So Say We All

by Mark A. Altman

  SCOTT MANTZ

  Baltar is pacing in his cell, and then on the other side of the prison door, Iblis says, “Sit, Baltar, don’t pace.” Baltar just says, “I know your voice. I remember that voice.” Iblis goes, “Do you?” And then it hits him, he knew. And John Colicos’s delivery of that line is brilliant. He’s already figured it out before we got to that scene. He says, “I know you. I know it. I’ve figured you out. That’s the voice of the Imperious Leader.” And Iblis says, “If that’s true my voice must have been implanted into the Imperious Leader a thousand yahrens ago. I have to be thousands of yahrens old.” Then, Baltar turns his back on Iblis and Iblis is suddenly in the cell with him. “Do not fear, my friend. All is not lost.” Whose side is this guy on? It’s such a great episode.

  RONALD D. MOORE

  (cocreator/executive producer, Battlestar Galactica [2004])

  We briefly thought about doing something with Count Iblis [in the 2004 Galactica]. Couldn’t find a way to work it into our version of the mythology. We talked about the Ship of Lights, which he’s connected to. There were ideas kicked around here and there, but we never quite landed on something that felt satisfying, so it never got very far.

  GLEN OLIVER

  In “War of the Gods,” the Battlestar mythology went full-tilt, and it’s a damn shame the show never had a chance to revisit the notions these episodes set forth.

  SCOTT MANTZ

  In addition to the battle of wits between Patrick Macnee and Lorne Greene, another great moment is when Apollo confronts Adama, and he sees Adama moving the figure with his mind. He’s telling how he did it, back with his wife and everything, and it drove him mad. It’s so deep. This is like mature, philosophical stuff dealing with religion and faith, and how is it that after all these years, I’m finally still learning things about my father? How is it after all these years, I’m still learning things about my son? It’s such a great moment. Lorne Greene and Richard Hatch were so good together. They have believable chemistry as father and son.

  HERBERT JEFFERSON, JR.

  I enjoyed that. I am very religious. When I look and listen it put into the hearts and minds of the viewers, especially the children, that there is something bigger than the war with the Cylons, it’s a struggle between good and evil, which is universal and covers the universe.

  SCOTT MANTZ

  The music for that episode is probably one of the best scores that Stu Phillips ever did. The episode is so emotional when they revive Apollo, and the fact that the pilots that they found before are going to be returned with no memory of what happened. Then they’re back on the Galactica, with very little memory of what actually happened, and suddenly Apollo walks over to the window and remembers the Ship of Lights and talks about a battle between good and evil. Adama says, “It’ll be that way until we find Earth,” and then they start expositing on the coordinates of where Earth is. It starts with nine planets and one sun, and they’re all like, “Whoa, what is that from?” If nothing else, Galactica would still be a monumental achievement because of the strength of that one two-part episode. It’s after “War of the Gods” that they start going through the motions.

  In the following episode, legendary actor/dancer Fred Astaire guest-stars as Chameleon in “The Man with Nine Lives,” an aging con who may or may not be Starbuck’s father (spoiler alert: he is). The energy on the set was electric in anticipation of Astaire’s arrival. For cast members, working with Astaire was a once-in-a-lifetime opportunity.

  DONALD BELLISARIO

  (supervising producer, Battlestar Galactica)

  I received a phone call one day, and my secretary said Fred Astaire was on the phone, and I said, “Yeah, right.” So I got on and said hello and it was really him. He said his grandchildren loved the show and they were after him to be on it. He asked, “Do you think you could give me a little part?” And I said, “Mr. Astaire, I will write an episode for you.” And I did.

  He was a charming man, a really wonderful guy. So professional. I can still remember when we were shooting that. I was just standing there next to the camera and Fred would not leave the camera. He would put his chair right behind it so that he could sit there and be available the instant you needed him. He was so professional. It was one of the best experiences I ever had.

  ROD HOLCOMB

  (director, “The Man with Nine Lives”)

  I got to go to his house, and I noticed something I thought was really odd. His belt was actually a tie that he wrapped around his waist, and he tied it into a really pretty knot that hung off to the side. Almost a gaucho kind of thing. I thought, “That’s freaking cool.”

  Of course, there was a fairly big party scene where he danced with one of the actresses, but he didn’t want to dance. He said, “No dancing.” I said, “Fred, what we’ll do is a little bit more of you hiding. Let’s think about what you’re doing, that you’re really basically moving and looking around to avoid the Nomen. Let’s make sure that’s the object.” And he was so appreciative. Those are great memories.

  TERRENCE MCDONNELL

  That was the last time Fred Astaire ever danced on film. I grew up watching his musicals. My mom loved the standards, in terms of music, and she had a Hammond organ in the house. At night I’d go to bed and she’d be playing music and in the morning I’d ask her what was that song and she showed me Fred Astaire. I’d never seen anybody dance like that before. It was just astonishing. I was always a huge fan of his. I still am.

  Laurette tells the story about coming back from lunch while we were shooting. And Fred, a consummate professional, always had everything memorized. Everything was prepared. He was just ready to go. She came back from lunch and I guess there was nobody on the stage but him and he was off in a corner. He was trying different ways of sitting down into a chair. Trying this way, trying that way. Didn’t think anybody was watching. That’s the detail that he would put into a performance.

  LAURETTE SPANG

  (actress, “Cassiopeia”)

  The sweetest moment that I had with him was the scene where we were talking about whether Starbuck and Cassiopeia will one day be together. Fred was supposed to sit down into a chair for me to do this test on him. We were rehearsing and talking and he would turn and sit in the chair from one direction, then he got up and went to the other side and kind of spun around and turned and sat down in another way. I thought this is the way he works. I have always heard that the way he danced he was a technician. He was incredible about practicing and trying different things, and here he was just going to sit in a stupid chair. He was just kind of looking for the most comfortable way to sit, and I just was so delighted talking to him.

  DIRK BENEDICT

  (actor, “Lieutenant Starbuck”)

  It was my favorite episode, and Fred and I consequently were friends for the rest of his life. He was a wonderful human being and a hard worker and I learned a great deal about a work ethic which no longer exists really in television. The guy just showed up, worked hard, and did his job. A living legend, but you would think he was a guy on his first bit part, as hard as he worked. No star temperament or anything. That was a wonderful script and an interesting story and I loved playing it.

  LAURETTE SPANG

  A couple of months later, at Christmastime, I had sent Fred an invitation to a Christmas party my husband and I were having. One night, I ran to answer the phone and it was Fred. He said, “I got your lovely invitation and I am going to be out of town that weekend.” I thought, “Oh my God, it’s Fred Astaire,” and it was sweet that he called personally. He said he was invited to a lot of functions, but he was very touched by my invitation.

  HERBERT JEFFERSON, JR.

  It was wonderful. You couldn’t find a more gentle and easy-to-work-with individual. I was awestruck.

  ROBERT FEERO

  (actor, “Bora”)

  Between setups one afternoon, they were resetting the camera and I sat down next to Fred. I asked him for an eight-by-ten glossy of himself for my
mother and I said, “Could you please put ‘Love from Fred’?” He paused for a moment and looked at me and said, “I never sign ‘Love’ on my photographs. I save that for [something] special.” He was a man of great, great integrity. It was a pleasure working with him.

  TERRENCE MCDONNELL

  The guy who played the leader of the Borellian Nomen, the villains of the episode, was an actor named Lance LeGault. He had done a lot of stuff at Universal. He was in Elvis Presley’s comeback special dressed in black leather and playing the drums. He was in a bunch of Elvis movies. He was a stuntman and stuff like that. One day, Don comes into our office and I’m trying to come up with names for these guys who are like nomads and Jim [Carlson] goes “Nomen.” That worked. Then we needed a weapon they use, and we figured they were a little behind technologically, so maybe we could find an older weapon, and we came up with the laser bola.

  As the countdown to the end of the season continued, story editors McDonnell and Carlson found themselves stuck writing a series of bottle shows—a term used to describe episodes that occur primarily on standing sets with minimal expense. Bottle shows are traditionally done late in a season to save on production costs. They seized on that as an opportunity to focus on the members of the fleet in such episodes as “Take the Celestra” and “Murder on the Rising Star.”

  JIM CARLSON

  Terry and I were sitting in our office kicking things around and trying to come up with something when we thought, “All these people get along so well, and that wouldn’t really happen that way.” When you’re boxed in under trying conditions, people tend to get a little feisty.

  STEVEN SIMAK

  (journalist, Battlestar Galactica historian)

  Although time is always a factor in short supply on any television series, it was particularly true for the writers working on the episode “Murder on the Rising Star.” After waiting to learn what the next script would be, Carlson and McDonnell were given notice at 4 P.M. on Wednesday to write a teleplay and have it in mimeo by seven o’clock on Friday morning. With little time, the writing team fleshed out a mystery story in which Starbuck is accused of murder.

  TERRENCE MCDONNELL

  We had no story; nothing was worked out. We had submitted a bunch of stories on Monday and we were sitting around waiting and waiting and we needed to go ahead because we knew we were up to bat next. Then at four on Wednesday afternoon we get word from Glen, who used to write in Hawaii on the beach, to go ahead and do the script off a little logline. He did that on a lot of scripts. We had about thirty-six hours to do an outline and write. Whatever came out of the typewriter was pretty much that script. We didn’t sleep for two nights. So, when I look at that script, all I remember is the pain and the hallucinations.

  In “Murder on the Rising Star,” a game of triad leads to a violent confrontation between Starbuck and Ortega, a pilot with anger-management issues. When Ortega turns up dead, Starbuck becomes the lead suspect. Apollo, confident that Starbuck is innocent, sets out to discover who really committed the murder.

  TERRENCE MCDONNELL

  We did the outline together, so we knew exactly where we were going. Jim generally did the teaser and the first two acts. And I did the last two acts and the tag. But we had a different writing style. Then we would get together and edit it so it all had one voice. And it worked. We were always able to knock an hour script out in five days.

  SCOTT MANTZ

  “Murder on the Rising Star” is okay. “Take the Celestra” is pretty good, another power struggle in the fleet, with Paul Fix as Commander Kronus, another Star Trek veteran.

  TERRENCE MCDONNELL

  When I first came out to Los Angeles, I got a job in the mailroom at ABC and my best friend at the time was Rod Holcomb. We were both working in the mailroom and we would go see movies and discuss film. We often fantasized about how I wanted to be writer he wanted to be a director and “Wouldn’t it be cool if I wrote something that you got to direct?” And that was “Murder on the Rising Star.” It was cool. It was one of those very lucky moments.

  Director Rod Holcomb returned behind the camera for “Greetings from Earth,” a two-hour episode that served as a backdoor pilot for a spin-off series. In the episode, Apollo and Starbuck intercept a shuttle-like spacecraft (a re-dressed version of Buck Rogers’s space shuttle from the “Awakening” pilot of Glen Larson’s Buck Rogers in the 25th Century) containing a man, woman, and four children and return it to the Galactica. Believing that the shuttle may be from Earth, the Council of Twelve orders that the inhabitants be detained even though the Galactica’s atmosphere is harmful to their health. Adama has Apollo and Starbuck arrange for the shuttle’s escape and follow it back to its original destination, Paradeen. The episode guest-starred Ray Bolger, the scarecrow from The Wizard of Oz, and legendary vaudeville performer Bobby Van, as two incredibly annoying robots, Hector and Vector. Randolph Mantooth, star of the hit NBC series Emergency, played Michael, and Kelly Harmon played his wife, Sarah.

  ROD HOLCOMB

  (director, “Greetings from Earth”)

  Mark [Harmon] came on the set and visited his sister, Kelly. She was a little difficult, but she was good. I liked her. She was a nice person. The learning process for me was trying to manage the overwhelming elements of trying to direct creatively in a gigantic business of making your day and staying on budget. I came from advertising, where everything was about making it as good as you possibly could.

  TERRENCE MCDONNELL

  It’s “Little House on the Planet.” It’s awful. It was all Lorne’s and Glen’s kids who were in that episode. I think Glen had seen the writing on the wall that maybe the show wasn’t coming back or he was trying to head it off and he was trying to do something that was real family-friendly.

  RANDOLPH MANTOOTH

  (actor, “Michael”)

  Ray Bolger was getting along in years and he was pretty grumpy, but grumpy in the neatest way. I loved being around him. It was hard for him to keep those kind of hours. But I thought, “Oh my God, Ray Bolger, he’s the Scarecrow.” Bobby Van was the exact opposite, so they made the perfect team. They wanted to do a spin-off and have it be me and Kelly and then the show got canceled. How can you do a spin-off of a canceled show? So it didn’t happen.

  ROD HOLCOMB

  Bobby Van was suffering from a brain tumor at the time I was working with him. He would get there late once in a while, and I think he may have had a little bit of a fainting spell. I really tried to take care of him. We were asking him to do a lot of things, and I didn’t realize what a strain it must have been for him.

  GLEN A. LARSON

  The only thing I regret about that episode, something no one really knows much about, is that Marvin Antonowsky, who was Frank Price’s right-hand guy at Universal, criticized a dance number in the middle of the episode as being something the kids wouldn’t like, and so I cut it down to the minimum. I think I lost the wide shots just to appease him. I shouldn’t have even asked his opinion, but at that point we were really trying to get everyone on our side. It was a classic with Ray Bolger and Bobby Van and it was a wonderful piece of theater. I got talked into pruning it, and Bobby Van died shortly after that.

  DAVID LARSON

  (son of Glen Larson)

  I was one of the kids in “Greetings from Earth,” when I was five years old. There was one scene where we’re all in these little, cryogenic sleep chambers when they find us. They wanted to stick me in one of those little sleeping pods and I just started screaming, “No, I’m not doing that. I’m not doing that. I’m not doing that.” They could have fired me right then, but I was the producer’s son, so they built something special for me. They had to take it off the hinges, take it off out of the set, put it on cinder blocks on the floor, lay me on the floor, put the thing over me, and told me to push a button to open it. I’m like, “What?” It would lock, but they explained if you just a push a button it will open from the inside. They accommodated me for my entire role. I still rememb
er that. You remember the fearful memories more than you remember some of your best memories.

  Meanwhile, art director Richard James had had enough and was ready to leave the series after being asked to work the impossible week after week.

  RICHARD JAMES

  (art director, Battlestar Galactica)

  They called me in to the Black Tower, and there were quite a few people in on the meeting. It was rather intimidating in a way, because they were grilling me on why I wanted to quit. Universal didn’t pay anything but scale and I had for fifteen months knocked myself out and no one came to me and said, “Would you like fifty dollars per week over scale?” I almost had the impression that no one knew who I was. Then they offered me something ridiculous over scale and I basically said, “It’s too late. I am wiped out.” It was just that there didn’t seem like there was any appreciation, and I did feel a certain sense of satisfaction when I left. When I went back to visit Universal and they had about three or four art directors doing Battlestar Galactica, they each said, “I don’t know how you did it.”

  For “Baltar’s Escape,” all of Galactica’s bad guys are featured in a single episode: Baltar, the Eastern Alliance, and the Borellian Nomen plan an escape from the prison barge and take the Council of Twelve hostage.

  ROBERT FEERO

  (actor, “Bora”)

  I can hear Lance LeGault’s voice now, saying, “THE BLOOD HUNT! THE BLOOD HUNT!” The blood hunt was never explained and they didn’t give us any background on it. I always thought of it as “We’re going to go out and whack somebody.” Someone has broken the code, perhaps, so they have to go on a blood hunt and whack the guy.

  WINRICH KOLBE

  (director, “Baltar’s Escape”)

  Sometimes you stand there and wonder how can you tell someone they are going overboard and looking campy without pissing the guy off. I remember we had a lot of fun doing that show. Yes, John Colicos was a campy actor and yes we had to tone him down occasionally but he was an excellent actor with a great sense of humor and he could handle it.