The Prisoner Reboots the Panopticon

http://blog.wired.com/underwire/2009/01/the-prisoner-re.html

The Prisoner Reboots the Panopticon for 21st Century
By Scott Thill
January 13, 2009
Sci-Fi, Television

HOLLYWOOD — The Prisoner's bold ambition and cult celebrity earned the '60s show a spot in TV history. Now the creative team rebooting the sci-fi spy classic for the 21st century is hoping to recapture both the dystopian fear and the cultural cachet of the original.

Rather than replicating the source material's essentially British mainframe, the team is going international, in cast, location and geopolitical concern. Instead of juxtaposing totalitarian surveillance society against bright color schemes, ubiquitous marching bands and enforcer balloons called Rovers, the new Prisoner miniseries is striving toward domestic normalcy in a world torn apart by terrorism, technology and the idea that being an individual just isn't what it once was cracked up to be.

"We're all total fans of the original, but we couldn't copy it," producer Trevor Hopkins told a crowd gathered Thursday at the Universal Hilton to preview the new Prisoner for the press. "We wanted to reinterpret it as a thriller. We wanted it to be as unfathomable as the original."

Though just 17 episodes of the original Prisoner aired in 1967 and '68, the show went on to become one of the most influential sci-fi series in television history, thanks to the brilliant political and pop-cultural instincts of creator and lead actor Patrick McGoohan, who died Tuesday. The series' subversive innovation has since inspired television shows (Lost, Battlestar Galactica and even The Simpsons), comics (Grant Morrison's The Invisibles) and music.

The show casts a long shadow, and Hopkins and director Nick Hurran refer to their upcoming Prisoner miniseries as "a reinterpretation" of the original. They've brought on some big names to drive the action: James Caviezel (The Passion of the Christ) plays Number Six, the unnamed agent held against his will in a resort called The Village that masquerades as a social utopia. Ian McKellen plays the Village's top administrator, Number Two.

(Wired.com talked with McKellen and Caviezel, as well as co-stars Ruth Wilson, Lennie James and Jamie Campbell Bower during Thursday's press preview. Look for those interviews in the near future.)

Cinema for Television

The updated Prisoner, due to air in November, is a joint production of Britain's ITV and America's AMC, which maintained an online diary tracking the show's production, which wrapped in December. Judging by the short clip aired Thursday in Hollywood, the miniseries will chart a new path to a similarly surreal climax.

Instead of rebooting the influential series in Portmeirion, Wales, where the initial narrative took place, Hopkins and Hurran transplanted the action to Namibia, specifically the strange colonial German village of Swakopmund. With the Atlantic Ocean on one side and inhospitable desert on the other three, the location worked perfectly to evoke The Village's dual identities. It's a nice place to visit, sure, but you'd never want to be imprisoned there.

The initial series' "theme is taken on by a man waking up somewhere he can't get out of," Hurran told the crowd. "The desert provides the prison that was Portmeirion, but the issues of family, control and freedom remain. In that way, there are parallels. Number Six has to assimilate to satisfy the powers that be."

Neither Caviezel nor McKellen deeply researched the original, thinking that a new, darker time called for a different Prisoner. Both credit Bill Gallagher's script with wielding more influence on their roles than previous actors who played the characters.

"The original went out on British TV just once. If you didn't see it when it was broadcast, you didn't see it," McKellen explained. "I caught up with it when it was in rerun, and was immediately intrigued. The original look was charming and unnerving at the time.

"But I didn't come to this with any sentiment for the original. When you have a script as literate as Gallagher's, an awful lot of your work is done for you. Once I put the clothes on and said the lines, everything seemed to fall into place. Frankly I'm more attracted to this Village."

Caviezel said he hadn't even heard of the original Prisoner before he was offered the part of Number Six, but the mention of McKellen's participation piqued his interest in the production he now praises.

"This project is cinema for television," Caviezel said. "It was like shooting a regular film with a brilliant filmmaker."

Meet the New Boss, Same as the Old Boss?

While the new version will no doubt be calibrated for the scientific and geopolitical tangles of the 21st century, the original series served up a countercultural counterargument to the two-toned Cold-War espionage of Patrick McGoohan's previous TV program, Danger Man.

Like the show itself, The Prisoner's genesis is murky. Among the show’s fandom, there exists a theory that Number Six is simply Danger Man's globalist fixer, John Drake, a secret agent who eschewed violence and women in favor of wit and wisdom.

The notoriously reclusive McGoohan refuted the Drake-Number Six connection, but it is nearly impossible to overlook given an analysis of both series, which still resonate in our era of Total Information Awareness. Indeed, in The Prisoner, information is The Village's most prized asset.

Danger Man started out as a cloak-and-dagger franchise, with McGoohan's Drake globe-hopping and putting out political fires as an Irish-American NATO operative. The show appeared in 1960 in half-hour installments, and was a minor success in Europe.

As a spy, Drake was an anomaly: As a rule, he mostly refused weaponry and always avoided sexual promiscuity, relying instead on power plays to solve problems across the continents.

Through much of Danger Man, Drake enjoys a comfortable relationship with his superiors, who usually served as comic relief for McGoohan's quips. The show was canceled shortly after American funding failed in 1962, only to be resuscitated in 1964. But times had changed — for the worse.

The assassination of JFK, the Cuban missile crisis and the pop-culture rise of secret agents, from James Bond to The Saint's Simon Templar, revived interest in Danger Man. The show was dramatically altered and extended to a full hour. Character and plot development were hammered out more finely, and Drake, once a mildly irritated company man, became yet another pawn in an intelligence game over his head. Bosses became corrupt opponents, and Drake's insistence on democracy and fairness took a back seat to nefarious machination.

During this evolution, McGoohan became an international star and, at one time, the highest paid actor in Britain. After the show's fourth season, he quit Danger Man and moved on to The Prisoner.

The original Prisoner begins with Number Six striding into his superior's office and resigning from his post in a fit of controlled rage. Shortly after, he is extraordinarily rendered to a remote prison disguised as a holiday resort. But unlike Danger Man's black-and-white intrigue, The Prisoner reflected the social and political upheaval of the late '60s in brightly colored tableaus.

Now, instead of bristling at his superiors, Number Six was directly battling them, using his physical and mental prowess to defeat them. In the case of co-star Leo McKern, who played Number Two in the show's two-part finale, McGoohan actually gave his opponent either a heart attack or a nervous breakdown. (Reports differ, but you get the picture.)

But rebellion always comes at a price. During the acclaimed run of The Prisoner, Number Six is tortured, battered and even body-snatched: In the episode "Do Not Forsake Me Oh My Darling," his mind is transplanted to another man's body. Number Six repeatedly escapes The Village only to be returned to it in the end, trapped like an animal, overcome by a restless energy he cannot expend, and betrayed by nearly everyone around him.

McGoohan was even persuaded into exile in America because of The Prisoner's subversive, controversial final episode, "Fall Out." He never ventured too far out of that self-imposed seclusion, save to appear in a handful of films and TV shows.

For his part, McGoohan was, like his characters John Drake and Number Six, aghast at the creep of the surveillance state. His views on technology, weaponry and the panopticon were prophetic given current affairs. As he explained in a 1977 interview:

"We're run by the Pentagon, we're run by Madison Avenue, we're run by television, and as long as we accept those things and don't revolt we'll have to go along with the stream to the eventual avalanche.... As long as we go out and buy stuff, we're at their mercy.

"We all live in a little Village," McGoohan concluded in the same interview. "Your Village may be different from other people's Villages, but we are all prisoners."

Decades later, he has proven to have been correct not only about his time, but ours. Our 21st century panopticon stretches from reality TV all the way to the Patriot Act and Guantanamo Bay, and it will be interesting to see how the new Prisoner tackles issues like these.

This story has been updated to reflect the passing of original Prisoner actor Patrick McGoohan, who died Tuesday.

R.I.P. Patrick McGoohan

http://blog.wired.com/underwire/2009/01/rip-patrick-mcg.html

R.I.P. Patrick McGoohan, The Prisoner's TV Visionary
By Scott Thill
January 14, 2009
Celebrity, Sci-Fi, Television

"I am not a number, I am a free man!" Patrick McGoohan's character Number Six shouted at the panoptic eye in the sky at the beginning of every episode of the revolutionary '60s sci-fi TV series The Prisoner. And although the character would come to dominate McGoohan's life and even chase him out of London following the series' controversial 1968 finale, "Fall Out," McGoohan is a prisoner no longer.

The actor died Tuesday in Los Angeles at the age of 80, a still-underrated legend whose influence will no doubt grow larger as this still-new millennium unfurls.

A cosmopolitan iconoclast in an entertainment world still teeming with conformists, McGoohan was known for both his brawn and brains, a rare combination. Born in Queens, New York, in 1928, his family soon moved to Ireland and eventually England, where McGoohan made his name.

He excelled in boxing and math at Ratcliffe College, and worked a variety of odd jobs before landing a gig as a stagehand at Sheffield Repertory Theatre, where he not only kick-started a brilliant stage career but also met the love of his life, actress Joan Drummond. According to popular lore, McGoohan continued to write her love letters even as old age beckoned, and remained loyal to his family until his final days.

It was perhaps that utterly romantic commitment, along with the fact that he first studied to become a Roman Catholic priest, that caused McGoohan to eschew violence and promiscuity once he became one of the most popular actors in England, after his first major series Danger Man (also known as Secret Agent Man in the United States) landed in 1960.

Unlike the brusque heavies he played in films like 1957's Hell Drivers or plays like Shakespeare's Taming of the Shrew or Orson Welles' Moby Dick Rehearsed, Danger Man's John Drake was the ultimate cool customer, a globe-hopping fixer for NATO who nearly always solved major geopolitical tangles with brainy stratagems rather than sex or violence. McGoohan's resolute morality would eventually pave the way for others to become stars: He passed up both the roles of James Bond and The Saint's Simon Templar, opening doors for Roger Moore.

When Danger Man was resuscitated as an hour-long thriller in 1964, McGoohan flexed his muscle further, demanding more room to act, sharper plots and more friction with his superiors, which set the stage for the intelligence showdowns that would serve as the thematic center of every Prisoner episode.

He also became one of the highest-paid actors in England, which he parlayed into roles in spooky Disney films like Dr. Syn, The Scarecrow of Romney Marsh and The Three Lives of Thomasina. Along the way, he impressed nearly without fail. Welles called his acting "intimidating;" billionaire Howard Hughes obsessively watched Ice Station Zebra, a nuclear thriller in which McGoohan appeared alongside Rock Hudson, Jim Brown and more; Secret Agent Man's eponymous musical theme, performed by Johnny Rivers, became a pop hit. He could do no wrong.

That is, until the controversial 1968 finale of The Prisoner, which — like the later cliffhangers of similar envelope-pushing programs like David Lynch's Twin Peaks or J.J. Abrams Lost — confounded conventional expectation and stoked a viewer outrage that McGoohan admits led him to leave London for Los Angeles for good. (For an extended analysis of Danger Man and The Prisoner's cultural influence, read Wired.com's feature, eerily published hours before McGoohan passed.)

As McGoohan would later explain of the destabilizing conclusion of The Prisoner in a 1984 retrospective: "If I could do it again, I would. As long as people feel something, that's the great thing. It's when they are walking around not thinking and not feeling, that's tough. When you get a mob like that, you can turn them into the sort of gang that Hitler had."

From the outset, McGoohan constructed The Prisoner as an escape vehicle designed to tease brains and incite response. Its main character, Number Six, was, like John Drake, an intelligence agent, but one tired of the grind and looking to retire, much like McGoohan when he dreamed up the character after expressing a desire to leave Danger Man. He conceived the series nearly on his own, and wrote and directed several episodes, including some of the finest: "Many Happy Returns" and the last two episodes "Once Upon a Time" and "Fall Out." When he first thought up the influential series, McGoohan wrote a 50-page Prisoner bible that explained everything actors, producers and other principals needed to know.

And there was a lot to know, given that the show skewed television stranger than most anything that had aired at the time, including The Twilight Zone. Though designed to last only a few episodes, The Prisoner's popularity and bravery stretched the show's run to 17, with the later installments like "Living in Harmony" and "The Girl Who Was Death" head-tripping off into the Western genre and surrealism, respectively.

From technological nightmares of surveillance and murderous inventions like the balloon Rovers to brain transplants and Clockwork Orange-like torture, The Prisoner challenged viewer expectation and experience with every episode. The Prisoner was an allegory of the individual, aiming to find peace and freedom in a dystopia masquerading as a utopia.

"I must have individuality in everything I do. It's not easy to find it always," McGoohan once explained. "I question everything. I don't accept anything on face value."

After The Prisoner's astounding conclusion, McGoohan left the madding crowd ironically for Los Angeles, where he continued to work in television and film. He won two Emmys for his work on Columbo, whose star Peter Falk was one of his good friends. He appeared in films like Braveheart, Treasure Planet and David Cronenberg's sci-fi crossover Scanners. He even lampooned The Prisoner in The Simpsons. But it was clear that McGoohan was picking and choosing his work after more than two decades of stunning productivity and cultural influence. And although director Nick Hurran and producer Trevor Hopkins tried hard to involve McGoohan in their forthcoming miniseries reboot of The Prisoner, due in November, his declining health made that a near impossibility.

Perhaps it is fate or coincidence that as Hurran and Hopkins previewed scenes from the 2009 version of The Prisoner last week in Hollywood, McGoohan had succumbed to an illness that would take his life mere miles away. But whatever it is, the fact remains that television has lost one of its most compelling, honorable stars.

Rest in peace, Patrick McGoohan. Your mark on the 20th century simply cannot be ignored. Your influence on the 21st century has yet to be fully measured, but when it is, one thing is sure: You will be more missed than the day you left us all.

The Icon Of Individuality Who Will Live Forever

http://www.prisonplanet.com/the-icon-of-individuality-who-will-live-forever-as-the-prisoner.html

The Icon Of Individuality Who Will Live Forever As “The Prisoner”
Patrick McGoohan dies aged 80
Paul Joseph Watson
Prison Planet.com
Thursday, January 15, 2009

Fans of the cult 1960’s TV show The Prisoner are today mourning the death of Patrick McGoohan, who passed away aged 80 after a short illness, but the role embodied by McGoohan as “Number 6? will live on as an icon of individuality and freedom in an increasingly totalitarian and controlling society.

McGoohan’s character, who introduced every episode with the cry, “I am not a number, I am a free man!”, railed against the overlords of a beautiful yet oppressive open air prison known as The Village during the 17 episode series as his ceaseless efforts to escape were continually thwarted by the authorities that ruled over the mostly brainwashed and subservient population.

The series was littered with disturbing parallels to what has unfolded in terms of the big brother panopticon that surrounds us more than 40 years after The Prisoner was first broadcast.

McGoohan himself was the creative force behind many of the episodes as well as playing the lead role and he made it clear in interviews that The Village and its symbolism was merely an allegory for the psychological prison of modern society - authoritarian control, mindless consumerism and lack of independent thought, or as McGoohan put it, “A place that is trying to destroy the individual by every means possible, trying to break his spirit so that he accepts that he is Number 6 and will live there happily as Number 6 forever after,” adding that the character of Number 6 symbolizes “the one rebel that they can’t break”.

“We’re run by the Pentagon. We’re run by Madison Avenue. We’re run by television. And, as long as we accept those things and don’t revolt, we’ll have to go along with the stream to the eventual avalanche,” McGoohan said in a 1977 interview.

“As long as we go out and buy stuff, we’re at their mercy. We’re at the mercy of the advertiser. And, of course, there are certain things we need, but a lot of the stuff that is bought is not needed. We all live in a little village. Your village may be different from other people’s villages, but we are all prisoners.”

The series was decades ahead of its time and predicted the ubiquitous surveillance society that we now find ourselves living in, as well as technological advancements such as the cordless phone, which was unheard of in the mid 1960’s, as well as miniature spy cameras.

The rulers of The Village, headquartered within a giant central dome that also served as a CCTV surveillance hub allowing them to track the movements of every citizen, were symbolized by a metallic pyramid with an all-seeing eye at the top, but the viewer only ever met a series of sidekicks called Number 2, and never discovered who was Number 1 until the very last episode.

McGoohan enraged many viewers with the controversial conclusion of the series, which revealed that Number 1 was Number 6 himself, a metaphor for the fact that ultimately we are wardens of our own prison. The finale also depicted the prisoner’s escape, only to reveal his return to another form of prison - society itself.

The intellectual mystique that surrounded the series engendered a cult following that remains decades later and provides a literary alarm bell for the direction in which our world is heading - with freedom, privacy and individuality being crushed and replaced with authoritarianism, bureaucracy , and tyranny as well as an exaltation of the cultural mundane while genuine originality, intellectualism and creativity is shunned.

The spirit of McGoohan’s creation lives on in all of us as we each in our own small way continue to rebel against the prison planet that has been built around us while attempting to educate the wardens who continue to support the very means of their own enslavement.

Patrick McGoohan has died

http://watching-tv.ew.com/2009/01/patrick-mcgooha.html

Patrick McGoohan has died
Jan 14, 2009
Categories: '60s mind-blowing, Television

Patrick McGoohan, the man who embodied hope over despair in the coolest way imaginable in the 1960s cult TV classic The Prisoner, has died--he was 80 years old.

The Prisoner was a British TV series that aired in America starting in 1967. Only 17 episodes long, The Prisoner was a strikingly original show about a former British spy who wakes one morning to find himself in a psychedelic fantasy-land that's not all candy and sunshine--it's a combination British village/futuristic prison, and McGoohan's character was stripped of his identity and known only as "Number Six." McGoohan (who'd starred in an earlier spy show, Danger Man, which was titled Secret Agent in the U.S.) had the rugged good looks and clipped accent that leant The Prisoner a gravity its giddy alternate-worldliness might otherwise have lacked. Number Six's famous cry, "I am not a number, I am a free man!" became both a counterculture catchphrase as well as an anguished plea for freedom. The Prisoner was James Bond for acid-heads, and McGoohan's straitlaced image made his small-screen version of a hip spy all the more appealing.

McGoohan also appeared in many films, from Ice Station Zebra to Braveheart, but for TV fans, he'll always be The Prisoner.