Production
"All the Best Cowboys Have Daddy Issues" was written by Javier Grillo-Marxuach. Throughout the writing process, the episode went through several changes. The working title for the episode was "What It Takes". However the writers deemed the title "lame." In writing Jack's flashback scenes, Grillo-Marxuach drew his inspiration on his own background as the son of a doctor. Two new minor characters, named Arthur and Sullivan, were originally created to accompany Locke. The idea was later scrapped in favor of including series regular Boone Carlyle; this development would serve as a genesis for the character's upcoming death in a later episode, "Do No Harm". The idea behind the metal surface, which would be known as the hatch for the rest of the season, came when the producers were storyboarding the season. The hatch's discovery was to be introduced earlier into the episode, but was moved to the end to give the episode a cliffhanger.
With Jack and Kate's journey, in the original outline they were to come under a dart attack by the Others, the island's native inhabitants, however it was cut because executive producer Damon Lindelof deemed the attack too "cheesy." Grillo-Marxuach described the "hysterical CPR" as "the biggest cliché in the book," but added "the nine people who were writing for the show decided, maybe we earned that. It gave us the emotional payoff for the episode."
The fight scene between Jack and Ethan was performed by the actors themselves. The two were given the freedom to set up how their characters would fight each other. However, stunt coordinator Michael Vendrell wanted Ethan to be "as feral as possible; no school of combat, karate, kung-fu." Before filming the scene where Jack finds Charlie, episode director Stephen Williams scouted for a suitable location and found "what looked like a cathedral," because of the layout of trees behind where Charlie was hung. Monaghan had to be harnessed to a cable for roughly four to five hours. The actor described the scene; "they put me in the tree and I just hung there. I just hung limp. I tried to fall asleep, I tried to relax. When everything was going on, when they cut me down from the tree, when was trying to revive me, when was crying, I really didn't hear any of it. I just was in a semi-meditative state; however close that I could get with someone smacking me in the chest.
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Famous quotes containing the word production:
“An art whose limits depend on a moving image, mass audience, and industrial production is bound to differ from an art whose limits depend on language, a limited audience, and individual creation. In short, the filmed novel, in spite of certain resemblances, will inevitably become a different artistic entity from the novel on which it is based.”
—George Bluestone, U.S. educator, critic. “The Limits of the Novel and the Limits of the Film,” Novels Into Film, Johns Hopkins Press (1957)
“The growing of food and the growing of children are both vital to the family’s survival.... Who would dare make the judgment that holding your youngest baby on your lap is less important than weeding a few more yards in the maize field? Yet this is the judgment our society makes constantly. Production of autos, canned soup, advertising copy is important. Housework—cleaning, feeding, and caring—is unimportant.”
—Debbie Taylor (20th century)
“The repossession by women of our bodies will bring far more essential change to human society than the seizing of the means of production by workers.”
—Adrienne Rich (b. 1929)