Has anyone ever seen of heard of "Doorways"?

[Gotham Central]

Has anyone ever seen the pilot for the aborted tv series Doorways? (Temporal Flux I'm looking at you)

The movie predated Sliders by a few years, but apparently had a nearly identical premise.

 

[sojourner]

If I remember there was even a lawsuit against Sliders over the similarity.

 

[M'Sharak]

I never saw it and don't know much about it, but there are a few familiar names on the cast list.

http://www.imdb.com/title/tt0106752/

 

[zenophite]

sounds interesting...

 

[Brendan Moody]

The first draft of the pilot script, which is a bit different from the finished pilot, was published in the second volume of screenwriter George R.R. Martin's collection Dreamsongs.

 

[drasche]

I watched it when it was broadcasted here a long time ago to fill the scifi slot on Saturday night. Too bad they didn't do a series.

And Anne LeGuernec was hot!

 

[TemporalFlux]

Has anyone ever seen the pilot for the aborted tv series Doorways? (Temporal Flux I'm looking at you)

Doorways was a strange idea in my opinion, and I think it died on the vine because even the average sci-fi fan had problems relating to it. Basically, there was this race of talking clouds that enslaved alternate realities and turned the populace into something like the Hounds of X-men's Days of Future Past.

Well, a female hound (who even looked alot like the Rachel Summers hound) steals a doorways device and uses it to run away from the clouds to an alternate reality. The hound eventually ends up in an ER, and an ER doctor is swept up into the clouds' sights and forced to run for his own life with the hound in tow.

The doorways device was a handheld thing that projected a holographic global map showing where and when the next doorway would appear on earth. The two then had to travel the planet to the doorway before it disappeared; and oddly enough, the doorways only appeared in actual doorways (such as to a house). The device created no doorway; it was essentially a compass.

How anyone could ever say the Sliders pilot movie was a rip off of the above scenarios, I'll never understand; but that's exactly what Martin has done for years. The only thing the two shows really had in common was the alternate reality travel premise (something neither show invented), so it would be like saying Grey's Anatomy ripped off Trapper John M.D.

If Martin was being legitimate with his ire, then he would have filed a legal theft claim against the 1998 ABC made for tv movie "Tempting Fate". The movie featured an ER doctor swept up into an alternate reality adventure because a girl with an alternate reality travel device ran to him for help. That one *did* seem to be a rip-off of Doorways. (ABC was even the same network that had previously paid to produce and passed on Doorways!) Yet to my knowledge, Martin has never said a single word about "Tempting Fate".

In any case, you can sometimes catch "Doorways" on the various Starz pay channels.

 

[Christopher]

I never saw this, but I read about it in Starlog back when the pilot was in production. I was briefly confused when Sliders was announced later on, wondering if it was the same project, but it became clear upon seeing it that there was no resemblance beyond the many-worlds premise, and that's a long-standing SF trope. It would be like saying that Babylon 5 ripped off Red Dwarf because they both have spaceflight.

 

[Brendan Moody]

Martin has claimed that Sliders co-creator Tracy Tormé's agent had once approached him about a staff position on Doorways, saying that Tormé had read the script and "loved" the idea. Tormé said this claim "would be completely libelous if it were not so laughably untrue." There was also some mutual content-bashing. (Martin is in the habit of describing Doorways as "Sliders, but good"; Tormé wrote of Doorways "When it had mercifully ended, I could truly understand why the network that produced it not only didn't buy the series, but deemed the pilot so unwatchable that it never aired, even as summer fill.")