So Say We All

by Mark A. Altman

  Because of our background on Six Million Dollar Man and Bionic Woman, we also did a series called Gemini Man with Ben Murphy. People liked our work, and apparently there had been some conversation at ABC about getting somebody in to help them at Galactica. Don Bellisario and Glen were writing the scripts and they couldn’t do it because they needed a third wheel to keep the machine churning, so the guy that was in charge of prime time, my ex-girlfriend was his secretary and she recommended us. We got called in out of the blue to meet with Don. And he says, “We’d like you to go home and figure out ‘Patton in space.’” I said, “Okay.” He said, “Bring me act one in the morning.” We said, “Okay.” We just thought we were getting an assignment. So we beat out the outline and we wrote the first act and the next morning we turn in act one. And Don says, “What’s this?” And we say, “That’s act one,” and he says, “Already?” So he looked at it and he says, “Go home and write act two.” So, we went home and we beat out and finished act two and we brought it in the next morning. He says, “Okay, let me read this and I’ll get back to you.” I remember going out to Jim’s house that night because we hadn’t heard from him and we figured we better start on act three just in case he forgets.

  So, I pulled in the driveway to Jim’s house and I knocked on the door and came in and he handed me a glass of wine. And I said, “What’s this for?” He says, “Welcome, Story Editor!” I said, “Are you kidding me?” We were ecstatic. The story editor job today would be the equivalent of producer of some type.

  We got hired based on the first two acts. So did Annie Lockhart [Sheba], because they used that half of the script to entice her to be on the show. She read it and accepted it. That particular script, by the way, was taken away from us. We called it “The Last Legend” [later renamed “The Living Legend”]. In the script, we called him Jedediah, but Glen always used to use the Bible, so he called him Commander Cain. Glen decided he wanted to do a two-parter based on this idea, so our two acts were thrown out. Instead we went on to “Fire in Space.”

  GLEN A. LARSON

  “The Living Legend” was probably one of the purer shows in terms of the two-hour epic with some of the feel of the pilot. Patton was blood and guts and Cain was really our Patton in space. Cain was driven by his own ego and point of view. Everything was simple for him, you know, you kick ass. There are deliberate parallels there again, because a show like Galactica really gives you a chance to explore the basic conflicts and predicaments we experience in our world, even though we’re looking at it through a mirror world.

  TERRENCE MCDONNELL

  This was my introduction to Glen the first day we’re there. We have parking spots on the lot where the Jurassic Park ride is now. We’d walk past Alfred Hitchcock arriving in the morning and [legendary costume designer] Edith Head being dropped off. So we get there and they don’t have offices for us yet. So we’re put in the basement of the commissary. Don [Bellisario] took us down to the set where they were shooting the Boray episode. Barry Nelson, the first guy who played James Bond [in the CBS TV version of Casino Royale], was in it and this was all very exciting. Now Glen wants to take us to lunch. We said, “Oh my God, we’re living the dream!” So we go up to Glen’s office and it’s during the World Series. We get on the elevator to go down into the garage and we get into his limo. Does it get better than this? I wonder who we’re going to see next. He’s got his own driver. We pull out of the producers’ building down to the guard gate to Lankershim Boulevard and across the street into the restaurant. He had to show off that he had a limo. We couldn’t just walk across the street. And the whole time we’re in the limo he’s watching the World Series on a little TV, which he then takes into the restaurant.

  SCOTT MANTZ

  Of the two-part episodes, there were two that stand out as among the very best. The first one is “The Living Legend,” with Lloyd Bridges as Commander Cain. He was a guy who was a World War II vet, Mike Nelson from Sea Hunt, one of the early choices to be Captain Kirk. He didn’t want to do sci-fi, go figure.

  I loved the beginning of the episode. Starbuck and Apollo are being chased by two Vipers. They’re Vipers, but they’re firing on Starbuck and Apollo. We hear from the Pegasus, and Starbuck goes, “Wow, that really is the Pegasus,” but it’s supposed to be like a great moment of relief. Not only did we find more human survivors, they’re on a battlestar, we just doubled our power and increased our chances to survive. This should be a piece of cake from here on in until we get to Earth.

  There’s just one small problem. There is a massive power struggle going on, because of the very different commanding styles of Adama and Cain. Adama just wants to escape. Cain wants to attack. Right there, you’ve got a big problem. It got to the point where Adama had to relieve Cain of his command.

  VINCE EDWARDS

  (director, “The Living Legend”)

  It worked very well for Lloyd, it was right up his alley. I don’t mean it arrogantly, but he plays a forceful figure well. Lorne is forceful and the script was well written. There was no problem of equating the two. It was a much better picture if you have two forceful characters instead of one totally dominating. It makes for interesting conflict.

  JIM CARLSON

  (story editor, Battlestar Galactica)

  Adama was cautious but rightfully so, as opposed to Lloyd Bridges’s character, Cain, who was a bull in a china shop. Not that there was anything particularly wrong with that, except that in this case you could get people killed.

  LAURETTE SPANG

  (actress, “Cassiopeia”)

  Early on I felt that I just wasn’t getting anything to do, so I went into Glen’s office and asked to be given the chance. A week later he wrote the two-part Lloyd Bridges episode. He was terrific that way. He listened and was reasonable. He was a nice guy.

  SCOTT MANTZ

  One big addition to Galactica that came out of “The Living Legend” was Anne Lockhart as Sheba. Laurette Spang, she was great as our favorite socialator turned nurse. Maren Jensen, I thought she was a knockout, but she really didn’t have much to do. Now, Sheba was a great character. She was one of the boys, and she was also very feminine, vulnerable. She was terrific. Anne Lockhart just nailed her performance as Sheba.

  TERRENCE MCDONNELL

  For me she was a utilitarian character who was a member of the fighting-forces group. A woman who obviously would have intuition that would enable her to possibly look at things differently. She would throw out the other possibility. It couldn’t always be Starbuck and Apollo. Hers was another point of view we could get across and keep that antagonism alive. She respected Apollo. There was absolutely no question about that. But she was her own woman.

  ANNE LOCKHART

  (actress, “Sheba”)

  I loved this character. I liked that she had great gumption and she was very good at what she did. She was a warrior equal to the men. In fact, I loved that gender was not made an issue of at all. I also very much liked her vulnerability and her awkwardness with personal situations. She never wavered from her convictions or her intelligence as a warrior and as a military character, but she was very awkward emotionally. I really loved that dichotomy of a young woman who is so in control and on top of her game in the military aspects of her life and just as clumsy but trying desperately to cover it and be cool.

  TERRENCE MCDONNELL

  I think it was the first time we ever saw a woman in combat in terms of science fiction. Personally, I love strong women, so it was fun to write her character where she gives as good as she gets. She is one of the boys and she was probably raised with brothers. So she doesn’t back down from anyone. Besides that, she was Cain’s daughter, for crying out loud, with that charismatic personality, so all of that has to be a big part of who she is. I loved getting my teeth around that character.

  SCOTT MANTZ

  That great scene on the bridge of the Galactica, where Cain says, “You were right, I was wrong.” At that moment, they were working together. Their str
engths worked in their favor. Cain pulled out the Pegasus, Baltar and the Cylon fleet attacked the Colonials, and Baltar was wearing this ridiculous Cylon helmet. It was so stupid, but it was funny. The Cylon says, “Sir, if I may,” and he goes, “Not right now, I don’t want to miss another moment of the last battlestar’s destruction.” And the Cylon goes, “I really think you should take a look at the other battlestar.” “What are you talking about? That’s impossible,” and then he panics as it approaches: “Turn, turn you fool, it’s coming straight at us.…”

  To Be Continued. That’s how you do a cliffhanger. It’s a lot of good conflict in this two-part series, and then Cain attacks two Cylon basestars that explode, but what happened to the Pegasus? You don’t really know. The door was left open for Cain to return.

  GLEN A. LARSON

  We would have brought Lloyd Bridges back. I deliberately obscured what happened in that battle so it wasn’t definitive that we had killed them off. I figured that Cain was too good. It also gave you a chance to go off and do episodes with just him and his group.

  LAURETTE SPANG

  It was fun. We had one scene where Anne Lockhart and I had on these black leather suits and they strapped us to some contraption to make it look like we were coming down by parachute—we were on a crane at night. It was very exciting and you revert to being eight years old running across your backyard with a laser gun. I had done a lot of TV in the years before but I really think that was a highlight. It was just great fun.

  ANNE LOCKHART

  We were so excited. We shot that at Cal State Northridge. Laurette and I went go-karting that morning. We weren’t in a soundstage. It was such a thrill.

  When we all stepped out of our trailers we were like, “Hey, ain’t we hot?” The outfits were fabulous but we were in black sprayed hockey helmets.

  SCOTT MANTZ

  With Sheba, there was something about her that they were setting her up to be Apollo’s love interest. I don’t see Apollo going for a girly girl, like Starbuck. Sheba was such a great addition, you forget that she was only in half the series.

  Interestingly, Anne Lockhart, the daughter of Lost in Space star June Lockhart, had actually turned down a different role in the original pilot when Glen Larson first called her about appearing in Battlestar Galactica. This time the answer was different.

  ANNE LOCKHART

  To this day is still amazes me, the nerve I had for doing this, but I called him up on the phone after I got this script about eight months before they shot and I said, “Thank you, I am really flattered that you think enough of me, but I have to make a decision based on what you have given me at this point.” And I said no. He was very nice about it, and I just figured that was that. The show went on and the pilot was shot and it was a huge success, but something inside told me I had done the right thing. It was purely a gut instinct that I did that, and something told me that sticking to my guns was a good idea. I guess it turned out in the end that he respected me for that, because he called me up when Jane Seymour did not want to do a series.

  He called me again and said, “I have the opportunity to write a new character and I would like to write it for you.” I said, “I’d love to read it,” and he said, “I’ll send you what I have,” and within about four hours a messenger arrived with the first twenty-five pages of “The Living Legend.” I read those and I called him up and I said, “When do you want me to start?” I loved this character and I think Sheba was far more suited to me and I was far more suited to Sheba.

  They all thought that I was there as a guest star for a two-parter. They did not know when I started working that I would be a series regular, and I actually couldn’t say anything, because the deal was still being done. The only person who knew was Lorne Greene, who said something to me my first day. He kind of winked at me and said this will turn into something good for you, and I knew he knew.

  SCOTT MANTZ

  The episode that followed was The Towering Inferno in space. It’s a potboiler episode, it’s entertaining, it’s fun while you’re watching it, but you don’t really remember it when it’s over.

  In “Fire in Space,” the Cylons launch a deadly kamikaze attack on the Galactica, causing devastating damage to the bridge and a raging fire. Apollo and Starbuck place charges on the hull, hoping that the resulting detonation will expose the fire to the vacuum of space and smother it before the Galactica is destroyed.

  TERRENCE MCDONNELL

  Jim and I were down on the set for that particular episode more than any other episode of any show that we have ever written, especially when they blew up the bridge. It was terrific. There were a lot of cuts in there. The ceiling would collapse and then they would clean that up. They would fire these guys off of trampolines to go flying and then we’d get a shot of the glass map shattering. Everyone was standing around applauding.

  CHRISTIAN I. NYBY II

  I had directed like thirty-five Emergency episodes, so I have a lot of fire experience, I guess. We planned that fairly carefully. I don’t think we storyboarded it but we had all the effects pretty well figured out. A little of it was the seat of your pants.

  TERRENCE MCDONNELL

  Apparently before we got there one of the other people who had worked on the show was Michael Sloan and he had written a script that was also called “Fire in Space.” We never saw that script until a week or two before the series was over. There was a lot of anger on Michael’s part, because he thought we’d stolen it from him. It was a two-hour two-parter, and the fire did not occur until the second half of the script, and there was a murder in it. But Glen wanted to break it up, so he talked us through what he wanted in “Fire in Space” and then we gave that to him—although the original ending that we wrote was a thousand percent better than the ending that ABC demanded.

  At the beginning of “Fire in Space,” there is a suicide attack by the Cylons, and we thought that was great, because already friends of mine were complaining that the Cylons were no threat. They couldn’t kill anybody, so we had a suicide attack and the ship slams into the Galactica and causes this huge fire that is raging on board. At the end, Starbuck and Apollo go out on the hull and set these charges. In the finished product they are out there and they are climbing up these rungs that are attached to the hull and one of them breaks loose coincidentally and goes sailing out into space as the charge is about to go off.

  The other launches himself bodily into the other one, and that propels them out of the way as the charge goes off. That was hardly what should have been the ending. ABC did not understand drama. In the original they were back out on the hull and the Cylons come back for another suicide run and they are firing at them. One ship is getting through, and Apollo and Starbuck set the charge just as the Cylon ship comes in for another suicide crash, and it takes out the ship and puts out the fire simultaneously. ABC said, “Well, they did that at the beginning, so we don’t want to see it again.” It would have been so dramatic and intense. It’s unbelievable drama, because we know what is going to happen if it gets through. But you’re talking to empty suits.

  RICHARD JAMES

  They would write things like our guys are on the outside of the ship planting explosives, and this was a Friday-night production meeting. We were getting the first two acts in pencil and we were going to start shooting the episode on Monday. This is the way it went. Literally, we were working on two acts that weren’t even finished at a late Friday night production meeting, and then Universal would say you can’t work overtime on Saturday and Sunday. How are we going to shoot this? We went through that line—you know, our boys go out on the exterior of the battlestar and plant bombs to snuff out the fire—and they just continued on with the meeting. My hand shot up and I asked, “Where exactly is the exterior of this ship? It’s vast.” I’d run into the office and say, “I’ve got to have another stage,” and they’d say you can’t have any more stages.

  Under tight budget and time constraints, James set out to create a hull set that
would match the intricate surface detail established by the six-foot miniature of the Galactica used in filming the special effects.

  RICHARD JAMES

  I finally got an empty stage, painted the walls all black, did the floor like the surface of the ship, and painted it battlestar gray. I ran around the backlot and got pieces of junk that I planted on the stage that became the exterior of the ship. I did rivet runs all over everywhere and went out and found big hunks of machinery on the backlot. I painted the machinery all the same gray and stuck it around on the stage so that it kind of looked like ducts to match the miniature as close as possible. The studio could have fired me any day if I was going over budget, but Glen did not care. They ended up I don’t know how many millions of dollars over on those shows, but Glen was telling them, this is what I want and then the studio would say you can’t. And, of course, they had to bring in the guy who did the wiring to wire the actors like they were floating in space.

  CHRISTIAN I. NYBY II

  The weightless thing was tough. Filming that was very difficult then, but today you could just CGI out the cables. We ended up with two large wires and you could really see them and we couldn’t get rid of them. We had to do front projection, because we were putting up the stars and stuff on the back, so we had to reshoot. Oh, it was awful.