Finding hope in dystopia

THE Will Smith movie "I Am Legend" takes place in 2012, three years after a botched cure for cancer wipes out the human race. Everyone, that is, except military virologist Robert Neville. When first we see Neville, he's joy riding in a 2007 Mustang, careening through the streets of a Manhattan that has grown over itself from abandonment -- weedy, dusty and haunted.

"The minute I saw the trailer I couldn't wait to see it," PBS talk show host Tavis Smiley told Smith on his show airing tonight. "But I did say to myself, 'Here come this Negro to save the world again.' "

But falling into cinematic racial cliche was the least of the filmmakers' challenges. Indeed, "I Am Legend," based on the 1954 sci-fi novella by Richard Matheson, has been something of a Hollywood hot potato for the last decade-plus; it once was in the hands of Ridley Scott, director of the dystopian classic "Blade Runner," to star Arnold Schwarzenegger, from a script by Mark Protosevich.

It was later attached to Smith and director Michael Bay ("Armageddon") before falling to 37-year-old Francis Lawrence, a longtime music video director who'd worked with Smith on a "Men in Black II" video.

Lawrence made his debut in features with 2005's "Constantine," a neo-noir, neo-goth film starring Keanu Reeves; Lawrence landed the job after lobbying to do the movie for close to a year, overcoming, he says, Reeves' edict of no first-time directors, no video directors.

The "I Am Legend" source material was not a natural for Hollywood. Given the cataclysmic set-up -- and the dark, allegorical payoff at the end of the Matheson novel -- it is surprising to hear Lawrence say, several times, that he wanted to make a movie about hope.

"When you read the novel, I mean, it very much plays like a 'Twilight Zone,' which is part of what's hard in translating it to a feature," Lawrence, the son of a Cal State Northridge physics professor, said on a recent afternoon, promoting "I Am Legend" at the Four Seasons. "To translate it to film, if you were to do it direct, it feels more like a short. Structurally, it doesn't have the same motor that pulls you through."

In the novel, Neville is of English-German descent; he smokes and drinks and unwittingly falls for one of the mutant vampires, who has been sent as a spy, outside his fortified L.A. house. Matheson, a regular contributor to Rod Serling's TV series "The Twilight Zone," ends his story with a "Zone"-like reversal: The vampires see the human as "the other," as fearful and mythological as they are to him. Thus the title -- and the last line of the story, said by Neville with self-reflexive bite: "I am legend."