Leonard Nimoy's arts legacy; the Robin Thicke trial; 'The Last Man on Earth'

He told me about his play, "Vincent," about Vincent Van Gogh, and it's told through the lens of Theo, Vincent's brother. We started talking about me presenting and remounting the play. He's so generous, and he would stay after many of the plays and do Q&As and discussions and I said, "Rather than doing that five-to-eight times, why don't we just do a talk about you, the making of the work. And who would you like to interview you?" And he said, 'Well, you, of course." Then I've been nervous basically for over a year. 

Leonard Nimoy, to me, is the embodiment of the greatest part of the human potential. I think most of how he found a way to both express, but also take hold of, community came through the arts. He's a profound advocate, but he's a discerning thinker, he has a profound eye for so many things. His collection, of course, is remarkable. But it's remarkable because it's not the kind of collection you look at and say, This is somebody who's acquiring objects because they will escalate in value. They're an authentic collecting family. 

Certainly there is...right now [we're] supporting the family, what they want to do, how they want to go about that. I'm sure in some way shape or form there will be a kind of memorial. Right now, I think the biggest, most important thing for the public is to find the outlets of expressing how much they respect and grieve Leonard, but not directly [involving] the family. When I find out more what they want to do, we'll move forward with that. 

Living long and prospering for me means the prosperity of the continuation of legacy and using our highest and best selves as we wander the planet. He certainly did. I feel so profoundly made better because of him and I know that I am not alone in that feeling. 

Chris Miller: The idea was something that Phil and I had been kicking about as a feature idea, but Will really sparked to it. We talked about it for a couple hours and he got really excited, and then he spent a weekend writing a treatment for the first season. And that's basically what's happening right now. [laughs]

Phil Lord: Right. When you watch each episode, you're watching his pitch in extremely slow motion.

Miller: If that pitch lasted, like, seven hours.

Miller: They're just out of frame. You can smell them if you're on set, but we didn't include them in the shots. [laughs]

Lord:  I don't know if Will has a rationale for what exactly happened. In my mind, a bunch of animals gobbled up all the bodies, and then they succumbed to the virus, and then they died.

Miller:  There have been a number of off-handed mentions about like, "Oh, help me clear this body out of there," or they'll drive by a hospital and say, "You do not want to go in there," but in general, we've found that the more talk or visuals of dead bodies, the less hilarious it is.

Lord:  You wind up provoking two questions for every one that you answer, and we didn't want the show to be about what happened or what the virus was like. We didn't care about any of that stuff; we were interested in how a man deals with this new reality.

Miller: All along, we talked about how, if there were an apocalypse, none of us would really be well prepared for it. I find everything about how to do everything off the Internet. I can't really fix a car or tell you the elements of the Constitution.



So it was kind of funny to think about an average person with no real skills. Not some person who's stocked up their basement with emergency supplies, but how a regular person would solve their problems and learn how to live.

Lord:  Yes, exactly. I'm really worried that a lot of that information is just going to disappear, right? We don't store it on paper any more, we just store it in some computer's brain. So in our initial conversations when this was a feature, that idea takes about 10 minutes in a feature, and then you have to bring in vampire zombies or something.



But in a television show, which is really about exploring a character, you can get a lot more granular and that 10 minutes can become a whole series: What parts of society are essential? Can we throw it all out, or are there certain things we need to keep?

Miller:  We've definitely had several conversations where we've used the phrase, "Trust us, we can make this work." [laughs] For sure, that was definitely a part of it. But the show has to be good, it has to deliver. And what really made Fox believe in the show was when they started reading the scripts and the executives were passing them around and couldn't wait to see what would happen next.



They were like, "Don't tell me what happens next! I just want to read it in the next script." So the fact that Will and the writing staff were able to deliver a show that continually surprised everybody and was hilarious, but also kept taking new turns in a way — that kept them on the edges of their seats — was really the reason why they ended up believing in it.

Lord:  I could speak for Chris. I think he is a genius of simplicity and boiling something down to its barest, most concentrated, funniest elements.

Miller:  The thing I admire most about Phil is his ability to think not only outside of the first box, but outside of the second box that the first box was in, and you didn't even know there was a second box. [laughs]

 One of the reasons this case is interesting is because Robin Thicke, Pharrell and Clifford Harris — who's better known as the rapper T.I. — sued the Gaye family to get a preemptive declaration that they have not copied any of Marvin Gaye's songs. Then, of course, the Gayes immediately filed a countersuit alleging that the musicians had copied the work of their late father. 

This is a very interesting change because, before 1978, according to the judge in this case at least, copyright law only governs the written sheet music composition of a piece of music, not the actual sound recording itself. That is a separate copyright. What the judge has deemed is that what the Gaye children own is, in fact, the sheet music copyright. Therefore, what Robin Thicke and Pharrell have to prove is that their composition is not improperly derived from what's written in the sheet music of Marvin Gaye's music, not whether the song themselves sound too similar.

It is unusual it went to trial. I know, for instance, that the Sam Smith/Tom Petty dispute never got anywhere near a lawsuit. It was settled very amicably. I think what's happening here is both parties are very emotionally invested in the work they claim is theirs and both essentially have the financial and experiential resources to pull a lawsuit forward. 

Essentially he is saying that not only he was completely untruthful in the interviews, but that he was drunk and high on Vicodin during every single one of them. He gave this extraordinary deposition not too long ago where he essentially claims that in all of those interviews, he was just trying to sell records by saying something that he thought sounded cool and interesting. 

That was an interesting demonstration to show that even songs with similar chords — like "Let It Be," like "With or Without You" — could end up being recorded completely differently. Because essentially what Thicke and Pharrell are arguing is exactly the opposite, which is that however similar the recording of "Blurred Lines" and "Got To Give It Up," they found the actual underlying compositions are very different. 

He immediately noticed some similarities between the recording of the commercially released version of "Blurred Lines" and of Marvin Gaye's song. So much so, in fact, that he even pushed executives at Universal to cross-market Gaye's material with "Blurred Lines" and to create a mashup. However, he conceded that he had only been listening to recordings, not looking at the actual sheet music itself. 

That's absolutely true, but the sheet music is by legal standards the only thing this case can concern.