“Editorial: Our style will avoid the now cliched MTV fast-cutting while at the same time foregoing Star Trek’s somewhat ponderous and lugubrious ‘master, two-shot, close-up, close-up, two-shot, back to master’ pattern. If there is a model here, it would be vaguely Hitchcockian—that is, a sense of building suspense and dramatic tension through the use of extending takes and long masters which pull the audience into the reality of the action rather than the distract through the use of ostentatious cutting patterns.
“Story: We will eschew the usual stories about parallel universes, time-travel, mind-control, evil twins, God-like powers and all the other clichés of the genre. Our show is first and foremost a drama. It is about people. Real people that the audience can identify with and become engaged in. It is not a show about hardware or bizarre alien cultures. It is a show about us. It is an allegory for our own society, our own people, and it should be immediately recognizable to any member of the audience.…
“Character: This is perhaps the biggest departure from the science fiction norm. We do not have ‘the cocky guy,’ ‘the fast-talker,’ ‘the brain,’ ‘the wacky alien sidekick’ or any of the other usual characters who populate a space series. Our characters are living, breathing people with all the emotional complexity and contradictions present in quality dramas like The West Wing or The Sopranos. In this way, we hope to challenge our audience in ways that other genre pieces do not. We want the audience to connect with the characters of Galactica as people. Our characters are not superheroes. They are not an elite. They are everyday people caught up in enormous cataclysm and trying to survive it as best they can. They are you and me.”
RONALD D. MOORE
(cocreator/executive producer, Battlestar Galactica [2004])
There is definitely truth in the idea that Battlestar Galactica was a means for me to do things I wasn’t allowed to do on Star Trek. As much as Deep Space Nine pushed things, there were things I wanted to do, and fought for, but just couldn’t in a Star Trek universe when you’re doing a war story. That I was frustrated with, and I wanted a chance to do it. When I went to Voyager, there was a storyline that came up that did have Voyager, for a time, escorting a group of alien civilian ships through a war zone or something. We talked explicitly about the fact that it was like Battlestar Galactica. I thought, “Oh, that can be a great, gigantic arc where you explore how Janeway deals with the other people and that civilian fleet. Don’t they get a vote and a say in sort of what happens with them? Don’t they have a culture? And isn’t this some kind of society at a certain point?” I just was really intrigued in exploring those aspects of the story.
I had a lot of ideas about making it its own culture, and was really pushing hard for a lot of the things that, ultimately, I ended up doing in Galactica. So, yes, a lot of the early thinking about how and why different aspects of Galactica would come into being were done at Deep Space and that brief period of Voyager.
One of the things I kept saying was if Voyager’s really on the other side of the galaxy and they’re off by themselves, by the time the ship gets back home it should be unrecognizable. They should develop their own culture, they would deal with things on their own. Why is Janeway going to be the captain of the ship forever? Shouldn’t there be some elections? Shouldn’t there be some political thing that should come up? Do they have any other rights? Wouldn’t they start customizing the ship in certain ways? Why can’t we have battle damage from last week’s episode last for a bit? Maybe there’s areas of Voyager that you can’t go into anymore because they’ve been too damaged? I was looking for some kind of grounding in some kind of reality.
In response, I got a lot of “That’s not the show. That’s not Voyager. We don’t want to do that. That’s not Star Trek. Star Trek is…” They had this idea of what Star Trek had to be, and it’s adventure. “We don’t want to deal with damage to the ship, and no one should ever question Janeway’s authority. And Janeway doesn’t have to vote.” You just had to accept the heroism of the characters, and they couldn’t be morally questionable.
Even on Deep Space, during the Dominion War I wanted more ambiguous stories that made the characters more flawed; have them make bad choices or difficult ones in wartime. You know, having more dark endings and having a sense of the devastation; that this is wrenching throughout the entire Federation in that quadrant of the galaxy. They were just unwilling to go to those places.
I was also butting up against the style of the show itself. I wanted to do a lot more handheld work, wanted to make it grittier. And the show, stylistically, in terms of the way it was shot and produced, absolutely refused to compromise. They were like, “This is not how we shoot Star Trek. Star Trek is shot in a particular way,” which I thought by that point was a boring way and a very stilted way. They wouldn’t make it rougher and edgier. They just absolutely refused to go there.
When we were doing Deep Space, we definitely felt like the redheaded stepchild. We felt like they were not supporting the show. Paramount was not a supporter. They were disappointed in the ratings and sort of felt like, “Well, this whole thing has been a flawed experiment. The next show has to be a starship and all of the usual things.” So, we kind of felt like we were not taken seriously. That said, we did just push it—push all the boundaries as far as we possibly could—and we felt proud of what we were doing. And now, looking back on it, you can go, “Wow, that’s really unlike anything else that anybody ever did.” At the time, we loved the show so much. We were so enamored with the characters that we just wanted to keep going further and further. And any kind of limitation, and any kind of boundary, frustrated us, because we just kept feeling like, “There’s so much more if you let us keep going. Come on, don’t slow us down.”
All of that was the beginning of my thinking, “If I had to do this show my way, what would I do?” I would edit it differently, and I would shoot it differently. I would rough up these characters even more, and I would be riskier in a lot of ways than what we were willing to do in Star Trek. And I’m tired of the big viewscreen, and I’m tired of the captain’s chair, and I’m tired of the way the ships move in space. Why can’t they move more like ships in space would really move? It was a lot of that sort of thinking all through those years that later, when I had the opportunity … well, now you really can do a show. All those things were ready. I’d already thought deeply about them. I was ready to just implement them.
Ronald D. Moore, born on July 5, 1964, in Chowchilla, California, developed a love for science fiction early in life. He was obsessed with the space program when he was a kid, a love that spread to the science fiction genre in general and Star Trek in particular in the years to come.
RONALD D. MOORE
Lost in Space was the first space show that I fell in love with, and then I started seeing Star Trek and that became the show for me. It was on five days a week at four in the afternoon, and after I got home from school I would watch Star Trek every day. I saw it as where NASA was going someday and where we could all go someday. I read it as a prophetic show; that this was what was going to happen. I remember thinking, “When are we going to have one world government and start building starships?”
Moore dabbled in writing and drama while in high school, but by the time he went to Cornell University he’d decided to study political science, attending based on an ROTC scholarship. Although he would leave school in his senior year (completing his degree later), during his freshman year he spent a month serving on the USS W. S. Sims, a frigate. In the fall of 1986 he was working a variety of jobs, among them receptionist at an animal hospital, while awaiting his big break as a writer.
RONALD D. MOORE
I would tape Next Generation every week on VHS and watch it, and told myself someday I’m going to write for it, but I was still sort of at ground zero in terms of actually having a writing career. I worked different jobs and along the way I started and stopped scripts. I wasn’t really pursuing a path to get me through the doors of Paramount, wh
ich is so odd in retrospect. I was just kind of being a young guy in L.A. and telling myself I was going to write for the show someday.
That opportunity ultimately presented itself thanks to the show’s open-door script policy, which meant that the producers would look at virtually any script that came its way as long as it was accompanied by a legal release form, not necessarily through an agent or attorney. It was the belief of executive producer Michael Piller (who joined the show in its third year) that this would be the best way to find talented young writers, back when television series still relied on freelance pitches and spec scripts. Moore joined the show and stayed with the franchise for a decade, cowriting (with Braga) the Star Trek feature films Generations and First Contact along the way. Following the Voyager debacle, he took a year off to, as he says, recharge and get his thoughts together.
RONALD D. MOORE
Leaving the Star Trek universe after ten years was a pretty big deal. First step was I consulted on a show called G vs E for the Sci-Fi Channel. Jonas and Josh Pate were the showrunners and creators of the show. It was a funny, off-kilter, eccentric show, and the Pates were a couple of guerrilla go-getter guys. They made that show for a song; for nothing, and it was fun and really just goofy and interesting. It was also the experience that introduced me to David Eick.
And then I got a call to do Roswell with Jonathan Frakes, who was one of the executive producers. They were looking for someone to come in and kind of bring a deeper mythology to the show in the second year. That was a real growing experience. I learned a lot about postproduction and editing. You know, a lot of the things that I wasn’t allowed to get involved with at Trek, I was able to do at Roswell. And then Jason Katims handed the show over to me in the third season. So that was my first real experience running a show.
JONATHAN FRAKES
(executive producer, Roswell)
First of all, Ron and Brannon wrote First Contact, which I directed. They were an incredible team. Ron’s passion about the Klingons was unsurpassed. One of the reasons I recommended Ron to Jason Katims on Roswell, besides the fact that he was a brilliant writer, was that he had created so much mythology of the Klingons, both on Next Generation and Deep Space Nine. We really needed to ground the mythology of the aliens on Roswell, so there would be enough backstory, enough consistency. It was a situation where Jason Katims was the relationship guy and Ron ended up, I think without having been in the writers’ room with them, balancing that with a grounded mythology. Ron’s other show, Outlander, is a perfect example of it. That’s a romantic, surreal sort of magical realism, but also almost sci-fi and very much in his wheelhouse.
Moore nearly had a second showrunning experience with an adaptation of Anne McCaffrey’s Dragonriders of Pern, which was far along in the development process: sets were being built and roles cast, but a severe difference in opinion on the eve of production on how the show should be approached resulted in Moore departing and the project falling apart.
RONALD D. MOORE
During that period I pitched a pilot called Dragonriders of Pern. And actually a lot of the Galactica style of handheld photography in space was born on Pern. Because, as I started thinking about how we would do dragons on TV, I got this notion of doing it very handheld and making it very realistic, because I’d developed this theory that if you’re asking the audience to sort of believe in something that is fundamentally unreal—and you’re asking them to believe that these dragons are really flying around and people are sitting on them—the only way to really convince them of that is to shoot it handheld and to shoot it like you had to actually go out and do it in a real environment. So, if we’re going to see a shot of the dragons flying through the air, it couldn’t just be a steady pan watching them fly by camera. I wanted to make it feel like a helicopter had to go out there and chase this dragon down. And you have a cameraman sitting out the side of the helicopter, trying to hold focus, losing the dragon in frame, and there would be fixed cameras on the neck of the dragon shooting back at the rider. So, I had this whole sort of idea, in order to convince the audience that something that was fundamentally unreal was real, that the way to do that was to make them feel the presence of the camera. There were a lot of conversations with VFX artists.
FELIX ENRIQUEZ ALCALA
(director, Dragonriders of Pern)
That style was something I’d also done on The Shield, just because of the time period. I interviewed to direct that show and I went in to talk to the writer and I said, “This is a documentary. Do two-camera, handheld, and you just don’t light anything. You just shoot the shit out of it and that’s how you make the show. And you don’t do two takes, you just go for one take here and there, and let it be a mess. It’ll be cool.” I think I scared the writer, like I was going to try and take over the show or something, which I didn’t, of course. So they hired another director to do the pilot and, of course, they did everything I told them to do. And then a year later, they called me and said, “Would you just come work on the show?” I came in and everybody said, “Look, we have a way we’re doing the show,” and I said, “You know what? I know exactly how you do the show.”
RONALD D. MOORE
One of the ideas of film is that, theoretically, the audience should never be aware of where the camera is. You should never think about the camera, because you’re pulling them out of the drama if you do. But I kind of went the opposite way and said, “If you’re trying to convince them that doesn’t exist, actually, it’s not going to work.”
FELIX ENRIQUEZ ALCALA
Ron and I were on location in Santa Fe, and we were told a script from Warner Bros. was coming and they said, “Look, we made some changes and we want you guys to read them.” And Ron says, “Who made changes on the script?” “Well, they want to polish this and that.” And I told Ron, “Look, let’s just read the script. No big deal. Let’s just keep working.” And then we got the script and it was a total rework. It was not anything he wrote. It was like somebody had been writing on this thing for a while. It was a totally different thing.
RONALD D. MOORE
I hated it. We all hated it; it was just not the show. They had done a WB on it, all right—it had become a teenage idiotfest. They were trying to be hip and cool with these dragons, man. And you’re like, “What is this?” And it was so far from what Anne McCaffrey had written. So I said, “I don’t want to shoot this. Let me go back and rewrite my own script. I’ll rewrite it the way you want, but I can’t shoot this.” WB said, “No, this is the script we’re approving. So this is the script you have to shoot.” And I said I wouldn’t do it and they said, “Well, now we’ve got a big problem. A very serious problem. Let’s get on the phone tomorrow.”
FELIX ENRIQUEZ ALCALA
We’re standing there, like, what do we do? I guess I instigated, but I said to Ron, “Look, let’s mark the line in the sand and we’ll say we’re going to do the show that we came to do,” which Ron wrote. We were just going to produce the show and shoot the shit out of it. And that we weren’t doing the other script. He should say, “If you make us do the other one, we shut production down.” I said to Ron that if we didn’t draw a line and do that, we would be dead meat. We would end up doing a piece of shit we’re all going to hate and we’re going to get blamed for it when it failed.
That night Moore had to be in Beverly Hills for a panel at the Museum of Television and Radio featuring a number of science fiction writers, among them J. Michael Straczynski and Harlan Ellison, the latter of whom would, whether he realized it or not, have a profound impact on Moore and his dealings with studios from that point forward.
RONALD D. MOORE
At the end of the panel, the moderator said, “Last question is, ‘What advice do each of you have for young writers starting out in the business?’” We go down the line, and each of us answered the question. Then they give the mic to Harlan, who leans forward into the mic and says, “Don’t be a whore. You know what? These people will rape you, and they will ta
ke all your talent and use it for their own shit. You’ve got to stand up and have some principles. Don’t whore out your talent to anybody; show some balls in this business. Be about something. What does it really mean to be a writer if you can’t protect your talent?” And it was just, like, “Whoa!” And I was literally in the car driving home that night and was like, “Don’t be a whore, don’t be a whore … oh my God, I’m having this call tomorrow.” It was a movie moment.
So the next day on the call they put it to me again: “This is the script we approved.” I said, “Well, I just don’t want to shoot it, but I will rewrite the script. You can give me all the notes and I’ll rewrite it. But this is not the show.” They said, “Well, Ron, this is the show. And here’s the deal. I guess if that’s the way you feel, we should all just say good-bye right now and just let it go.” I took a deep breath and said, “Okay, then let’s do that.” And there was dead silence. I heard a network exec go, “All right, then, I guess that’s it.” Click, click, click—everybody got off the phone and all hell broke loose. The phones are ringing, they’re calling my agent, they’re calling each other, they’re screaming. People are freaking out, because New Regency was on the hook for a million or two … whatever they had spent. Basically the whole thing had just blown up and it was my fault and I was afraid that no one would hire me again.
But by the time I got to Battlestar, I had gotten to the point where I realized that moment was a really important one for me, because I had been willing to walk away. I learned that I could walk away and it meant that there was a line I wouldn’t cross, and if you tried to push me over that line, I would quit or walk away. That knowledge gave me a tremendous amount of security in two ways. One, it told me I knew what the battles were that I could fight and that there were hills to die on, and I knew the difference. In a weird way, it gave me permission to compromise, because I wasn’t afraid of conceding ground anymore. I wasn’t afraid of changing my mind, or giving the network a victory, because it didn’t mean I couldn’t stand up to them. I knew when I could say fuck off.
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