"The Visitor" - the new Fox series from the producers of the box-office superhit "Independence Day" - has a strong Utah connection.
The pilot was filmed here.But, unlike "Touched by an Angel" and "Promised Land," this network series isn't sticking around. All the ensuing episodes "The Visitor" will be produced in Los Angeles.
It's not that executive producers Dean Devlin and Roland Emmerich and the rest of the crew and cast had a bad time in Utah. The reason the opener was shot here was "simply that we needed snow for the pilot," Devlin said.
The premise of "The Visitor" is that an American pilot (John Corbett of "Northern Exposure"), kidnapped by aliens in 1947, somehow manages to steal a spacecraft from his abductors and escape in 1997. The Air Force pursues the craft, finally shooting it down over Utah.
The visitor - who returns to Earth with strange powers and more than a few secrets - is befriended by a single mother and her teenage son as the series begins. And not only is the pilot shot here, but the setting is also Utah.
Not that the shoot, which took place in February, was completely trouble-free.
"We would shoot a scene with beautiful snow and we'd come back the next day and it melted," Devlin said. "So we're like, `Oh my gosh! What are we going to do?'
"And so we're trucking snow in Utah."
Locals may have enjoyed the thaw, but it wasn't welcomed by the producers.
"The first four or five days, it was absolutely perfect. Just snow everywhere and beautiful. And then we show up the next day and half the snow's gone," Devlin said. "The day after that, two-thirds of the snow was gone.
"I'm pulling out hair out and saying, `Where's the snow? Get me snow!"
Not that that was the reason the production moved back to Los Angeles.
"No, we always planned to do that," Devlin said. "The snow melting was a problem, but we dealt with it."
("The Visitor" is scheduled to premiere on Friday, Sept. 19, at 7 p.m. on Fox/Ch. 13.)
HER GREATEST ACCOMPLISHMENT: A lot of big things have happened for country-music sensation Mindy McCready in the last few months.
The 21-year-old got herself a Nashville recording contract in less than a year, and her first album has sold almost two million copies.
And she's performing in the upcoming Nashville Network special "Long Live the King: Country Salutes Elvis."
But her greatest professional accomplishment, believe it or not, runs through Utah.
"I think what other people would consider my greatest professional accomplishment and what I would consider my greatest professional accomplishment are two very different things," she said.
To understand her thinking, you've got to understand that she is "very much a fan of Garth Brooks."
"When I'd first moved to Nashville I would read everything about him," McCready said. "How he'd gotten his record deal through singing demos, how he chose his songs and what he wrote about. And just his stage performance being the best show there is in the music industry today, and I really admired that about Garth."
So, obviously, she's a big fan. And, because of that, she's still excited about something that happened in Utah with her first single.
"When `Ten Thousand Angels' was first released to country radio, they do these things called `smash or trash,' " McCready said. "And a Salt Lake City radio station put me up against Garth Brooks' song `The Fever' when Garth's single had just been released. And `Ten Thousand Angels' beat the pants off him.
"So that's my greatest accomplishment."
HOW IGNORANT: McCready's story is like something out of an old movie. She went to Nashville, giving herself a year to get a record contract.
Like her idol, she did a lot of demos for other people. Eventually, she was "discovered" by a producer - and, one week short of her one-year time limit, she got her contract.
At the time, McCready didn't know how nearly impossible her dream was. Only after achieving success did she discover how unusual it was.
"I give all the credit to my success to ignorance," McCready said. "I knew absolutely nothing, and I think that that was my biggest asset in getting as far as I did in such a short time."
A RATHER BITTER MAN: In the upcoming NBC action drama "C-16: FBI," D.B. Sweeney is one of the supporting players.
Two years ago at this time, he was being built up as a TV leading man with the starring role in the Fox series "Strange Luck" - which turned out not to be a particularly happy experience for him.
Actually, he wasn't all that anxious to do anything in television again after what happened the last time around.
" `Strange Luck' was a very frustrating and disappointing experience for me," Sweeney said. "Because I felt we came up with one of the best pilots of that year . . . and we had great characters and it was a great idea behind the show - but, unfortunately, they didn't manage to write the show every week.
"They tended to think that it would write itself, or that people would just think back on the pilot every time it stunk."
Whew!
"It got real frustrating and I ended up with a pencil in my hand, which wasn't what I wanted to do," he said. "And based on that experience, I was very much against the idea of doing another TV show."
And he was a bit tough on the producers and writers of "C-16."
"I told them, `I think this pilot episode is great, but for all I know you've been writing it for four years. What are you going to do in episode two?' " Sweeney said. "So I was real impressed with their answers about where they thought the show was going to go and specifically about my character, who I thought was not very clearly defined in the pilot script."
Stay tuned . . .