Last Surviving Heaven's Gate Member Not Eating The Applesauce Until You Hear His Pitch

The current issue of LA Weekly gets acquainted with a man named Rio, the sole survivor of the infamous Heaven's Gate mass suicide of a decade ago that inspired those macabre "Just Do It" parody Nike ads while forever tainting the public's congenial perception of their neighborhood, sci-fi-based alien-worshipping cult. You'd think ten years without his spaceship friends might have given him some perspective on the matter, but Rio, a Westwood resident, remains confident he will one day join them, just as soon as he finishes some unfinished business for departed leader DO here on Earth: High on his To DO list, selling a studio on his Hollywood passion project, SIRUS FROM SIRIUS, a SCI/FI-ACTION-ADVENTURE-COMEDY, a script in which NBC once reportedly demonstrated some interest:

The script incorporates the Heaven's Gate cosmogony. Humans are bit players in a vast galactic drama, including at least one alien summit on Mars. The protagonist is a telepathic man-dog descended from the Atlanteans who has a crystal embedded in his forehead and journeys to Earth to grow a soul. The first draft was several hundred pages long, and featured concept art for all the different alien races and ships. NBC, Rio said, was interested.
All of this checked out when I tracked down Alex Pappas and Rick Singer, the producers who shopped the script around in 1996 and 1997. They ran a company called Way Out Pictures with Mark Bakshi, son of animator Ralph Bakshi and current president of Paramount Production. They were introduced to Heaven's Gate when the group rented a house from Pappas. DO found out about Pappas' ties to Hollywood and set up a meeting. "It was pretty wild ," Pappas said. "Good, but unwieldy. Needed rhythm." [...] Pappas and Singer brought in writer Alan Haft to help pitch a take on the project around town. "NBC had Dark Skies then," Singer said. "So they were getting into sci-fi, and there was some traction there."

The cyclical and forgiving nature of Hollywood means that Sirus From Sirius might again be a viable property for NBC, or any of their competitors looking to capitalize on the epic sci-fi storytelling niche Heroes so comfortably occupies on the primetime landscape. And if Americans' associations with the writers leave a somewhat bitter, phenobarbital-applesauce taste in their mouths, the network can always follow the renegade publicity efforts of exploitation cinema studio AfterDark Films, and use the mass suicide to their marketing advantage. Nothing drives up new series awareness like placing bunkbeds containing partially enshrouded dummies at major shopping plazas and thoroughfares, with only black sneakers protruding, on the heels of which read, "Catch Sirus From Sirius: The hot new show from NBC and Heaven's Gate - Mondays at 10!"
Published 3/22/07 by


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