What's inside the mysterious hatch on ABC's hit TV show "Lost"? Maybe a tunnel to Burbank, where a dozen cast and crew members surfaced over the weekend for the world's first official "Lost" convention.
In an event that was billed as "history in the making," fans hobnobbed with the show's stars, scooped up "Lost" merchandise and unearthed a few secrets about the cryptic series, which is like a cross between "Twilight Zone" and "Gilligan's Island."
The two-day convention was organized by Creation Entertainment, a Glendale company that also runs fan conventions for "Star Trek," "Xena" and other shows with cult followings.
Nobody wore costumes to this confab, unless you count the woman with the red blob of fake flesh attached to her shoulder. "It's a piece of Arzt," she explained, referring to the character who inadvertently blew himself up in the season finale.
Other "Losties," who paid as much as $189 per ticket, were just as ardent about the show. One asked actor John Terry, who plays the father of Jack, if he was "in need of female companionship." Terry said he was "happily married."
At the end of a Q&A session with several of the show's writers, one audience member shouted, "Don't kill Sawyer," referring to the island's hunky bad boy. Executive producer Damon Lindelof replied, "We won't. But he did get shot, which means his shirt will be off in a future episode." As female crowd members whooped, Lindelof added, "And he'll be wet" (Sawyer fell into the ocean after being shot).
Many of the audience questions focused on various conundrums from the Wednesday night show, which will move to 9 p.m. this fall. Set on a strange tropical island, the sci-fi series revolves around 14 survivors of a plane crash, and their encounters with an unseen monster, a polar bear, the wreckage of a 150-year-old slave ship and other oddities.
"Have any of you heard of string theory?" Terry asked at the beginning of his talk. "I think the characters have fallen into a tear in the fabric of the universe, and they're co-creating this reality." But, he added, "I really don't know. And even if I did know, I couldn't tell you or I'd have to kill every one of you."
It's a familiar refrain among the show's cast and crew.
"You learn to become artful about giving infuriatingly vague answers," writer Javier Grillo-Marxuach said backstage. "I don't even show the scripts to my wife."
