Damon Lindelof Was 'Constantly Challenged' By White HBO Execs About Watchmen's Hooded Justice
Are we as a human race still holding Damon Lindelof's feet to the fire for the ending of "Lost" or some of the sillier aspects of "Prometheus"? In the year of our lord 2023? Couldn't be me! For years, the somewhat divisive writer had earned the scorn of fans for some high-profile missteps a time or two in the past (we as a society agree to simply never speak of "Cowboys vs Aliens" again, thank you very much), but all of that should've been water under the bridge a long, long time ago. When he guided HBO's "The Leftovers" to the finish line back in 2017, he'd successfully wrapped a bow on one of the greatest shows of all time. Incredibly enough, he then followed that up with yet another huge success by doing the impossible and actually creating a worthy successor to Alan Moore's seminal graphic novel "Watchmen," telling a vital and unabashedly political (and, most importantly, very squid-focused) story about where those "heroes" would've logically ended up years after the conclusion of the original comic.
Never one to shy away from a challenge, Lindelof ended up making some major departures from the source material for "Watchmen" — or, more accurately, from what many fans assumed about the acclaimed story. Nothing in the established canon actually prevented the castings of Black actors like the great Yahya Abdul-Mateen II as Doctor Manhattan or Jovan Adepo as the enigmatic superhero Hooded Justice in the black-and-white portions taking place in the 1930s. But, boy, that didn't stop certain fans from throwing hissy fits anyway!
New comments, however, paint a picture where fan reactions hardly factored in at all. At an Austin Film Festival panel attended by /Film's Ryan Scott, Lindelof revealed the biggest obstacle to the Hooded Justice reveal: white HBO executives.
'There's no reason for a white man to be a vigilante in 1939'
Nobody involved in creating "Watchmen" leading up to its debut in 2019 could underestimate just how massive and pressure-packed an undertaking this was — least of all Damon Lindelof. Despite being a huge fan of the original material, the writer/creator/executive producer had already been rebuffed by the notoriously grumpy Alan Moore after seeking his blessing on the sequel series. Unsurprisingly, practically everyone holds the original "Watchmen" in high regard, and another writer stepping in to interpret such material in their own unique way was bound to result in a certain amount of controversy.
That's exactly what happened when Lindelof first broached the possibility of unmasking Hooded Justice, one of the first influential superheroes (called "Minutemen") from the original "Watchmen" and whose superhero outfit of choice strongly evoked a hangman's noose — loaded imagery, to say the least, that wildly changes context depending on the skin color of who is wearing such garb. Moore never revealed the character's identity, notably, which freed Lindelof to propose in his follow-up show that the character had actually been a Black man all along. While speaking at the Austin Film Festival panel, the writer explained:
"['Watchmen' writer] Cord [Jefferson] expresses this much better than I could, so I wish that he was sitting next to me right now, but he was one of the first people that I talked to about this idea. And he essentially said, 'There's no reason for a white man to be a vigilante in 1939, because the law is for the white man. The only justification to be a vigilante is if the law isn't for you. And that's why I think your idea works.'"
This reinterpretation waded into tricky territory, obviously, and HBO execs knew it.
'Are you sure you want to do this?'
By Lindelof's account, Cord Jefferson (one of five Black writers on the team) was mainly responsible for fleshing out this pitch of his and tying Hooded Justice's origin story to a harrowing experience with police brutality. Lindelof spoke about how his co-writer came up with the idea that Will Reeves' alter ego came about very intentionally. "It wasn't an identity [Reeves] chose, it was an identity that was born out of an attack on his life — a racist attack by cops, no less, by supposed carriers of justice." That theme hits particularly hard in episode 6, titled "This Extraordinary Being," which walks viewers through Hooded Justice's traumatic beginnings in flashbacks to the 1930s. But as well-written and provocative as this storyline was, HBO balked at the idea of going all the way. According to Lindelof:
"I was challenged constantly. And I think that, truth be told, it was all white people like me at HBO, and what they were saying instead of, 'I don't think you should do this,' was, 'Are you sure you want to do this?' And my answer to them was always, 'I am sure that I want to do it, but I don't know if it's going to work.' And I do understand that if it doesn't work, what the risks are ... as long as we're able to present the story in a way that isn't exploitative and purposely harmful."
Knowing that depicting an attempted lynching would be "triggering" and "upsetting," Lindelof acknowledges that this episode only worked thanks to credited writer Jefferson and director Steven Williams. "I was the museum curator, but I didn't do the art," as he put it. With a creative mindset as impressive as that, no wonder "Watchmen" felt so revolutionary.