So Say We All

by Mark A. Altman

  DAVID WEDDLE

  Ron used to have a house out where I lived and I saw him a weekend after 9/11. He poured me a glass of champagne and he said, “Here’s to being alive.” I mean, we were all totally shaken by what happened. And that’s an element of his genius, that he took that event and would fuse it into Battlestar Galactica. I don’t think I ever could have made that kind of leap or seen that kind of potential, but he could.

  RONALD D. MOORE

  There’s a good chance the show would’ve happened even without 9/11, because they were just looking for someone to capitalize on the title in the library. And it wasn’t because of 9/11 that they saw value in it. It was just a market title. So I think that was on a separate track. I believe that it definitely would have gone in a different direction no matter what if not for 9/11 and the aftermath—the war in Afghanistan and then Iraq, the Patriot Act and Guantánamo and all those things—were such a heavy influence in the show that, if none of that had happened, it’s hard to imagine the show would’ve developed in the same way.

  BRADLEY THOMPSON

  (producer, Battlestar Galactica [2004])

  9/11 was definitely in our consciousness, but did we say, “Let’s make this like 9/11”? Not particularly consciously, except there’s a photograph that our guys slap when they’re going out to battle leaving the ready room, which is a deliberate homage to the ones with the firemen and the flag, and the shattered buildings of the towers. We wanted to do that to say, “Yes, this is what this is about.” But this was America after 9/11. Without it, the show would have been different. It wouldn’t have been as “scared”; I don’t think our audience would have had the same reaction to it, because that informs everything in the country, not just us.

  MICHAEL RYMER

  (director, Battlestar Galactica miniseries [2003])

  We were on the tail end of the September eleventh tragedy, and that was a big positive to me, because I lived through that experience like everyone else on the planet and it was a very shocking, surprising, transforming experience, where you started communicating more deeply with strangers; strangers started to make eye contact. It felt like there had been some sort of paradigm shift, so immediately, as an artist, you’re trying to interpret and process that experience for yourself. I happened at the time to be working on an espionage story and immediately became embroiled in reading everything to deal with this problem of how to protect our civil liberties. That’s all I was thinking about at that time, so it was great to have a story that was an outlet but at the same time it was a little close to be making movies about. Then again, you’re dealing with the other side of the galaxy, and it is clearly fiction.

  MARY MCDONNELL

  (actress, “President Laura Roslin”)

  We were so fresh from September eleventh, so we had a sense of our mortality as a nation, as a people. We were suddenly threatened. All of it was threatened. We understood what that was for perhaps the first time, even though I was old enough to remember “duck and cover.” But as an adult I hadn’t really felt what we felt that day. And that was in the script.

  MICHAEL ANGELI

  (co–executive producer, Battlestar Galactica [2004])

  Right from when I read the script for the miniseries and saw it, I realized this was going to be an adult show that is dealing with the types of issues that we deal with every day. 9/11 was three or four years earlier, but it certainly did resonate. We talked a lot about that in the writers’ room. The first time we all got together, we just sort of riffed on the zeitgeist and of course that came up. What I thought was really ahead of the curve is what we’re seeing now a little bit: the possibility of a nuclear strike that could devastate the planet. And having people find a way to survive with our Agent Orange president. I went back and watched some of our episodes a couple of weeks ago, and it felt so relevant. It sort of transcended the time in which we created the show.

  GRACE PARK

  (actress, “Lieutenant Sharon ‘Athena’ Agathon / Lieutenant Sharon ‘Boomer’ Valerii”)

  The allegories to 9/11 were the key for all of us, because it was so fresh and it put us all into space where everything was a lot more serious, for lack of a better word, than, just, “Oh, there’s an attack with a robot race and, ooh-la-la, we’re running through space.” That doesn’t sound compelling, but the real world we live in is pretty scary. I don’t know how it affected the evolution of the story, but it certainly affected the execution. I do think that the two races and the war between them brought a lot of resonance with genocide and racism; how we divide people amongst almost any line that we can think of. If it’s race, it’s race. If you’re the same race, then we’re going to do countries. If you’re in the same country, we’re going to do towns. Or religion. It’s still the duality, the us-versus-them.

  AARON DOUGLAS

  The show’s response to 9/11 was a little bit of, “Hey, World, let’s stop lying to ourselves and take a look and see what we’re doing to each other here. How many planes do you need to get flown into buildings before we all wake up and stop watching Dynasty and All My Children and Law & Order? Come on!”

  MICHAEL RYMER

  During the shooting of the miniseries, I kept saying to everybody in the cast, “You’re coming to conclusions too quickly. Remember how long it took you to process 9/11? It took weeks before you even understood. It was beyond our imagination. This is what it’s like for these guys.” The miniseries is slow, but I love it for that in that it takes time to let the reality of that situation sink in in a more realistic way. It’s quite different in tone, and a different piece to the series, where we start with “33.” But in the way that 9/11 is the great mythological story of our life span, that was the goal, to try and touch that mythic stuff, which is why the rituals were so good—the funerals and the pageantry of their culture. We did a good job on that, because it resonates with people that, “Oh, okay, yeah, our funerals don’t look like that, but I know what that feels like.” The goal was to make something as gritty and real and adult as we could make it. To move away from the broad strokes of the cartoon sci-fi shows that we all love and bring it closer to 2001, Blade Runner … the gritty, real good classics that we all admire and which are the reason we’re in this game.

  DAVID EICK

  When I sat down with Ron, I was relieved to learn he knew how to do everything differently than it had been done before. Like I’ve said, he knew how to cut right every time Star Trek would cut left or whatever. We could talk about what that meant in terms of the lighting and the camerawork. “What did Rick Berman tell you that you could never do? Let’s do that all the fucking time. What did he tell you you had to always do? Let’s never do that.”

  RONALD D. MOORE

  I got the call from David in January/February 2002. I was still on Roswell. Dragonriders had fallen apart, and David called and said, “What do you think?” I was intrigued, but it had been a while since I’d see the Galactica series, because the series wasn’t available on VHS and it was way before streaming or anything like that. I just said, “Give me the weekend, let me go track down the pilot.” So I went to Blockbuster and rented the pilot, watched it over the weekend. And watching it a couple of months after the 9/11 attack, it just had a completely different resonance for me than back in the seventies. I just saw the opportunity. I was like, “Okay, if I remake this now, in today’s world and about this attack, and what it does to these people, and the questions that would come up, and the survivors—what they would do. And military versus the state authority. And freedom versus security. My God, this is an enormous opportunity and I could put in effect these ideas about shooting a new kind of sci-fi story and not having a big viewscreen, and not doing a captain’s chair. Being more documentary-style in production and doing this naturalistic approach.” I just got excited about it, and I said, “Okay, David. I’m in.”

  DAVID EICK

  For a director, I called this guy Breck Eisner [son of former Disney head Michael Eisner]. I
had done a drama pilot with Shaun Cassidy as the first thing in the overall deal I’d gotten. The pilot didn’t get picked up, but I really liked Breck. I figured because his father is so deeply in the business, I’m sure Breck may know things about the original Battlestar. You know, he might have been able to inform some things.

  So we all go home over the weekend. Ron watches the three-hour pilot. I watch SportsCenter and the Dallas Cowboys. We get back on Monday, Ron’s done his homework, I have not. But this dynamic in a weird way sort of serves as a model for how we all end up working over the next four years, because, by knowing what the old Battlestar show had done, Ron was always going to have a sense of a wink and a nod, and even an homage to certain either structural or characters or just kind of thematic ideas that the old show dipped its toe in. At the same time, there would be a counterbalance to that, with no allegiance to any of that shit. Someone who didn’t give a fuck about any of that, didn’t understand any of it. And if it worked for both of us, meaning in terms of Battlestar and the “knower” and first-timer virgin, then we figured it was good. So that’s not an excuse for not doing my homework. In a weird way, it gave us kind of a yin-yang advantage so neither of us were too inside it.

  For example, when we got to the season-two Pegasus arc, which was greatly inspired by one of the original-series episodes [“The Living Legend”], it had to mature and evolve enough to work for someone who had no context for the old episode. And because that was the circuitous obstacle course any idea had to navigate, it meant that we forced it to be better than it might have been. So our version of Pegasus had a female antagonist who usurped Adama’s authority, would be torturing—Abu Ghraib style—a Cylon prisoner. All of these kinds of things that spring from having a sense of what came before, but not being bound by it at all.

  RONALD D. MOORE

  The development process was relatively easy. Angela Mancuso, who was an executive at USA Networks at that point, was a big proponent of it. I pitched our take to her with David and Breck Eisner, who was originally going to be the director for the mini. The three of us kind of did the preliminary groundwork on developing the fundamentals of the show and how we were going to pitch it. We pitched it to Angela and she was like a bull terrier, man. She just went in there and fought for it and wasn’t going to take no for an answer. Angela is kind of the forgotten player in all of the stories of how Galactica got made, because she really believed in the project. She fought for it and she just wouldn’t let it go. She made it happen.

  ANGELA MANCUSO

  Bonnie Hammer, who’s my good friend and at the time was president of Sci-Fi, finally got behind it and said, “Okay, we’re gonna do this.”

  RONALD D. MOORE

  When I went in to pitch it, they were like, “Yeah, we kind of want to do this. This isn’t really where we want to go, but we’re open to it.” I pitched it to Bonnie Hammer. She was on a big TV; I was pitching in a conference room in L.A., and Bonnie was on the big TV. All of a sudden it’s like I was in Star Trek, because I’d never done a video conference. It was really bizarre, because I’m getting distracted by seeing myself at the bottom of the screen. Like, “Am I leaning too far forward?” It was that kind of shit. But Bonnie liked it. I remember the moment that I thought I had her was the moment I said that we were going to make Starbuck a woman. I remember Bonnie specifically clenching her fists and going, “Yeah!” I was like, “I’ve got her,” you know? She was intrigued by it and pulled in, even though the idea would be controversial to some people.

  MICHAEL RYMER

  I find it curious this controversy over Starbuck being a woman. It’s quite bizarre. When the original show was made, in 1978, there were no women in the military, or very few. And now there are lots of women. There they are fighting wars and dying. We were watching it happen as we were shooting and they were very young, fresh-faced women.

  ANGELA MANCUSO

  The vision was totally Ron’s. The only place I can say I honestly pushed was really wanting more diversity and strong women. Otherwise, a hundred percent of it was Ron.

  RONALD D. MOORE

  One of the first things I thought about when I was rewatching the original premiere was what to do with Apollo and Starbuck. One of the things I’d forgotten was, when the original show was starring Richard Hatch and Dirk Benedict, they were the stars. It wasn’t Lorne-Greene-as-Adama’s story with the focus on the captain of the ship. The stars of the show were the two pilots. So I was like, “Okay, what do you do with this relationship? What do you do with the straight-arrow son and his roguish, cigar-smoking, gambling, womanizing friend?” I was like, “Wow, that’s such a cliché. I’ve no idea what to do with this. How do you possibly update this?” And the thought just occurred to me, “What if we made Starbuck a woman?” I just realized that would change everything. It would change the whole dynamic. She would be an interesting character. It was right at the point where we were starting to get familiar with the idea of women in combat in the United States. So it was kind of a fresh and new character to play with. That was an early idea that then came to be a big influence in the show.

  I started looking at the old show and said, “All right, I’m going to keep everything that works and lose everything that doesn’t.” You know, aircraft carrier in space? Keep it. Civilian fleet? Keep it. Cylon attack? Keep it. The Adama family? Let’s keep it Apollo as Adama’s son. I think that works. That’s a strong, interesting relationship. In the original series there’s Athena, his sister, and as I looked at the original series, she had no real role to play. She just wasn’t a vital character. She was in love with Starbuck and that was about it. So I quickly decided to lose that character from the show, because it didn’t serve a purpose. They did have a Council of Twelve and a civilian president, but in the old show the civilian president was just such a stick figure that was always suggesting the wrong thing to do so that Adama could be smarter. I thought that there was an opportunity to make that a real character so that she could play the tension between the military and the civilian authority. I was fascinated with the idea of what the survivors would try to reconstitute as part of their society.

  I really liked the idea of, once the Cylon attack happens and they were cut loose and there’s only these people that happened to be on these ships, what are the aspects of their culture that they choose to hang on to? Do they try to maintain their democracy? Do they try to remain true to the concepts of their republic? What do they think of civil liberties in this context? Is it all just what Adama says? Is there any power to balance? I was fascinated with all of those elements that are of the series.

  It was just one of those things where you kept finding more and more places to go. And you know, you just took this construct, but then you kept enriching it and finding more levels to it. It was just something so great about the premise, the fundamental jumping-off point of what the show was going to be. I did have an attitude from the beginning that the original Galactica was a missed opportunity. That it had such a dark, challenging idea at its core, but that it was forced to sort of become a popcorn show by ABC in 1978. The pilot is emblematic of everything that was good and bad about it. It had this dark premise, this apocalyptic attack that wipes out human civilization. Oh my God. But they go to a casino planet, you know? Therein lies the conundrum of the original show.

  I felt that filmed science fiction started to become all popcorn. That it was all just silly escapism and that it had no relevance to the world I lived in anymore. And at that moment in time the world I lived in had just been upended, you know? The 9/11 attacks changed everything in so many ways. Suddenly we were in a long war that wasn’t going to end for many, many moons. And we were passing things like the Patriot Act. It was just like, suddenly my world had shifted and I deliberately set out to comment on and talk about that environment in Battlestar Galactica. I was like, “This is going to be the format in which we’re going to discuss those questions.” And I was also pretty adamant that it was not a place we were goin
g to get answers to those questions. I said, “These are really complicated questions and complicated issues, and my job on the show is not to say, ‘Well, here’s the easy answer.’ Captain Kirk is not gonna show up at the end of the episode—or Captain Picard—and say, ‘And here’s the moral of the story…’ It’s always going to be difficult, it’s always going to be ambiguous, and you’re never going to be quite sure if our characters have landed on the right answer or not. But it’s going to be in their struggle to find the right answer that you’re letting the audience see.” I just wanted the audience to be engaged and think about things in the world around them by allowing them to watch a show that took place in another place, another time.

  DAVID WEDDLE

  I saw the 9/11 reflections that made Battlestar Galactica such a very relevant show. But I didn’t, at the beginning, see how much we were going to explore the issues that America was struggling with after 9/11.

  MICHAEL RYMER

  Look at the miniseries. The opening show very much describes where America was pre–September eleventh. We were very lackadaisical about any sense of threat. There was a lot of finger pointing that went on afterward, but the truth is none of us took any of that stuff seriously. We were caught off-guard. That’s the world—they are pulling back on the military. They are closing the Galactica and making it into a museum. It’s very clearly not a relevant force in the world anymore, because the powers that be have decided that there is no threat and the human race had disconnected its computer network so the Cylons couldn’t compromise them. They said life’s too hard now. It’s ridiculous to deprive ourselves of the convenience and comforts of network computers for some paranoid right-wing vestiges from the past. That really struck a chord in terms of the parallel between that and September eleventh.