More often than not, it’s a decision that is made at the "show me the money" level as opposed to the artistic level. It’s so frustrating; I’m going through it right now. I own the motion picture rights to V and a number of studios, all of the majors virtually have all been all over me to buy the rights and let me produce it. But they see it as this big $150-200 million summer tent pole, which, of course, they want to bring in Ridley Scott or Sam Raimi to direct. And I said, "No." And they said, "But we’ll pay you a whole lot of money." And I still say no because I watched what has just happened to The Bionic Woman and watched what happened the first time to The Incredible Hulk. And, as a movie, the people just didn’t get them and they didn’t understand what made the shows successful was not big bloated stuff. And certainly V, originally, when I did it back in the '80s, had state of the art big screen production values. But even then I could never make it look the way I wanted to because I didn’t have the tools back then that I have now. They missed the fact that what V was about originally. It was never about spaceships, aliens, and reptilian races, it was about power. It was about people who were in power who were abusing it. People who would suck up to it like the Vichy French sucked up to the Nazis and how other people will sort of keep their heads down and say, "Well, the power won’t bother me if I don’t bother them." Then ultimately it’s about the people who say, "No, wait a minute it. This is wrong. We gotta fight back against this." And they, of course, become the heroes of the resistance just like the heroes of the American Revolution or Spartacus’ revolt against the Greeks. I think V was a timeless story that I carried forward now in my new novel, V: The Second Generation, which picks up the story twenty years later and we see the brave new world that the visitors have created here since they control all of the communications and media. They are masters of propaganda. And it’s also a bit of a parallel world that we’re living in.

When I wrote V originally in the '80s, there were two super powers predominant - us and the Soviet Union. The Soviet Union is gone and now there’s one hyper-power. And part of what V: The Second Generation is about is the dangers of an unchallenged monolithic hyper-power who wants to voice their values and desires onto everybody else. And since they control the media, they can certainly do that and they have done that. The majority of the people in The Second Generation, the majority of the people in the world, have bought into the big lie that the visitors are our saviors and the resistance, even though they’ve been fighting back for twenty years, it looks like it’s the end of the world and they’re not going to be able to survive. Then there comes a knock at the back door, we open the door, and there are three peculiar people standing there who say, "Hi. Remember that distress call you sent out years ago at the end of the first mini-series? Well, we got it and we’re here to help... or are we?" And that becomes the engine that drives The Second Generation, that sense of "okay". Again, it’s another Oscar Hammerstein line from The King and I, "If allies are strong with power to protect me, might they not protect me out of all I own?" It’s been fun to play with that whole notion and there’s a lot of contemporary resonance and echoes in The Second Generation when a number of people have spotted that fact that there’s a lot of Cheneyisms that find their way into it, too.

Back in Time with Alien Nation Creator Kenneth Johnson Page 3