So Say We All

by Mark A. Altman

  JOHN DYKSTRA

  (visual effects supervisor/producer, Battlestar Galactica)

  The work that I did on that show, although I think it could have been better if I had organized it differently, was really hard on me. You have to remember, too, that at that time, because there weren’t many effects houses in town, there were some pretty tasty offers in the air. So it really came down to, as much as anything, a decision based on what I wanted to do rather than this was too hard to do. There was no real animosity. It was simply an issue of saying I don’t think I can keep doing this. Also, I won’t say I was young, but I was young. That was a new experience for me and I was learning and trying to do at the same time. It was a formidable task.

  After Dykstra left Galactica, special effects would be handled by the Universal Hartland effects facility under the supervision of Wayne Smith and David Garber. Unlike Apogee, Universal Hartland was a wholly owned subsidiary of Universal Studios. Hartland (named after the street where the facility was located, in North Hollywood) was initially created to design and produce the visual effects for a theatrical version of Buck Rogers—a project stalled in development at Universal. Eventually, Glen Larson became involved, and Buck Rogers in the 25th Century moved forward as both a feature and a television series for NBC. Special effects development for Buck Rogers progressed at Hartland simultaneously while Apogee was creating the visuals for the Galactica TV series. After Galactica moved to Hartland, the facility was doing the effects for both series.

  PETER ANDERSON

  (visual effects supervisor, Battlestar Galactica)

  We had actually started off at Douglas Trumbull’s Future General; we had taken over—David Garber, Wayne Smith, Richard Yuricich, myself, and a few other people. When it went down we sort of semi-dissolved, but kept going and building the computers, the technology, and the Draconia for Buck Rogers. The Draconia was about two years in building. Three weeks to shoot it at the end of two years. During the hiatus, we realized that we were going to have to create our own environment to carry this, and by that time Battlestar Galactica was fairly far along. We knew we would be picking that up as well as Buck Rogers, which was going to be a series. So we put together this incredible facility that Universal owned and operated but was off-site in North Hollywood. It was about a hundred and thirty people; some of the best technicians, the best-educated people, the best designers and electronics came together and, as you can see, we were allowed to have fun. We were allowed to deliver images that just had some magic to them. The editors would say we need a shot and we would put personality into it. We built our own star fields; we built everything. Everything was delivered in-house, including the designs.

  We had three different sections of models shops, full machine shops, full editorial, full processing, optical department, and a matte department. [Matte painter] Syd [Dutton] did the marvelous work on the feature, and on the series we set up our own [matte painting] shop. So it was a full-service facility, and the contract with the network was we had to deliver a finished print, same as a theatrical print. So what we saw here was the feature release, and every week we delivered two films [Battlestar Galactica and Buck Rogers] on print. Oftentimes it was thirty to forty different shots under motion control and a lot of animation effects, but we didn’t miss an episode and we didn’t miss a shot. So sleep was not an option, generally speaking, but what a great team, what a great facility, and what a great series of shows to work on.

  WAYNE SMITH

  (co–effects producer, Battlestar Galactica)

  What they asked us to do was almost impossible, because none of the equipment existed. We had to pull stuff from all over the place, and at the same time there was a grab for people in the industry because there was a lot of effects work right then. We didn’t know who was going to show up sometimes for work. The first six months was unbelievable when I think about it. We tried to set it up so we had a library of shots and we would add to those every week. So in optical we would put existing elements together with new elements for a story and we just set up an assembly-line kind of process.

  DAVID STIPES

  (special effects, Battlestar Galactica)

  We had ridiculously long hours, but it was delightful and really wonderful to work at. Peter Anderson was a bit of a jokester. He knew it was stressful, so he would at times bring food in, but if Peter ever walked out with his rain slickers on, you knew you were in trouble. He actually had a set of rain pants and overcoats, stuff like that, for rain and wet stuff, because … he loved to “pie” people—hit them with pies or food fights. Stuff like that. Basically it blew off a lot of tension, plus we all got a certain level of camaraderie that came of all that silliness. We finished a shot or got some accomplishment done and he’d bring in some food. Usually Peter also wound up throwing something. It was always an interesting time.

  PETER ANDERSON

  Our record was about two hundred and fifty separate passes for one shot [on Buck Rogers] but we were up to speed at that point and rather streamlined. We had fine-tuned our own blue screens and our own MOCO units so we were able to take the workload and run with it.

  Universal Hartland never missed an airdate on either show. However, with an average of four to six weeks to produce visuals for an episode, it became necessary to use stock elements to save time wherever possible. Generally, the Hartland team received a first draft of the script for an episode one to two weeks prior to the live action shoot. Meeting in the facility’s “war room,” they would plan their strategy for the upcoming show.

  TERRENCE MCDONNELL

  They were doing Buck Rogers at the time, too, so Hartland was doubly busy. They could do little things, but if you needed a big effect you probably weren’t going to get it and had to figure out another way to do it.

  PETER ANDERSON

  We would create a list of shots and oftentimes we would deal with the editors directly or indirectly to find out what they thought they really needed, because if they were going to cut something out it wasn’t worth putting that much energy into it. Or, if they felt they had a big hole [effects-wise] coming up we would go back and shoot new elements, pull a couple of shots out of library, recomp them, or figure out something else appropriate to create for them.

  The marvelous thing was that we had a season budget—we didn’t have a show-by-show budget—so we knew how much money we had to spend. Therefore we could balance out the staff and materials, the purchases, and the gear we needed as a global, and at the end of that season we had to stay within that budget. In a couple of cases we had go to NBC or ABC when we were going to do a couple of two-hour shows and we would have them kick in a little extra bit of change to make them special.

  Occasionally, we would sit up with the corporate people and do a little negotiation, but basically we knew by the end of the season that we would have spent our money properly, and how we did it was to deliver the best show possible. We had a strategy, we knew the shots, and we knew we had to have a couple of hero shots in each show. Each show was hand-approached, basically, and depending on how much lead time we had and how much magic that was in there, we would run with it.

  DAVID STIPES

  If all of the motion-control setups were tied up, I would wind up doing the shots stop-motion-animation-style or something. They were just amazed how I could do that without having motion control, because they were locked into that technology. Most of these were guys, even then, who were younger than me. They knew the motion-control technology, but didn’t know any of the other more eclectic obscure stuff and approaches to things. So I got the chance to work on a lot of really weird projects. like doing the little shots of things that nobody could figure out how to deal with.

  I saw the pilot for Battlestar Galactica that Dykstra had done. I thought it looked glorious and I thought, “Wow! Great stuff.” So I was really stoked and excited in being on the show. At the same time, I was a little bit intimidated and concerned, because I didn’t know how to do motion control. But
what was important, and actually the point I wanted to go to here, was that this was one of those liberating moments or pivotal experiences that a person has—where I finally got to realize what I knew. At that point I had already been working for almost ten years; even though I had the years of professional work plus I’d done all that effects experimenting in high school, I was thinking, “Well, I don’t know if I can measure up to these guys.” As it turned out, I knew a heck of a lot more than most of these guys. This is not a place of ego, but it was actually one of those moments where I realized, “Damn, I actually know more than I thought I knew.” It made me more confident to really jump in to get more projects. And I’d like to feel that I made a contribution and helped get some shots done that otherwise never would get done without my approach to some things. It was pretty neat.

  STEVEN SIMAK

  As a time- and cost-saving factor, as the series progressed it was also not uncommon for modelers to create new ships from existing models. For example, in the Battlestar episode “Greetings from Earth,” the Eastern Alliance cruiser was adapted from a minor member of the ragtag fleet. The pumpkin shuttle from the same episode (named for its orange color) was a re-dressed version of Buck’s shuttle from the theatrical version of Buck Rogers in the 25th Century.

  KEN LARSON

  (model maker, Battlestar Galactica)

  Usually we would go out into the cupboard and grab one of the ragtag fleet ships—things which we didn’t build; the stuff we inherited from Dykstra. These were all very crude, for the background. They were never featured, so they were all sitting there in the cupboard. Dave [Jones] would just go out there and say, “This one.” He’d go through the kit boxes and he’d pull out an F-16 engine or something like that and say, “Put this engine here and add some piping there and put a dome here,” and that’s how we would build the ship. The chassis was already there, and it had an armature in it.

  We would maybe spend two or three weeks on a model, and meanwhile someone else would spend two or three weeks on a model for a different show, so there was that leapfrogging. I would maybe finish the model on Tuesday and it would be painted. By the end of Thursday night, they would be shooting it. We would see dailies on Friday or Monday. It would be comped on Tuesday and I would see it on TV on Thursday. I am not exaggerating. More than once, I would see my model less than two weeks after I finished it. It was a very good learning experience for me.

  DAVID STIPES

  The shot count started going down. You start recycling stuff. There was one episode of Buck Rogers where they had to go from one place to another in the show. In one shot it’s Princess Ardala’s shuttle and in another shot in the same sequence it’s the Battlestar Galactica shuttle. I was just going like “Oh my God, guys!” and they said, “Don’t worry, nobody will notice.” Well, everybody noticed! It looked horrible. Then they have this ship going into this cave and you see its engines blazing as it goes in. Then there’s a shot of it coming out and they just printed it backward, so now it’s flying backward, with its engines blazing backward. They were so desperate for money that they would do crazy stuff like that, right toward the end. I was just rolling my eyes, “Oh my God!”

  Universal Hartland continued on after the cancellation of Battlestar Galactica and Buck Rogers in the 25th Century. The facility contributed effects work for such projects as Airport ’79, Cosmos, John Carpenter’s The Thing, and Disney’s 3-D Captain Eo before disbanding in 1984.

  WAYNE SMITH

  Everything has changed. What you see now on television is just incredible. We couldn’t even come close to it before. I don’t think it’s any faster and, probably, it isn’t any cheaper—but you can do it.

  One of the things I learned is, again, about not taking things personally. It’s not my show. I need to be responsible for the shots I do and do the best that I can for those shows. If the producers or the directors or somebody else wants to drop the ball and that’s out of my realm of control, well, that’s out of my realm of control.

  Also out of control were the series’ reviews. Even legendary science fiction author Isaac Asimov lambasted the new series. “Well, I liked Star Wars. I thought Battlestar Galactica was such a close imitation of Star Wars, emphasizing the less attractive portions, that I was a little impatient with it,” Asimov said at the time. While the comparisons to Star Wars were inevitable, matters took a dramatic turn when 20th Century Fox filed an injunction to prevent ABC from airing the three-hour Battlestar Galactica pilot. Claiming copyright infringement, Fox was subsequently joined by coplaintiff Lucasfilm Ltd., which charged that ABC and Universal had also infringed on the company’s copyright to the Star Wars novelization.

  SCOTT MANTZ

  The lawsuit was bad PR for Galactica. Lucas tried to stop it because there were too many similarities. Fighting spaceships, lasers, droids; he felt it was a rip-off of Star Wars. It kind of was, in terms of the tone of what they were looking for, but storywise, it was different. This lawsuit went on long after Galactica was canceled.

  In the suit, Fox charged that a comparison of the two franchises revealed at least thirty-four similarities, ranging from the overall visual design of the series to various plot points. The trial judge was presented with a copy of the Star Wars film and book, videotape of the Galactica premiere, and, for comparison, a video montage of prior science fiction works. Universal countersued, claiming Fox had infringed on its Silent Running property—with R2-D2 and C-3PO being reminiscent of the robots Huey, Dewey, and Louie—as well as on the Buck Rogers property the studio controlled.

  According to court records, Fox charged that, like the vehicles in Star Wars, the vehicles in Galactica “are made to look old contrary to the stereotypical sleek, new appearance of space-age equipment.” The suit alleged other similarities, including that “the central conflict of each story is a war between the galaxy’s democratic and totalitarian forces” and that “a leading character returns to the family home to find it destroyed.” Fox also argued that the Carillon gambling casino plagiarized the renowned Star Wars cantina sequence, stating that both featured “entertainment by bizarre, nonhuman creatures.”

  GLEN OLIVER

  I wasn’t necessarily surprised by the lawsuit, but I was disappointed by it. To my eyes, Galactica didn’t rip off Star Wars any more than Star Wars ripped off—or rather was “inspired by”—a substantial quantity of outside narratives and source material like Dune and Kurosawa. For Star Wars’ powers that be to take aim at Galactica wasn’t necessarily a shock given Battlestar’s proximity to the original Star Wars film, but it always felt like a bit of a crass double standard to me.

  JOHN DYKSTRA

  Personally, I didn’t think that there was something sacred that was being violated here. I felt that there was a technology that had opened up, an opportunity or genre for television that wasn’t available before.

  Ironically, Larson had attempted to avoid any problems over Star Wars initially by consulting with George Lucas and producer Gary Kurtz before production began on Galactica and made several changes as a result of those conversations in order to avoid a lawsuit.

  GLEN A. LARSON

  I was only surprised because I thought we had agreements with all the people involved by which we weren’t going to have any litigation. It was counterproductive given the fact that, even though they lost the lawsuit, the amount of time I took to devote to that was probably destructive to the series. It’s the same with the coroner from New York who sued us over Quincy because I guess he decided any coroner show has to be about him.

  SCOTT MANTZ

  Lucas had already said, “Well, if you’re going to have laser battles with guns, I don’t want you to see the laser being fired.” They had the flashing lights on the pistols instead. “Don’t call them droids, call them something else.” Larson called them drones. Then, there was word that the next Star Wars movie was going to be done on an ice planet. Well, Galactica beat them to the punch with “Ice Planet Zero.”

 
STEVEN E. DE SOUZA

  I was working with Glen Larson at that time on The Hardy Boys/Nancy Drew Mysteries and I was there the day that he was served the lawsuit from George Lucas. He was really in a panic and I go, “I can’t believe the nerve of this guy [Lucas].” Glen starts going through a list of what they’re saying in the lawsuit and I go, “Two suns [is an infringement]? Go look at the cover of Farmer in the Sky. The paperback cover of Farmer in the Sky.”

  Glen said, “What’s that?” I go, “The Robert Heinlein book.” He turns to an underling and says, “Go buy that book right now.” They were back in twenty minutes. He goes, “This is bullshit. What else do you know, Steve?” He starts grilling me about stuff and then he has a secretary come in and take notes and he calls Don Bellisario in and says, “Come and listen to this guy.” As I’m going through this, I said, “Listen, you don’t need me. I got a book in my desk, The Encyclopedia of Science Fiction. It has every sci-fi book cover going back to 1930.” As a result, they ended up re-cutting the premiere. They had creatures, they started cutting out the creatures. They were such pussies. I remember being in the editing room with Glen and he’d say, “Cut out that creature, it’s too Star Wars–y.” They ended up cutting some of the early episodes to ribbons, which was ridiculous because Fox had no case.

  GLEN A. LARSON

  It was a body blow that was like dropping a newborn on its head. It’s not real good for the child and you find yourself distracted and preoccupied and it sort of imposes a certain kind of censorship on yourself. Not even using the laser streak is kind of ridiculous when they had been used before in Star Trek and stuff like that. It made us look a little old-fashioned but we went along with it. That was really the least of our worries at that point, because the costs of the show were so enormous. The problem was we were on a network that was very spoiled. Had we been on the number-two or number-three network at that time we undoubtedly would have been on a lot longer.