So Say We All

by Mark A. Altman

  You shoot a master of some sort where you’re establishing where you are and who the characters are, and the position they are in and where they’re moving to first. It doesn’t have to be perfect all the way through, because you can fix that in coverage. Where you’d have problems is if you’re going to do one take, where it’s a long kind of walk-and-talk and you have two characters walking down a long corridor and the camera is in front of them. If a mic shadow pops in there, or if somebody blows a line, you have to go back to number one, because you don’t have anything to cut to. Unless you’re really hard up and try to cover it, but it’s hard when you have two people in a corridor they’re walking down. You can’t get too much closer to them or you’ll see just two heads walking.

  However, the biggest challenge for the fledgling series remained the punishing production schedule. With the rigors of filming a visual-effects-intensive series in the seventies, pre-CGI, and mounting a massive production with a large ensemble, it became more and more difficult to make the episode airdates, in some cases necessitating episodes being flipped in broadcast order and often overlapping shooting schedules among multiple episodes.

  DIRK BENEDICT

  It took us sixty-nine days to do the pilot, which was supposed to be done in twenty-nine. I remember, by the end of the first season, we were shooting two episodes simultaneously to try and make it. Richard and I would be in both episodes and we would go from soundstage to soundstage with two crews, two directors, two of everything. I’d say the last couple of months it went like that. It was very intensive twelve- or thirteen-hour days.

  HERBERT JEFFERSON, JR.

  (actor, “Lieutenant Boomer”)

  It was a lot of fun, a lot of work. We put in fourteen-, fifteen-hour days under the hot lights in hot uniforms and all kinds of physical discomfort here and there, but it paid off in the fun that we had.

  ANNE LOCKHART

  It was sixteen- to eighteen-hour days.

  HERBERT JEFFERSON, JR.

  Some episodes they were writing as we shot. We would get rewrites on the spot.

  LAURETTE SPANG

  I had been doing guest-star parts for a while, so I just wasn’t prepared for this sort of thing. I wasn’t unhappy, because it was just too exciting. It’s a very overpowering thing for someone in their twenties to be thrust into all of a sudden. Dirk was being chased by the National Enquirer and I gave him the keys to my house a couple of times when I was out of town so he could stay there and they’d leave him alone. There was just a lot of that. There were interviewers on the set a lot and there were fans, but beyond that the hours were long and there was night shooting and going overtime. I think it ended up being thirteen months of straight shooting.

  GLEN A. LARSON

  I used to have a reputation, which may or may not mean anything to the layperson, but you know at some point you have to turn over a film. We had very pressing airdates and difficult effects and I had a reputation for having heel marks all the way to the lab: “Give it back to us, we can still fix this, this, and this.” I’m still making notes on some of the things I would fix even now.

  VINCE EDWARDS

  (director, “The Living Legend”)

  Long hours but it was enjoyable. Everyone was into the space craze at that particular time and it was fun doing it. We had a lot of set visitors.

  ANNE LOCKHART

  Our shooting schedule was really loopy. I remember one night watching the show and what they showed as coming attractions for the following week were the dailies of what we’d shot on Friday, which literally made no sense. I had no social life. One night, I fell asleep on the phone with a guy I was dating.

  LORNE GREENE

  (actor, “Commander Adama”)

  We started up as a miniseries and all of a sudden it became a full-fledged series. We didn’t have enough lead time. We didn’t have four or five months to prepare for the series itself. It takes time. Sometimes you get one line in a script that says that the battlestar Galactica is on fire, and four days later that one line has been filmed.

  So each show has its own schedule. You can’t say a show is going to be done in seven days, because sometimes it’s done in ten days or twelve days.

  LAURETTE SPANG

  There was a period of time there in the middle of the season where I was really worn out and I had a week off and I went to Mexico myself. I had never been out of the country before. We were all doing a lot of talk shows like Mike Douglas and Merv Griffin and Dinah Shore and doing Hollywood Squares. It was terrific, but it all took its toll.

  ANNE LOCKHART

  I have also heard stories of the picture being delivered to the network in New York four minutes before airtime. We got rewrites two days after we’d shot a scene. We’d go, “We already shot this.”

  TERRY CARTER

  (actor, “Commander Tigh”)

  It was very difficult to develop the scenes as you might have if you had more time with things. I am from the old school. When I started working in television, it was live back in New York with Playhouse 90 and Kraft Theatre. We rehearsed for weeks before we shot, because it was live. Live TV meant you had to know what you were doing, so we would rehearse and you would develop your relationship and your character. You would have a chance to think about things, and that’s, of course, based on the whole theater tradition of rehearsal and development. Hollywood had a whole different way because they had a movie tradition and in movies they didn’t do a lot of rehearsal. In television they did even less. They would say, “Let’s do a rehearsal for camera,” and you would walk through and hit your marks and then we’d be ready to shoot. They do give direction, I don’t mean to imply otherwise, but if it looks good the director will just shoot it.

  CHRISTIAN I. NYBY II

  It was difficult, because we tried to achieve something that was only achieved in film. We were cranking out eight or nine pages a day. I really did enjoy it, though.

  PETER BERKOS

  (sound effects editor, Battlestar Galactica)

  We sometimes reached a point where executives from the Tower [Universal corporate] came down threatening to pull the plug on us Sundays because we were taking too long. Yet, we were not going to release anything that was not ready for the general public.

  STU PHILLIPS

  (composer, Battlestar Galactica)

  Before I even got on the scoring stage I was over budget. Even though they gave me thirty-eight or forty-two players, they still budgeted the thing like it was The Rockford Files. As far as they were concerned at Universal, it was still a one-hour dramatic show and every one-hour dramatic show gets the same budget, so none of the producers bitched. From the very beginning I was over budget. When I asked what I should do, they said do nothing—just continue being over budget. In three days there was no way I could write twenty-five minutes of music. It was the worst.

  Phillips’s solution to the rigid time constraints was to restructure cues that had been used in previous episodes so they would fit the new story in terms of length and dramatic intensity. Tracking, a practice no longer permitted by the musicians’ union, was another alternative, which involved using the actual music recordings from previous episodes to fill the series’ current needs.

  STU PHILLIPS

  The union went to a hundred percent no tracking a little at a time. When we did Galactica we were on ninety percent no tracking. However, even to this day when you have no tracking, if you petition the union for reasons beyond your control that you have to track, they can give you permission. Exciting and next to impossible but it got done. Somehow all these things and all these deadlines get done eventually. You suffer. You don’t sleep a lot but you get it done and if you are lucky it comes out reasonably well.

  STEVEN SIMAK

  (journalist, Battlestar Galactica historian)

  The music for the pilot was recorded in five days, with some additional work done after revisions were made to the final edit.

  Art director Richard James f
aced similar budget and time problems. Although a substantial amount of money was allocated for the construction of the standing sets on the premiere, once Galactica went to series, the art director saw his budget for new sets drop to an anemic $17,000 per one-hour episode.

  RICHARD JAMES

  (art director, Battlestar Galactica)

  Here I was spending a hundred thousand dollars on sets and suddenly when we went to series, my budget was seventeen thousand dollars per episode. You can’t do that show on that kind of money.

  GLEN A. LARSON

  Television is restrictive and when you’re on fairly early Sunday night it can be even more restrictive and it takes a lot of pressure on your creative juices, but probably the most inhibiting of all of them was just simply time.

  Maintaining the Cylons as a credible threat also became problematic, owing in large part to the relationship the series had with ABC Standards and Practices. Utilizing a point system, Standards and Practices would review each episode to ensure it was not overtly violent for network broadcast. Although an action show, because of its 8 P.M. Sunday nighttime slot Galactica was also considered to be family viewing. As such, the series was allowed only six acts of violence per episode. Because the Cylons were depicted as essentially alien robots, there was no limitation on how many of them could be destroyed in an episode.

  DONALD BELLISARIO

  (supervising producer, Battlestar Galactica)

  The problem with that is that all you could do was kill machines and show no consequence of it. The machines couldn’t kill anybody back. It soon became a bit ludicrous to the watching public, who did like the show, but your hero was never in any jeopardy. No one was ever in any kind of jeopardy in this trek through space to find Earth, and I think that was very detrimental to the show.

  STEVEN E. DE SOUZA

  (story editor, The Hardy Boys/Nancy Drew Mysteries)

  The network tortured them on violence. The shows had not aired yet. They were filming the third episode and some junior underling at the network was in the room and they had this long memo from the censor. “You can’t do this?” she asks. “I don’t understand why they’re giving you such a hard time about killing the Cylons. Aren’t they just robots?” Somebody started to say, “No they’re rep…” Then Larson kicked that person hard under the table. As we all left and got into the car, Glen said, “The Cylons are robots from now on!” They had been lizard people, but now they were robots.

  Somebody said, “We already showed the leaders.” He goes, “The leaders are lizards but the Cylons are robots.” They had already filmed a scene in the snowram for “Gun on Ice Planet Zero,” where they go to a planet of clones and they’re all wearing OshKosh B’gosh overalls where Boxey says, “Why do the Cylons hate us?” Apollo says, “They’re cold-blooded creatures. They have a natural enmity toward mammals.” It was a whole biological thing. They reshot that entire scene to explain they’re mechanical life forms instead because they were getting so many notes about killing them.

  Censors are horrible. I had one guy that had the misfortune of constantly being my guy at ABC. I was always good. I would say, “What about this? I don’t want to spin my guys’ wheels here, so on next week’s episode I took your note about guns seriously so we’re only going to kill one bad guy, we’re going to crush him under a collapsing house. Another guy we’re going to have cut in half by a steel cable. We’re also going to have somebody fall into a commercial oven.”

  He says, “Are you out of your fucking mind? It’s a 7:00 show.” I said, “A-ha! I just described The Wizard of Oz, Captains Courageous, and Hansel and Gretel.” Anyway, I battled with this guy on The Hardy Boys and then it was The Spirit and then I had him again when we did the television series of Foul Play.

  GLEN A. LARSON

  You’ll have the network pushing you to do certain things, but a prototype for me on this was The Fugitive. A lot of the guys at the network weren’t familiar with that show, but I was, because I was weaned on it as a kid. Lieutenant Gerard, as opposed to being a constant threat unlike in the movie, didn’t show up very often. You talked about him a lot and he shows up maybe every third episode for a quick pop and that was a good idea. When you’re running, there’s a threat, but very much like The Fugitive you’ve got these fugitive people running through space and are constantly under pressure and afraid of people who will betray them. So if you combine The Fugitive with space and Wagon Train, you’re exploring some fairly successful shows.

  TERRENCE MCCDONNELL

  Part of the problem initially was the Cylons looked so cool and their ships were great and at least in the first episode they were actually a threat; but when you got into eight o’clock on Sunday night they were no longer a threat. They couldn’t kill anybody. So it became a joke and I think at least to some degree that’s why they started shifting the focus of stories to what other kind of villains can we have. That’s why you got the neo-Nazi thing [“Greetings from Earth”] and Count Iblis [“War of the Gods”].

  GLEN A. LARSON

  What was great was Galactica sets out to find Earth but we have no way of knowing if this is a thousand years in the past or a thousand years in the future because there is no clock. They could have advanced a lot faster than us or a lot slower. Earth could have been a futuristic world when we got there, so what I was trying to avoid in the first season was nailing certain things down just to keep our options open. You could have discovered Earth and found a planet filled with prehistoric monsters or come back in the distant future. That might have been better than what ultimately became Galactica 1980.

  There’s a point where you can’t bring in writers to do too much. That just bulges out and pushes out the parameters of the series until you have gotten your feet on the ground, especially when you have the network hammering you every day for different things. We actually had a lady come in from the network who was a coke addict. I didn’t know at the time, but she would have these hyper ideas where she suddenly comes racing in and have this brainstorm. You’d look at her and say, “Gee, that’s a great idea.” Her idea was—and this was in the third week of the show—“Let’s have the Galactica discover Earth.” It’s like let’s have them catch the Fugitive or let’s find the One-Armed Man in the third episode. I don’t know how she got her job, but she certainly didn’t have a great sense of theater.

  The scope of the series, like the telefilm, remained unlike anything previously attempted for episodic television. Costume designer Jean-Pierre Dorleac estimates that once the show went to series, his team was producing close to 125 costumes every seven to eight days. Also, some thirty Cylon costumes, at $3,500 a piece, were also created, and, in many cases, destroyed.

  JEAN-PIERRE DORLEAC

  (costume designer, Battlestar Galactica)

  Galactica was quite an undertaking. There was a lot of money spent. All of the various pieces on the show were made to order. All the boots, all the holsters and all the guns, everything that was in the costumes was all made. We only had eight days to do the episodes. During that time, we were supposed to be preparing for the next show, but inevitably, because the scripts weren’t available, we would end up using probably five of those days actually doing the show we were working on, and then three days prepping the next show, and then five days on the next show finishing it off. We were constantly overlapping on shows, and after a while they all ran one into the other. But I have always been proud of the fact that no production has ever had to wait for my costumes. Sometimes we did not get the scripts until two or three days before the shoot, but the costumes, no matter what they were, were always there.

  ROD HOLCOMB

  I was just so blown away by all the creativity that was on that set.

  Leaving the show was an aggrieved John Dykstra, upset over Universal’s sudden decision to release “Saga of a Star World” theatrically, when he had only designed the visual effects for the smaller television screen (the telefilm played in theaters in Canada and Europe prior to its
U.S. TV premiere in 1979 and was later released in America, in 1979, after having already played on television). Dykstra and his team had never designed the shots for the big screen and was unhappy with how the visual effects translated onto film screens. In addition, he was also anxious to realize the many post-Star Wars opportunities that existed in feature films for him, ankling Galactica, and soon found himself in an even more chaotic situation, taking over visual effects on the troubled Star Trek: The Motion Picture from Robert Abel & Associates, along with visual effects legend Doug Trumbull. As a result, the newly formed Universal Hartland took over production of Galactica’s extensive weekly visual effects work.

  STEVEN SIMAK

  Dykstra’s company, Apogee, was only contracted to create effects for the pilot and the two-hour episodes “Lost Planet of the Gods” and “Gun on Ice Planet Zero.” After these were completed, many on the crew elected to return to ILM, newly relocated to Northern California, to work on The Empire Strikes Back. After Galactica, Apogee continued as a separate entity and created the effects for new projects including Star Trek: The Motion Picture.

  RICHARD EDLUND

  (special effects photography, Battlestar Galactica)

  The funny thing about the show was there was no George [Lucas] there. There were different directors on the three [episodes] and they didn’t really know how to deal with effects. It was kind of interesting for us who were doing it because I think a lot of us felt on Star Wars that we could have done more far-out shots, but George wanted very specific stuff, so we shot exactly what he wanted. On Galactica, we had kind of free rein to develop our own shots, so I think a lot of the shots in Galactica, dynamically and so on, are superior to Star Wars. Partially, it’s because we had already learned to use the equipment and we had our chops together when we did Galactica. So the shots are better, but how they worked in the show, I don’t think they are as good as how George put Star Wars together.