ALEX HYDE-WHITE
MCA founder Jules Stein was still on the lot, and I met him at the commissary one day, that was cool. He was one of the original “alpha” New Yorkers, an eye doctor turned music and band promoter-agent turned mogul, taking a moribund Hollywood motion picture studio of horror films and turning it into what became a huge conglomerate. Universal TV was still in its heyday.
CHRISTIAN I. NYBY II
It was kind of the last of the big studios. By then, Fox had sold off their backlot and it became Century City. Warner Bros. kind of had that kind of feel, but Universal still had actors and directors under contract. Actors would shift from one show to another. You’d see them on The Virginian and they’d go on The Name of the Game, then show up on Ironside or Adam-12 or something.
TERRENCE MCDONNELL
(story editor, Battlestar Galactica)
Steven Spielberg had his offices on the first floor. Glen and [Galactica producer] Donald Bellisario were on the fourth.
ROD HOLCOMB
(director, “Murder on the Rising Star”)
I thought Battlestar Galactica was really so timely and groundbreaking. It changed television and offered an opportunity to get out of the Marcus Welby, M.D. mode of doing series, and really got into doing adventure, and having control over it, on the stage. The work that they did was just stunning.
ALAN J. LEVI
Back then, we shot television. Head close-ups and masters, and over-the-shoulders. Today, every TV show today is a feature film. We began that transition. I think Galactica was one of the shows that was at the beginning of that.
With a string of television hits behind him, Glen Larson was probably one of the few people in the industry with the experience and clout to make Battlestar Galactica, an epic and expensive TV series with feature film aspirations, a reality.
SCOTT MANTZ
(film critic, Access Hollywood)
No conversation about Battlestar Galactica can start without talking about Star Wars, because the pitch for that show, the pitch that everyone was given, was imagine Star Wars production values on TV, and that’s what it looked like. I’ll never forget in the commercial for the premiere that shot of a Cylon Raider passing over the top of the Galactica, with that little tiny Raider, and you see the scope and the detail on the Galactica model.
STEVEN SIMAK
(journalist, Battlestar Galactica historian)
A successful producer always looking for the next big hit, Larson saw the achievements of Star Wars as an opportunity.
GLEN A. LARSON
Science fiction had been pretty dead up until Star Wars broke, and obviously when something like that comes in and fuels the market it makes a big difference. People did bring out their projects, including us. Clearly we came in early, and with such an ambitious project and with the Industrial Light & Magic group involved. This was a different generation of space project. It captured the new wave.
DAVID LARSON
Star Wars gave them license to say yes. It was a proven model now. They hadn’t done anything like that on TV. Star Trek wasn’t really like that. Very different show. Star Wars proved that people wanted to see this kind of thing. Let’s do it on TV using John Dykstra. You had Star Wars as the boot camp which created all of these possibilities and these effects makers. It did a lot of the legwork, so you could do it on a much smaller budget on TV.
GLEN A. LARSON
Ours is a business and a world in which I guess every car has to look like a Mercedes and when you go in to sell something it doesn’t hurt that one of the biggest blockbusters of all time is on the screen. I have to say that John Dykstra and Richard Edlund and that group of young people from Long Beach City College had taken and moved the techniques of doing space effects into a whole new generation.
DAVID LARSON
He had the right idea at the right time. Without Star Wars, it never would have happened, but I think they were very different things.
A huge part of Star Wars’ success, in addition to the groundbreaking special effects from Industrial Light & Magic, was the designs by legendary conceptual artist Ralph McQuarrie, who was also part of Galactica’s early development and helped sell the show, as Larson cagily included McQuarrie’s stunning preproduction art as part of his sales pitch, even attaching McQuarrie’s artwork in copies of the scripts he gave to the crew and actors.
GLEN OLIVER
(pop-culture commentator)
My layman, nonartistic eyes have always perceived a distinct difference between Ralph McQuarrie’s preproduction aesthetic, and how those concepts and designs were ultimately visualized onscreen. While many broad strokes of McQuarrie’s intent were grafted on the show, his developmental work suggested an overall aesthetic which was much sleeker—perhaps glossier—than what eventually went before cameras, which was grittier. His concept paintings are rather badass.
That said, I understand why the powers that be opted for a more grounded, gritty universe. Galactica isn’t a terribly clean tale in terms of thematics—many stories were driven by explorations of treachery, greed, desperation, and struggle. These concepts often feel more accessible, and may even be amplified by, more “real world” and familiar settings. And, of course, Star Wars demonstrated that a universe doesn’t have to be squeaky-sleek. Love or hate the show, it’s impossible to argue that there’s some mighty potent iconography present. For my money, the show’s base aesthetic is a key reason the series has endured.
GLEN A. LARSON
We had pretty good response from the guys at ABC. We had very strong support from one of the top guys [ABC VP Stephen Gentry], who later died in a plane crash with [Mission: Impossible creator] Bruce Geller, and was really our mentor at ABC, a big fan. When we lost him, we lost some of our people who were most simpatico with us, who kind of knew what we wanted to do.
To make the ambitious project a reality, Larson teamed up with longtime associate Leslie Stevens. Stevens, a writer/director who had worked with Larson previously on McCloud and It Takes a Thief, joined the series as supervising producer. John Dykstra, fresh off his revolutionary work on Star Wars, was lured away from ILM, both to serve as a producer on the pilot and to supervise the visual effects.
STEVEN SIMAK
For Battlestar Galactica, Larson revived a series concept he had pitched unsuccessfully a decade earlier, Adam’s Ark. The premise focused on the journey of a group of humans in search of a new home after the cataclysmic destruction of Earth. For Galactica, he reversed the idea, having our celestial brethren coming in search of us.
GLEN A. LARSON
It was a colonization theme and had a lot of interesting elements to it. At the time I was pitching it, Star Trek was on the air and Star Trek didn’t last long so no one was interested in that area. In a way, it was the reverse of Galactica. It was inspired by the mysteriousness of Howard Hughes and all of his enigmatic dealings out in the desert in Nevada, where he was buying up hotels. Hughes had always been one of the pioneers of aviation. I noticed Time magazine had a cover anniversary issue which looked at the top five hundred people in our society. Anyone who had ever been on the cover of Time had been invited to a photographic session and so I had this sort of screwball idea, that Howard Hughes invites these people out to a major achievement ball in the middle of nowhere.
The building for the celebration is the most spacey-looking thing you’ve ever seen. Somewhere along the line someone realizes there’s some odd sensations going on and you discover that this thing has taken flight. It turns out the Hughes computers have predicted that within a finite date a nuclear holocaust destroys Earth. We had variations on what the threat was, but the premise was Noah’s Ark. The ship had left Earth with all of these incredibly important people to set sail. For Galactica, instead of leaving Earth with sort of a doomsday scenario, it was a little more optimistic coming from out there.
SCOTT MANTZ
It was the biblical story of Exodus. They’re looking for Earth. What a great twist. I
remember thinking, “Oh, I get it. They’re looking for us.” Does it take place in the past or the future or the present day? Who knows? We found out, and we regretted it, when we actually learned in Galactica 1980.
GLEN OLIVER
Given that Galactica was driven by so many conceits and thematics derived from outside material, Mormon beliefs and practices, for example, it’s certainly feasible that Larson had conceived the overall thrust of the show far earlier than the late 1970s. Or, that the essence of the show had been generally shaped in his mind or via notes, without pen having been formally put to paper.
This said, considering the substantial amount of material which is available from Galactica’s development and production, including extremely early designs and unproduced scripts, it’s hard not to raise an eyebrow at the notable dearth of material directly pertaining to Adam’s Ark.
Knowing a bit about Larson from folks who worked with him over the years, my personal hunch is that some variant of Galactica was bouncing around in his head for quite some time, but was never fully formed. When it came time to coalesce these ideas—an opportunity enabled by the release Star Wars—it was impossible for him not to catch some sort of blowback given that franchise’s immense visibility, popularity, and uniqueness.
DAVID LARSON
More than any other show, Battlestar Galactica was my father’s legacy. He felt attached to that more than anything else, so he was really reluctant to let that one go. Back in 1977, he was successful, but he wasn’t huge yet. They weren’t just writing him checks to do whatever he wanted to do. He had to prove himself. Battlestar Galactica was his sort of magnum opus. There was a lot of that methodology from the [Mormon] church. There was just a lot of him that he put into it. It was a story he had been mulling over for a long time. Some stories just stick with you, and I think he knew this was going to be his legacy. He put everything he could into it.
ALAN J. LEVI
Glen’s main force through all of that was he wanted to beat Star Wars to the theaters, because he had read the Star Wars script. When Universal turned it down [after George Lucas made American Graffiti for the studio], he and Leslie Stevens got together and formulated Galactica. That’s how he got the idea of making it and he was determined to get it on before Star Wars came out.
Leslie was an alien expert and he wrote books on aliens, interplanetary travel, and the whole bit. Universal had turned down Star Wars and Glen had read the script somehow, and he said I’m going to bring Star Wars to the small screen, and that’s how Battlestar Galactica got off the ground. It was he and Leslie actually speaking to put the initial thing together, not a lot of people know that.
The one thing about Glen is that Glen was always the star. There was a little bit of tension between the two of them because Leslie always felt that he had made more of a contribution toward the original Galactica being done than what he had been given credit for. He didn’t get co-credit on much of what he wrote. He was such a kind, soft man. He was so brilliant. His books are almost a bible on intergalactic beliefs, alien beliefs, and so on. He believed it all! He was a very quiet man, a big soft-spoken man, but you listened to every word he said because he was that brilliant. My dealings with him were basically as a mentor that I owed a great deal of appreciation to. He never really got involved on set. He would come down and visit every once in a while, but Glen was the one who really ran the show and Glen hired most of the people who were working on the show. I never did forget that Leslie was really a good human being. A very talented writer and it was very sad when he died.
RICHARD COLLA
(director, “Saga of a Star World”)
I first became acquainted with Leslie Stevens’s work on a play that he had done in New York in the early fifties called Bullfight, which was kind of a dark piece about two brothers who are bullfighters, and the bullfight is done almost as a ballet on stage. He had a lovely poetry and a lovely sense of human value. He can also be very commercial and did plays like Marriage-Go-Round and TV series like The Outer Limits.
I had great respect for Leslie Stevens as a writer and he said, “Come on and do the pilot of Battlestar Galactica, ‘Saga of a Star World,’ because what we’re going to do is we’re really going to tell the story of mankind here, we’re going to talk about human values.” I said, “Okay, because it’s really a comic book right now as far as the story is concerned and the people.” He said, “Yeah, but we’re going to work on that.” It ended up being a really good craft exercise, but they ultimately never did fix the story. It never really did become the story of people. It was just a cartoon.
GLEN OLIVER
I see Star Wars as a literal and figurative “hero’s journey,” sometimes wrapped in sociopolitical allegory with hints of slavery, Nazism, World War II, Vietnam, etc. Galactica, to me at least, has always been about humanity trying to find itself and define itself, asking what is truly important when all is lost? How do we relate to spirituality and faith, when neither seems to be delivering exactly what we’re seeking in a given moment? It’s about the dangers of imbalance between political and military infrastructures, and how this lack of clarity can lead to uncertainty and even annihilation. Galactica, in many regards, is driven by harder, more tangible, more expansive themes than Star Wars often is. How fully, or smartly, it actually exploited these themes is an entirely different matter.
ALAN J. LEVI
You can’t sue Roy Rogers for being a cowboy after Gene Autry, you know. This was a different kind of a show. He put Cylons in there because there were no Cylon types in Star Wars so there was a real threat there.
GLEN OLIVER
Does Galactica owe its green light to Star Wars’ success? Without a doubt. But riding the wave of a popular trend—and exploiting genres and formulas which have recently proven successful—is a long-standing Hollywood tradition which is practiced even today. There’s a long road between existing because another property proved successful, and actively ripping off that property.
ALEX HYDE-WHITE
Battlestar Galactica was my entry into TV in Hollywood. Like many of my generation, Star Wars was the catalyst. After numerous enthralled viewings on the big screen, I wanted to fly jets in space. And apparently, so did ABC.
TERRENCE MCDONNELL
Not only had I seen Star Wars a day or two before it opened but I had sunk a ton of money into 20th Century Fox stock based on the movie and it like tripled. I saw it at the Academy of Motion Picture Arts and Sciences building on Wilshire Boulevard and, like everyone else, I’ll never forget seeing that ship coming over your head and it didn’t stop and everybody went out of their minds.
Back then it was all doctor shows and a Western or two. It was just by the numbers. And then there was this weird space show they didn’t know what to do with it. When we went off the air we were twenty-fifth in the ratings. They would kill to have that kind of number right now.
Of particular interest to Larson was the opportunity science fiction provided to explore theological and theoretical themes not possible in more earthbound programming. In the mid-seventies, long before the Kardashian daughters were even a glimmer in their parents’ eyes, pop culture was fixated on astrology, the Bermuda Triangle (to wit: NBC’s short-lived Fantastic Journey), and Erich von Däniken’s Chariots of the Gods, first published in 1968, in which the author postulates that ancient astronauts (a.k.a. aliens) helped forge the great civilizations of the globe.
One of the more visually intriguing examples of this exploration is Galactica’s use of Egyptian symbols, such as in the helmets and costumes, to suggest a link between the citizens of the Twelve Colonies of Man and ancient civilizations of Earth as well as the signs of the zodiac. Larson was fascinated by the idea of an advanced civilization settling on Earth and leaving its influence, in the form of the pyramids, on developing civilizations. He married this to the tenets of his Mormon faith, creating such concepts as the Quorum of the Twelve, part of the Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints.
GLEN A. LARSON
It’s fun stuff theoretically and philosophically to explore some of these themes. I actually used to sit with who I consider to be one of the great minds behind Star Trek, Gene Coon. Gene was a mentor of mine who brought me into television. He would sit with me at lunch and we would explore thematic issues about the Athenians and the Phoenicians and all kinds of migratory patterns of humans on Earth. We would talk about some of the theological things that the Mormons believed; that the Tribes of Israel scattered and many wound up in Central and South America with the pyramid influence. There’s a kind of interesting contamination from what we perceive as the old world to the new.
DAVID LARSON
Even today, very few people are aware of some of the references to Mormonism in Galactica. He drew from some of the names, but they’re not religious. The religion has been stripped away. You’d have to be pretty high up in the church to know about Kolob. The Council of Twelve is a very different thing in the Mormon church than it is in Galactica, but that’s what he knew, and that’s what made it so special and so different. Even today it’s a very esoteric thing. A lot of people like it for that reason. They like that he infused his own beliefs. Nowadays everything has to be sanitized, cleaned up, focus-grouped to death. It’s the corporate nature of entertainment these days.
GLEN A. LARSON
I also thought it would be great fun for all of the people who live and die and won’t get out of the bed in the morning until they read their horoscopes. I thought they would have great fun in giving greater credibility to astrology and letting the mythology of the zodiac like the Picons and the Virgons spring from something far more tangible; that perhaps the origins of some of these things really precede these beliefs. What I was laying was the groundwork for further exploration of those themes and letting people’s beliefs take a new form. Instead of nailing everything down, you just open up areas and discuss them in the genesis of these people that ultimately genetically wound up here.
So Say We All Page 4