MTR Heroes Event

[sftv]

I thought it would be good to start up a thread about the Museum of TV & Radio Heroes event during the William Paley Festival. This has been going on for quite a few years and keeps getting bigger and bigger. I've only made it to a few of them, but they were worth going to (Lois & Clark, Angel, The Deep Space Nine Finale, and a Max Headroom event).

A few things to note for people considering going:

Tickets go on sale to members first, on Feb 1st. I imagine the Heroes panel will be one of the hot tickets this year, so it will likely sell out right away. Unfortunately, the festival has gotten higher profile and it is likely a good number of those tickets will be resold on Ebay (which happened when they did Lost a couple of years ago). Now that they are doing it through Ticketmaster, it looks fairly easy to get set up with a membership as opposed to when it was all manual.

What they generally do is screen an episode from the series (sometimes in advance, sometimes one of the more popular ones) and then follow it with an hour or so Q&A session. They try to have the full cast of the show at the panel as well as some of the creative staff (which will make for a full stage). They do not usually have any organized autographing, but some of the actors will stay on stage at the end and sign. Now that they have reserved seating, that may not happen as much as when it was general admission.

If you live in the LA area, I would recommend joining. The Museum has a lot of stuff that is not on DVD, plus most of their past Paley Festival sessions are available to watch there. I see they are starting to make some available for sale on DVD (including Lost).

Lee Whiteside
SFTV.org
(who needs to get his MTR membership renewed and plan a road trip for the second weekend in March...)

[sftv]

I'm not sure if anyone else here attempted to get tickets. It appears that this event has gotten the notice of ticket scalpers.

It also didn't help that the password I was given by the Museum didn't start working until 30 minutes after the tickets went on sale. By that time, about the only shows with tickets left were Jericho and Brothers & Sisters.

It appears that it may only have been people who recently bought memberships via Ticketmaster that had valid ID numbers to buy member tickets at the start, which means most of the tickets sold were to scalpers. When the venue only holds 600 people, a few scalpers can snag up the tickets really fast.

If you did get tickets, consider yourself lucky. If you didn't get tickets and still want to go, keep an eye on Ebay or find someone with connections...

Lee Whiteside
SFTV.org

[KSiteTV]

I'm very glad you posted this. My password did not work in the first half an hour either. I had to catch an airplane, and by the time I was able to reach MT&R, they were sold out and I was given mostly a "we don't care" attitude.

It was especially aggravating since I was giving them free advertising for the event.

I'm glad you posted; I am going to send this to the Museum personally.

[sftv]

FYI,

There's a couple of single tickets for the Paley festival Heroes session up on Ebay that aren't too insanely priced (yet).

Might be worth keeping an eye on them for those of you in the L.A. area....

Its not worth it to me to make a trip out with just one ticket since my girlfriend would never let me live if I didn't get her in as well.

Lee Whiteside

[sftv]

A few initial notes on the night. I plan to work up a full, detailed report that I will make available here and on SFTV.org. I need to head back home to Arizona before I can finish the whole thing....

Pictures from Wireimage.com: http://www.wireimage.com/GalleryListing.asp?navtyp=gls====263993&nbc1=1

Heroes at the Museum of Television and Radio Paley Festival, March 10th at the Director's Guild of America theatre.

Outside the auditorium, a MTR Paley Festival backdrop was set up for the press to take pictures of the actors before the panel started. Fans were not allowed to join them for pictures and were kept back from the area.

The event started with some prepared video about the Museum and William S. Paley. They also showed a clip from a old science program about scientists making super-smart mice by enhancing their brains.

Tony Potts of Access Hollywood was the moderator for the evening. He indicated that he gets to see all of the pilots each summer and watches them with his family to get their reaction to them. He said most you can tell pretty quickly if they are going to be any good and even when they are bad, they watch them all the way through. When they watched Heroes, they were all attentive with not talking during it and once it was done, they were ready to see the next episode. Tony continues to watch it constantly, and since he works in NY and his wife works in LA, each Monday, he's on the phone at 1 am with her to talk about the episode. For the most recent episode, he was back in LA for the first time in a while and had a nice evening with dinnner, Heroes and then maybe some fun afterwards. When his wife saw the "no new episode until April 23rd", she wasn't in the mood and went straight to bed. Tony made it a running joke throughout the evening about how the show had affected his love life.

Tony introduced Executive producer Tim Kring. Tim apologized to Tony and introduced the episode they were screening. He said that in late October, the NBC promo department came up with the whole "Save the Cheerleader, Save the World" campaign. They had never really intended for that line to be used for a big publicity campaign, it was just a line in the episode. He picked the Homecoming episode to screen since it was the culmination of the "Save The Cheerleader, Save the World" thread and also featured all of the main cast in the episode. Afterwards, they showed a clip from the next new episode featuring Nathan and Linderman. (details at the end for spoiler protection).

After the episode and clip are screened, they brought the cast out on stage. Present were Tim Kring, Santiago Cabrera (Isaac Mendez), Sendhil Ramamurthy (Mohinder Suresh), Jack Coleman (H.R.G.), Greg Grunberg (Matt Parkman), Hayden Panettiere (Claire Bennet), Masi Oka (Hiro Nakamura), Milo Ventimiglia (Peter Petrelli), Adrian Pasdar (Nathan Petrelli), Ali Larter (Niki Sanders), Noah Gray-Cabey (Micah Sanders), and Leonard Roberts (D.L. Hawkins). No other creative people were on stage, although many were in the audience and Tawny Cypress (Simone Deveaux) was not present, even though she was listed in the program.

The cast were pretty loose during the session, although some were more at ease than others. Greg Gunberg was the one with the most jokes with Hayden and Jack making a lot of comments. Some members of the cast were making comments to each other at times. As with a panel like this with so many people on stage, some got to talk more than others. Potts moderated the majority of the panel and then opened it up for a few questions from the audience.

Potts opened with some comments about how the cast must be anxious to see the next script, wanting to make sure their character is still alive. Kring indicated he was still working on the script for the season finale (Episode 23) and that none of the cast had seen it so far. Grunberg said that when he got the script for Episode 22, he was blown away by it. Someone asked if that meant his character was literally blown away. Coleman joked that it's so much better being on a show like this because showbiz was so secure a place to work.

Milo's lock of hair was brought up and he showed that he still had it, that it wasn't really cut off. Maybe the cut lock will turn up on Ebay.

They mentioned the drinking game for the show, with drinks for Milo arranging his hair, Hiro making a face and Suresh saying "My Father's Research". Later, when Pott's asked Sendhil to say the phrase, everyone took a drink after he said, in character, "My Father's Research."

Ali mentioned that when they were shooting the pilot, she felt it was something special. That it was a rarity to be on a show that was fun to do and was loved by the fans.

Kring was asked about how he came up with the idea. He said he likes to reinvent himself along the way and that he has a short attention span. He wanted to try to do something different and that there hadn't been any big serial dramas on the networks since Dallas and Dynasty (with Jack Coleman making a gesture when Dynasty was mentioned). NBC didn't have any ensemble dramas of this type and he wanted to try doing this type of show. He saw how Lost had been frustrating it's audience and wanted to go for a bigger/broader premise. His initial pitch to NBC was 20 minutes giving them the breakdown of the pilot and they were wondering how he was going to pull it off. Potts noted that he'd talked with the executives and that after they heard the pitch, they all agreed to go for it. It went through pretty much the standard cycle for a drama pilot. Script in the fall, casting and production of the pilot during the winter and early spring and a pickup for series in May.


More to come....


Lee Whiteside
SFTV.org


For the sceen from episode 19, here's some of the specifics:
[Note, I'm not sure how to spoiler tag this here, so if someone could do that for me, it would be appreciated]






The scene is with Linderman and Nathan Petrelli, with Linderman showing Nathan around in his collection. When passing a picture with Hiro, Nathan says he knows him, and Linderman grumbles that he wants his sword back. Linderman indicates he knows all about the impending explosion and want's it to happen. That "Tragedy will be a catylyst for good". He says he and a group of people used their powers to try to make the world better, but thin

[sftv]

I'm back in Arizona and hope to finish transcribing my notes. It looks like Comic Book Resources were there and they will have a report tomorrow. They have posted a more detailed description of the script from episode 19 on their web site.

http://comicbookresources.com/news/newsitem.cgi?id=9944


Lee Whiteside

[sftv]

One more to note:

http://thetvaddict.com/2007/03/11/2007-paley-festival-recap-heroes-2/#more-1554

A fairly detailed transcript of parts of the panel, but not the whole thing. Obviously someone with a recording device instead of a notepad....

Lee

[sftv]

I have posted my full report on my website at www.sftv.org/sftv/heroesmtr.html.

My latest blog entry at sftvblog.blogspot.com has links to other reports.

Lee Whiteside
SFTV.org