The Lost Room started as two separate ideas that got mashed together. The first idea was from my friend Paul Workman. He and I used to work together in the library at Carnegie Mellon University and we would spend most of the time joking around and making up stuff. One day Paul came into work and told me this idea he had for a superpower. It was a thought experiment: what superpower could you have that would be the smallest power with the biggest effect? And Paul’s idea was that if he had the power to teleport into a hotel room, that would be life-changing. You could live there, you could order room service, so you wouldn’t have to pay rent, buy food, etc. Basically it’s a perfect way to not need a job. Paul also had an idea for a second superpower, which was the ability to teleport someone to Fort Wayne, Indiana, and when they arrived they’d have a bus ticket back to wherever they came from. So it would be inconvenient and annoying to the person, but not devastating. Anyway, these weren’t story ideas yet. These were just these things we would sit around and talk and laugh about for hours.

The second idea came from a movie project I was brewing maybe 4-5 years later. It was about a kid who got a glass eye that was magical somehow and incredibly powerful, although I wasn’t sure what it did yet. But I knew there was a secret war going, just below the surface of everyday life: people meeting in diners and bowling alleys, killing each other trying to get this glass eye. I had a few scenes sketched out, but mostly I had a world and a tone in mind — kind of a dark Americana — but the story hadn’t gelled.

Then maybe around 2000 or 2001, Laura Harkcom and I were writing together at the time, and someone reached out to us — I think it was a show for the then-Sci-Fi Channel, coincidentally — about developing short film ideas that could turn into TV series. We started kicking around ideas but ultimately didn’t end up pursuing it — maybe we didn’t like the deal. But during that process, at some point Laura suggested fusing the two ideas together, Paul’s and mine. Which was really interesting, but the rules didn’t quite match up. I didn’t think a secret war would work with Paul’s ideas unless those oddball powers were somehow connected to objects, like the glass eye. So a key would open a door to the hotel room, a bus ticket would teleport you to Fort Wayne, and so on. That meant your “superpower” could be stolen. People would try to kill you for it. And the whole idea exploded from there. None of us knew anything about TV — and it was a different era of television at the time — but we knew the world was too huge and sprawling to be a movie.

What were your influences when creating the show?

Our influences are a weird grab-bag. Paul and I developed this shared sensibility over the years, this big brew of movies and comics and in-jokes and half-remembered late-night TV, so in my mind it mostly comes out of that soup. But I can pick out a few specific influences. Looking back, I think my original glass-eye movie idea was massively inspired by The Talisman by Stephen King & Peter Straub. Paul was a big fan of Bob Burden’s Flaming Carrot Comics, so I suspect that influenced his ideas for the powers. Black Friday by David Goodis was also a big influence on tone — it’s an amazing paranoid, claustrophobic crime novel.