My first shot, it was all set up to go. The camera was running. I was so enamored by the camera and with the noise of the film I never called action. Somebody behind me yelled, “Action,” and I turned around, then I went back, and a Jeep drove by. It was a simple Jeep drive-by we were shooting. I said, “Gee, that was pretty good.” Then, somebody called, “Cut. Print that, and we’re moving on.” It was Lee Majors with the crew, laughing their asses off. I forgot to say cut. I reminded him of this when he called me to congratulate me on the Emmy, a long time ago. I reminded him of the story. He says, “Well, I guess you learned something since then, huh?” Always a ballbuster. That was back when you were doing twelve pages a day on a six-day show. I watched it recently, it was terrible.
I was on a producer’s contract with Universal, after Six Million Dollar Man went down, when I got a call to do Galactica. There was a big learning curve for a director on that show. The big thing was that I always wanted to get wider on the cockpits of the Vipers. I wanted to get back to where I could see the wings, but that seemed to be a little bit out of their ability to do, because it was costly. I felt we were always tight and doing close-ups. I was glad that I had “Lost Warrior” as my first episode, because it was actually kind of a real heroic moment for Richard Hatch.
I’m not so certain I saw him as the lead, as much as an ensemble with Dirk and everybody else. But I thought this was a very good opportunity for Richard to do some kind of good stuff. I liked the actress a lot, I let the kid get a little bit broad, because I hadn’t been used to working with kids very much, but it seemed to work, for the audience. I loved some of the actors. There were a couple of the actors, they got a little big.
CLAUDE EARL JONES
(actor, “Lacerta”)
I had done a show with Rod Holcomb before, and so, apparently, when this role came up on Battlestar Galactica, he sent for me. He had the casting director call my agent and said, “I want to see Claude on this.” So I went in and read for it, and Rod told the producers, “I want you to experience Claude. He’s quite a special actor.” I’m not an ordinary actor. I’m different, and I’m unique, and I don’t play the same thing twice. I’m a true character man in the sense that I play what’s written, not what they don’t write for me. I adapt myself to the script. At least, that’s what I assumed he meant. The point is that I had played a very strange thing for him, off-the-wall kind of role, and Lacerta was certainly off the wall.
ROD HOLCOMB
That was my Sydney Greenstreet character. That went too far, and how they even hired me back after that is beyond me. But it was such a great learning experience to be able to have all these great toys. I remember walking in with my first agent and he said, “Jesus, Rod, they’re really putting some money into this, aren’t they?”
CLAUDE EARL JONES
Rod is a very fine director, and he’s one of those smart directors who hires good actors and gets the hell out of their way. That’s one of the reasons why I liked to work with him. He entrusted me to do my job and he didn’t really direct me so much as he just points me in a way. The episode was a kind of takeoff on Shane. I played him, at least I tried to play him, with a great deal of humor, but I didn’t set out to make him funny either. He was a very lethal man, and one of the things that I found in playing heavies and playing bad guys, and I played a lot of them, is that the ones that I find most frightening are the ones that are very quiet, who don’t rage and scream and yell and all of that. Some of the most lethal real people that I’ve known in Hollywood are Medal of Honor winners like Audie Murphy. The quiet, soft-spoken people don’t have to prove they are tough. They don’t have to prove they are rough and mean and that they can kill you. They know they can.
GLEN OLIVER
The greatest challenge facing the original series was that it was too often a hodgepodge. Whether that was because of time or talent or both, my sense of the matter is that writers were struggling to balance and refine the flavor of the show.
By “flavor” I mean: Galactica sported a distinctive vibe, a “flavor” if you will. There was an aesthetic, an atmosphere, a cadence of dialogue and tone which defined the series very succinctly from its earliest moments. This “vibe” was one ingredient in its “flavor.” But they often added other ingredients. For example, many episodes then proceeded to intermix this preset “Galactica vibe” with clichés and conventions from other genres: bedroom comedies, pseudo-fantasies with unicorns, World War II “squad on a mission” tales, lost-pilot gags, Westerns, the building-on-fire saga, even a murder mystery centered around sports. This, in itself, wasn’t necessarily an ill-considered approach—many movies and TV shows have utilized similar “genre potpourri” philosophies. And I’m sure the thinking at the time was that exploring the potential of so many genres would broaden the breadth of story ideas which Galactica could consider telling, which is a reasonable and fundamentally correct assertion.
But where Galactica went wrong, in this regard, was that writers chose to exploit some of the most trite moves from the genres they were incorporating—instead of mining less literal elements, or tweaking literal elements and having fun with them. Instead of using genres as inspiration to steer in unique and unpredictable directions like in the original Star Trek, they often choose the path of least resistance. This approach often did not create a fresh-feeling mash-up which people would be excited to see, but instead delivered something that people would expect to see. Something which felt more familiar than it probably should’ve and more stale. This resulted in something of an identity crisis for the show.
After Apollo was stranded on an alien planet in “The Lost Warrior,” Starbuck found himself marooned on his own as well in “The Long Patrol,” in which the hotshot pilot tests out a new long-range Viper to escape the date from hell with Cassiopeia and Athena. Outfitted with extra thrusters and a flirtatious computer named C.O.R.A., the recon Viper is twice as fast as a normal fighter but is unarmed. Outwitted by a criminal, Starbuck is captured and trapped on a penal colony where the inmates are imprisoned for the crimes of their ancestors.
CHRISTIAN I. NYBY II
(director, “The Long Patrol”)
I liked the story on that one a lot. It was an interesting concept, that these people were generations of prisoners and there were generations of guards.
SCOTT MANTZ
I loved the flirty banter between Starbuck and C.O.R.A. Not a great episode, but the beginning of that episode is fun, because it deepens the dynamic of the character of Starbuck.
CHRISTIAN I. NYBY II
Jimmy Whitmore, Jr., who played Robber in “The Long Patrol,” and I were up on the backlot at Universal. He was in the cockpit of a Viper and I was on the big Titan crane. It was a night shoot. I was just lining up the shot and we were rehearsing. I was just having the grips moving the crane in for a close-up or something of him and he just kind of looked at me—since we were kind of rehearsing it—and he said, “Isn’t this great, Chris? It’s like we’re twelve years old and we were given all of these great toys,” which was true. The patient is not going to die and nobody is going to lose the lawsuit or anything and it was a lot of fun.
“Gun on Ice Planet Zero” was directed by returning helmer Alan J. Levi and was the final two hours of what had originally been conceived as a series of TV movies. “Gun” had the most torturous development of all of them, going through many extensive rewrites and iterations before it was finally broadcast. In the episode, the Galactica recruits a band of convicts and infiltrates an ice planet to destroy a Cylon superweapon created by a human inventor, Dr. Ravashol (Dan O’Herlihy), in order to continue their journey through space and avoid annihilation.
ALAN J. LEVI
(director,”Gun on Ice Planet Zero”)
It was the original Rogue One. The focus was on destroying the giant superweapon that had to be stopped before it could destroy us.
SCOTT MANTZ
“Gun on Ice Planet Zero” is basically Ice Station Zebra i
n space. Great setup; they had to recruit these murderers and cutthroats and go down to this ice planet to destroy the Ravashol pulsar, with the help of Ravashol’s clones. You get into some provocative stuff about what it means to be human, because the clones are greedy. It is an exciting episode. I’ve heard people say that they don’t really like that episode, or it’s too much of a rip-off of The Dirty Dozen, but you know what? It worked.
The conflict between the warriors and the prisoners was great, and you have one convict who used to be a Colonial Warrior who’s trying to regain his lost honor.
The fleet can’t turn back because they’re being tailed by a Cylon basestar, they have to move forward. The only way to move forward is if they go past the pulsar. If they go past the pulsar, they’re never going to make it, which is why they have to send these people down to destroy it.
MICHAEL SLOAN
(producer, Battlestar Galactica)
We did talk about Guns of Navarone and that’s how the genesis of that came about. You don’t so much rip them off as say, let’s take that idea and give it the spin of this particular show.
ALAN J. LEVI
I had a different crew on the second movie. Benny [Colman] had left and I brought in Enzo Martinelli, who I learned more from than any other DP I’ve worked with. Enzo was just fabulous. I worked with him on The Invisible Man and then The Gemini Man. We were really good buddies. Enzo started making movies before the laboratories and before sound. He really knew how to make a movie, and fast, and just marvelous.
HERBERT JEFFERSON, JR.
It was all done on a set. We were all in the big quilted winter gear that we were wearing for that show when in reality we were on a soundstage with huge klieg lights, so every fifteen to twenty seconds someone would have to come over to mop our brows so we didn’t look like we were sweating in the middle of an ice storm. We had to act cold.
ALAN J. LEVI
We were halfway done with the day and we had lost three hours due to makeup runs. I called upstairs and I said, “Guys, I’ve got my crew and cast in parkas and snow gear and I can shoot for maybe five minutes before everybody is drenching wet. I’ve got to get another air conditioner on set, we’ve got to bring the set down to forty degrees.” They said, “You’re not going to need it. You’re at sixty-five degrees now with this one.”
I’m shooting on set and sure enough we have to dab every ten minutes. I called the front office and I said, “Please come down here as soon as you can, I’ve got a big problem and I don’t want it to go any farther and you can help me.” They came down to set, walked on set, and saw everyone was just dripping wet. The next morning we had two big air conditioners, which got it down to forty degrees and we could shoot. We were on that set for days and days because of all the snow.
HERBERT JEFFERSON, JR.
They had these big bins that were made with wooden cylinders that had chicken wire wrapped all around it and inside they had this chipped-up white plastic, and what they did is they’d turn these bins around so that it snowed. This stuff is plastic, we’re trying to act and we’re breathing in all this plastic stuff. But, of course, the director and the crew were wearing masks while we’re inhaling all this.
RICHARD JAMES
For the pulsar, I wanted these big cylinders going up and down and they had to rig those. They were massive. They were framed and actually lightweight and faceted, they just weren’t built on curves. I had that narrow split-lighted area in them. There was a big fight going on over that, because I had gotten this set, which is the one where I said it’s not finished and you have to give me the money to finish it. I probably came very close to getting fired over it.
For “The Magnificent Warriors,” after a Cylon attack destroys two Colonial agroships and damages a third (utilizing the miniature and some stock footage from Universal’s Silent Running), Adama leads a team down to a nearby planet in search of new seed for crops. Once there, the Colonials come to the aid of the local inhabitants, who are being terrorized by the piglike Borays after Starbuck is made sheriff. A would-be comedy, with some truly cringe-worthy moments, it’s the first of the one-hour episodes in which the production values really suffer despite an amusing coda in which Starbuck negotiates a deal with the Borays after Adama fails to come to terms.
SCOTT MANTZ
One of the worst episodes, with Brett Somers guest-starring. It is terrible. It’s sort of like slapsticky kind of romance between Lorne Greene and Brett Somers. At another point, it’s exactly like the Old West. It’s like, “Really?” It felt very rushed.
Shooting this episode proved to be a difficult prospect for director Christian I. Nyby II. One key sequence required that the Borays, mounted on camels, ride dramatically into town. Short on camels, the producers added horses galloping toward the back to add greater size to the charge. Cowboys, wearing pig masks portraying Borays, were hired to ride the animals.
CHRISTIAN I. NYBY II
These cowboys hated these camels. I remember we were having trouble getting them to charge, because the horses were balking at the back. They didn’t like the smell of the camels. We did this charge down across the bridge. We had done it a couple of times and we finally got a good take but I had to do it again because one of the cowboys lost his pig mask as he came by. We all saw the mask go off, but he was trying so hard to be a good trooper about it that he had his face all scrunched up like a pig because he didn’t want to do it again. The lead Boray was actually a publicity agent that used to walk around the studio all the time. He just sort of had the look. He was an actor, too, and was always looking for a part, so we brought him in and had a mask made for him. We had two or three masks that we could have in the foreground and then we had others of cheaper quality in the background.
In “The Young Lords,” after a battle with enemy fighters, Starbuck is forced to crash-land (again!) on a planet under Cylon control and commanded by the cunning Cylon robot Specter, an acerbic and quick-thinking member of Lucifer’s IL-series. Starbuck encounters a group of child warriors who have been attacking the Cylon battalion that abducted their father. He leads the children on a raid to rescue their father and destroy the Cylon garrison there. Unfortunately, the production destroyed numerous Cylon costumes as well when they were marched through the swamp and the water seeped into the armor, damaging them beyond repair.
DIRK BENEDICT
(actor, “Lieutenant Starbuck”)
Don Bellisario was directing and we were shooting at night on the backlot, which, of course, is where we always were, since we never left Universal. We were in this fortress and the Cylons were up on the upper level of the fortress and we were in the middle and there was kind of a shoot-out. There were eight or nine of them in a long line marching and coming down the wall of the fortress and then down the steps, and twenty feet up, the first guy stumbled and of course the second and it was dominoes. You had twenty Cylons go down these steps, and when you’re watching it it was terrifying and yet it was unbelievable—it was like a bowling alley.
HERBERT JEFFERSON, JR.
In those outfits you could only see through a little slit, and it was angled so you could only see about two or three feet in front of you, so you had to keep your head up and angled and watch where you were going, because you couldn’t see straight ahead. So we had a whole phalanx of Cylons just piled all lying on the ground with their scanners looking up in the air with little red dots going.
DIRK BENEDICT
Nobody got hurt, so we laughed a long time about that.
ALAN J. LEVI
I do remember that they had to set up a repair set somewhere because we had a lot of pyrotechnics on the Cylons and we would burn a lot of them. They were getting expensive as hell to make, and there were a lot of them. I remember we had to be very careful about putting on the pyrotechnics for a while because we were destroying suits left and right. In the second half of the pilot we must have destroyed forty of those suits.
ROB KLEIN
(Battles
tar Galactica archivist)
They were filming out at Fox Ranch in Malibu and they had the life-size Viper in the marsh from Ape City [from Planet of the Apes] and it got stuck, so they were cutting up Ape City to put underneath the crane to get the Viper loose.
With production continuing to fall further behind and budget overages mounting, Donald Bellisario, on the recommendation of ABC, approached writers Jim Carlson and Terrence McDonnell as potential story editors. No strangers to series television, the writing team had contributed scripts to such hits as The Six Million Dollar Man and The Bionic Woman.
TERRENCE MCDONNELL
(story editor, Battlestar Galactica)
I got into game shows early on, and one of the guys that I was working with at Jack Berry Productions’ name was Ken Johnson, and Ken was doing Juvenile Jury or something like that, and he had also written a few episodes of The Six Million Dollar Man. He comes in this one day and he says very excitedly, “I think they’re going to offer me producer of the show.” I didn’t even wait for him to finish the sentence when I said, “If you get that job can I come in and pitch?”
I called a friend of mine that I knew, Jim Carlson, and said, “Do you want to team up and go in and try and do this?” I had never done it before, but he had. He was from Laugh-In and had done Emergency, Adam-12, The Jeffersons, and stuff like that. We just clicked from the get-go, so that’s how it all started. They started handing us scripts and all of a sudden we were a team.
On Six Million Dollar Man, the first episode we did was a trial by fire. I thought it was going to always be like this. They wanted to shoot it up at Mount Shasta in the snow, so we wrote the script and then we turned it in. It was a good script and they said, “Oh, great, but we can’t go there. So, don’t do it in the snow now.” This was a page-one rewrite. The second one we did for them we wrote in the mountains somewhere, but it was local. The next one we wrote was about a Japanese Zero that shoots down an experimental aircraft and we discover the bad guys have a hologram they are using to bring planes down. They want to bring down Air Force One with the president on board. The network came to us and said, “We can’t do this. We don’t want kids duplicating this.” I said, “Really? They’re going to build a hologram to bring down Air Force One?” They were worried about replication. It was total insanity. The other thing was they wanted to change Steve Austin’s friend with whom he is flying the plane to Farrah Fawcett. So, it’s another page-one rewrite, because the whole relationship changes. I thought it was always going to be like that and it wasn’t. It seemed like every time we did a script, it was a page-one rewrite.
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