THE DEADBOLT: Now that the writer’s strike is over, what's the status of The Second Generation on TV or a possible feature film?

JOHNSON: What happened was, when I came up with the idea of doing The Second Generation, I had to go through Warner Brothers to do it as a TV project because, since I was under contract to them, they controlled the TV rights and I wrote it as a four hour TV mini-series originally. Although, even then when I was writing the script, I said, "Oh gosh, I gotta turn this into a novel. This is too dense. There’s too much good physiological stuff that I can only deal with in a novel." So I did a sort of parallel at the same time and my experience with The Second Generation in television was not like my original experience with Brandon Tartikoff when I did V originally. Honest to God, I told Brandon the story in his office of V in 1982. He never read the story. I just told it to him and he sent me off out of that meeting to write the script. I came back 19 days later with a 230 page screenplay. Brandon read it over a weekend and on Monday he said, "Here’s a check, come back when you’re done." And we shot my first draft. The only changes that were ever made were changes that I made. No notes, just go do it.

THE DEADBOLT: Wow. That would never happen today.

JOHNSON: Well, you had to have the right guy and the right project and I was lucky enough to do it. My friend Steve Cannell had the same experience with The A-Team with Brandon, and he was a visionary. The guys running NBC now are not the same guys and they’re very talented, very bright, and obviously know what they’re doing, I guess. But they kept dragging their feet and taking forever and finally, by the time that they decided, it was really pretty good and they probably ought to do it - nobody was making TV movies anymore, much less mini-series. And NBC was in such trouble financially that they just couldn’t afford to do a $20 million mini-series. So, what’s happened though since I own the motion picture rights to V, we’re in the process to do a remake of the original mini-series first as a theatrical feature, which I’m so jazzed about, because it will give me an opportunity to really realize it and execute it in a way that was impossible to do back then. Then that will lead to the obvious sequel, because it is a franchise, and then we’ll get into The Second Generation and hoping we’ll be able to do 2 movies, because there’s certainly enough material in the novel to warrant two separate sequels. That’s my goal at this point and that’s what we’re in the process of doing. I just literally came from a meeting, 15-20 minutes ago with a fellow in Beverly Hills, who really says that we’re gonna do it.

But I’ll really believe it when I’m on the street, the trucks are parked around me, and my assistant director, Venita Ozols, hands me my breakfast burrito. At that point, I look around and say, "You know, this could really happen." But not until then. It’s that moment that I finally say, "Oh boy," and that’s the best payoff of all. It was like going to Alien Nation. It’s like the bell rang and I got to go out on the playground. It’s funny, people ask you what are you the proudest of. And because Alien Nation, Bionic Woman, and Hulk were all adaptations of something else, I’m proud of them, but V - the whole thing came out of my little pea brain. So that’s probably the piece I’m proudest of. But when people ask me, "What did you have the most fun doing?" Alien Nation hands down.

THE DEADBOLT: Just out of curiosity, have you heard any talk of a Six Million Dollar Man remake?

JOHNSON: Well, they were going to do one with Jim Carey a few years ago, I think. After Bruce Almighty they were looking around wondering how else can they give him powers. I think a script was actually written for it. But there’s also a rights issue. Universal forgot to re-up for the underlying rights to the novel it was based on and Dimension, The Weinstein Company own the underlying rights. That’s why the Bionics have never been released on DVD, because Universal owns the film, Dimension owns the underlying rights, and they haven’t been able to hammer their swords into plough shares.

THE DEADBOLT: And the fans are the ones left to suffer.

JOHNSON: Yeah, don’t you love it? It’s so stupid, it makes me crazy. It’s like one of the things we went through with The Second Generation was that the Sci-Fi Channel wanted to make the mini-series, but Warner Brothers said, "We can’t make a deal with Sci-Fi." And I said, "What are you talking about?" And they said, "We cannot figure out a corporate template for Time Warner to work with GE/Universal/NBC." So I said, "Wait a minute. Here’s a buyer who wants to make it, here’s a seller that’s got a product, and you guys can’t figure it out?" What it was is that both of the corporate entities wanted too many pieces of the pie and so who ends up suffering are the fans. You know, the audience for V is just astonishing worldwide. It’s amazing the amount of e-mails I get just on V alone from people all over the world who remember it and love it and can’t wait to have more of it. So we’re hoping to get it out to them.

THE DEADBOLT: Given all the hype about remakes, you should really remake or bring back Cliffhangers.

JOHNSON: [laughs] Oh, my god. You’re the guy that saw Cliffhangers.

THE DEADBOLT: I know. I talk about it to everyone and not a lot of people remember it.

JOHNSON: Well, I’ll tell you why nobody remembers it. It’s because we were on opposite Happy Days and Laverne & Shirley when they were getting forty shares in reruns. It was the absolute nightmare timeslot of all time and it’s funny because Cliffhangers was, at the time, the most expensive one-hour show ever made for television. Basically, I was doing three shows at the same time."

THE DEADBOLT: Michael Nouri was awesome as Dracula.

JOHNSON: Oh, wasn’t he? He was wonderful. He came into my office and started talking to me like that [in a Dracula voice]. And that look, he was so handsome. And women were just falling down in the hallways, you know. He was fabulous and I always wanted to do more with Michael where I could show his comedy side, because he is one of the funniest guys I’ve ever met. But yeah, Cliffhangers was enormously challenging and so much fun, although it was probably the hardest I ever worked in my life because I was still doing The Incredible Hulk and I had three different separate shows running with three different writing crews, shooting crews, and casts. I would go into my dailies to see the filming from the day before and I’d be in the dailies for like three hours. It was really hard, but we had a great time and I’m delighted to know that somebody still remembers it. You should get on the phone to Universal and tell them to put that out on DVD.