In anticipation of the January 18, 2011 U.S. release of Dark Skies on DVD, we've put together this YouTube of the main title sequence. This work won the Emmy award for designer Mike Jones in 1997 in the "Outstanding Main Title Design" category. The music was composed by Michael Hoenig, as well as the short samples we use in between the main titles and at the end on this video. Michael was nominated for an Emmy for his work on the series, too. His music could be scary and suspenseful when it needed to, but it was tragic and elegiac when it needed to be, and so beautiful. It helped the entire series rise to a new level.
It's interesting to listen to Michael's music and watch the three versions in a row: the first is the one we ended up with and includes the classic "History is a lie" line, followed by "John, someone's coming!" and gunfire. The second one is just the instrumental, what was constructed by the title designers, the way we thought we'd might do it until we added the voice-over. The third one is the first version of the voice-over, different delivery and not nearly as strong, I think, as the one we ended up with.
Dark Skies is, finally, for real, and without qualification, coming out on DVD. It will be released by the Los Angeles based Shout! Factory on DVD on January 18, 2011. This coincides with the 50th anniversary of the inauguration of President John F. Kennedy. Fans will remember that JFK's assassination in the pilot episode is tied in to his interest in disclosing UFO reality in his second term.
Shout! Factory is a successful home video company that was originally started by an exodus of employees from Rhino Records. It has evolved into a premium supplier of content, including a full-line of classic TV series, like the recently released Max Headroom. Dark Skies is just the kind of product they love to bring to market -- an overlooked gem with passionate fans.
Dark Skies -- the 1996-1997 NBC UFO series -- is composed of twenty hours (18 one-hour episodes, and a two-hour pilot) that tells an epic story of suspense and danger, set against the colorful backdrop of the 1960s. The UFO cover-up unfolds from the point of view of John Loengard, a naive congressional staffer who comes to Washington D.C. to be a part of JFK's "New Frontier" but ends up reluctantly working for the secret organization Majestic-12 as an undercover operative from 1961-1967. Because of its period and the incredible set design and wardrobe, some fans consider it a forerunner of Mad Men, but with aliens!
On DVD, we believe that audiences will finally get to see the series the way its creators intended, free of the scheduling challenges it faced on its network run. Back in the pre-DVR mid-90s, Dark Skies was on Saturday nights, suffered numerous pre-emptions and spotty promotion that started great, then dropped off a cliff.
From the moment the series begins, however, you'll know you're in for a special ride. The main titles, for example, won the Emmy award the year the series debuted, and the pilot that was written by Brent Friedman and myself was nominated for a Writers Guild of America award in the "Outstanding Original Longform" category.
The Shout! Factory release will have all the episodes, mastered to be the highest possible quality. While the extras are being developed, they will be substantial, and I'll be involved in helping to make sure they meet the same high standards that all of us involved in the television series brought to that endeavor.
A special note to all the fans who have seen people try to rip them off over the years with bogus versions of bad quality. The two companies listed above are the only places to get the approved, high quality, with extras, version of this series. Do not buy it anywhere else or from anybody else. Shout! Factory and Medium Rare are the two companies to look to, depending on where you live, period.
First off, thanks for dropping by. As it turns out, I'll be on Coast-to-Coast AM with George Noory on Monday night, August 9 with UFO researchers Stan Friedman and Don Schmitt. They've got us slated to talk about "Hollywood and UFOs" in general, and specifically about a new film project, Majic Men.
Coast-to-Coast AM has monumental importance to the Disclosure movement, so this should be something to look forward to.
Along with my fellow producer Don Most, we have optioned both the life rights to Stanton Friedman and Donald Schmitt but also the book rights to Friedman's Top Secret/Majicand Schmitt's (along with Thomas Carey) Witness to Roswell.
From this we are now beginning to develop and find the right creative partnership to make Majic Men which will be the story behind the story of breaking the Roswell mystery into the open secret it is today. We hope to do for this story what All the President's Men did for Watergate and to use some of the same visual energy as was found in JFK. But with just enough humor to justify saying it's about two down-to-Earth guys who are breaking a story that is out-of-this-world. Lots more coming on this Monday...
There are some other highlights to look forward to in that show, however...
First,there will be a major announcement about Dark Skies, the NBC series I co-created with Brent V. Friedman in the 1990s. It told the story of the UFO mystery through the eyes of a young man recruited into Majestic-12 in 1961. The first season told his story (and the UFO cover-up's) until its final episode which took place in 1967 during the "Summer of Love" in San Francisco. I've been waiting years to say the words I'll get to say Monday night out loud and the fans who have written me so regularly about the series should be happy to hear them. Details, coming up on Coast-to-Coast -- a place that is close to my heart -- because during the production of the series I appeared twice on Art's show as his guest, and returned the favor by casting Art as member of the Majestic-12 control group.
Second, and this is very real and very immediate, the book that I am co-authoring with UFO historian Richard M. Dolan, A.D. After Disclosure: The People's Guide to Life After Contact, is nearly finished, and goes to the printer later this month and will be published by Keyhole Publishing on September 23. We believe that it is the first non-fiction book to be devoted entirely to discussing the impact that Disclosure will have on the world and how it will change everything: politics, military, economy, culture, industry, science, religion, media and particularly government. We have some breaking news about a bold new way that book will be presented to the public, too, and hopefully I'll be able to share that as well Monday night.
Richard Dolan and I met professionally when my company -- Stellar Productions -- optioned Richard's outstanding first two volumes of his UFO trilogy as the basis of a television series (UFOs and the National Security State). While that is still the plan, we realized we shared a mutual vision about the post-Disclosure world and we've thrown all our efforts into this coming book first.
If you join our Facebook page, however, that's where you'll find over 1300 like-minded people discussing this topic, links to this site and other places of interest, and discussion groups. You can click on the image in the right-hand sidebar and it'll take you right there.
Finally our first promotional video has just debuted on Youtube and we want to invite you to give it a watch. The music is the trance-like instrumental background track of "Need-to-Know: The UFO Disclosure Song" as written and performed by Damian Valentine. The pictures come from the Hubble telescope.
We have a second trailer, as well, this one uses the full "Need-to-Know" song complete with lyrics and some very interesting classic UFO photos.
Thanks for coming by. Here are a couple of other links you may want to check out:
The world is probably evenly divided now between those who were alive 41 years ago on July 20, 1969 when the Eagle landed in the Sea of Tranquility and those who weren't. I was. It was unforgettable, but not necessarily for the reasons you might think. As with 9/11, JFK's assassination, and the deaths of John Lennon and Michael Jackson, people's memories of these super-events are colored by where we were when they happened, what was going on in our own lives, and how we felt about the actual events. Where were you? For me, July 20 remains an important day -- not solely for the awe and accomplishment of the technological and spiritual acheivement of the moon landing -- but equally for the extreme personal impact it had on my young life.
Let's roll the time machine back four decades. It was 41-years-ago that Neil Armstrong made that little jump off the ladder from the lunar lander: "That's one small step for a man, one giant leap for mankind." The ghostly TV transmission had people glued to their sets around the world, blowing past barriers of nationalism and politics. And, up in the Pacific Northwest, it was also exactly 41-years-ago that I was fired from my first job. I have since been fired again, laid off, cancelled, and otherwise unemployed in a variety of ways, shapes and sizes and, as someone with great depth of experience in this area, I can tell you that Cat Stevens was correct when he wrote that oft-recorded song, "The First Cut Is the Deepest."
I get mail. To this day, nearly 13 years after my TV series "Dark Skies" went off the air over at NBC, I still have people asking about when the DVD will be out. Or if we have any plans to finish telling the epic story we started in 1996.
Just today I got one from a fan who wrote, "Since Dark Skies ended with such a cliff hanger, have you ever considered making a movie or even a written follow up to wrap up the loose ends?"
Of course the answer is that I consider often how to finish telling the story but haven't found exactly the right venue to continue it. I have other things to say on the UFO topic but I'm currently working to express them in original projects in film and television.
If you want to know a bit more about what the fuss is about, here's a little blurb over at my Facebook page about the series if you want to know more. And here's one about the DVD situation.
Frankly, even before considering how to finish telling the story, a huge victory would be to get the original series out on DVD. As it is, people sell it on the Internet illegally. In some cases, buyers get a very poor copy of it and in other cases they get nothing at all for their money.
2009 was a very, very frustrating year trying to get the DVD (or Blu-ray) release of those 20 hours of TV. As many of you know, SONY was set to release it in October 2008, changed their minds at the last possible moment, told fellow creator Brent Friedman and myself that if we could find a DVD company to release it they would help facilitate it. Well, we found three. They liked the idea, the series concept and the fact that plenty of fans still want to see it released. Each time we got cautiously optimistic.
All of them, when it came time to budget the project, however, backed out when they realized the sheer amount of period music that we had incorporated into the series and factored in the cost of licensing against what they perceived as the upside of sales. To have so many people saying "We love this project but we're not going to take it on" was heartbreaking and frustrating.
Brent and I aren't ready to say that's the end of it, but we're very sorry to report this. We are back in touch with our friends at SONY, and they say they are trying to find a way to make this work somehow. We have told them again we have a partial solution in that our series music supervisor Marty Wereski has agreed to help us replace the original costly period music with sound-alikes to bring the cost down. It's not ideal, of course, but a legitimate release is still better than seeing god-awful pirated copies as the only way for people to see the work.
So that's the DVD update. We're still working on it.
Let me also give a plug to Frank Garcia and Mark Phillips are out with Science Fiction Television Series, 1990-2004 and it includes an excellent amount of material on DARK SKIES. Both Brent and I talked to Frank extensively. This is a highly recommended book for any science fiction fan. Here's an excerpt:
Dark Skies came to light when two of Hollywood's most experienced producers met for the first time and sat down, ruminating for their next project. The discussion turned to the UFO phenomenon and that's when the electrical charge they generated became a neon sign. "It just came to us — what if we fused the two greatest conspiracies of all time together?" says executive producer and co-creator Bryce Zabel. "We came up with the Unified Field Theory of conspiracy — who killed JFK and why, and whether Roswell was a real event or not. The essence of the series is that John Kennedy was assassinated because he was going to tell the truth about UFOs in his second term."
"I told Bryce about a very credible Washington insider I knew who had told me there was intelligent, extraterrestrial life here on Earth," says supervising producer and co-creator Brent Friedman. "That sparked some conversations about Roswell and the possibility it really occurred. And if it did, how could events like JFK's assassination, Watergate, Vietnam, etc. — how could those events have any meaning historically unless they were somehow tied to the alien truth."
With the basis of the series firing up their imaginations, Zabel and Friedman went to work. The first task at hand was to shape the "series pitch" proposal into an unconventional form to generate interest, and provoke the network executives receiving it, to immediately pick up the phone and say the words, "We're interested!"
"We started creating an ultra-classified briefing book that was meant for high-level top secret people that basically told them about the UFO cover-up and how it all happened and made the case that, in 1994 and 1995, the government was going to have to come clean and tell people what was going on," explains Zabel. "And the best way to get the public prepared for it was to do a television series about the truth, so that they could see it as fiction at the beginning and later come to understand the truth. So we were already mixing reality and non-reality in a way that I think was pretty fascinating. We did this whole briefing book before we showed it to anybody."
John Lennon would have been 70 years old this October 9 had he not been gunned down 30 years ago on December 8, 1980. No doubt last year he'd have been smiling, if he'd lived, to know that The Beatles Rock Band was kicking ass in homes across the country, and that those re-mastered Beatles CDs were, once again, burning up the charts. But that emotion has cooled, and it's thirty years, and there's not much comfort in that loss hitting such a definitive mark.
As a collector of news magazines, I note that both Time and Newsweek gave over their covers to Lennon's passing the week it happened. I've chosen Newsweek to focus on because it has that haunting portrait by Richard Avedon. Also, I had previewed the first Newsweek cover to feature the Beatles back in 1964 in an earlier post, and it's interesting to compare how the coverage changed in those intervening years.
Newsweek devoted twelve entire pages to the death of John Lennon in a special "pull-out" coverage. It contained a handful of separate articles entitled: "Death of a Beatle" which was the news coverage, "Lennon's Alter-Ego" about assassin Mark David Chapman, "Strawberry Fields Forever" about the influence of the Beatles, and "An Ex-Beatle 'Starting Over'" about Lennon's new emergence on the public scene after nearly five years of absence.
"Come together, he had once asked them in a song, and now they came, tens of thousands of them, to share their grief and shock at the news. John Lennon, once the cheeky wit and sardonic soul of the Beatles, whose music had touched a generation and enchanted the world, had been slain on his doorstep by a confused, suicidal young man who had apparently idolized him. Along New York's Central Park West and West 72nd Street, in front of the building where Lennon had lived and died, they stood for hours in tearful vigil, looking to each other and his music for comfort."
Back on July 20, 1969, Neil Armstrong and Buzz Aldrin kicked up their own moon dust when they became the first human beings ever to walk (or bounce) on the Earth's Moon and the world's most trusted man summed it up, "Oh, boy." The world is probably evenly divided now between those who were alive when the Eagle landed in the Sea of Tranquility and those who weren't. I was. It was unforgettable, but not necessarily for the reasons you might think. As with 9/11, JFK's assassination, and the deaths of John Lennon and now Jackson, our memories of these super-events are colored by where we were when they happened, what was going on in our own lives, and how we felt about the actual events.
Where were you?
For me, July 20 remains an important day -- not solely for the awe and accomplishment of the technological and spiritual acheivement of the moon landing -- but equally for the extreme personal impact it had on my young life.
Let's roll the time machine back four decades. It was 40-years-ago that Neil Armstrong made that little jump off the ladder from the lunar lander:"That's one small step for a man, one giant leap for mankind." The ghostly TV transmission had people glued to their sets around the world, blowing past barriers of nationalism and politics. And, up in the Pacific Northwest, it was also exactly 40-years-ago that I was fired from my first job. I have since been fired again, laid off, cancelled, and otherwise unemployed in a variety of ways, shapes and sizes and, as someone with great depth of experience in this area, I can tell you that Cat Stevens was correct when he wrote that oft-recorded song, "The First Cut Is the Deepest."
If you remember The Wonder Years(that great TV series set in the 1960s starring Fred Savage), it'll help you appreciate the tone of what will follow. If you're too young to recall the 60s (when the series was set) or the 80s (when the series was filmed), then you'll have to settle for this shorthand. The series told the story of Kevin, a kid growing up during the time of Vietnam, hippies, civil rights and moon walks, all told with a gentle sense of humor. So, in this story, I'm Kevin. And Kevin's dad (Dan Lauria) had a gruff son-of-a-bitch exterior, always was pissed off, and never connected with his kids. Like my dad, Harvey, who was a high school teacher in Hillsboro, Oregon at the time. It had something to do with his being a part of the "Greatest Generation," having lived through the Great Depression and World War II. Like a lot of guys who had that experience, he was changed by it. It seems so much more understandable to me now than it did when I was a kid.
Anyway, back then, I was the youngest fry-cook in all of Washington County, having scammed my way into a job at the Arctic Circle Drive-In before I was strictly employment legal, I think, based on the fact that my older brother Alan had paved the way. It was a sweet deal -- I was making a full $1.35 an hour, up from my starting wage of $1.10 a year before. Do the math, that added up to a whole $10.80 a day and, if overtime was involved, man, that was serious bread. Of course, those burgers only cost nineteen cents, a quarter for a cheeseburger.
The boss was a tough immigrant -- a Basque from Spain -- named Mariano Bilbao and he was living (or working) the American dream. Work, work, work and, if you did that, life would be easier for your kids. His kid was just a baby, and Mariano was in full pay-the-dues mode to get ahead in time for his kid to have the good life he dreamed of.
When the schedule for the week of July 20 got posted, I got a sinking feeling because I had the night shift and, if all went according to plan, Neil Armstrong was going to be moon-walking while I was slinging burgers. At the time, I was very into the whole moon landing, even more (if possible) than the rest of the country. I'd actually tried to mimick a Gemini capsule with a refrigerator box a few years earlier in our basement until my mom made me come up and eat dinner. Plus, Harvey, being an American history teacher, made sure we all knew that history didn't come in any bigger size than this.
So I asked Mariano if I could trade shifts with someone. No. Maybe we could have a TV in the kitchen so we could watch with every other person within ten miles of a TV? No. A radio then, just to listen to hear in real time how it went? No.
Resigned to missing it all, I accepted my fate, strapped on my apron, and went to work. Being the boss, even Mariano was at home, of course, watching the moon-walk with his wife. Back at the grill, I was going insane because there was almost no business because everyone else in town was home watching TV. About thirty minutes before Armstrong was scheduled to set foot on the lunar surface, I snapped. I called my dad and told him I wanted to come home to see the moon walk. Would he come pick me up?
There was a long pause. I waited on the other end of the phone, knowing that The Lecture was coming. About responsibility, about sticking with your decisions, about not screwing up. Instead, he said, "You know you'll be fired?"
I said I knew. I waited again. Surely The Lecture was coming now. Another beat. "I'll be right down."
So my Dad drove down to the Arctic Circle Drive-In on Baseline Street in a moment of high drama in my young life. We went back home, gathered with the rest of the family around the TV set, held our breath with everyone else and watched Armstrong's ghostly image from the moon. It was the most exciting TV I had ever seen. Better than the Beatles on Ed Sullivan kind of TV, if you want to know the truth. Part of the attraction was the danger. These guys might die on live TV. Or they might sink into moon dust and never be heard from again. You never knew.
When it was over, dad said we had to go back to the restaurant and I had to face the music. I had done the crime, now I had to do the time. As I returned, it was clear that my co-workers had given me up to Mariano, who was there waiting for me and, man, was he pissed. He was a short guy with a fiery temper and his face was as red as I'd ever seen it.
Mariano fired me that night, as predicted. My dad told him he was missing a great worker and he was a small-minded man to not understand the importance of what was happening, and how this event had changed the world for everyone. Even teenage fry-cooks.
All I know is that my dad had never stood up for me quite like that before and never quite like that after. I remember July 20, 1969 as clearly today for turning in my greasy apron as I do for Armstrong and Aldrin doing the moonwalk. And I remember July 20 because it was also the day that my dad passed away back in 2001.
So -- that giant leap for mankind -- for me, it isn't about where I was when it happened -- but all about where I wasn't.
For those of you who experienced your own "Moonwalk Memory," please do leave your own personal stories in our comment section. Thanks!
Brad Markowitzis a broadcast journalist, Hollywood writer/producer with extensive TV credits and a regular contributor to "For What It's Worth."
If he could report on his own death, Walter Cronkite wouldn’t waste any time with the glowing tributes and teary remembrances of him that are sprouting up like mushrooms on every news program, radio show and blog (including this one). No, Walter would have simply noted the relevant facts of a life that saw him rise from small town newspaper reporter to the man millions of Americans invited electronically into their homes every night as “The Most Trusted Man in America” – 45 years in journalism, 19 years as the anchor of the CBS Evening News and 92 years on the planet. All in that distinctive baritone voice with the rolling cadence. No frills. No editorial comment. No bias. And no trace of the other abbreviated word that starts with a ‘b’ and ends with an ‘s.’
Well, I am no Walter Cronkite, even though my first and perhaps most successful career was as a TV journalist. And so I will embellish the plain facts of this legend’s passing with a couple of personal observations. One dates back to 1973, and the tumultuous time of Watergate and Richard Nixon. As a sophomore in high school, I and a few classmates achieved the true definition of ‘sophomoric’ by making our social studies class project be an original play about the saga, cleverly titled (or so we thought) “Waterfence!” And yes, the exclamation point was part of the title.
The major figures in the piece were of course the figures in the scandal, but with their names purposely mangled, for satiric purposes. There was John Hitchmall and J. Gordon Giddy and Tricky Nick Dixon. And the narrator… that, of course was the famous newsman, Cronker Walltight, played by none other than Yours Truly. In the one and only command performance of this opus, I appeared with slicked back hair and a fake moustache and did a passable (or so I’m told) imitation of Uncle Walter’s voice.
How sad that the "way it is" tonight is that Walter Cronkite is no longer with us. Even sadder that he didn't make it three more days so he could have appreciated just how much we appreciated him all over again as we talked about the 40th anniversary of the Apollo 11 moon landing and how he was our worldwide tour guide.
In 2003, when I was Chairman/CEO of the Academy of Television Arts & Sciences I had the rare honor of being able to introduce Walter Cronkite on the "live" primetime telecast. Everyone knew who he was -- that wasn't my job -- we brought him out by remembering his great work as a war correspondent and tying it in with the death of David Bloom. It went like this:
...I’m talking about the most personal news coverage ever seen during the Iraq war.
For the first time, on a mass scale, reporters – many of them TV reporters – were embedded with combat units, travelling with the soldiers, facing the same dangers, and reporting back home, often in real time, over satellites. We lost some of our own, too, including NBC’s David Bloom.
It was the immediacy of the TV pictures that made news by covering news. But there have been other brave reporters over the years, sending their coverage from the front lines to the home front, but none of them have been as distinguished through their careers in television as our next guest.
Ladies and gentlemen, please help me welcome one of America’s original embedded reporters going back to World War II – Mister Walter Cronkite!
I'm still blown away that I got to make that introduction to so famous a man as Walter Cronkite. He was 86 years old that year, frail, and his voice faltered a bit from what it had been in its prime, but he walked out there strong, made his speech and every single person in the audience paid rapt attention. It was Walter Cronkite and he had earned that level of respect from everybody there.
So we're sorry to see Walter go... He had a great life. He made ours better. He was so infinitely cool, even to the end.
To fans of the NBC series that aired in 1996-1997, I have some good news and some bad news.
The bad news is that it's been a very, very frustrating year trying to get the DVD (or Blu-ray) release of those 20 hours of TV. As many of you know, SONY was set to release it last year, changed their minds at the last possible moment, told fellow creator Brent Friedman and myself that if we could find a DVD company to release it they would help facilitate it. Well, we found three. They liked the idea, the series concept and the fact that plenty of fans still want to see it released. Each time we got cautiously optimistic.
All of them, when it came time to budget the project, however, backed out when they realized the sheer amount of period music that we had incorporated into the series and factored in the cost of licensing against what they perceived as the upside of sales. To have so many people saying "We love this project but we're not going to take it on" was heartbreaking and frustrating.
Brent and I aren't ready to say that's the end of it, but it's the end of the beginning. We're probably more disappointed than any fan out there. We're very sorry to report this.
The good news is that Frank Garcia and Mark Phillips are out with Science Fiction Television Series, 1990-2004 and it includes an excellent amount of material on DARK SKIES. Both Brent and I talked to Frank extensively. This is a highly recommended book for any science fiction fan. Here's an excerpt:
Dark Skies came to light when two of Hollywood's most experienced producers met for the first time and sat down, ruminating for their next project. The discussion turned to the UFO phenomenon and that's when the electrical charge they generated became a neon sign. "It just came to us — what if we fused the two greatest conspiracies of all time together?" says executive producer and co-creator Bryce Zabel. "We came up with the Unified Field Theory of conspiracy — who killed JFK and why, and whether Roswell was a real event or not. The essence of the series is that John Kennedy was assassinated because he was going to tell the truth about UFOs in his second term."
"I told Bryce about a very credible Washington insider I knew who had told me there was intelligent, extraterrestrial life here on Earth," says supervising producer and co-creator Brent Friedman. "That sparked some conversations about Roswell and the possibility it really occurred. And if it did, how could events like JFK's assassination, Watergate, Vietnam, etc. — how could those events have any meaning historically unless they were somehow tied to the alien truth."
With the basis of the series firing up their imaginations, Zabel and Friedman went to work. The first task at hand was to shape the "series pitch" proposal into an unconventional form to generate interest, and provoke the network executives receiving it, to immediately pick up the phone and say the words, "We're interested!"
"We started creating an ultra-classified briefing book that was meant for high-level top secret people that basically told them about the UFO cover-up and how it all happened and made the case that, in 1994 and 1995, the government was going to have to come clean and tell people what was going on," explains Zabel. "And the best way to get the public prepared for it was to do a television series about the truth, so that they could see it as fiction at the beginning and later come to understand the truth. So we were already mixing reality and non-reality in a way that I think was pretty fascinating. We did this whole briefing book before we showed it to anybody."
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