I’d be out making something, and he’d come down after dailies and he’d chat with me about it, and I’d say, “So how does it look, George?” He said, “It looks just fine.… It looks just fine.” I used to kid him about the place just being a factory, and that we were churning out automobiles. I’d say, “So, does it look like a Chevrolet, or does it look like a Cadillac?” And he’d say, “in this case I need a Volkswagen.” I said, “George! I can’t give you a Volkswagen here. We both know the only way the studio’s going to get out of this is by making a picture that’s good enough that you can release it theatrically first. That’s the only way you’re going to make your money back.”
While that would indeed eventually happen, Star Wars veteran John Dykstra and his crew were already working on the visual effects. Universal art director John E. Chilberg II began designing the numerous sets envisioned by Larson’s script, which went through numerous rewrites. Chilberg worked with assistant art director Richard James, set designers John Warnke and David Klassen, and set decorators Mickey Michaels and Lowell Chambers. When Chilberg left the project early on owing to health problems, James (who later worked on Star Trek: The Next Generation and Voyager as a production designer after Herman Zimmerman left for Deep Space Nine) was promoted to lead art director, alternating episodes with Mary Weaver Dodson.
STEVEN SIMAK
(journalist, Battlestar Galactica historian)
At its height, the standing sets for Battlestar Galactica spread across eight soundstages at Universal, the largest number of stages ever utilized for a single television program. The most extensive set was the Galactica bridge. Built at an estimated cost of eight hundred and fifty thousand dollars, the bridge set was the centerpiece on which much of the action and drama would take place. To create greater visual complexity, the set was designed with multiple levels and a rotating circular command pedestal.
RICHARD JAMES
(art director, Battlestar Galactica)
We thought in terms of a captain standing on an upper deck and looking down. That was the driving influence. You are on a ship and it sort of goes back to the time when you look back and see a captain on board ship. He is always elevated and so you have those levels. That was the development of it, and the levels create an interesting set because it gives something for the director to do with the people.
SARAH RUSH
(actress, “Flight Corporal Rigel”)
It was incredible! It was like a three-million-dollar set and at that time that was enormous. The set looked brilliant and it really was wonderful to work on it. I had never been a big sci-fi person, but I loved the thought of real people in this kind of atmosphere. It was one of the reasons why the show was so successful. People were very human and had human experiences in the perspective of space.
STEVEN SIMAK
One goal was to create the illusion that the bridge controlled every function on the Galactica. With this in mind, set decorator Mickey Michaels contacted computer giant Tektronix, Inc. In return for a prominent screen credit, Tektronix donated some three million dollars of computer hardware to dress the set. A large number of television monitors, worth an estimated thirty-five thousand dollars, were also used. Computer schematics generated by the Universal art department were fed to the computer terminals to make them appear functional. In addition, effects shots—such as a Viper launching—were looped to the television monitors from a series of Betamax players hidden offstage. Stage twenty-seven, known as the “swimming pool,” was selected for the bridge set, because it contained a tank below the main floor that was used to conceal the equipment necessary to run the Tektronix hardware.
RICHARD JAMES
In the beginning, it was hurry-up-wait. There came a very lengthy delay in shooting from the time we first started designing everything. And then they just put us on hold and all of a sudden it was go, go, go. And then everything had to be ready overnight. The main push up front was the bridge set. At one time, Battlestar Galactica had more stages involved than any production had ever had at Universal.
Tektronix furnished millions of dollars’ worth of computers for the set. The lowest level was multiple stations and all the electronic equipment, and the computers had all been preprogrammed. We had people in the art department who worked with programming the computers so they could pull up images that were for on camera so they didn’t burn into the screens.
CHRISTIAN I. NYBY II
(director, “Fire in Space”)
As far as the computer effects, we had everything set up on the bridge; someone was very clever. The extras in the background that were part of the crew, on their computer screens, had early computer games. They were really playing Artillery or whatever. They had three or four games so they were actually working the computer and they were having fun at the same time. We just told them that if they won, not to show great excitement or anything.
RICHARD JAMES
The set was built so they could pull the back panels out of those stations so you could get reverse shots of the people at the stations and there was room down there to go behind the set. The command station rotated, and there was room underneath that. It was complicated, and a lot of the directors complained it was probably too complicated and too ambitious. It was just time-consuming to film.
GLEN OLIVER
(pop-culture commentator)
I’ve always thought the Galactica bridge, which presumably Ralph McQuarrie was involved in shaping, was an astonishing set—even though it feels illogical in some ways and probably wasted a great deal of space when considered practically. But the essence of it, the busyness of it, the sense of power and functionality it conveyed, were invaluable to the scale and energy of the show. It looked fantastic on camera.
RICHARD JAMES
The bridge set was a long time in construction, and Jack was very nervous to get it built, because of all the working electronics involved. We really pushed to get that set going; it would be the one set that we were going to need and it would also give us the cushion to get the other sets done. That set was able to be started before there was final approval, because they knew once they got final approval they needed to have somewhere to go to film.
Although the bridge set had been approved early on in the production process, changes had to be made once the effects work began taking shape so that the interior matched the design of the miniatures. Initially, designers had envisioned a more streamlined approach for the bridge and interior sets. However, the model for the Galactica, designed by Ralph McQuarrie, with its heavy industrial detailing, required James to make a midcourse adjustment.
RICHARD JAMES
We had some stuff that didn’t look like it would go in that ship at all. We had to scramble to make modifications so we didn’t get such drastically different looks. We actually had the bridge design before John Dykstra got it. It was pointed out that we had curved designs. We did things to reinforce the ability to eventually come out of the models and so forth with the rivets. There was a lot of discussion of those issues. In reality, spaceships wouldn’t have rivets, but Dykstra was the hero of the day for doing Star Wars and we had to take the lead from him in that situation. He wanted that hardware look and not the clean Star Trek or 2001 look. I remember I just told the shop to make lots of rivet runs because we were going to add rivets to everything. We added lots of support beams. I got Universal finally to buy a vacuform machine so we could do vacuform [panels] to give a machinery look to the walls. It really helped us out a great deal to have that.
STEVEN SIMAK
The multilevel set proved to be a double-edged sword for most directors. While it afforded them many great opportunities for dramatic shots, it proved to be a time-consuming process.
RICHARD JAMES
Any time you create the levels, it makes it harder, because you have to do camera platforming. That takes time to set up, and when you get into shooting a series they don’t want that kind of time spent.
ALAN J. LEVI
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br /> It was a difficult set, but it lent itself to some wonderful camerawork. It was a three-level set, and using a crane I was able to go over the side and do a bunch of stuff. It was almost a practical set in that there were very few wild [movable] walls, which made it very difficult. I found it amazingly challenging to get good shots, but when you did they were terrific because you had great scope. It wasn’t just a little tiny cabin—it was bigger and broader and more interesting.
ROD HOLCOMB
(director, “Greetings from Earth”)
Unfortunately, it was a little too quiet for my tastes on the bridge. I felt that they needed more people on the bridge and more sound effects. I felt that in some ways, the bigness hurt it. If you look at the Star Trek bridge, it’s not that big and yet you had tons of people coming and going, so there’s a real sense of movement and life in it.
TERRENCE MCDONNELL
(story editor, Battlestar Galactica)
The set that had the bridge also had one of the hallways, the generic hallways. I think it had a swing set that also had the Imperious Leader. There was a little room alongside the bridge that had to have over fifty Betamaxes with a different tape in it that was going on to the individual screens. I remember being over there when they did “Fire in Space” because they were doing a lot of gags there with the explosions like blowing up the screen. There was a big piece of Plexiglas that was wired from the back, and the stage was packed with people watching it. There was no sound. It just disintegrated. But onscreen, it’s this big thing. They had the wrap party on the bridge. It was so cool.
The directors would work closely with the series’ initial director of photography, Ben Colman, a veteran cinematographer whose work included several previous shows for Larson, and later John Penner, to maximize the possibilities of shooting on the ambitious set.
ALAN J. LEVI
I said to Benny [Colman], I tell you what I want to do on this set, I want an Atlas crane. So they brought in a crane and I shot the bridge set with a crane, because I could take one wall out of the stage on the left side and stick the crane in there on a big platform so it could come in and I could go from the bottom all the way to the top and go all the way up to the map. I shot eighty percent of everything on the bridge from the crane. And it sped it up. I don’t know what they did before, because that set wasn’t even completed until I came on.
Benny Colman was a gift to me. We could set up shots that would follow them all around the set, and he never missed a beat; it was amazing. I remember this unbelievable scene where Maren Jensen was down on the bottom and there was an attack coming, and she ran up the rear ramp to the middle portion of the set up to the top of the set, and Apollo was right up there and there was some kind of problem. I turned to Benny and said, “Did you get it?” He said, “Wasn’t I supposed to?”
RICHARD JAMES
We had so many stages tied up with standing sets that the studio kept saying to us, “You have to relinquish some of these stages, because we need them for other productions.” I don’t recall for sure, but we had seven to eight stages tied up at one time and as many as eight standing sets. By comparison, on Star Trek: The Next Generation we only had two stages tied up with permanent sets, and then I had one large stage for turnaround. Seven to eight stages is a lot of stages to have tied up for a TV show.
WINRICH KOLBE
Stage twenty-seven was always underwater when it rained.
ALAN J. LEVI
In fact, at that time Universal was so busy that we had to rent general-service studio space over on Las Palmas, because there were too many shows and we didn’t have enough stages.
DAVID LARSON
(son of Glen Larson)
Walking through the sets—I think that’s where I began my love affair with doughnuts. There was always the smell of doughnuts in the air. I still smell it. It was amazing. I think I was a little entitled brat walking around set. “Do you know who my daddy is? Do you know who my daddy is?” There’s a story, I kicked Vince Edwards, who was directing one of the episodes, because he wouldn’t let me see my dad. I don’t think he liked me very much after that. I don’t blame him.
DIRK BENEDICT
I remember talking to John Harker Wade, who was our unit production manager. He used to come to me and he’d just shake his head, because we built a set once where we played a game on the show called triad, which was a basketball-meets-handball kind of game that was a forty-thousand-dollar set which we used in one episode for two or three scenes.
WINRICH KOLBE
Battlestar Galactica was a warship, so everything was in the tradition of the American navy and was gray. Everything was gray inside, and since everything had to be shot on stages with a few exceptions when we went outside, it was an eerie atmosphere on set. At seven o’clock in the morning every day you entered another world, all gray and dark. After a while, I think it began to bear down on me, because I was ready to do something else after the pilot. I think I had done enough gray hallways as associate producer on the pilot that I decided, Okay, now I am going to go out and see the world and enjoy flowers.
STEVEN SIMAK
Another complex set piece was the life-size Viper. One full mock-up as well as a two-dimensional cutout profile were constructed. In addition, a partial cockpit was created for two-shots of the Vipers in space. The back wall of the launch bay set was adorned with a forced-perspective painting depicting a series of Vipers ready to launch.
TERRENCE MCDONNELL
They had another stage that they used at Universal where they had two Vipers and the launch bay. The Vipers were made of wood, but the one in the back was just a flat—it had no three dimensions to it at all. It was just guys sitting behind a piece of plywood.
If you pull in on Jimmy Stewart Avenue and go a little bit to the left and head toward where DreamWorks used to be on the Universal lot, there is a little café. Right next to it is this other stage, and that’s where they had the two Vipers. They put up a felt star field with little twinkly lights in it. The front one was all wood, and there was a place for the actors. The second one was a completely flat board. The one that was in the back, somebody just sat in a chair behind it.
On lunch hour, I wandered down there and they were shooting some Starbuck and Apollo scenes in the Vipers. There was nothing really to do, and there were these big huge velvet drapes that were hanging down as baffles, and out of curiosity I walked around behind these drapes and all of a sudden I just kind of stopped and it absolutely took my breath away, because I am standing onstage looking out at a magnificent opera house from Lon Chaney’s Phantom of the Opera, and the rumor was and still is that if that set falls, Universal Studios will fall, too. It was there and they used it for a number of pictures and used part of it for the remake with Claude Rains in the forties.
But, I’ve been told that within the last year they’ve moved it to somewhere else safe and that it’s going to be part of the studio tour.
RICHARD JAMES
We had a very difficult time with the way the fighter planes were designed. They were just letting model builders come up with them, and it became an issue with the union, because the designs are supposed to come from the art department, not from the model makers. When we tried to generate the drawing of the Vipers after the models had already been made and they were taking them from model kits and putting them together, we still had to build sets that people had to get into. You have to be concerned that a person can get in the set and work.
What we had to do with those Vipers was do a forced perspective against that nose, because the nose was so far out of proportion to the cockpit that if we had built it the way it was on the models, it wouldn’t have worked. If you started with the cockpit and increased the size of the cockpit to scale, then the nose became something like thirty-eight feet long from the cockpit windshield to the tip of the nose. It couldn’t have been done, so we did a forced scale on that. Even then it was still quite long [eight to ten feet].
It w
as just very time-consuming, and we had to have design engineers drafting those sets. I actually worked on the Apollo missions at NASA, so I had some background in design engineering, and it was a very complicated issue in some respects, with those models that had been generated without first coming to be designed in the art department. It was a very backward situation that was kind of out of hand and was one of many issues.
CHRISTIAN I. NYBY II
It was so hard shooting the Vipers. I had done rear projection and we used that occasionally for some of the cockpit stuff, but I don’t even think we used any blue or green screen. We didn’t have time. In fact, Lorne had such blue eyes that we could never shoot him in front of a blue screen.
HERBERT JEFFERSON, JR.
(actor, “Lieutenant Boomer”)
We were rarely in the life-size Viper. Most of it was a tiny mock-up cockpit with process screen going past us. We’d sit there basically just wearing our tops and the helmet because it was so hot inside.
ANNE LOCKHART
(actress, “Sheba”)
The first day that I did the cockpit stuff, I remember, they said we need to shoot some shots of you launching and said on action push yourself back into the seat like g-forces shooting out of the launch tube. So the first time I did it, I hurled up and pushed myself back into the seat and the helmet slips up and hits me in the nose. They printed it, and it was used repeatedly throughout.
DAVID LARSON
I remember my father would do pickup shots in the living room. He had a mock-up of the Viper. He had the canopy brought in and set it up on the pool table and he would have a crew come in and they would shoot some stuff. It was the full-size canopy. I was too young to understand what he was doing, but it was cool. To see the process like that made it this very magical thing. It has a mythical status to the people who watched it growing up, but it was the same thing for me. I was just a little bit closer to it, and I saw some of the behind-the-scenes stuff.
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