Wildly popular, pioneering series set the pace for future TV shows

Everywhere Jean Higgins looked from her spot near the outdoor screen at Sunset on the Beach, she could see people. A sea of faces stretched before her.

That so many would show up for the pilot of a TV show they knew nothing about took the executive producer’s breath away. Honolulu police told Higgins that 10,000 people attended the Waikiki screening of "Lost," which launched the fall TV season 10 years ago.

"There were people as far as I could see," Higgins recalled during a phone call from her office in Seattle. "There were people on balconies. It was stunning. It was staggering."

It was TV history in the making.

"Lost," which was shot almost entirely on Oahu for ABC, became an international hit that changed television. From the way it was told — with flashbacks, flash-forwards and flash-sideways, subtitles for foreign-language dialogue and a cinematic vision — to the way people watched it, "Lost" gave millions of fans something they didn’t expect to find on TV.

Over six seasons, from 2004 to 2010, "Lost" set a new standard for television. It won 10 Emmy Awards, including outstanding drama in 2005. In 2013, three years after "Lost" ended, the Writers Guild of America ranked the drama No. 27 on a list of the 101 best TV shows of all time.

And in Hawaii, where it spent more than $400 million during its run, "Lost" showcased what was possible in a location traditionally thought of only in terms of providing tropical backdrops. The show turned Hawaii neighborhoods into England, Iraq, Australia, Korea — even a snow-covered street in Buffalo, N.Y.

"’Lost’ became the premier calling card for the state in terms of what they were able to accomplish here during the show," said Donne Dawson, state film commissioner. "At one point ‘Lost’ was the No. 1 show in the world, and because this is a very word-of-mouth industry and a relatively close-knit film community, the word got out. People knew that ‘Lost,’ in all of its complexity and diversity, was filmed in Hawaii."

But on that premiere screening in 2004 in Waikiki, no one on Queen’s Surf Beach knew what to expect.

Most of the actors in the cast photo ABC handed out at the screening along with palm-size electric fans, license plate frames and postcards were relatively unknown.

High school teacher Tony Traughber, who teaches Bible classes at Hawaii Baptist Academy, was there with friends. Some of them were fans of "Lost" co-creator J.J. Abrams, and some of them just wanted to watch a movie on the beach.

That changed after they saw the two-part pilot under the stars.

"This is going to sound like hyperbole and fake, but I think we were really blown away," said Traughber, 38, of Nuuanu. "It was a mystery that at that point was pretty fantastical. You thought everything was going to be explained. It was a fresh thing and it kept you guessing."

The story sounded straightforward, at least in the beginning:

Oceanic Airlines Flight 815, a commercial jetliner flying from Sydney to Los Angeles, crashes on a seemingly deserted island, and the surviving passengers — among them a troubled surgeon, a wisecracking con man, a drugged-out rock star, a former Iraqi army interrogator, a wily female murder suspect in handcuffs — must cope with their surroundings.

Things got weird very quickly.

Out of the tropical jungle came a polar bear and a roaring, tree-shaking monster made of smoke. There were ghosts and whispering voices. There was a man living in an underground bunker who felt it was his mission to type a series of numbers into a computer every 108 minutes to keep the world from ending. And there were The Others, a mysterious group of gun-toting "hostiles" who battled the castaways.

"It was just something I don’t think we have seen on network TV before," said Michael Daley, a writer whose credits include "CSI" and "Reaper" and who teaches at the Loyola Marymount University School of Film and Television.

"I think it completely changed the landscape," he said. "It opened the door to so many types of shows."

TV writers got excited about "Lost" when they saw it, Daley said.

"It became the thing everyone wanted to do," he said. "They wanted to get on it, and they were inspired by it."

"Lost" arrived at a time when traditional network television was dominated by situation comedies, procedurals that delivered a tidy conclusion at the end of the hour and unscripted reality shows that were inexpensive to produce, said Walea Constantinau, Honolulu film commissioner.

"Television was going through a time period where there were not a lot of dramas, and I don’t think the powers that be that dream up shows thought the American people were interested in watching dramas and especially serialized dramas," she said.

But "Lost,"with its long story arc packed with unanswered questions, proved they were. The show is credited with bringing drama back to television, Constantinau said.

"It felt like you were watching a feature film every week," she said. "It was one of the first shows to think of things in a cinematic way. Traditional television is told in a square format with a lot of close-ups. When you start thinking cinematic, you open it up and have big landscapes."

The series embraced diversity with an international cast and with episodes that relied heavily on English subtitles for Korean characters Sun and Jin, an estranged couple played by Yunjin Kim and Daniel Dae Kim.

"Prior to ‘Lost’ you didn’t have many multiracial casts, and you didn’t have many where you had interracial relationships," said "Lost" producer Higgins, who has worked in television and film for more than 40 years.

"You think it has always been that way, but it really hasn’t been. ‘Lost’ was the first. In the 10 years since ‘Lost’ started, the whole face of TV has changed."

One of the plot devices synonymous with "Lost" was the use of flashbacks. It’s common practice now, but back then it was novel television, said Robert Thompson, founding director of the Bleier Center for Television and Popular Culture at Syracuse University in New York.

"This idea of completely breaking the notion of telling a story from the beginning to the end — the flash-forward and flashbacks, the almost baroque twisting of time into filigrees — I think ‘Lost’ did it in an interesting and satisfying way," Thompson said. "It was so much fun to watch."

The series demanded viewers pay attention.

"It really asked you to search for things and interpret things and, I think, more so than most programs up to then," he said. "It was almost unrelenting in the invitation it gave you to try to figure out what this puzzle was about."

Viewers talked about it, too, fueling the rise in social media and the now common practice of providing episode recaps on entertainment websites.

"When it started, people talked on blogs and message boards," said Hawaii fan Ryan Ozawa, who hosted a weekly podcast on the series with his wife, Jen. "At the end it was all Twitter and Facebook. The platforms where the discussion was taking place evolved during the course of the show."

Time-shifting wasn’t limited to the plot of "Lost."

When Apple’s iTunes Store started selling episodes in October 2005, "Lost" helped influence binge viewing — a common practice now.

Because "Lost" was a serialized drama with a cliffhanger every week, fans wanted to watch multiple episodes at a time. Some waited for the DVD collections that came out between seasons.

"It was one of those seminal shows that really drove habit because it was so desired," said Constantinau. "Viewers all of sudden had a chance to time-shift and watch it on demand."

Other networks ried to create their own versions of the show. "Lost" became a genre, inspiring shows such as "Fringe," "Flash Forward," "Under the Dome," "The Event," "The River," "Revolution," "Once Upon a Time" and "Grimm."

None has been as successful.

But for all its quirky plot twists, its flirtation with science fiction and clever surprises, "Lost" may have succeeded by tapping the most basic of storytelling devices.

"They were really good at keeping the mystery alive," said Daley, the TV writer who was a fan of "Lost" from the pilot to the finale.

"Lost" was a show Daley had to watch the night it aired. He wasn’t going to wait or binge later.

"Some people would complain that they didn’t solve things, but the idea of the mystery kept you watching week to week because you wanted to know more and more and they would piecemeal that out," he said. "It really kept me hooked."

Pricey, tricky acquisition of iconic airplane paid off

Of all the props on ABC’s “Lost,” the wreckage of a Lockheed L-1011 spread across a Moku­leia beach is arguably the most memorable of the series.

But it didn’t fly to Hawaii — or crash there, either. It had to be shipped, an expense roughly 10 times more than what it cost to buy the wide-body jet once flown by Eastern Airlines, said Jean Higgins, an executive producer on the series.

It was worth it, though.

“The plane was the icon of the show,” Higgins said.

The wreckage gave the Moku­leia set so much realism that unsuspecting tourists once stopped and ask how many people had died, she said.

“I was thrilled because it looked right,” she said.

The plane came from an aviation graveyard in the Mojave Desert near Palmdale, Calif. Higgins had it cut up and shipped to Oahu.

“We made a plan to cut it up and put it into containers and on flat racks,” Higgins said. “We started out with very nice clean cuts because we knew we had to put it back together. By the end we were ripping it apart because we were running out of time.”

The plane was shipped out of three ports — Los Angeles, Long Beach and Oakland — and Matson Navigation even pulled a ship out of dry dock in order to get everything to Hawaii in time to shoot the pilot in the spring of 2004, Higgins said.

The fuselage, a wing and an engine wound up at the beach while the forward section of the plane, including the cockpit, was set up near Heeia to look as if it crashed in the jungle.

The beach set wasn’t easy to create and took a month to complete. “Lost” co-creator J.J. Abrams insisted the L-1011 be upside down, but that meant its 45,000-pound belly would be in a precarious position, Higgins said. The production team talked for days about what to do.

The solution: a stack of steel plates placed inside the fuselage. Normally used to cover trenches dug into streets, each plate weighed about a half ton.

Oahu’s diverse landscape sealed the deal for execs

When a pair of producers from “Lost” were looking for the right location for the show’s mysterious island, they booked a flight from Los Angeles to Australia. But they had a layover on another, less mysterious island — Oahu — which they liked so much, they never caught their connecting flight.

 Honolulu film commissioner Walea Constantinau picked them up at Hono­lulu Airport, and off they went. By the end of the day, “Lost” was here to stay.

“We went all over the place,” Constantinau said. “We went to a magnificent grove of palm trees. We found bamboo. We found hanging, drippy, viney places. I think it was being able to show not just that we had jungle, but a breadth of diversity of jungle.”

Although a savvy TV production can make any location work, Hawaii was “Lost.” Especially its jungles, according to executive producer Jean Higgins.

“I remember we had one director who came out and literally labeled it ‘happy jungle,’ ‘sad jungle,’” she said. “There were different looks to it: the deep dark jungle and the bright jungle.”

On “Lost” the enigmatic island where the cast had crashed was always viewed as a character on equal footing with any actor — and Hawaii offered that island.

“That character, which was the location, could really inform the attitude of the scenes,” Higgins said, “whether it was foreboding or pleasant. The beach sometimes was angry and sometimes it was exquisitely beautiful.”

Scripts were closely guarded

Secrecy was always paramount on the set of “Lost,” which maintained its allure with surprises.

Because of the fear of spoilers getting onto the Internet, scripts were rarely emailed, said executive producer Jean Higgins. Instead, they were printed and delivered.

“We tracked down actors at dinner in restaurants in order to deliver scripts,” she said. “Every script was watermarked with their name so if the script ever got out and copied, you knew exactly where it came from.”

Sometimes scripts got lost.

“Actors would come to me and say, ‘I misplaced my script,’” she said. “They would be terrified.”

ENLARGE CROSSWORD PUZZLE