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AFF panel wrap: ‘Lone Star’ screening
Kyle Killen is either the nicest guy in Hollywood or as good a con man as the lead character in his spectacular failure, “Lone Star.” The signature show of the 2010 Fox fall season, “Lone Star” was cancelled after only two episodes had aired.
Killen’s got to be kind of tired of talking about it, right? But he approached me in the lobby of the Driskill Hotel in between panels at the Austin Film Festival, not vice-versa. And there he was again on Sunday, showing the series’ pilot at the Alamo Ritz and taking questions from the large, enthusiastic and exasperated audience afterward.
You’d think that Killen would be bitter — after all, the series was his first foray into television (he’d previously written short stories and a feature screenplay, “The Beaver,” plagued by its own unusual problems). But if he is disappointed, he’s also optimistic. And more than anything, he’s grateful.
He told the audience that Fox let him make exactly the show he wanted to make and never tried to make him change it. He revealed that the network did everything they could to help the show survive: it not only supported his urgent Internet campaign to get viewers, but also pulled technological tricks to allow its popular lead-in “House” to run three minutes into “Lone Star’s” time slot so the show could count some of that program’s audience.
Killen suggested that he was too ambitious in trying to put a show with cable sensibility on a network, and conceded that, in hindsight, the marketing — although extensive — may have been off (at least one woman in the audience admitted that she was turned off by the print ads showing star James Wolk in two nearly identical photos with his two wives). Finally, he realized in retrospect that the slow pacing in the first half of the pilot might have been challenging for network viewers.
Killen said that everyone involved with the show would land on their feet. He retains a good relationship with Fox and plans to take his next project, whatever that turns out to be, back to a broadcast network.
But this time, he says, he’ll try to do a “network” show there.
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