What Would You Ask: Jeff Pinkner and JR Orci?

Excited about the return of Fringe? So are the writers and producers.

Writer and Supervising Producer J.R. Orci will join "Showrunner" Jeff Pinkner in an exclusive FringeTelevision.com interview to answer your questions about the future of Fringe.

What would you ask? We'll be accepting questions until tomorrow (3/17) at midnight (EST).

Happy Birthday J.R. Orci

Happy Birthday to Fringe supervising producer / writer J.R. Orci!

Orci has also worked on Alias, Vanished, and Journeyman, and is the brother of Roberto Orci, who also works on Fringe.


For more Fringe Birthdays, check out the Fringe Birthday Calendar!

LA Times: Web Surfer's Guide To Fringe

The L.A. Times has a great web-surfer's guide to Fringe. The article mentions official viral sites like MassiveDynamic.com and ImagineTheImpossibilities.com, semi-official sites like J.R. Orci's Blog and GlowingMonkeys.com, and important fan sites like Fringepedia.net, and of course FringeTelevision.com :), which they describe as:

It's where I go to find out most of what I missed, plus it has great links...

Thanks Andrew!

Click here to read the full article

'Fringe': Web-surfing for 'Fringe'-fanatics
By Andrew Hanson

"Fringe" might have taken a break with an encore presentation of "The Ghost Network," but there's no rest for fanatical Fringehead or devoted Show Trackers. As 'Fringe' reshows a few of its greatest hits over the next few weeks, there are plenty of places online to fill that all-consuming need for new facts and information on the Pattern.

Apply for an internship at Massive Dynamics: "Fringe" exists beyond your 46-inch LCD screen. There's a whole ARG (alternate gaming reality) growing on the Internet. Your best jumping-off points into this other world are the Massive Dynamics official site and ImagineTheImpossibilities. If you're the type that always needed the hint book for that extra edge when it came to puzzles, though, you might need to check out the next site.

War over edits to Astrid's page: Have an hour or six to waste? You might want to dig into Fringepedia. Take a dip in the pool of collective knowledge. Help figure out what the images that lead into or out of each commercial break denote. Meticulously catalog every narcotic Walter professes to take. Or just spell-check every instance of "Fibonacci Sequence." It's fun for everyone. And if a wiki doesn't give you enough opportunity to get into arguments with your fellow posters, you can always take your social issues over to the Fringe Forums.

Delve into your own fringe science: Glowing Monkeys. I'm not sure what this has to do with the show, but it's mentioned on several other "Fringe"-related sites. Plus it's just full of crazy science. Isn't that enough?

Track down any Observers you've missed: The encore episodes make for the perfect time to brush up on your baldy spotting skills, but if you want to go back and check where your keen eyes have failed you, check out this compilation. The Fringe Television site is a great location for tracking all the scavenger hunts going on throughout the series, whether you're looking for Observer spottings, next episode clues, Massive Dynamic posters or whatever. It's where I go to find out most of what I missed, plus it has great links like our last one.

Step into the mind of a writer/supervising producer: Want to see what the powers that be over a "Fringe" see? Pop on over to J.R. Orci's Flickr page. Not only do you get fun facts, like the existence of the Neoclinus Blanchardi or Sarcastic Fringehead, but you also can check out some cool behind-the-scenes peeks at meetings and late-night writing sessions and, of course, the occasional pic of the Hustler store.

Well, those should keep you busy until "Fringe" returns or at least until the holiday slump at your office passes and you have to get back to at least pretending to work. Looks like next week's encore is "The Arrival." Grab a buddy who's never seen the show and relive the exposure of the Observer. Should get him or her hooked. It's the episode that did it for me.

Orci Snapshots: Fringe Set Mockups

Fringe supervising producer J.R. Orci posted these photos up on his blog. They are scale models of two Fringe sets: The FBI offices and Walter's Lab.

Walter's Lab

The FBI Offices

Fringe Televison Talks to J.R. Orci - Part 2

Here is Part 2 of our exclusive interview with Fringe supervising producer J.R. Orci (part 1 can be found here):

Q: Who does the cow really work for?

J.R. ORCI: Arvin Sloane.

Q: What are your favorite movies / TV shows?

J.R. ORCI: I can't say I have ONE favorite of anything. But in my top five I'd count "Back to the Future" in the movie column. I'm a sucker for well executed time paradoxes. And any movie that has a scene where the main character is forced to make out with his mother to restore the timeline gets a gold star. For TV, I'd say "Battlestar Galactica" is among the current favorites. As a classic sci-fi nut you'd be hard pressed to find a more perfect example of the genre going back to its roots. That, and I like giant spaceships that make things go kablooey.

Q: Buzzsugar reports your brother Roberto Orci as saying that the Fringe team devours the press in search of "constructive feedback". Do you recall a specific instance of feedback that was especially constructive?

J.R. ORCI: It's extremely helpful in giving us insight into the audience's perceptions of where they think the story is going. That allows us to play with expectations and deliver unanticipated twists.

Q. Speaking of your brother, what did you have to do to get Roberto a job on Fringe?

It was easy... Since everyone still thinks we're the same person.

Q: I seem to have misplaced JJ's email address. You wouldn't happen to have it?

J.R. ORCI: I wish! I've never -- technically -- met him. In fact, I don't know of anyone who has. I'm not totally convinced he exists. There's a theory here among the staff that he's actually a sophisticated artificial intelligence program controlled by Bryan Burk.

[Bryan Burk was unavailable for comment]

Q: What is the general plan for the online presence? Is there a story to tell before the show, or will we just see more examples of "the pattern". Any chance of a full-on ARG (like Lost) maybe down the road?

J.R. ORCI: I don't want to give away too much about this... There are some things out there already and more on the way.

Q: Are you writing for the comic book too?

J.R. ORCI: I'm not currently involved in the comic book side of Fringe. It's in the very capable hands of some of our resident geniuses. Among them: Zack Whedon, Julia Cho, Alex Katsnelson, Danielle Dispaltro, Matt Pitts and Mike Johnson. [...more on the Fringe comic book team]

Q: Did you get to go to Comic-con?

J.R. ORCI: Sadly, I wasn't able to go... Some of us had to stay and man the fort! Which is a bummer since I was hoping to find myself a TNG-style Commander's Starfleet uniform with tricorder and phaser accessories. You'd think my brother would've been able to dig me up one given his Trek connections...but no dice.

Q: Who will play William Bell?

J.R. ORCI: That's a closely guarded secret -- even the actor doesn't know. However, we have a backup offer out to Bill Gates now that he's retired.

Q: Was "Massive Dynamics" repurposed from Transformers 2?

J.R. ORCI: That's preposterous. The notion that a respectable corporation like Massive Dynamic would be interested in ginormous extraterrestrial transforming robots just seems silly to me.

Q: Is there any connection between Massive Dynamic and The Hanso Foundation? The Pattern and The Dharma Initiative? William Bell and Thomas Mittelwerk?
YES -- and I can't believe you guessed that! It's actually an integral piece of the series mythology puzzle. We're planning to reveal that connection in season five. So if you want to know the answer, please watch the show so we can stay on the air.

Fringe Televison Talks to J.R. Orci - Part 1

The name Orci comes up a lot when talking about Fringe. Roberto Orci is, after all, one of the Co-Creators, Writers and Executive Producers of the show. So when we stumbled upon JROrci.com, we naturally concluded we'd found Roberto's personal website. It later dawned on us that who we'd found wasn't J. Roberto Orci, but his brother J.R. Orci.

J.R. Orci is the Supervising Producer on Fringe, and the writer for episode 3. He has previouly worked with J.J. Abrams on on Alias as the Co-Producer, and was also a writer on the short-lived series Vanished and Journeyman.

Following the rabbit-hole from J.R.'s Blog will lead you to his Twitter, Flickr, MySpace, and Facebook pages. There are references to Fringe scattered throughout - for example, these Fringe-related tweets:

• Officially on "Fringe" - March 07, 2008
• Moooooo? - March 26, 2008
• Sciiiennnnnnnnce! - April 18, 2008
• Fringe: Day one. - May 05, 2008
• Fringe - picked up!!! - May 09, 2008
• Unleash the cows!- May 15, 2008
• Proudly donning my Fringe hat. - May 30, 2008
• Gangbanging 102 outline. Progress! - June 02, 2008
• needs more Fringy-ness. - June 08, 2008
• In our new "Fringe" offices above the Hustler store on Sunset. - June 16, 2008
• Episode 3 is mine enemy. - June 30, 2008
• In outline hell and only 5 days til prep. NO. ES. BUENO. - July 04, 2008
• 103, Writer's Draft -- DONE! - July 11, 2008
• First re-write begins... - July 12, 2008
• Awaiting Fox 103 notes... - July 16, 2008

J.R. was gracious enough to answer a few of our questions. Here is part one of our interview:

Q: Who wrote the show bible for Fringe, and what exactly is a show bible?

J.R. ORCI: A handful of us were responsible for writing the show bible. It's basically a document that lays out the series for the studio and network. Although there's no specific template for it, it generally includes things like bios and season arcs for each character -- general direction of the series-- a map of the first season's storyline -- the overall mythology of the show -- a description of what the first six or twelve episodes would be -- and a long string of sentence fragments separated by double dashes. I believe the document is sometimes used by the network to help them figure out marketing demographics and things of that sort as well.

Q: How many writers are currently working on the show? How is the work divided up?

J.R. ORCI: We have a staff of about ten writers. The way the work is divided up is pretty straight-forward. The writers' room goes through the process of breaking the rough moves of each story. Once there's a skeletal structure in place, the individual writer/writers of that particular episode split off to figure out the details and write an outline. From there it's just the process of refining until it's ready to go off to script.

Q: What episode is currently being written/shot? Has Fox ordered a full season? Would a full season run straight through like 24, or will there be a mid-season break.

J.R. ORCI: Episodes 105 and 106 are being written as we speak. And we’re currently shooting episode 104. We're still operating on the initial order of 13 episodes, but hoping for the full season pick-up. There's no "extended" mid-season hiatus planned at the moment. But there will be a few breaks in the air schedule scattered throughout our run (can you say IDOL?). This is all subject to change, of course...

Q: Assuming the episodes turn out as good as they are on paper, which episode are you looking forward to watching the most and why?

J.R. ORCI: I'm extremely psyched for episode 102. There is some...unsettling stuff in there that I'm dying to see once all the visual effects are completed. All I can say is -- that episode will not be lacking in the creepiness department.

Q: Are there any sci-fi subjects in Fringe that are "off-the-table", such as time travel?

J.R. ORCI: I wouldn’t say that anything’s categorically off the table. We approach these stories by starting in a place of science reality… Some interesting fact, phenomenon or theory. Then we run with that notion and take it one step further into a hypothetical “what if” sort of place. Given the insane state of science and technology these days – that allows us a pretty wide playing field as far as the stories we can tell.

Q: One of the talking points of the TCA and Comic-Con panels was to establish that Fringe won't suffer from the impenetrability characteristic of Alias and Lost. However, some of the fans like impenetrable, and are now wondering if that means Fringe will lack the depth and complexity characteristic of their favorite shows. Is it an either or equation, and will Fringe ultimately warrant a Fringepedia.net?

J.R. ORCI: Doing a show like Fringe is a tricky balancing act. You don't want to make the series impenetrable to new viewers, but you need to keep the die-hards (of which I count myself) satisfied. I'm confident we can straddle that fine line that satisfies both. There will be serialized threads running through the episodes, and our characters will be very much alive and develop over the course of the series. But aside from that... We will definitely have a deepening mythology running over the course of the season, and there will be episodes devoted solely to telling that ongoing storyline. Fringepedia.net will have its work cut out for it!

Q: What question should I have asked, that I haven't asked so far...?

J.R. ORCI: You should've asked, "Who's the cow really working for?"

Stay tuned for Part 2 of our interview with J.R. Orci, where we will find out who the cow really works for, and other Fringe related things.