Lindelof Brought On A Journalist To Help Write Tomorrowland

This weekend, audiences will be taken to a land of pure wonder and imagination in Tomorrowland as Disney unveils their standalone summer adventure film. 

Tomorrowland pools together a handful of impressive, well-known Hollywood talents including a cast of George Clooney & Britt Robertson, director Brad Bird of acclaimed films such as The Incredibles and Mission Impossible Ghost Protocol, and writer Damon Lindelof who penned World War Z, Prometheus, and the TV phenomena LOST.

Lindelof wasn’t alone in writing Tomorrowland, though. Jeff Jensen, a journalist at Entertainment Weekly, was given his first go at writing a movie when Lindelof came to him while Tomorrowland “was in the very early stages,” he told us. During LOST‘s tenure on ABC, Jensen was in charge of writing recaps and theories of the cult favorite castaway drama and had spoken to Lindelof several times during it’s six seasons.

“We had become very close in that time,” Jensen says. It was “in the fall after LOST ended,” that Jensen and Lindelof started really becoming pals because he initially had to keep a buffer between them as he would critique Lindelof’s work online and needed to keep any bias out. 

It was about a year after the show ended that Lindelof and Jensen dove into creating Tomorrowland. They “wanted to create a world,” before they burdened themselves with characters and if you see Tomorrowland, you’ll know they certainly created a world. Jensen admits though, “the creativity in that world… That’s all Mr. Bird.” While the world we see in Tomorrowland was initially created by the pooled minds of Lindelof and Jensen, Jensen told us that director Brad Bird is the one who came up with the finer details we see on screen. He says that they would leave most of the world’s imaginative details up to Bird so much that in the script, lines would end with, “and our wonderful director comes up with what this looks like.”

Lindelof has, in the past, become known for building worlds and questions without answering them. After chatting with Jensen as a fellow LOST fan about that show’s ending, it’s easy to see how Tomorrowland‘s ending stemmed from his brain. Not that Jensen took the credit for Tomorrowland’s conclusion but his outlook on providing answers is one that could have saved LOST some of the grief and helps Tomorrowland tie up it’s loose ends before the credits roll.

Today, Jensen continues his work as an entertainment journalist. As for a future as a Hollywood movie writer, Jensen isn’t very interested. “I’d love to go back and revisit the Tomorrowland world and tell more stories from that world,” he says, but he is not, “chasing any Hollywood screen writer dream.”

Tomorrowland is now playing in theaters.