If you’re like me, you’ve probably been pronouncing the title of “The 100” wrong. Until I heard someone at the network say it, I assumed it was “The One Hundred.” Turns out, it’s just “The Hundred,” and it refers to 100 teenagers sent from a space station called The Ark to see if Earth is habitable again.
Now imagine 100 teenagers with no adult supervision, let alone the dangers of a post-apocalyptic earth. I sat down with series creator Jason Rothenberger before The CW presented “The 100” to the Television Critics Association.
CraveOnline: I’ve been calling it “The One Hundred” but it’s actually “The Hundred,” right?
Jason Rothenberger: It is “The Hundred,” yes. It’s kind of the bane of my existence, it’s funny. I love the logo now. I’ve come to love it. I get the marketing aspect of it, but for the longest time I was resistant because I knew everybody would look at it and say “The One Hundred” because that’s what I say. Needless to say, I’ve come to not only believe that I was wrong, but it was funny, for the longest time my title pages, I would not write “The 100.” I spelled it out. It’ll be one of those things, for the rest of my life.
It’s 1/44th of “The 4400,” right?
Your math is better than mine.
It’s also more than 11 times “The Nine.”
[Laughs] Yes, it is.
Is this is the first series you’ve headed up yourself?
Well, I had a pilot made a couple years earlier called “The Body Politic.” It’s funny, I don’t know that a lot of people have had the experience that I’ve had this year which is I’ve been a feature writer for 15 years. Lots of feature writers obviously come into television, but I never have. I’ve been working on studio projects, big ones. Twilight Zone, Colossus, huge movies with movie stars and big directors, but nothing got made. Zero movies produced.
I’d started a while ago thinking, okay, I’m a big fan of television. I think television is better than feature films right now for many reasons than movies that are being made. Obviously it’s a cliche to say it but we’re in kind of a golden age of television. So I started writing pilots about six or seven years ago, got one made pretty quickly, “The Body Politic.” And then a couple that didn’t get made, and then this one. So all of a sudden I go from never having anything shot to executive producing my own show. Now in this one six month period I’ve produced 13 episodes of television, so it’s crazy.
When it got up and running, how did the workload surprise you?
Oh, it is the hardest, most time consuming. My family, I have two kids and I’m married. It’s a total culture shock. I was in my pajamas all day working on features in my house. Suddenly I have an office. There’s never enough time. Really where you get killed is when you get into episode four or five, six and you’re writing things, you’re breaking things. You’re editing the stuff that you’ve already made that’s now coming in, and you’re in production on other things. So really you’re pulled in a million different directions, and that’s where you look to experienced people to help make sure that you’re doing it right.
“The 100” could have been a movie, but you couldn’t have gotten into all the weekly details. Was that your thought of doing it as a series?
It was pitched to me by the studio as a television series. The book, which at the time was a book proposal, sort of touched on all these ideas that I loved. I was looking to tell the Lord of the Flies story, frankly, writ large. I was looking to do a colonial mission to another planet story where that kind of thing would happen. Then I read this and I just heard the idea. I thought, “That is, that’s Lord of the Flies. That’s another planet where the planet is Earth” and it just clicked in so many different ways. So it was never a thought to do it as a movie.
I 100% agree that this would make a great movie. In success, who knows? I have crazy ideas of between season three and four, we do a feature that bridges the gap. By the way, there’s a whole world down there. It’s not just this little slice of the world where our kids landed. There’s a whole planet that was simmering radiation, so who knows what is going on down here. Maybe there’s a way to really expand the playing field, but again that’s ridiculous pie in the sky stuff.
When you have the scenario where you have, not just kids, but a group of people sequestered away from society, do the Lord of the Flies ideas just present themselves?
What it is, is these people are thrust into this situation. They are 18-year-old kids, right? So the instinct to go wild, the instinct to run free, especially coming from where they came from. They were in a very repressive environment on the Ark even before they were locked up. It’s repressive up there.
So the idea is, a la Lord of the Flies, some kids want to go native. Some kids want to just indulge in that wildness and others are trying really hard to hold onto some structure, some ritual, some rules. It really becomes what kind of society do they want to have. That’s what we play with in the season. We really see them. I don’t really look at them as kids. They’re all young adults, frankly, and they’re dealing with very adult issues.
When characters start to die, do you have to re-title the show “The 99,” “The 85,” etc.?
We do keep track of it. It’s funny, I resisted having anybody refer to them as The 100 for a while. I’ve given into it. You’ll notice characters referring not to themselves as “The 100” but Jaha calls them The 100. The way I’ve justified that is the mission, the plan was called, on the board, as they figured out we’re going to send these kids down. Essentially they’re canaries in the coal mine for us. If they live, we life. If they die, we’re all going to die very soon. So that plan was called “The 100.” Even as they start winnowing down, you’re right. By the end of season one, I don’t want to tell you, it’s not close to 100.
Is anything going on with The Twilight Zone?
The Twilight Zone is a situation where I went to the studio and I had no idea I was going there to meet on that movie. It would’ve been nice to know it, although I did get the job so it’s fine. I had a story that I wanted to tell. The president of the studio said, “You can either use the vault of ‘Twilight Zone’ episodes and blow one of those up into a movie, or you can give us an idea that feels like Twilight Zone.”
It would have just been one story?
It was going to be a feature length, and it will still be, but it’s not going to be my idea, which is good and bad. The truth is I loved this idea. It was an idea that’s very sci-fi, a great companion on some level to “The 100,” but Matt Reeves was brought on to direct my script and it was in development gone wrong. So many times, that’s why so many of my movies didn’t get made. Development is a slippery slope. They take a wrong turn and then they’re down blind alleys.
But instead of doing three or four shorts, their idea is to do a series of feature length Twilight Zones?
Branded as The Twilight Zone. That’s the plan and I think that’s really exciting, to have every couple years a great standalone Twilight Zone movie would be amazing.
How about Colossus and Red Star?
Colossus is still potentially going to happen. Colossus, for a long time, Ron Howard was attached to direct and Will Smith was attached to star. I had worked with them, both of them, we developed the script. These things in the movie business are crazy. Before they’ll make a move, they’re talking about a $150-200 movie. So they really are careful. This is a very smart movie. It’s not like a popcorn movie. It’s incredibly edgy although I see trailers for Transcendence and I feel like they beat them to the punch frankly.
Is Josh Trank still doing Red Star?
I don’t know. He’s busy with Fantastic Four.
