Montage

Vampires on the attack in The Strain; Cuse on the set of his new show Colony; and a still from Colony, which stars Lost actor Josh Holloway

totalitarian societies, be- tween appar- ent normalcy that the tragedy and the anxiety it belies. “In certain ways we know is com- things function well” in the show’s imag- ing doesn’t befall ined L.A., Cuse explains. There’s no street them.” crime; a bus ride across the city takes 12 More recently, minutes. “But there are enormous costs Cuse has been stay- and consequences to living under this ing up nights with imposed colonialism. And that’s what the his latest project, show explores.” Colony. He describes Growing up, Cuse’s afterschool hours

Sa networkSa the show as a “fam- were filled with reruns ofHighway Patrol, U ily drama crossed Gunsmoke, Bonanza, The Rifleman, Green Acres, with an espionage I Love Lucy, The Twilight Zone, The Outer Lim- thriller, with a sci- its. But it was The Chronicles of Narnia,

Paul Drinkwater/ Paul ence-fiction over- which his fifth-grade teacher read aloud original movie, plus two 1980s sequels and lay.” The story is set in a Los Angeles oc- to the class, that hooked him on narrative a later prequel, only as a ghostly voice or cupied by a mysterious invading force. A and made him want to write. Enthralled corpse; Hitchcock famously kept an empty 300-foot metallic wall surrounds the city; and impatient with her chapter-a-day chair marked “Mrs. Bates” on the set of the a proxy government is in power. Cuse says pace, he convinced his mother to buy the 1960 film.) “You’d think that Norma Bates he and co-creator Ryan Condal wanted books so he could read them all at once. was this horrible shrew who berates her to explore a modern-day version of a He entered Harvard as a pre-med stu- kid into becoming crazy,” he adds, “but scenario like Vichy Paris: “The idea that dent—a family ambition more than his what if that wasn’t the case at all? What if you have Parisians going about their lives own—but had begun to drift toward other she loved her child to death, and there was and drinking espressos in sidewalk cafés subjects by his junior year, when the mak- just some flaw? So really it’s a story about while Nazi stormtroopers are marching ers of Airplane came to campus. Cuse was two people who love each other, and as an down the street.” Colony reflects that same recruited to help set up a screening in the audience we’re sort of hoping against hope split, often felt in occupied countries or Science Center. “They were recording a laugh track,” he says, “and they wanted an ‘intelligent audience.’” He had never met anyone who made c hapter & verse movies, and here suddenly were writers Correspondence on not-so-famous lost words and directors. “It was like a bell went off,” he says. He asked Tom Parry ’74, a Harvard Thomas Gutheil seeks the full text of “Childhood is a lost, enchanted land, grad who’d recently gone to Hollywood a poem with a final couplet that runs, as and we spend the rest of our lives trying (and who brought the Airplane filmmakers best he recollects: “His claims to be bru- to find it again.” to Cambridge), how to get there himself. tally frank were just endless, / Until, to be The words to “My Little Papaya Tree,” “And he said, ‘Make a movie.’ ” So Cuse, a brutally frank, he was friendless.” heard sung on the radio to the tune of member of the varsity crew, made Power “The 12 Days of Christmas” Ten, a documentary on rowing. “It’s this es- More queries from the archives: oteric sport, and people outside it don’t re- “Life is all right but for a bad 15 minutes Send inquiries and answers to “Chapter ally understand why anyone would get up at the end” (perhaps from Edward Gibbon) and Verse,” Harvard Magazine, 7 Ware at three in the morning to train and work “Not at the table, Amanda” (c. 1920s) Street, Cambridge 02138 or via e-mail to like crazy for what amounts to, like, five “Beginning in October effectively again” [email protected]. six-minute races in the spring.” To fund the film, he sneaked into the boathouse at

Harvard Magazine 65 Reprinted from Harvard Magazine. For more information, contact Harvard Magazine, Inc. at 617-495-5746