So Say We All

by Mark A. Altman

  DAVID EICK

  While we were waiting, I needed a job. I got hired to be the senior vice president of the cable division of Universal TV, which means that I was suddenly reporting to Michael Jackson [the British studio executive, not the musician] and I’m able to work on the cut of the miniseries in my spare time on nights and weekends, and quietly whisper into the ears of the people who were going to be picking it up to actually pick it up with an understanding from my immediate supervisor that if I got it picked up, I could resign and go make the one-hour series.

  RONALD D. MOORE

  I can tell you that while I was at Universal waiting for them to pick up the show, for a brief period of time I went off and did a couple of scripts for a show called Touching Evil, which is a cop procedural based on a British show. So, suddenly I’m doing cop scripts while I’m waiting for Galactica to get picked up. It was just Maril [Davis, Ron’s former assistant who now runs his company] and I in an office at Universal waiting for a word, and meanwhile we were farming me out to other shows. And David Eick’s working on the inside to kind of get the show made.

  There was a moment when it did not look like Sci-Fi was going to pick it up, and UPN got involved. UPN was saying they were looking for a science fiction series. They’d seen the Galactica miniseries and were possibly interested in picking it up to do a series. This is like Christmas. David calls me and he says, “Okay, there’s a shot at UPN, but if UPN is going to pick it up, they need to have the first script in January. Could you just write the first script of the series by then?” I was like, “Uh, okay, if I have to, I will.” But at that point there was no outline. There were no stories. There was nothing. I had written the bible for the show and I had also written loglines for potential episodes. Just literally one-liners of things that could’ve happened. In one, there’s a serial killer loose in the fleet, and Apollo and Starbuck have to find out who it is. There’s an uprising on a prisoner ship that they have to put down. The fleet has to keep jumping every thirty-three minutes, because the Cylons keep chasing them.

  I looked at the loglines and I thought, “All right, I’ll do the ‘33’ idea, because that’s just kind of intriguing.” And it’s the only time in my career I’ve ever sat down with a blank page and just started writing. I didn’t break the story. I didn’t write an outline. I didn’t get it approved by anybody. I sat down and started writing from “fade in,” and I just wrote the script. And it was an amazing, wonderful experience I’ve never been able to replicate. Where I just wrote one scene to the next, to the next, to the next, just in the spur of the moment, and wrote “33.” And I loved the episode. I loved it in its first draft. David was blown away and they were all convinced. Sci-Fi liked it so much that then it kind of tilted the balance to pick up the show instead of letting it go to UPN. It was amazing. Suddenly we had the first episode. No one had even approved it; I just started to live with it.

  DAVID EICK

  With Battlestar, when we had Ron’s first script, “33,” I just knew at that point we were going to have to try to fuck this up. If Ron can dash off with relative speed our first episode, and it’s this fucking awesome, there’s no way this thing’s not going to work. But, again, at this point I’m working for the studio. I report to David Kissinger, and Michael Jackson is our boss. I have a lot of face time with Michael Jackson, and after seeing the miniseries’ ratings, he says, “Pass.” Kissinger’s telling me, “Dude, you’ve got to let it go. He doesn’t think the ratings were good enough. He thinks the show’s budget looks too expensive.” Eventually he says, “Okay, if you recast the whole thing, I’ll let you go make a series.”

  RONALD D. MOORE

  It did come to a point where we had a meeting with Mark Stern at Sci-Fi. He had just kind of taken over the network at that point and they were saying, “You know, we are seriously considering picking up Galactica to series, but we probably want to recast the show with cheaper actors.” We were like, “No,” and they said, “What do you mean, no?” “If you don’t want to use the original cast, then we don’t want to do it.” And they were all kind of, like, “What are you talking about? Are you crazy? Come on, you don’t really mean that.” We responded, “No, we really mean it. The cast is a huge part of the show. Letting go of Eddie and Mary for God’s sake, not to mention anybody else, and doing a cheaper version of Galactica with subpar actors is out of the question. This is the cast.” And they really got kind of upset and were annoyed, but we just held our ground, because there was no way we were doing it without them.

  DAVID EICK

  First of all, the idea of recasting is asinine. Second of all, half our cast was already Vancouver dinner theater players who’ve never worked before. How much cheaper do you think it’s going to get?

  TODD SHARP

  The way it works is that the network pays the license fee and the studio finances the rest. And, even though we got adequate funding for the miniseries, the network was used to paying a much lower license fee and doing shows that were in the million-dollars-an-episode range. It’s unfathomable now that TV costs anywhere between three and six million an episode. That was a time when Sci-Fi was making ambitious genre television for a million, two million, or three million an episode. And that’s what they wanted to make Battlestar for. I’ll take credit as the guy who would say to the network, “If you want to make this show, it’s going to cost you X dollars. If you’re going to spend less than X dollars, don’t make the show, because we cannot do it justice. We cannot deliver every week what people will expect based on the miniseries.” They had already aired the miniseries before they made a decision to go to series. God bless ’em, the corporate gods went out and found a financial partner.

  DAVID EICK

  When it looked grim and like we were just not going to get there, this woman, Belinda Menendez, the head of the international TV group, said to me, “Hey, I can make a deal with Sky [TV in Britain] where they’ll pay four hundred thousand dollars an episode in exchange for world premiere rights on Sky in the U.K.” I was like, “Well, will Jackson allow the studio to have a worldwide premiere in another country?” She said, “Well, he’s leaving anyway and it’s the U.K. where he’s from.” The whole scheme completely worked.

  RONALD D. MOORE

  Premiering in the U.K. market before it premiered in the U.S. market was really unusual. But they were able to put up a big chunk of money, and it bridged the gap between what Universal and Sci-Fi were willing to pay and what the show would actually cost. When they stepped up and made that offer, Universal jumped. David made the deal happen and they got it. So as a result, the actual premiere of Galactica was in the U.K. by several months. So back then you started seeing the reviews from people who had seen it in the U.K. first, and there were certain piracy issues with people pirating the show. It was the beginning of all that stuff on the internet.

  DAVID EICK

  Once the deal was made and Jackson said, “Okay, you’ve got a show,” I promptly sat down with David Kissinger for lunch and resigned. He thought I was nuts, because I had this brand-new deal as a senior VP at a studio. He was like, “You’re going to walk away from stock options and a car allowance and free insurance and all that for thirteen producing fees?” I was like, “Yup.” By that point we had Ron’s script for “33,” and I just knew there was no way I was not going to at least give this thing a fucking try. It worked. They picked up the show and I quit. Oh, and one footnote: By that point in time, Ron had left Carnivàle, and suddenly the only way we could make Battlestar is if we have an overall deal with Ron Moore. I made him an overall deal to come back to the studio so that I could quit and join him in working on Battlestar. That thing was so incestuous.

  RONALD D. MOORE

  I look back at that miniseries, and I’m really impressed by what we did and the boldness of what that vision is. It’s just still kind of mind-blowing what we got away with. You know, everything from the building of the characters and the world before the big attack happens. The s
tyle of how we shot it, the quality of the acting. It’s just all of those pieces are just phenomenal. The music and the set design and the visual effects … I remember watching it again and going, “Wow! We just captured lightning in a bottle from the very beginning,” and how just fully formed an idea this was. Looking back on it, I just remember that spirit of, “We’re all in this together.” That was always on the show, and always on the set, where we just were such believers.

  SECTAR THREE

  BATTLESTAR GALACTICA (2004)

  THE SYFY YEARS

  11.

  THERE ARE STILL THOSE WHO BELIEVE

  “Let’s get this genocide started.”

  Having achieved what seemed to be the impossible—taking a short-lived sci-fi show from the 1970s, with all that that era for the genre in television suggests, and reimagining it in such a way to make it one of the medium’s true standouts by which all others would be measured—the next challenge was to figure out how to do so again, week after week, year after year.

  RICHARD HUDOLIN

  (production designer, Battlestar Galactica [2004])

  While I was designing the miniseries, I said to Ron and David, “Look, are we going to series or is this just a one-shot deal? ’Cause I’ll design and build it differently if it’s for a series.” “Oh, it’s definitely a one-shot. No problems there. One show.” And then they came to me, really late on, to make the changes in the drawings and said, “What do you think about storing some of this stuff?” So we stored a lot of it. We didn’t store the monitors and all that kind of stuff, but the bulky pieces, complicated building pieces, we stored. And that’s a couple of warehouses. Anyway, we finish the miniseries and it did very well, apparently, and I get a call later on, I don’t know how many months later, “What do you think about doing a series?” Naturally they called me, because I was the guy who took it all apart, so I would know how it went together. They said, “Give us an estimate of what it’ll take and we’re gonna do a series.” I said, “How many are you doing?” “Thirteen.” Well, holy Christ! So off we went and set it up again.

  We had to get all new monitors, and this time it was going for a longer run, so you’re buying stuff, right? You’re not just renting all of it. The thing is, we shot the mini on thirty-five-millimeter, so we fired up all the monitors in the set. And it looked like a jukebox, because digital in those days wasn’t as good as it is today. So I had to have our painters come in and wax down all the monitors, to crush the colors. It took three or four months to put it back together, and it was a lot of money. And then we continued on. And the greatest thing was having the run that we did. It was a dream job, because everybody was smart. Everybody was talented. They parked their egos somewhere else and had a great time. The writing was fantastic, I have to say.

  RONALD D. MOORE

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

  Probably the difference in the series, when I got involved as the showrunner, is that now I’m the writer. And the writer’s involved more day-to-day on an ongoing series than the mini. On the mini, it’s more like, “Here’s a big movie,” so you can hand it over to the producer and director, because it’s a one-off story that’s taking place from here to there. When you get into the series, now you’re dealing with not just the needs of this particular episode, but the needs of all of the episodes. What was before, what was after it, and how it’s all going to interact in this sort of complicated story.

  David didn’t really sit in the writers’ room. That wasn’t his thing and he didn’t really like it. He sat in maybe one or two sessions. At that point in time, in season one, he concentrated more on the actual production up in Vancouver. I was down in L.A. more in the writers’ room.

  The truth is, in season one David and I had to kind of figure out how we dealt with each other. There were definitely times when we were butting up against one another just in terms of who got final say on what. Sometimes his story sense didn’t match up with my story sense. Sometimes my sense of editorial and how to cut a show didn’t match up with his. We definitely had some healthy debates, and sometimes just flat-out arguments and yelling matches with each other. But we both loved the show and we both liked each other and respected each other, so we never got to a point where there was an open break. But we definitely went at it to sort of creatively argue through the show.

  DAVID EICK

  There were definitely hills and valleys, you know? As the show wore on, like any partnership, our differences, which in the early days were ninety-nine percent of the time valuable, risked having more liability to them, because you get deeper into a show. Your agenda becomes narrowed by definition. Just because you know who your fans are, the pressure to be attracting new viewers goes down, the network settles into what kind of audience share they can expect from the numbers that you’re pulling, and it’s easier to just sort of focus on the folks who are already watching your show. And that certainly created tension, to the extent of, “How narrow do you go?” That is always going to be a point of conflict between creative people.

  RONALD D. MOORE

  David has an encyclopedic knowledge of film. He can quote specific shots and specific cinematographers from many motion pictures. He brings a tremendous visual sense of how film is put together, and telling stories visually. I had very much a writer’s background and so the two of us could marry those two perspectives really well. But other times there just was a disconnect and we’d have to kind of wrestle it through.

  DAVID EICK

  That’s not to say it ever got to Dean Martin/Jerry Lewis levels, but certainly there were points at which Ron and I stopped working as closely. But we started to really cook deep into the first season. I would say the last two episodes of season one were probably my and Ron’s deepest creative collaboration on a specific piece of material. Episodes twelve and thirteen are my favorite episodes emotionally, because I feel they represent maybe the best of what Moore-plus-Eick meant, if that makes any sense. Beyond that, it always felt like it was a partnership, but if I had to hang a couple of episodes on my tombstone, it would probably be those two.

  RONALD D. MOORE

  I know in season one there were definitely times when the production would wonder which of us to listen to, because maybe he was telling them one thing and I was telling them something else. We’d have to circle back to each other and argue it out and move it forward. It got better. David and I’d never worked together on a show before that. He was a network exec when I met him. Then he moved over to the studio, then he became a producer. He produced the Battlestar miniseries. But then he left to go be a studio exec again, and then he came back to the production. So I was very used to running my own shop at that point, from Roswell to Carnivàle, and having to sort of figure out how David was going to fit into that and how he and I were going to work it out as partners when we’d never really talked about it. We never really had the discussion ahead of time. I think we just sort of walked into it and then went, “Wait a minute, what do you mean you’re saying no? You don’t get to say no.” We both kind of say that. “What are you talking about? I’m the one who gets to say no.” So it just took us a while to work it through. Pretty much by the end of the first season we knew what we were doing, so we felt we were both fantastically defensive of the show, and it was two of us against the world. It’s like there was no daylight between us—fighting with the studio and the network. By the time we had finished that first order of thirteen, we were just in a better place and whatever flare-ups there were afterward were relatively minor.

  DAVID EICK

  There were points where I think both of us agreed to disagree. When you got to season four, most of the time it was my acquiescing not nearly as much as Ron did. I think I acquiesced because his vision was stronger at that point. He really had a strong sense of how he wanted to end it. He had reasons for it. It wasn’t arbitrary at all. I didn’t agree with all of them, but in a situation like that you have to abdicate to the one
of you who’s got the vision. So while I didn’t agree with everything, I wanted to support the vision and did. It wasn’t difficult at all. In the final analysis, I don’t regret it at all. But season four was different from the first three seasons, make no mistake. That was definitely a time when I got shifted into a more supportive role. I stand behind everything that was done. Things just got tense in our interpersonal exchanges. But only because we’re both passionate and we both care.

  RONALD D. MOORE

  At one point David said he wanted to write. I said, “Okay, but you’re going to have to write it,” helping him through it. Helping him on the first draft. I rewrote him, which is never a fun moment for any writer, but he took it like a man. And it was fine. And then he wrote another one. And then he’s taken that writing and gone off and become a showrunner. He writes and produces things in his own right now. Every once in a while we still get together for dinner, to chat, or we’ll send each other goofy emails or whatever. But we were able to laugh about it. That’s why they did the cartoon thing at the end of each episode, each of us arguing with each other, killing each other over and over and over again. That was our inside joke, but we loved each other and it was fine. It was like two brothers just going at it. By the way, those endings were David’s idea. He had a friend in Arizona who did animation and things like that, and David had the idea to do these little gags at the end of the show. My participation in it was basically they took my picture and Photoshopped it. I never saw it until they were on air. I just always thought they were hysterical.