So Say We All

by Mark A. Altman

  As Dragonriders of Pern collapsed, Moore was approached by former Universal executive David Eick, who had transitioned into producing. They had previously worked together on G vs E.

  RONALD D. MOORE

  David had read my scripts and we’d had a couple of interactions during Good vs Evil. And we liked each other; we had lunch a couple of times and he just kind of remembered me. Then when he left the network to go work for Universal as a producer, they came to him and said, “Hey, we’ve got this property with Battlestar Galactica that various people have tried to get off the ground. Nothing’s really worked. Do you want to take a crack at it?” And I think David said yes, and then he called me—he might have called a couple of other people, too, but he called me.

  Behind the scenes at Universal, a reborn Battlestar Galactica had been discussed for a while. Among those involved from the start of that process were Angela Mancuso, then president of Universal Cable Entertainment, and production executive Todd Sharp.

  TODD SHARP

  (production executive, Battlestar Galactica [2004])

  In most cases on most shows, you will have a studio and you will have a network. In most cases, those are separate entities. The thing that’s probably confusing is that Universal owned both Sci-Fi Channel and our studio. And the reason why I say “our studio” is it had so many different names over the years. At one point it was Studios USA. At one point it was USA Cable Entertainment. At one point it was Universal Cable Productions. It changed names repeatedly through the years, because we kept going through corporate reorganization. Barry Diller owned us. Then Universal owned us. Then NBC came in and took us over. The current version of that company is called Universal Cable Productions. Basically the studio was the group within Universal that was producing shows for the owned cable networks USA Network and Sci-Fi. We were making the show. I was the executive of the show Monk for USA Network, and I was also the executive on Battlestar. Both USA and Sci-Fi, as well as the studio, were all owned by the same parent company, but we were all separate entities. So on the studio side you have Angela Mancuso, who runs the studio. I’m the production executive.

  I would say Angela was probably the most responsible for the show existing, because there was a big push at the time to kind of mine the Universal library and figure out what shows in the library we could rekindle and make some money on.

  ANGELA MANCUSO

  (former president, Universal Cable Entertainment)

  I was the one who pulled Galactica out of mothballs. Barry Diller had bought the company and he said, “I want to go through the entire library. I want you to find anything that might be something we could remake.” He was pushing us to do stuff that was already a title that we owned. One day I got a call from Scott Greenstein, who was the chairman of USA Films at the time, and he said, “Bryan Singer wants to do Battlestar Galactica.” And I said, “That’s great. So he wants to do it as a feature?” “No. I’m calling you because he wants to do it for television.” I said, “That’s fabulous, because we’ve been thinking about doing Battlestar Galactica and if Bryan wants to do it, that’s amazing.”

  TODD SHARP

  At Universal, there were two sides of the television group that were completely unrelated to one another. There was the cable side, which was us, and there was the network side, which was a different group of people. And Bryan Singer was developing a faithful adaptation of the original show. Totally, spiritually, very much a redo with Tom DeSanto.

  TOM DESANTO

  (executive producer, X-Men)

  Initially it was a decision between me and Bryan Singer on whether to do it as a continuation or not. My thing was always to do a continuation and keep it in continuity, sort of as The Next Generation was to Star Trek. Keep it almost in real time, twenty-five years later. The great thing about the first Galactica was that it was symbolic about the story of the Exodus. It’s this group of people fleeing, being pursued by the Egyptians, which were the Cylons, and the Israelites are fleeing, looking for the Promised Land, which was Earth. There was something about that theme which was really resonant, and it was wanting to keep the fact that they didn’t find Earth, and the way that we had described it became “What if the Israelites stopped at Mount Sinai and it was Las Vegas?”

  ANGELA MANCUSO

  So now I was in charge of the cable studio, David Kissinger was in charge of the network television end, and I brought it to the television staff meeting and said, “Bryan Singer wants to do this. This is fabulous.” And David said, “Well, then we’ll do it for Fox. Why would we do it for Sci-Fi Channel? Fox is a bigger network, they’ll pay more money.” I started literally jumping up and down, saying, “But we own the Sci-Fi Channel. This is the biggest sci-fi title that we have in the library. We should do it for Sci-Fi.” But I got vetoed and they developed it with Bryan Singer at Fox. The short story is they had a handful of writers who wrote a handful of scripts no one was happy with. I don’t remember much about it, except that it was not dark and was a little closer to the original. It was nothing like Ron Moore’s version. It didn’t have the social resonance that I think Ron’s had about, you know, how precarious our lives are. It definitely didn’t deal with a woman head of the universe dying of cancer. It didn’t have any of that gravitas. It was much lighter and much more tonally like the original.

  TOM DESANTO

  What we wanted to postulate was that twenty-three years ago there was a great battle between the Galactica and the Cylons, and they won but it wasn’t decisive enough to fully defeat the Cylons. There was no contact with the Cylons after that point, so the humans come across this massive asteroid belt and it’s filled with raw materials and ice and gold and everything they need to hide. And that’s what they want to do. It’s not a planet, but they start to mine this asteroid field and build this massive—for lack of a better word—white elephant. This space colony is filled with pleasure domes and business centers and gambling areas and everything that is shallow in life and that becomes their focus.

  But, of course, those who do not remember the past are doomed to repeat it, and there is the decision made by the Council and the president to decommission the Galactica, their reasoning being that they haven’t had any contact or any word from these things in over twenty years. So they turn the Galactica into a historical tourist attraction, but, of course, that doesn’t last long when the Cylons pull another Pearl Harbor and attack the Galactica and the Colony again. They come out of this and defeat the Cylons with a renewed sense of purpose and repledge themselves to finding Earth.

  TODD SHARP

  My recollection is that version went down because Fox had just had a bit of a hit with X-Men and they had decided that making a sequel with Bryan Singer was a far more financially lucrative decision than doing the season of Battlestar. They were deep into prep. They had already built some ships. They had already built some sets.

  AARON DOUGLAS

  (actor, “Chief Tyrol”)

  I was told it was a continuation. He wanted to have the same clothes, the same everything and he wanted to have Richard and Dirk, but obviously not Lorne Greene. Then they had their kids or something. So it wanted to pick up where the original left off, which I thought was a pretty challenging thing to do given that everybody’s thirty years older.

  ANGELA MANCUSO

  When Bryan Singer bailed to do the next X-Men movie, I said, “Give it back to me, I want to do it for Sci-Fi Channel.” So I finally talked them into giving it back to me, and the next battle was, “It’s so expensive, how can we pilot this?” The answer was “Let’s do it as a miniseries.” So, literally, I marched around halls like the minority whip at Universal, trying to garner support to do it as a miniseries.

  TODD SHARP

  When that version went down, and simultaneously Ron and David are putting this Battlestar together, we were actually told that we shouldn’t see any of the stuff from the other show, because we don’t want to taint it in any way, either creatively or legally. I did
n’t see the sets that they were building from that original Battlestar. Ours was a totally separate animal. I’m sure Bryan Singer would’ve made something perfectly wonderful that would have had fans—he’s certainly a talented guy—but it was much lighter and more optimistic than what it would become. Ron and David would embrace the dark, embracing the zeitgeist of the time, which was that things are not so good. There’s a lot of instability. A lot of uncertainty. To do what the best science fiction does, which is to be able to comment on today, comment on the world that we know.

  RONALD D. MOORE

  The network was of two minds. They were kind of predisposed to do it and they were predisposed not to do it. They were predisposed to do it, because they had done a lot of market research for various titles and had found that even though not many people remembered the show as such, a lot of people remembered the name. Early on they said to me, “We’ve already done the research that proves that we could get eyeballs on this. So it’s an easy lift for us to sort of sell this series.” Added to that, because of the previous attempts, they were already a little bit pregnant; they’d already put some time and money toward doing it internally.

  But the part of their brains that didn’t want to do it was they were having a bad experience with Farscape and the money with the Jim Henson Company. They felt like they got screwed, and it was too expensive and it wasn’t worth it. They were starting to have a philosophical change in terms of where they wanted the network to go in that they were saying, “We want to get out of the spaceships. We don’t really want to keep doing space programming. We want to start doing things that are set up on Earth.” Ultimately things like Eureka.

  ANGELA MANCUSO

  And what really saved us was that the merchandising department said, “If you can get this off the ground, this could be giant merchandising-wise.” So we got our estimates together and we finally were able to talk everybody into doing it as a miniseries for Sci-Fi Channel. And there was a lot of opposition from the ridiculous comments that the original audience is going to feel cheated by a new take on it. It’s ridiculous, because I’m in my fifties and I don’t even remember the original one.

  Eventually I brought on David Eick, who had a deal at the studio, to produce it.

  Born in 1968, Eick graduated from the University of Redlands with a BA in political science and a minor in business administration. Prior to Battlestar Galactica, he worked as a producer with Sam Raimi and Robert Tapert on such shows as Hercules: The Legendary Journeys and American Gothic; during the show he was executive producer of the remake of The Bionic Woman, and since then was consulting producer of Touch, executive consultant of Houdini, and executive producer of Falling Skies and Beyond. Inspiring him into Hollywood was the experience of watching films like Dirty Harry and The Exorcist.

  DAVID EICK

  (executive producer, Battlestar Galactica [2004])

  The Exorcist sort of shocked me into a state where I had to believe that it was possible to really traumatize and upset people through filmmaking. I knew you could tickle them, I knew you could delight them, I knew you could surprise them. I didn’t realize you could actually upset them.

  If you come to my house and look at my home office, the posters on the walls around my writing station are Manhattan, Taxi Driver, All That Jazz, Lenny, Jaws, The Exorcist. But not outer space, not sci-fi really at all. So my roots are not necessarily genre, except for The Exorcist, this kind of separate bit of trauma that kind of forced me into the industry. I guess I responded to a kind of masculine protagonist who was strong in spite of his obvious foibles. I liked that flawed hero. I liked Dirty Harry. I liked the priest in The Exorcist. I liked these strong male figures who were flawed, who had corruption inside them, yet could overcome it. That probably wound up being applicable to some of the stuff I would do later, versus more atmospheric or aesthetic inspirations like outer-space shows and stuff like that. That wasn’t where I was coming from. But, like I said, The Exorcist and even something like Dirty Harry were traumatizing—I guess I saw them too young—and in chasing the solutions to the trauma, I got dragged into the business. And, fortunately for me, because my early sort of mentors were also irreverent, subversive types, rather than having my instincts diluted or shamed or put in the corner, they were encouraged.

  I got sort of dumped on Sam Raimi and Robert Tapert’s doorstep in 1992, and six years later we had done six TV shows and it was a lot of happy luck and a lot of good fortune, but a lot of it had to do with my desire to tell stories from the point of view of an irreverent subversive protagonist, and here I am at a company where that’s all they do. So that combination got us some early success and it was through that success that I was able to spend a couple of years as an executive. Sort of a kamikaze experiment to see what the other side of the coffee table was like. I did that at USA and Sci-Fi. I ran development for those two networks after my days with Sam Raimi. So I spent six years with Sam, two and a half years working for Barry Diller at USA and Sci-Fi Channel, realized that was not where I wanted to be and that I wanted to get back in the trenches. I was able to get—I wouldn’t say a golden parachute, it was more of a nickel parachute—out of the executive ranks and into my own overall deal.

  Which is about the time that Battlestar Galactica made its potentially renewed presence known in his life.

  DAVID EICK

  Shortly after putting the finishing touches on my office furniture, the phone rang and the head of the studio asked if I was interested in rebooting this Battlestar Galactica title as one of the early projects under my new overall deal. And, I, of course, said no, because I heard the title and thought it was ridiculous. Being friends with Shaun Cassidy—we did American Gothic together with Sam Raimi—I learned a lot about the seventies on the Universal lot. Shaun was, of course, very close to Glen Larson, who had done The Hardy Boys, which Shaun had starred in, but also had done the original Battlestar Galactica. So when it was first presented to me, the echo chamber in my head was, “Oh, this is the goofy space show that Shaun Cassidy told me about.” That was my only reaction to it: that it was Shaun’s goofy seventies story of the time that Glen Larson ripped off Star Wars and they had this one-season kind of expensive flop.

  It wasn’t that I had never heard the title, but I didn’t have an opinion about it. I’d never seen it. What I had seen was the Universal Studios Tour with those Cylon robots. I just didn’t know anything about it. In one regard it was the training from running Sam Raimi’s company that came back. When I was running Raimi’s company, it’s, like, the studio came to us and said, “We have the title Hercules as public domain. You want to do something with it?” “Well, no, not if we have to do it the normal way. But if we can do it in a completely crazy way in New Zealand with girls with breastplates and all kinds of crazy monsters, well, sure. You know, we can make it kind of funny, too.” So it was a little bit like that. The appeal to me had nothing to do with the title.

  This was 2001 and there were five gazillion space shows on TV—at least two Star Trek shows, Farscape had just gone away, Joss Whedon had his show Firefly coming, so to say you were going to do a space opera was to say you were going to do a superhero show. I was like, “Who gives a shit?” But I felt if I could cut left every time Star Trek would cut right, and if I can subvert and demean the expectations of the contemporary TV space opera, then that might be fun in a sneaky kind of dirty way. It could be fun to upend the whole infrastructure of what everyone is used to. But I had a problem: I didn’t really watch Star Trek, I didn’t really watch Farscape, I didn’t really watch Firefly.

  To solve that particular problem, he turned to writer Matt Greenberg, with whom, as he describes as part of his “kamikaze moment at the network,” he developed a show called The Invisible Man, which had been a minor hit for Sci-Fi.

  DAVID EICK

  Matt is a hilarious and great action-adventure sci-fi writer. Invisible Man was irreverent in taking the Claude Rains heaviness of Invisible Man and kind of punking
it. I didn’t want to do a spoof with Battlestar, but I thought, “Well, this guy knows how to think outside the box. He just has kind of a kooky perspective.” So I sat down with Matt and said, “They’ve given me the title, but I don’t really know what I want to do with it except I want to cut against all the fucking Star Treks.” And he didn’t like it. He came back to me with a whole weird pitch about a Cylon planet. It was a little more fantastical, I guess. Too much like Star Trek. Neither one of us knew if it was something we should be working on.

  ANGELA MANCUSO

  David really didn’t have a take on it. What it ended up being came largely from Ron Moore.

  DAVID EICK

  I’d had two experiences with Ron Moore. One was—again, back in the kamikaze days—I’d hired him to be a consultant on a little punk rock show called G vs E, created by these Sundance punks, the Pate brothers. They were great, but they were young kids. They didn’t really know what they were doing when they were doing the show, so I brought in this guy Ron Moore, who I’d had a general meeting with and really liked. He’d come off Star Trek and he’d come off of Roswell. So he came in for a general meeting, and I was very reluctant to ask him about Galactica, because I thought that nobody who’s spent the bulk of his life immersed in fucking Star Trek is going to want to go back into another sci-fi space opera thing. So I was very tentative and that was a reason I didn’t go to him first.

  So we sat down. Now we’re just after 9/11; it’s just happened. I think this was December of 2001. We start talking about it and, to my surprise, he recalls that the pilot of the original involved this holocaust, and at that moment we were bleeding raw from 9/11. We’re thinking, what if we took it really seriously? That was sort of the linchpin.