From The Incredible Hulk to V: Emmy Award Winning Filmmaker Kenneth Johnson Invades Scared Stiff Reviews.com
Interview by Geno McGahee - February 4, 2008
“V was never about spaceships and reptiles and aliens, and all of that. V was about power.” – Kenneth Johnson
In 1983, a miniseries called “V” was released to the public, broadcast on NBC, and set the standard for alien invasion movies. The movie focused on a large squad of mother ships, filled with evil extraterrestrials, looking to enslave the world and steal the resources. It was, perhaps, the best miniseries ever to grace network television and is still talked about to this day. It is a classic, and now the long awaited sequel is on the verge of being made into a major motion picture, titled: “V: The Second Generation.”
Kenneth Johnson is the mind behind both projects, as well as many others that were extremely successful. In 1976, he wrote and produced “The Six Million Dollar Man,” and moved on to another hit series, “The Bionic Woman” before taking on one of his most memorable and greatest projects: The Incredible Hulk television series. The show was refreshing, featuring Bill Bixby in the title role and took the character in a welcomed direction. It was one man with a problem, on the run, hunted, and looking for a solution to return to normalcy. The longevity of the series was due to this approach and the fantastic storytelling from Johnson, who understood that the character development and story comes first, which is all but lost now.
 In 1989, another popular alien series was written and produced by Johnson: Alien Nation, once again concentrating on the characters and making an unreal situation believable. It seems that everything that Johnson produces falls immediately into the classic category, gathering loyal followings. Nearly every project has several fan sites, and the demand for these projects to this day has been met with the DVD box set releases of The Incredible Hulk, and Alien Nation series.
Johnson is now promoting his novel: “V: The Second Generation,” which is what the motion picture will be based on. The long wait for the fans of this series is coming to an end, and now Scared Stiff Reviews brings an exclusive interview where some of the mystery surrounding this sequel is revealed.
Ladies and Gentleman, Scared Stiff Presents Emmy Award Winning Filmmaker, Kenneth Johnson
GM: How did you first get into film and what were some of your initial experiences working in this field?
I had played with cameras and film as a kid, but once I got into Carnegie Tech., I met a fella named Bill Pence, who later went on to create Telluride film festival. Bill ran a film society at Carnegie, which I ended up helping him with and ended up taking over when Bill left college. I ended up putting myself through school setting up film societies in other colleges around the countries and in my senior year, Bill, who was stationed in the Air Force, borrowed a camera from the Air Force for me and some film, and sent it back to Pittsburg so that I could put together my first film. It’s about 30 minutes long and I look back on it today and see some really good things in it, but I think that it would be a better 20 minute film.
GM: How difficult was it to break into the industry and what were some of the major obstacles for an unknown writer trying to make it in show business?
After I graduated Carnegie, I couldn’t find work in the film business because there was very little going on, got to working in television as a production assistant at CBS and then a year later, I was hired at WPIX in New York to be a producer and director. Shortly after that, I went to Philadelphia where I took over as the producer of the Mike Douglas show and then about a year after that, I became the executive producer of the Mike Douglas show. During my time there, I did a lot of film work, and sort of honed my talents. It was a fun place to learn.
GM: You have focused primarily on science fiction projects. Is your focus on this genre due to your own personal love for it or did you see more mass appeal and economic success with this sort of film? Or was it a little of both?
While I was at the Mike Douglas show, I used the opportunity to learn different types of filmmaking. I called the Navy and said that Mike would like to become a member with the underwater demolition team. So the Navy flew me to Puerto Rico, taught me how to scuba dive, gave me Navy film crews, and a couple of small submarines, a couple of helicopters… I hit the beach with the Marines at Camp Lagune, doing Cinema Variety work in the streets of Philadelphia, some very slick commercial pieces in films, so, I was really putting together a reel that would allow me to sort of show the kind of thing that I could do.  Shortly after that in 1969, I went to California, where I discovered that I was thought of as a talk show producer, having been type cast already, and the film that I had done didn’t include anything from a feature, so I was basically starting from scratch. My friend Steven Bochco, who created Hill Street Blues and LA Law and such, and we had been at Carnegie together… Steve prompted me to try my hand at writing, which I didn’t think that I was very good at, but discovered that I could do it and do it pretty well and became a great writer of unproduced screenplays for a long time, but then Steve introduced me to a number of people at Universal, where he was working as a story editor and I began to get my foot in the door there that way. I wrote for my friend Steve Canal, who was a story editor on Adam 12, some episodes for them and ended up directing some for them. I also wrote a couple of episodes for other shows, and then Steve Bochco introduced me to Harv Bennett, who was doing The Six Million Dollar Man. Harv read a script of mine that he really liked a lot and we talked about ideas, and we came up together with doing “The Bride of Frankenstein,” which basically became “The Bionic Woman.” After that, Harv asked me if I would join The Six Million Dollar Man as the producer and the producer got to hire the writer and the director, more importantly, so I took the job. For a while, I was both writing and producing both The Six Million Dollar Man and The Bionic Woman. It was like living in a garbage disposal.
After I had done The Bionic Woman at Universal, I was asked to take on one of the Marvel Comics super heroes, and ended up bringing a little bit of Victor Hugo and Robert Luis Stevenson to this ludicrous thing called “The Incredible Hulk,” and it became a very big success right away. Once you have done The Six Million Dollar Man and The Bionic Woman and then The Incredible Hulk, people begin to think that that’s what you do. They ignored the fact that I was trained in the classic theater, from Sophocles to Shakespeare and Eugene O’Neil and all of that, but I always tell my students at UCLA and USC to be careful what their first success is because that is what people will want you to do forever.
The nice thing about working in science fiction, of course you can work in allegory and metaphor and take a little bit of the classic training that I had gotten in college, and my own interest in reading that literature, and blend that with more commercial…things that had an appeal to the science fiction audience as well as all audiences in general.
 GM: You wrote and directed the popular miniseries “V.” How long did it take to write and film this production?
I got very intrigued about doing a piece about a sea change in America and wrote a spec feature screenplay about a fascist grass roots takeover of the United States. My friend, Brandon Tartikoff read it and really flipped out for it. He was running NBC at the time and wanted to turn it into a big miniseries and then take it into a series perhaps after that about America under occupation, but he was concerned that America wouldn’t really understand fascism and suggested that it be the Soviets or the Chinese. I didn’t believe that they could sustain a protracted occupation of the United States, and the subject of aliens came up, and I sort of didn’t want to think that way, because again, it just fed into the type casting of “he’s the sci-fi guy,” but I realized that I could do a really cool allegory and metaphoric piece and still be able to tell the story that I wanted to do to tell. It took me a couple of months to fashion the story. I wrote a 230 page screenplay in only 19 days and normally, you get three to four months to prep a big four hour miniseries. NBC and the Warners were in a very big hurry at the time. So from the time that Brandon said “go,” and I said “action” was only two and a half weeks…an outrageously small amount of time.
 The shooting schedule was about fifty days, fifty-five ultimately because we had to reshoot because one of my leading ladies, Dominique Dunne, was murdered three weeks into principle photography, and we had to recast and reshoot. It was very, very, very difficult to make it happen.
GM: This was a very ambitious production. Was it difficult fitting it into the network budget and how much was the budget of the “V”?
We didn’t even have a budget for V until we were three weeks into filming and after that, the budget just seemed to keep going up. It started at around eight million and ended at about twelve, but part of the reason was because that we were the only thing shooting at the Warner Brothers’ lot at the time. So everybody in all of the departments had to feel that they could cover their overhead and I bought a lot of carpet for executives’ offices, and fuel for the Warner Brothers’ jet.
The original four hours went on in 1983 and it was deemed too expensive to do as an ongoing series, although it was wildly popular, having being the highest rated show NBC had had in two and a half years, drawing an audience of over eighty million people with a forty share, still the highest rated science fiction project ever on television and in the top fifteen highest rated miniseries in history. Over the summer of 83, with three very talented writer friends, fashioned the screenplay known as “The Final Battle,” but I departed Warner Brothers before that was shot because we had a disagreement over what the quality of the project was going to be and just how desperately they wanted to get it done in a quick and cheap and dirty fashion. It was a frustrating situation.
GM: You chose to make the aliens reptoids. What do you think of the conspiracy theorists, namely David Icke, that claim that shape shifting lizards rule the planet, and have you gotten a lot of feedback from this group regarding this topic?
I never paid much attention to the conspiracy theorists about reptiles. I wanted to do something that had seemed to have a logic behind it and that is what I did, although it has occasionally occurred to me that some of the agents that I have met might have reptilian nature underneath (laughs).
GM: You have stated that the Holocaust and atrocities of World War II were part of the inspiration for the V. Because of this, did you find yourself being more careful writing this as to not to offend anyone effected by those horrible events and have you received any feedback either positive or negative from any of the survivors of that tragedy?
Reflecting the Holocaust and the atrocities of World War II were of course part of the inspiration of V. I wanted it to have a historic residence and the beauty of working in allegory and metaphor was that I was doing with this science fiction piece was that I could talk about it in a way that would not be offensive to anybody but would in fact, recall the horrors and the nightmares of the occupation of Europe during World War II, but set it in a contemporary context where we could observe how various people reacted to it. Some would suck up to the powers of the visitors, some would just try to duck and keep their heads down, and others would fight back against that abusive power. V was never about spaceships and reptiles and aliens, and all of that. V was about power.
GM: Was the “V” and the “V: Final Battle,” shot at basically the same time frame or was there any delay to see just how well the first part did before the network invested any more money into the series?
I was very upset about what happened with The Final Battle. Till this day, I have never seen it…more that thirty seconds of it. All of my friends, who were involved in it, warned me that I should never take a look at it because the people that had came in and taken over the project just totally trashed and destroyed the basic quality of what we were trying to do, as well as a lot of the logic. So I have never been able to look at it. The series, I’ve heard, which also I have never seen, was even worse than The Final Battle. It was very disappointing to be in that set of circumstances.
GM: The V: The Second Generation is set to debut in 2009 according to IMDB.com. Have you started filming it yet and how many familiar faces will we see in this long awaited sequel?
V: The Second Generation is not yet in production. We are endeavoring to set up V as a motion picture right now. The miniseries world has essentially gone away. All of the networks are not doing miniseries anymore, so it’s very difficult to get it onto television, but I control the motion picture rights to V and there is a good deal of interest in getting it set up as a feature motion picture franchise.
GM: Without giving too much away, what can we expect from the Second Generation?
As far as what the Second Generation is all about. It picks the story twenty years after the initial arrival of the Visitors and they have been hiding their reptilian nature underneath this false human skin, as well as their darker agenda. They have brought a lot of benefits to human kind and have seduced a lot of people…the majority, into believing the big lie that they are really here with our best interests at heart, but in truth they are draining our oceans, subjugating and imprisoning our people, and there is a small but very determined human resistance that has fought them for more than twenty years, but without more help, the resistance cause is going to be really hopeless. Then, what seems to be the darkest hour, the resistance discovers a startling new set of allies who say that they have come to help but have they?
GM: It has been twenty-five years since the V, the original miniseries aired. Why has it taken so long for this Second Generation to come around?
A good part of the reason why V: The Second Generation wasn’t immediately put onto the screen as a miniseries when I first conceived it several years ago was that my good friend Brandon Tartikoff, rest his soul, was no longer around and the people that I was dealing with at the new NBC Universal just didn’t seem to quite get it.
GM: You also wrote Alien Nation, the series, which was also very successful. Was it tough to write a completely different alien related program and how do you compare it to the V?
When my friend Harris Katleman at FOX asked me to take a look at his movie, “Alien Nation,” because he thought that there might be a series in it, I told him that I really wasn’t interested. I was really done with aliens, but he pleaded with me out of friendship, so I looked at it and I saw one scene where there was an alien woman and her two little kids waving goodbye to Mandy Patinkin, who played the alien cop, and it was the only time that we saw the family in the movie, but that scene made me think that wait a minute, there’s really something here that is very interesting, and I went back to FOX and said that I have no interest in doing Lethal Weapon with aliens, or Miami Vice with Coneheads, but doing In the Heat of the Night would be particularly interesting to me. To investigate what it would be like to be the newest minority on the planet…the latest people off of the bus. That way, I could do a show about prejudice, intolerance, discrimination, and culture clash that would have a great resonance and a lot of underlying power.
One of the great things about Alien Nation is virtually every minority group in the country thought it was about them. We got awards from the Black community, the Asian American community, the Hispanic community, the Gay and Lesbian community, plus it was probably the most fun that any of us have ever had in our professional lives. We loved Alien Nation and the new DVD release of our five Alien Nation movies is a box set that I am wildly proud of.
GM: Now onto another one of my favorite series to hit television: The Original Incredible Hulk series. The television series differed from the comic book depiction. Were you a fan of the Hulk from the comics and how much negative feedback did you get from the die hard comic book fans?
I had never read a Hulk comic book or really been aware of it at all until Universal asked me to investigate and develop one of the five Marvel Comics characters that they had just licensed from Marvel. None of them were appealing to me. I don’t spandex and primary colors, but I was reading Les Miserables at the time that my Wife, Susie, had given me, and the idea of marrying the travails of Jean Valjean and the Inspector Javert, who was pursuing him…that sort of fugitive concept, with a little bit of Jeckel and Hyde from Robert Luis Stevenson, and place it in a very, very real world…as real as I could possibly make it, was appealing to me. I think that that was the reason why the show was so extraordinarily successful for all the time that it was on.
 GM: I thought that the idea of that one character having the problem and trying desperately to solve it was magic and the series was just superb. Were you as bothered as I was to see “The Return of the Incredible Hulk” and “The Trial of the Incredible Hulk,” two movies that really seemed not to understand the character that you had built?
I never saw any of the later movies, nor was I involved with them, and nobody seemed to quite understand what it was all about, nor did they really understand it in the two big budget features of The Incredible Hulk that twelve writers worked on over a ten year period.
GM: Those two movies failed. The big budget “Hulk” came to the big screen in 2003 and bombed. I think that many of the Hulk fans were fans of the series and didn’t want the tremendous changes and they weren’t written very well to begin with. What did you think of the big budget Hulk and were you ever contacted to write it considering your history with the character?
I was very distressed by the picture when I saw it and thought that they had totally missed the boat. Obviously I was not alone. It did not very well at the box office. It crashed very quickly and burned unfortunately. The new Hulk movie that they are making, I understand, is being made much more like the character driven, relationship driven, television series that we did, and it seems like the right concept, doesn’t it?
GM: Television and movie quality has been in a downward spiral. You never find movies like “12 Angry Men” anymore, and everything seems to be a visual rollercoaster as opposed to the character development and plot that good movies are made of. What do you think of the current T.V. and movie scene and if you agree that the quality has gone down as time has passed, do you see any way to bring it back to the glory days?
I think that in Hollywood, both in television and film, everything is cyclical. If you look at the Academy Award nominations, you will see that they are all smaller, independent pictures. I saw one comment that if Juno had been a studio picture, one of the studio notes would have been: “Well, we like it, but does she really have to be pregnant?” I think that this crop of nominees does however, show that there is a market and an audience for good storytelling and solid character development, and that is what people are always really looking for: The character driven pieces. As soon as the piece is driven by the special effects, then it’s usually not very interesting.
 GM: What has been your favorite creation to date and why?
I think that my favorite creation has to be V, because the entire thing came out of my head, as opposed to the adaptations that I did with The Incredible Hulk and Alien Nation, both of which I am very, very proud of, still to this day. The project that was the most pure fun was Alien Nation because we didn’t have the pressures of time and budget that we did on V, and I also assembled a cast of actors, who have become a complete family and who still love to get together and hang out. One of the most favorite parts of the new DVD set of our five Alien Nation movies is the family gathering that Susie and I had in our living room, where all of the actors got together on a Sunday afternoon and we had four video cameras rolling and we just talked about the fun that we had. Every one of us would go back to Alien Nation in a second to pick up right where we left off.
GM: What advice do you have for aspiring writers and filmmakers that are looking to break into the business and be successful?
As far as advice, I think that you have to write from the heart. You have to really care about what you are doing. You have to have a complete and total passion for it. Otherwise it is not going to be as good as it could be. At Carnegie Tech, the book covers that you would buy at the bookstore would have Andrew Carnegie’s motto on them and his motto was: “My heart is in the work.” And I think that that says it. If your heart is not in it, it will never be as good as it could have been otherwise. The other thing to remember is tenacity. You really have to keep working at it. Be determined and passionate that you are going to succeed at what you do. Profit is without honor in their own country, as we have heard often. Talent often goes unrecognized, but tenacity, if you can just keep pounding, you’ll get your foot in the door. Then you will still have to do your tap dance, once they open the door, but at least you’ve gotten in. I think that that’s the best thing to do.
GM: Do you have any closing comments for your fans, the fans of the V that are awaiting the Second Generation, and the readers at Scared Stiff?
As far as The Second Generation of the V, I am very excited about it. The novel…I’m very pleased and excited about and I hope that it will fulfill the expectations of all the hundreds of millions of fans worldwide, who have been waiting for more of V.
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