So Say We All

by Mark A. Altman

  Ironically, planning for the anticipated second season of Battlestar Galactica had begun before the show’s inauspicious cancellation. An early detractor, sci-fi author Isaac Asimov had agreed to join the series as a script consultant. There were also several unproduced scripts from the first season sitting on the shelf that would have likely been produced. In addition, substantial cast changes were being considered. In a proposal to ABC, the character of Sheba was to be written out, foreshadowing a darker and less kid-friendly show.

  TERRENCE MCDONNELL

  (story editor, Battlestar Galactica)

  They had six episodes planned, and it wasn’t very good. It all felt like stuff I’d seen before. There was a script that was floating around called “I Have Seen Earth.” It was a pretty good episode. It was basically The African Queen about a miner who’s going from planet to planet and claims he’s seen Earth. We thought Jack Elam would have been great for it, he’s full of tall tales and Boxey loves this guy and stows away with him and, of course, they land on the planet where the Cylons are.

  In the first episode, they were going to bring back Cain with the Pegasus and they were going to kill Sheba. It was probably an effort to open up with some kind of big moment. That would have been the impetus for Apollo to become this brooding “I don’t care” type of character. He would risk everything and would have nothing to lose. Apollo picks Starbuck to be in charge of the fighters. Cassiopeia was going to be there, but her relationship with Starbuck would be over. How would I feel about characters I had come to like in this way going in another direction? I don’t know. I really don’t know.

  STEVEN SIMAK

  (journalist, Battlestar Galactica historian)

  Other proposals include the elimination of Colonel Tigh and the possible recasting of Athena with another actress.

  TERRENCE MCDONNELL

  We had been approached by the network about doing a script based on The Captain’s Paradise, a 1950s Alec Guinness movie where he is a sea captain and he has a wife in port A and another wife in port B. We said sure, so Jim [Carlson] and I wrote a script called “Two for Twilly.” It did not get produced. It was basically about the chief mechanic on the fleet and he was married to this woman and all of a sudden, the agroship starts listing and it’s heading toward a megastar and they can’t do anything about it and they’re going to lose the food. So they get Twilly over there to start fixing it and we discover that yeah he’s married to this woman, but he’s married to this woman, too, who’s on another ship. So he’s going to jump the boat because he’s so confused that he can’t get everything right, and at the end when he’s finally confronted with it and they’re back on the ship, they get a divorce, and he’s very upset. And so he calls his other wife, and that was the ending. They had a casting session for that and one of the people they were looking at was Jamie Lee Curtis. She came in and read for it. And she got the giggles in the middle of the audition, and my partner looked at me when we got back to our offices and said, “Poor kid, she’s never going anywhere in this town.”

  Second-season plans became academic when ABC canceled the series after only seventeen episodes. The ratings, while considered strong, were not sufficient to justify the series’ million-dollar-per-episode price tag, despite the fact that the network was only paying a $750,000-per-episode license fee.

  RICHARD HATCH

  (actor, “Captain Apollo”)

  I didn’t expect it. I was very frustrated as an actor after the first season, because I felt that, despite all the promises that had been made in terms of having really interesting things to play, I wasn’t getting a chance to really act. I was very idealistic and I just felt a little neglected as a character. I wasn’t sure if this was something I wanted to continue doing.

  ANNE LOCKHART

  (actress, “Sheba”)

  Galactica suffered from the network having input, and it was too many cooks spoil the batter. We were really close to hitting our stride at the end, and then they canned us.

  GLEN A. LARSON

  I wasn’t surprised, because I knew the realities of the numbers and of ABC. The costs of the show were enormous, time was a problem, and 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. There were some very good guys there and I think there were one or two that were not helpful to us. Some egos got in the way. This is a business of egos and it’s very difficult to balance all these things. Quincy, M.E. was on NBC and its numbers were just okay but Jack loved to scream at everybody and he sort of got into a groove. That show went on about three years longer than it probably should have because they didn’t have anything else to put on the air that was better even if it wasn’t in the top ten. It was a nice show, but it would have never lasted on ABC when they had all those hits. ABC knocked themselves from number one to number two the year after Galactica because of their stupidity. My fantasy was to do a spin-off about Starbuck, a gambler and maverick fighter pilot who travels the Wild West of the Universe.

  MICHAEL SLOAN

  (producer, Battlestar Galactica)

  Everyone hoped that they were going to do a second season and not, after all the money they spent, abandon the show. A network has to get behind a show like this and help it out, particularly when we did this in the seventies, because it was very expensive. It needed what Brandon Tartikoff did with Hill Street Blues. That show did not come on strong in its first year, but he was not about to cancel it, and then suddenly in the middle of the second season it became a hit. That’s what Galactica needed. It needed to go for another season, and then I think it really would have grabbed hold.

  LAURETTE SPANG

  (actress, “Cassiopeia”)

  It was very sad. Glen Larson was going to write some new scripts for the second season. We had just gotten to a place where Don Bellisario had written the last episode and it just started to open up and they were realizing they had to get more into the characters and put the Cylons a bit more in the background for a while. It takes a season for any show that’s worth its weight to get going, and they buried it before it had a chance to happen.

  It seemed that we were sabotaged at every corner. We aired opposite the Emmys, we aired opposite Gone with the Wind, we were preempted all the time. The other networks were brutal, they just threw stuff in our path every time, and we were kind of pulled from time slot to time slot and that’s what did us in. We went to the Rose Bowl, and Michigan was my hometown. I am from Ann Arbor and the band was playing and they asked the whole cast of Galactica to go onto the field at halftime. The band formed a giant spaceship that played the Galactica theme song, but it was on NBC and not ABC and they cut away from us because it was promoting another network. It never made it on the air. My whole family was watching and I was just devastated.

  GLEN A. LARSON

  Ironically, the thing that really did the most damage to us was a show called Mork & Mindy. ABC had a major hit night going on Thursday with Mork & Mindy. They thought that this was science fiction being done the way it should be done and that if Mork were on Sunday night then ABC would be in the top ten on Sunday night, too. They didn’t realize that Sunday night was going to get split regardless of what was done. So they moved Mork & Mindy to Sunday. That show went down to numbers that were not as good as ours, or at least comparable, and destroyed the night that Mork & Mindy had been on. They had to eat crow, retreat, and go back and rebuild that night by putting Mork back where it had been and find something else for Sunday night because they had already canceled Hardy Boys along with us. They never got back to those numbers. They were so spoiled that they didn’t appreciate how good our numbers were.

  DIRK BENEDICT

  (actor, “Lieutenant Starbuck”)

  It wasn’t a show that was a failure in the ratings. It was [canceled] because they expected it to be the number-one show in the country against All in the Family, and I thought that was asking too much.


  GLEN A. LARSON

  It had been too much of a television saga, between the simple logistics of doing it, the lawsuit, and the tremendous success the series had enjoyed at given moments, along with the general feeling that we were doing fine. Not perhaps holding the high numbers that we could like to have held and not doing the kind of numbers a Mork & Mindy was doing—but it should have been enough to guarantee our success. At that point, ABC was spoiled. Mork cost nothing to produce, because it was a three-camera show and look at the enormous numbers it got.

  If you rated us for the whole season, the phenomenal thing was that there were shows that were picked up that were in the sixties like The Rockford Files. It started a feud between me and Brandon Stoddard [ABC’s then head of programming] that never ended, because there was a lot of petulance and pettiness in that cancellation. There was no excuse for canceling a show with that high ratings.

  RICHARD HATCH

  With a first-year series you are basically trying to stay afloat. You’re trying to get through each episode and get it done on time. The fact that we accomplished as much as we did was a miracle.

  DAVID WEDDLE

  (producer, Battlestar Galactica [2004])

  Ironically, my writing partner, Bradley Thompson, and I were in an acting class after we got out of USC. One of the people in the class was Richard Hatch, and he was doing the original Battlestar at that time. And so, he was the big star in the class. All the women were in love with him. And here I was, starving film student. So, I wasn’t really happy with how all the women were, you know, enraptured with Richard Hatch. I watched a couple of the original shows, which I didn’t like. I don’t like it now, I didn’t like it then. The jealousy was all on my part, though. Richard was a very nice man. He was very down-to-earth, he didn’t act like a star in the class. He was really serious about developing his craft. Here he was, big star in a big series. He could’ve just said, “Hey, I’ve made it. I know what I’m doing,” and yet he was going to class every week trying to deepen his craft.

  ROBBIE RIST

  (actor, “Dr. Zee,” Galactica 1980)

  Battlestar Galactica, historically, sociologically, might be the last of the post-sixties television shows. Here’s what I mean by that. In the 1960s there’s all this youth culture and by 1969 the man has pretty much ensured that the foothold of youth culture sunk into the culture wasn’t going to take. So the kids got their asses kicked. Their heroes are dying. During Vietnam, a bunch of these disaffected kids are in college during that period and they, of course, graduate college, and some of them are theater majors and writers and things like that. It seems like there is a huge theme of entertainment in the seventies about people who can’t go home. The Incredible Hulk, every episode of the show is him walking down the street, lonely. Man from Atlantis was sad, Land of the Lost. Battlestar Galactica seemed to be a part of that continuum. There is no “you can’t go home” television now.

  ALAN J. LEVI

  (director, “Gun on Ice Planet Zero”)

  Television was different back then. I remember I was doing The Bionic Woman with Forrest Tucker, who was the star of F Troop. They said you better go over and meet him. He lived in Studio City and I went over to meet Tuck. I walk in and I said, “Mr. Tucker, I’m Alan,” and he said, “It’s Tuck.” We sat there and chatted and he is a very nice man. Before I left, he said, “Listen, I’ve got to tell you this, I have an assistant who follows me around all day and he holds my glass of bourbon, I will take a sip of bourbon all day long. Many sips, don’t worry about it, I’m fine. At five o’clock at night I won’t be able to say a word—at five minutes to five, I’m perfect.” “Okay,” I said, “you got it.”

  And goddamn that happened twice! Five, ten, fifteen minutes to five I would be shooting something and at five o’clock, he’s out, he had to go home. I just loved that.

  One of my favorite stories was in The Immigrants. Barry Sullivan was playing this old anti-Semitic, angry, pissed-off guy who owned a shipping company that was being challenged by these younger men. They meet at a wedding and I rehearsed the scene, we shot it, and I said cut. I was sitting on the dolly and Barry looked at me and said, “Alan, what’s wrong?” I motioned for him to come over and I said, “Barry, there’s a tension between you and the character of Levy that comes out of anti-Semitism as well as the young squirt who’s trying to take over your ownership of the world with your shipping company and I didn’t get that tension.” I asked him what he wanted to do and he said, “I would like for you to go back and roll the camera.” I went back and rolled the camera and it was like roses, it smelt of such anti-Semitism and hate, without being mean at all. I said cut and I went up to Barry and I shook his hand and I said, “Barry, thank you so much.” He looked at me and said, “No, I thank you.” Oh, I loved that.

  HERBERT JEFFERSON, JR.

  (actor, “Lieutenant Boomer”)

  There’s something about the way that Galactica was written and produced. Tune in to the original Battlestar Galactica and you know who the good guys are, who the bad guys are, you know what the objective is. And somehow this all started with a vision, a vision that one Glen A. Larson had for the story. Forty years later, people don’t want to know anything about my other body of work, I’ve worked on Emmy Award winners, no, they want to talk about Galactica. I’ve done work in the theater, that’s nice but I want to talk about Galactica. I love it but there are less than thirty hours total, including the three-hour pilot. Something must have clicked with the fans.

  ALAN J. LEVI

  It’s not that it was a new genre of filmmaking where there is a story about a family. It was one of the first family shows, especially in space.

  TERRENCE MCDONNELL

  This is about a group of people who are looking for their home. It’s like The Wizard of Oz, only sideways. They lost everything and I’m sure that lots of people can relate to this. Some people don’t have a home. So, I think that just subconsciously it’s there in the background. Nobody talks about it other than in the beginning when they say they are looking for a planet called Earth. But I think it tugs at your heart for that reason.

  DAVID LARSON

  (son of Glen Larson)

  It was the scope of the story that made it enduring. It had a cinematic scope shrunk down to TV, but didn’t seem small. It seemed big and iconic, and the story that they were telling was a human story. It was about humans fleeing an oppressive regime, heading to Earth, our home. It just somehow resonated with kids and adults. I think that’s kind of uncommon. Because it was personal to him, it became, I think, the best of his writing. If you’re writing from a personal place, it’s going to resonate with other people. People are going to hate it. There are people who like the Beatles and people who like the Who.

  Maybe it’s when they grew up. That’s another big thing. Who are you talking to? Galactica people grew up at that time. That era with Star Wars and Galactica. There was nothing else like it. My father was a family-friendly kind of writer. There was nothing very complicated about it. It was pretty simplistic stuff, but I think that’s part of why it resonated. You have laser battles. You have robot men. It’s the same thing you had back in the thirties, forties, fifties in classic sci-fi. It wasn’t complicated. You can root for the good guys. He liked heroes that were heroes. He did not like antiheroes. He didn’t like flawed heroes as much.

  JAMIE BAMBER

  (actor, “Captain Lee ‘Apollo’ Adama,” Battlestar Galactica [2004])

  I loved it. I was a child of the early eighties. It was Vipers flying out of these slightly phallic tubes, but nonetheless flying into space. It was the joystick with the three buttons, it was the sort of pharaoh-like, sphinx-like helmets. It was Richard Hatch’s great hair, it was Starbuck’s cigar, it was Lorne Greene’s—also great—silvery hair. It was just that life aboard the ship with all these people and these cool sort of different shades of brown leather and suede attire. It was all the surface of the show.

  ANDREW PROBERT<
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  (conceptual designer, Battlestar Galactica)

  I think it stands on its own as a fun series that had a lot of good stories and lots of “classic” visual effects … warmly remembered today by fans around the world. Working on the series had its ups and downs, like any other show, but, generally, the memories are good. The people I met were all great. That said, the experience, my first, in the movie business, taught me some things about the business while the design side of it became my confidence base with which to move forward.

  DAVID ROGERS

  (director, The Office)

  I grew up on shows like The Six Million Dollar Man, The Bionic Woman, Battlestar Galactica, and Knight Rider. They taught “Fire in Space” in my screenwriting class at Ithaca College. I’m a big fan of Battlestar Galactica. I’d worked on a bunch of things like Seinfeld, and a producer from NewsRadio said, “I have a pilot for you to work on.” I watched the pilot of The Office and, in it, Steve Carell does an impression of the Six Million Dollar Man and I said, “I’m doing this show!”

  So, I met with [creator] Greg Daniels and we talked about the show and I said, “I just love this environment and these characters,” but I felt that Dwight Schrute’s love of Star Trek was too mainstream for him. He should like Battlestar Galactica. I said, “I can picture him at his desk with like a Viper just sitting in the background.” And Greg took this in and I got hired on the show. I edited a ton of episodes and directed a bunch. I got started on the first episode after the pilot. Well, the next thing you know the reimagination of Battlestar Galactica took off, and instantly the writers started writing that for Dwight. Bears beats Battlestar Galactica. It just kind of took off and he became a fan of the show.

  For my birthday Greg Daniels bought me an original model of a Cylon baseship. I directed the second-to-last episode, and in it we have a plot point where Dwight is painting the Galactica and later he hangs it up in his office. Now, he has possibly had a son with his paramour Angela, who says it’s not his son, and there’s a scene where the kid is looking and pointing to the Galactica hanging up in his office and Dwight goes, “That kid looks at the Galactica the same I way I look at the Galactica.”