The CBS series Scorpion is based on the incredible true story of Walter O’Brien’s team of geniuses who work with Homeland Security to keep the world safe from high-tech threats. Some of O’Brien’s work is still top secret and won’t be included in the series, but much of what viewers will see in Scorpion is based on actual cases O’Brien’s team has worked on.
At the 2014 San Diego Comic-Con, O’Brien talked about his work and why it’s important to expose what he does to a wider audience at this particular time.
Why is now the perfect time to bring your story to the small screen?
Walter O’Brien: “Well, in the company we’ve been gathering geniuses for a while and we’ve gotten to about 2,600 of them. We use school reports from high schools that have As and Fs in them, so it’s kids that are turning on and off their intelligence depending on the teachers or the students. And then once we find the one, we genealogically map their family tree because IQ’s hereditary, to find their cousins, their brothers, etc. The trouble is we’re running out of the geniuses who know they’re geniuses or have tested themselves. Now we need to find people who don’t know they’re geniuses and just know they don’t fit in. Maybe when they watch the show, they’ll realize, ‘Wait a minute, that’s me. That’s how I behave.’
That’s part of the reason why now. The other part is we realize how much good we’ve done, how many lives we’ve saved, which logically would mean just as many people have died because they didn’t know we existed and didn’t know they could call us. So this solves that problem.”
How close is the series to what you’ve actually gone through?
Walter O’Brien: “In the pilot, the percentage I’ll give you is about 70% of the pilot is true. A lot of my life, the truth is stranger than fiction. The bits that aren’t true aren’t the things you think weren’t true, it’s things like the emotions and some of the relationships and how upset or how angry someone gets. Those are the parts that are less true than some of the action and some of the risks and dangers that happened. The first six episodes are all based on real things that happened.”
Are you okay with altering the emotional responses and relationships in the series?
Walter O’Brien: “Absolutely. Again, in the show we talk about the greater good so there’s examples of that. I’m sacrificing a certain amount of privacy to do this because I’m not benefiting in terms of wanting to be on screen or be a Hollywood character, but if that saves a lot of lives, sacrificing privacy is a small price to pay. It’s the same with switching it up in the show. If there’s more humor and more emotion in the show, that makes it more watchable. And if the show lasts longer and more people enjoy it, it’s again achieving the greater good purpose. Having a technically correct show that doesn’t last more than two episodes isn’t any good to anyone.”
What changes on the producer’s side when the real person is part of the equation?
Executive Producer Nick Santora: “I’ve done a bunch of movies that were based on real characters but in those scenarios, you get the rights and kind of go away and just write it and hope they like it. With Walter, from the beginning, from the first day I sat down with him, it’s been very much a give and take. I need certain information. I needed Walter to really open up personally. The nice thing about Walter is everything is kind of just, ‘These are the facts,’ and Walter will present that information.
There is a responsibility to not make someone look like a fool when they’re trusting you in the way Walter trusted me at the beginning of this, and now trusts every writer and every person involved in the show to not make him or his team look foolish. This team is Walter’s life, intellect, and using his intellect in the right away is Walter’s life. Also, listen, Walter is a really, really smart guy and if I mess up, he’ll erase my identity.”
How do you decide what information to share with the producers?
Walter O’Brien: “They’re pretty black and white. A lot of the missions that we’ve done have been funded by my company that I privately hold, so as the CEO I can make the call on whether we want to disclose the data or not. For military work that I’ve done, only if it’s been leaked into the public domain, Wikileaks or other areas where it ended up on the evening news do I feel comfortable talking about it. There are many things that haven’t yet and I can’t talk about them. So in my mind it’s very clear, very black and white what the rules are of what I can and can’t talk about.”
Has there been a shift with sensitive clients like the military when they know you have a TV show?
Walter O’Brien: “Well, for better or worse, we set the tone with our government clients years ago where they understand they’re not in charge. They can’t tell us what to do. We’re not ITAR restricted. We’re not restricted on which country we work on. We’re unaffected by religion, morals, traditions. We make our own judgment of what the greater good is and we follow through on that. Because of that, regardless of how they feel, they’re crystal clear on how we feel, on how much we can or can’t be coerced.”
How has social media changed what you do?
Walter O’Brien: “Very little. Actually, social media will probably have a bigger impact on this show than it’ll have on any of the things I work on. The things I work on are massive systems that are behind the scenes that control our power grid or control our medical systems or banking systems or Wall Street. That stuff is not really affected by social media. While we protect the general public, we don’t need them to be a fan to do so. Whereas the show makes an interesting exception to that in that the more popular the show, the more people hear about us. The more people that join us, now those people will work on the next crisis this country has. So indirectly we’ll do good.”
The characters in the pilot are like the characters in Big Bang Theory. Is there a universality to the people involved?
Nick Santora: “If you’re asking if we’d like this show to trend like The Big Bang Theory, absolutely. We would love their ratings and we would love their fan base, so yes.”
Walter O’Brien: “But in reality, each of the characters of the show are inspired by real folks that I work with and real superpowers that they have. It didn’t strike me until a panel recently. We knew the Big Bang Theory comparison because they go on before us [and it was pointed out] that they have Penny the waitress and we have Katherine McPhee who happens to be a waitress. I actually hadn’t connected the dots on that. It certainly wasn’t done deliberately. It was just that’s the way it worked out for the show. But the characters in the show, I think if you study each one, their abilities are very different from what the abilities are in The Big Bang Theory.
How surreal is it to see your story on screen?
Walter O’Brien: “It’s very strange to see myself at 11 years old with the NSA coming to get me; it’s a chilling flashback. I don’t know if I was very smart or very stupid in what I did at that point. Seeing the show portrayed that way and seeing how friends who really know me well feel that after about 15, 20 minutes of watching the show, they just accept Elyes [Gabel] as me in how he’s acting and what he’s doing, is a really cool thing to happen. It’s interesting to be cloned.”
