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It was an apartment fire.  Do you not have those in Idaho? 

Apologies if that's because there aren't any apartments in Idaho.  I'm sure it has many nice features.

Passengers actually predates Ark.  It was a highly ranked script on the Black List in 2007 - I believe that exposure is how Jon Spaihts' career got started.   I read the script at the time, and have to say I wasn't impressed.  It was an interesting concept but undercut over and over by a lot of dumb ways the spaceship "worked" that made absolutely no sense other than it justified plot points happening.   

It also had a lot of overused space-tropes, including my personal pet peeve "the ship's computer is damaged!".   This trope was acceptable when 2001 and Star Trek were made, because that was an era when a "computer" was the size of a studio apartment and there were about twenty of them in the whole world.  But that was fifty years ago - it's not the world we live in now.  I'm pretty sure the USS Theodore Roosevelt is never going to be crippled and adrift in the Persian Gulf because "the computer" went down.    I say anyone who writes a sci-fi script in the 21st century that includes a reference to the "ship's computer" is being lazy. 

In fact I hate that trope so much that in the story bible I wrote for the Ark series, the fact that there IS no "ship's computer" becomes a major story element. 

Passengers has been pretty much in continuous development ever since 2007 - Keanu was going to do it for a while - so if it really does get made this time, it might be a very different script than the one I read.  Or at least I hope it will be.

Anyway, Ark was made in 2008 and I have no idea if the creator of Ark was inspired at all by the existence of the Passengers script, but there were a couple of plot points in early versions of Ark that I removed because they were reminiscent of Passengers even though they were probably just coincidental.

Pandorum, the space ark movie that came out in 2009, was shot after we shot Ark, but was released first.  There's no connection there that I'm aware of, though.

As for Dark Matter, which I just found out about a few days ago... there might be something more than coincidence there.  Ark was pitched to Syfy more than once, but that was several regimes ago.  Is there any actual connection?  Dunno.  Other than the one-line description the two shows seem very different - so even if Ark was somehow a vague inspiration for Dark Matter there's nothing to be done about it.  It's just how it goes sometimes.

The strongest argument for Jon only being mostly dead is the "Who were his parents?" mystery, which the books and the show have both put a fair bit of time into dangling as a big reveal to come someday.   

All the more so since that was the famous question GRRM asked Benioff and Weiss when they were seeking the rights to turn the books into a series.  They answered correctly, and the rest is history.   Would Martin have asked that question if Jon's story was ultimately just going to be a dead end?   

I suppose there could be a way to someday say "Hey, remember that guy who died?  Guess who his parents were?" and have that still matter somehow, but it seems like it'd be kinda hard to make that work. 

Apparently they did destroy quite a few, but it was part of the plan - http://filmmakermagazine.com/94242-dp-j … fury-road/

Hadn't really thought about how well 7D's and such can serve as crash cameras - they're small and cheap, and all you need to worry about after the crash is salvaging a tiny memory card.  That's an option that's never been available to stunt filmmakers until just recently.

Violent Year is my least favorite of Chandor's three major releases so far - which is only to say I respect it, just didn't love it like I loved All Is Lost and Margin Call.   I just chalk it up to "well, that one wasn't for me" and I'm eagerly looking forward to seeing whatever he does next.

I mentioned Phil in the 2001 commentary? 

Well, okay...

In the mid-80's I ran lights at the Groundling Theater, an improv group that was (and is) one of the sources Lorne Michaels would scout for potential new cast members for SNL. So every summer Lorne would come to town and watch the show from the very back of the theater, as quietly and anonymously as possible.  Of course he wouldn't stand up at the end of the show and yell "I want THAT one!".  He'd just leave and whoever he liked would get contacted and maybe do a formal audition... and if all went well - boom, SNL.

The total Groundling cast is larger than the actual number of people performing any given night, because people get other gigs and aren't always available on show nights.   In 1985 Phil Hartman and Jon Lovitz were in the cast, along with Kathy Griffin and many other talented folks - but in my opinion Phil was far and away the best.  Just freakin' brilliant, both in his scripted sketches and at improv.  And a genuinely nice guy. 

Phil was getting small parts in movies and tv so he wasn't always there - but when he was, I always knew it would be a good night.   Meanwhile, Lovitz WAS always there, because what else was THAT guy gonna do? 

So at some point Lorne came and did his annual shopping trip.  A few months went by, and it dawned on me that Lovitz hadn't been around for a while.  I remember asking the sound operator "Where has Lovitz been lately?" and she looked at me like I was insane and said "He's on Saturday Night Live now!"  Which I honestly didn't know - I hadn't been watching the new season.

And I said "Are you telling me that Lorne Michaels came here...and he saw Phil Hartman and Kathy Griffin and (several other names)... AND HE PICKED LOVITZ?"

To Lovitz's credit he did great that season - '85 was that very weird year when instead of comedians the cast was mostly actors (Robert Downey Jr., Anthony Hall, Joan Cusack, Randy Quaid... seriously, that was a thing that happened) and in that crowd Lovitz was the standout.   Pretty soon "Yeah, that's the ticket!" was a national catchphrase. Which I suspect was what Lorne spotted, because Lovitz's "Liar" character was one he'd been doing at the Groundlings for ages.   And Jon and Phil were close, so for all I know Lovitz might have spent that season saying "next year you gotta get Phil in here".   Meanwhile Phil continued to perform at the Groundlings and be brilliant at it.

And so, a year goes by.  Almost everybody from the '85 SNL season got fired, only Lovitz and Nora Dunn and Dennis Miller survived.  And Lorne went shopping again.

On show nights before the show started, I would sit on a couch just inside the dressing room entrance, because the cast would have new pieces and we'd discuss what they needed from the lighting. (Also because it was a hilarious place to be.)   I remember the night when Phil walked into the dressing room and said "Well, who wants to congratulate the newest cast member of Saturday Night Live?" 

I was right there, so I got to be the first person to shake his hand.   

And then off he went to New York and there ya go.

PS.  A year or two later I was in New York - I don't even remember why, it was just for maybe two days. By this point Phil was a rockstar, of course.  Just for the hell of it, I looked up the number for 30 Rock, and I dialed it and asked for Studio 8H, and it started ringing.  Someone answered and I said, is Phil Hartman available?   They put the phone down awhile and then came back and said "no, he's not here right now."  And I said "Well, tell him Trey Stokes called, I'm in town and wanted to say hi". I gave the hotel number where I was and hung up.  And then went back to LA and forgot about it, because obviously nothing was gonna come from that.  But it was hilarious to me that you could just call for Phil Hartman at Studio 8H and somebody would actually go look for him.

Later that year around Christmastime I'm at the Groundlings on show night as usual, sitting on my dressing room couch - and Phil walks in unannounced. SNL's on hiatus, he's home for the holidays and he's dropped in to say hi to the old gang. 

He sees me sitting there and says "Oh hey, Trey - got your message and called you back, but the hotel said you'd checked out already.  Sorry I missed you!"

That's who that guy was.

Addendum: If you haven't seen this clip of Phil's SNL audition, here you go.  So this is the guy I knew, and a lot of this material is excerpts from pieces I saw him do a dozen times at the Groundlings.   His "Jack Nicholson's Hamlet" was one of my faves.

We have reviewed your proposal for a new weapons system - thank you for your submission.
After careful consideration, we feel that the complexities of manufacture and delivery make your proposal unfeasible for us at this time.  Instead, we have opted to continue with our current system of setting the arrows on fire, which has proven highly successful.

Yours,
Genghis Khan

I dunno, I always wanted to attend my own funeral.

I mean, I probably will someday but... you know what I mean.

"I don’t want to listen to you no more, you empty-headed animal food trough wiper podcast. I fart in your general direction! Your mother was a sine wave and your father was a secondary audio track!"

My one regret is that now we'll never catch up to him.

Well, that and that I never got to do the episode where I explain why Spaceballs is a terrible movie.

Finally, Blomkamp fesses up.

Apology accepted, Neill.  Now don't go making the same mistakes with Alien, umkay?