here's more--or possibly less--than meets the eye on The SCI FI Channel's
upcoming Invisible Man TV series. Set to debut early next year, the
show follows the exploits of a petty thief named Darien who, in order to
avoid a mandatory prison sentence, undergoes a risky surgical procedure that
allows him to become temporarily invisible. However, things don't go
quite as planned, and the situation becomes even more complicated when Darien
discovers that the underfunded agency he's forced to work for represents
bureaucracy at its worst. Here, Hollywood writer and Invisible Man creator/executive producer Matt Greenberg explains why, at least for this series, seeing isn't always
believing.
The concept of the Invisible Man is about a century old. What are
you doing to update the idea?
Greenberg:
When they initially approached me and asked, "Do you want to do an Invisible
Man?" my first response was "Hell no!" But then I thought, "If I can find a
way to do it and sort of go completely against expectation, while keeping it
within the reins of whatever..." So, I guess there are three ways that I'm
going against it. First of all, what H.G. Wells purported, and what has
subsequently been done in other incarnations, is that the way to go invisible
is somehow your skin turns transparent. And I thought, "Screw that. Let's try
something completely different, because that's just not practical." And then
I remembered I'd been inspired by the movie Predator, where, if you'll
remember, this thing has a contraption that bends light, and I was thinking,
"Well, that's kind of cool." So I started thinking about that and I said,
"You know, I want to get away from machines. I don't want something where he
stands under the ray of whatever and gets turned." Instead, I said, "Let's
make it completely biological and organic." So what happens in this one is
our hero is put into an experiment where they open up the back of his head
and they insert a gland right into the center of his brain. And what happens
is, when he has an adrenalin rush, he starts sweating out this stuff called
quicksilver, which is this mercury-like substance that immediately covers his
skin and his face and everything like that, and it bends light. So he
immediately becomes invisible. Then, when he calms down and he lowers his
adrenalin level, the stuff dries and turns to powder. That's it in a
nutshell. And, just inasmuch as it differs from the Wells' version, my
Invisible Man can obviously become visible again. He can also make
parts of his body go invisible. He can make his legs go invisible or his head
go invisible. He can also secrete enough of this quicksilver from his hands
that he can make objects go invisible for a small amount of time. That's
because one of the things I didn't want was what I call "the floating knife
scenario," where you go, "Oh, here comes the floating knife."
There have been other Invisible Man TV series in the past, and none
of them have been terribly successful. Why do you think yours will be
different?
Greenberg:
The problem with the shows that I know of, and I think of the 1970s version
with David McCallum, and there was another one called Gemini Man--I
know a little bit about that--but that was the second part of why I decided
to do this thing. Because, if I'm going to do something new, I don't want to
just do something new for invisibility. I want to do something new for the
whole SF genre. So the whole concept behind this is, I guess you could
call it a "subversive deconstruction" of all those '70s series that we liked.
You take the classic tropes, like the tried-and-true hero, and the mysterious
cool government agency, and you just turn it on its ear. In my show, the
invisible man is a total schmuck. At heart, he's a good guy, but he's also a
really fallible guy who finds himself in this weird situation. The
agency that he ends up working for is not some James Bondian, hyper-tech
thing. The agency is this really bureaucratic, awful agency that's falling
apart, because they have no funding. The head of the agency is just known as
The Official, and is sort of this low-rent Mephistopheles--he's trying to
save the world but on a really low budget. And that's not to say that this
show is a parody a la Get Smart. Within its realms there's a lot of
action and a lot of fun stuff, and it's relatively grounded, but what I hope
people will see is that this is sort of a post-modern superhero. It's for
people who have seen the Steve Austins and the David McCallums. Hopefully,
they'll want something sort of new, and they'll be like "Aha!" Because on one
level, it's a cool, fun, action show, but on another level they'll see that
there's some satire going on underneath it. And that's what I'm hoping will
be one of the hooks about it.
What can the audience expect to, ahem, see on your Invisible Man
show?
Greenberg:
You'll see invisibility done in ways it has never been done before. You'll
see what I hope will be some very clever, subversive plot lines that take,
again, older story lines and completely turn them on their ear. I think you
will see, hopefully later in the series as we develop, cool advents into
other technologies that are sort of burgeoning now, things like memory RNA
and everything like that. I want to keep present with cutting-edge science
and SF. What I think you'll see is a lot of attitude. One of the movies I
really loved was Men in Black, and what I loved about it was its
attitude. And that's what this is. It's going to be a very surly series. I
don't know if it's going to be up to people's tastes, but that's kind of what
I'm searching for.
You say this is an action comedy. Why are you taking that approach?
Greenberg:
That's an interesting point. First, I came up with the concept for
invisibility, and my original take on it was actually much more straight, and
I pitched it to David Eick, who's one of the main guys over at USA, and he
looked at me and said, "You know what? You're funnier than that. Try and make
it funnier." And I was thinking "How do we make it funny and not just dopey?"
That's the problem--you can get into really ludicrous, stupid Porky's
territory. But then I thought "Okay, if we go for a much smarter, subversive
approach, that's where we can pull it off." And as it turns out, I'm very
glad that David pushed me in that direction, because that had been one of the
failures of previous series. Universal apparently did an Invisible Man
pilot earlier that I never saw, but everybody just took it really seriously.
And you obviously can't do that. So I wanted to take this tack with it.
Haven't we seen enough of the action comedy schtick with shows like Xena and
GvsE?
Greenberg:
I don't really watch Xena at all, and GvsE, I think I've only
seen maybe half of one episode. But from what I understand, and from what
little I saw of Hercules and shows like that, Xena is really
much more over-the-top than this. And GvsE is in some ways a little
more hip than I think our show will be. I think this is going to be a
somewhat more intellectual approach. GvsE, which from what I saw I
really liked, is sending up a certain kind of cop show. It's obviously a kind
of Starsky and Hutch meets the devil kind of thing. And this is kind
of doing the flip side on the science fiction side.
What are...or aren't, as the case may be...you looking for in a lead
actor?
Greenberg:
We wanted somebody who was very, very smart. Someone who had a real edge to
him--a real sense of identity. He was a guy you had to believe had gone to
prison a couple of times, but at the same time had a soul and a conscience.
Because I kind of made him a series of paradoxes. He's this guy who was a
burglar, but he had also done a couple years of college, so he's constantly
quoting philosophy and everything like that. We were looking for somebody who
could really have fun with the role, who really had sort of a devilish aspect
to him. Somebody who really could encapsulate a lot of things. I wanted a
reluctant hero. And I wanted a guy who you can look at and say, "Yeah, he's
good, but he's also fallible. And we like him." That's kind of what I was
looking for.
What's the biggest challenge you face when your main character spends
much of the series invisible?
Greenberg:
He doesn't actually spend that much time invisible. The main challenge
is--because obviously we don't have huge amounts of money to do
this--actually trying to be creative with the money we have, and also trying
to not fall into the invisible man shtick, because there's only so many times
he can go into ladies' locker rooms. Which, ironically, I did a poll of when
I was first starting on the script. I asked around 30 people, "What would you
do if you could be invisible?" And all of the women said, "Well, I would do
this or that. I would find out what my boyfriend really thought of me, blah,
blah, blah." And all the men--to a man--said, "I would go into the women's
locker room." And I guess the challenge is to try to find, on the
invisibility stuff, cool and different ways to keep that alive and also,
within the story lines, making sure that they're cool. There's one episode in
particular that's a very subversive story line. I call it the "Invisible
Invisible Man," where my main character, Darien, wakes up one morning
and the quicksilver has turned his skin black. And now he's a black invisible
man. So he has to contend not only with being invisible but also being black.
It's a riff on that book Black Like Me and also Ralph Ellison's
Invisible Man. So I'm looking for story lines that really push the
edge of the envelope. And those are hard to find. Unfortunately, they don't
spring out of the mother wit very easily.
Why did you decide to make Darien a petty thief?
Greenberg:
I thought, in the 1970s, we had heroic stars like Steve Austin and David
McCallum, and I wanted to lead off in the opposite direction. I wanted to go
to a guy who was really motivated by self-interest, who is forced ultimately
to do good, but to do good despite himself. And who often gets screwed
because he does good. When I start searching out characters I kind of
free-flow, and one of the first images I had was a guy crawling up a
building. There was a very famous thief literally called Spider-Man who
operated out of Florida, and he would free-climb up buildings to, like, the
14th floor. People left their porches open there, because who's going to
climb that high, right? And, in my head, I saw this guy climbing and quoting
Nietzsche. And I immediately thought, "Okay, that's a character that I want
to write." And that's kind of the way it goes.
Darien occasionally becomes invisible accidentally. What makes that
happen?
Greenberg:
Throughout the pilot he actually gets more and more control of his
invisibility--he kind of does this biofeedback thing. But there are these
little glitches, because this experiment was not fully formed. Events in the
pilot, as you'll see, keep it from reaching total fruition. So he's always
going to be surprised. We have a thing that we call premature invisibility,
which is when his glands get activated too much. It's like when he sees a
beautiful woman, sometimes, you know... So those are some of the things that
are going to happen. The other aspect that's going to enhance the dramatic
element is, as you'll find out in the pilot, this quicksilver in his
bloodstream eventually starts acting as what's called a cerebral
disinhibitor, which, as my father, who's a psychiatrist, says, "blows the lid
off his id." What happens is that, if he uses it too much, he starts going
crazy. This was a nod to the original Invisible Man. So they come up
with a counteragent, and every seven days he's got to take it or he'll go
completely around the bend. That's a threat he's always living under.
Have you ever wished you were invisible?
Greenberg:
[laughs] From first to ninth grade! Honestly, I didn't really have a lot of
invisibility fantasies. I never had the fantasy of being invisible to spy on
people, but I always wanted, and I'm actually not kidding, but there were
points where I just wanted to disappear and not be there. And that was my
main fantasy.
