About a year ago I received a package from a Logan fan on the Isle of Man. I have forgotten who sent it now. There were several things in it. One of them was another of those press release looking documents. At first glance I thought it was one I already had so I set it aside thinking it offered nothing new. it ended up in a binder of stuff to add to the web site where I found it again this weekend. It turned out to be a pitch document produced for network executives while trying to sell the series it details a far different than the one we know. I think, at least the first part, is mostly taken form the writers guide for the series. It mentions the Domed City.. while a few later sections refer to it as the City of Domes. Later bits mention the revised pilot scenes and upcoming story episodes. In some parts they mention Francis and other Sandmen and in some parts them mention Francis and one other Sandman.
It also mentions Fear Factor, The Crypt, and Half Life so these must have been the three treatments or scripts completed first.
A rebel high tech base? The growing love between Logan and Jessica? Sorties into the City of Domes? Oh how I wish I could get my hands on a copy of that writers guide!!!
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Needless to say, "Logan's Run" doesn't end with the escape of Logan and Jessica and their cyborg friend, Rem, from the robots in the Mountain City.
In their search for Sanctuary, they come across enclaves of civilization which, separated by many hundreds of kilometers, by mountain ranges and waterways and vast wastelands, have survived the atomic holocaust that destroyed most of the the world.
In these pockets of life, all of them with their own special characteristics - some dominated by Good,, some by Evil, some by the Machine - we will find abundant material for stories of romantic adventure laced with imagination and 24th century technology.
The world, in this year of 2319, is no longer linked with lines of communication, so each pocket of civilization is a separate entity, its members totally unaware of the existence of anyone but themselves on earth.
Some of these societies will have expanded the technology they knew when the wars came so that today, a couple of hundred years later, they are capable of technological wizardry.
Others who were almost totally destroyed are discovered now in their slow evolution towards a stable society.
Somewhere along the way, Logan, Jessica and Rem will stumble on that is, in 2319 even as now, the innermost wish of every itinerant man and woman - a place, you might say, of their own. Not Sanctuary, by any means; not a home, even; but rather a base of operations from which they will venture into the outside in their search for true Sanctuary and their eventual sorties back to the Domed City.
This home made will be visually colorful and dramatically viable: a labyrinthine underground complex, the last seat of American government, whose members and staff fled from the poisoned air of the atomic eruption and died on the whispering plains. Here Logan, Jessica and Rem discover a treasure-trove of technology: radar screens, magnetic force fields, sophisticated weaponry... whatever serves the series best to catapult our trio into a new adventure every week.
They have a goal that prevents them from settling permanently in any of the societies they come across, including their home base, no matter how appealing. They have left hundreds of people facing needless extinction on Carousel because of a lie. Determined to save as many of their friends as they can, they hope, once having found Sanctuary, to return to the Domed City and prove that Outside offers unlimited possibilities for life and happiness, and that reaching the age of thirty is not an automatic death sentence. This obligation to those they left behind is that drives them in their search for the other Runners who went out to seek Sanctuary.
Our cyborg friend, the genial Rem, will function as a key to the outside world, since he has a store of knowledge fed into his computer by the Masters when they conceived him in the Mountain City.
For Logan and Jessica, Rem is their laboratory, their knowledge of Outside, which has always been a mystery to them. And though an android, and therefore something a good deal less than human, Rem slowly, by his exposure to Logan and Jessica, seems to assimilate some of their human characteristics. Incapable of emotion as we know it, Rem nonetheless exudes a basic goodness; perhaps it was the Masters' idea of a joke to program him with the approximation of a human heart.
And what of Logan and Jessica? Carefully reared in the precisely programmed world of the Domed City, they are, when exposed to the Outside, true innocents abroad, straining towards the maturity they were never intended to reach in a civilization where life ended at thirty.
Of the two, Jessica is the more intuitive, less because she is a woman than because Logan was trained not to think but to act, to live "by the Book" of the Sandmen. Inevitability, as they face hardships and danger, the two gradually begin to think as one. Products of a world where love as such was unknown, they do not for a moment suspect that love is what's happening to them.
We have not heard the last of Francis, Logan's nemesis. He escapes from the Mountain City and makes his way back to the City of Domes, where he is contronted (original spelling) by its actual rulers - a secret combine of elders, well past thiry, who manipulate the live of everyone else.
Their immediate impulse is to execute Francis and let his secret die with him. Francis argues for his life. He willingly pledges allegiance to the rulers, and applauds the institution of Carousel, which he realizes will maintain ecological balance and inhibit any ideas of revolution. Logan and Jessica, on the other hand, he reminds them, are true heretics and probably will try to return to the Domed City one day, to free its people. Give him a Mazecar outfitted for Outside travel, enough food, and another loyal Sandman, and he will track down Logan and Jessica.
The rulers are convinced of his dedication, and Francis and a second Sandman are sent into the Outside World to make sure the secret of the Domed City is never brought to light.
So we have a second dramatic situation to deal with in the series: Logan and Jessica looking for Sanctuary so that they and the other Runners can return and free the people of the Domed City who still live in bondage to Carousel; and Francis and the other Sandmen tracking them down in the nuclear wasteland, confronting them occasionally, losing them, but persisting in their search and on occasion returning to the Domed City to refuel and to report the results of their pursuit.
The story ideas for a Logan's Run series aren't limited by anything except the human imagination, which fortunately knows no limits.
Stories so far?
1) We've all heard the saying, "The lunatics are running the asylum." What happens if in the year twenty three hundred and nineteen Logan, Jessica, and the faithful Rem stumble on an asylum whose inmates survived the nuclear war because the city fathers built the institution as far away from the center of town as possible? And what is now, centuries later, the lunatics really ARE running the place....? Even "One Flew Over the Cuckoo's Nest" started with less.
2) You've read a lot lately about people who are being frozen at the moment of death, in hope that they'll be brought back to life someday when a cure for their disease has been found. Imagine, then, our trio coming upon a vast crypt stacked high with cryogenic coffins, and a group of scientists who have only enough of a new wonder serum to bring FOUR of the cryogenics back to life. Whom do they choose for the miracle of re-birth? And what if having decided to resurrect Albert Einstein, who can create a brave new world out of the post-nuclear shambles, they find themselves confronted with a substitute, a man bent on death and destruction - the Godfather....?
3) Consider the ultimate Jekyll-and-Hyde story. A future society, long since aware of the good and evil in man, has finally found a way to divide people into two - one pure, one evil. In this foray into the macabre, Jessica herself undergoes the act of division, and Logan is confronted by the embodiment of Jessica the Evil. logan and Rem have a devil of a job putting the real Jessica together again.
There are many other ideas germinating in the minds of our writers - romantic, healthey stories of adventure and excitement; stories of people, mainly rather than of hardware, though the technological wizardry of the twenty-fourth century certainly will not be neglected as Logan and company guide their hovercraft into the sun on their search for Sanctuary.