So Say We All

by Mark A. Altman

  RONALD D. MOORE

  Aaron’s a very instinctual actor. I don’t know if he was formally trained; he just went by instinct on a lot of things. He’d just show up and be like, “Okay, let’s do it.” He just did it from the gut and it gave Tyrol this very grounded, very man-of-the-Earth kind of quality. That was an interesting characteristic of Aaron and of the character. They just were both so blue-collar, middle-class, guy next door thrust into extraordinary circumstance. He never really lost contact with that all the way through. There was always this internal brooding quality to Tyrol that I thought was interesting.

  MARK VERHEIDEN

  You need that grunt-level guy who was making the ship run. He was the guy with the wrench. As the show went on, his character gained way more dimension, which is a credit to Aaron and what he brought to it. And what we realized we could do with him. So Chief Tyrol became a very important part, and the thing about Aaron is that underneath the surface he comes across as sort of the middle-class guy who’s got the wrench, and just wants to keep things going. You get a feeling that he goes back to his bunk at night and pulls out the bourbon and sits there.

  There’s a darkness inside that character that we saw come out. That was the surprise in watching him evolve from being the cheerleader, almost, of the flight deck, “Let’s keep these planes going,” into something much richer and darker as the show evolved. Aaron’s a personal friend, but that doesn’t matter. He just did a great job on the show. I don’t think that character would be as rich as it was without the reality that Aaron gave Tyrol. You feel like he could fix your ship. If he says he can fix it, I believe him. On the other hand, when the dark side came out, you were like, “Wow, there’s an undercurrent of something going on with this character that is really interesting to explore.”

  RONALD D. MOORE

  When he does the show where they have to kill Crashdown, when they’re down on Kobol and there’s all the scenes where Tyrol has to rein himself in and he knows Crashdown’s screwing it up and he knows this guy is not qualified to lead the mission, but he’s got to support him and he’s got to tell the other guys to pipe down and shut up, and it’s all just boiling within him, it’s all fantastic work.

  AARON DOUGLAS

  I viewed Chief Tyrol as a blue-collar, honest guy and sort of the heart of the show. I don’t want to rewrite history and cast my mind back with the information I have now, but he was a military guy. We had Sergeant Ron Blacker, retired U.S. Army Ranger, instruct us, “This is how you stand, this is how you walk, this is how the military does it.” I’m from Canada and my grandfathers fought in the Second World War, but other than that I have zero military history. I’m fascinated by it, I read about it, but I don’t have any understanding of what these guys actually did. But he put us through a boot camp and all of that.

  So with Tyrol I wrapped my head around, “Okay, he’s a military guy and he believes in what he’s doing following orders, but he’s also got to have a little bit of self-assuredness and be a bit of a freethinker.” But like I said, it wasn’t until after season one that they even came to me and said, “Okay, we want to offer you a contract.” I was just a day player up until then. They set up a five-year deal. I realized that, okay, this is a character that is going to stick and they wanted to do something with him. At the beginning, once I got settled into the hangar deck as my domain, even though the officers outranked me they’re now in my sandbox and they can come in and they can swing their dicks around all they want, but at the end of the day I can punch them in the dick and throw them against the wall and tell them to get out. And they go back to their officers’ rooms and play cards and drink and smoke and fight, but I get to say what goes on in my hangar deck, because it’s my playground.

  With the chief, here’s a guy trying to do his best, but life just kept coming up and punching him in the face. The universe was just one thing after another. He just kind of got to a place where it was like, “What the fuck is the point? Why are we doing this?”

  Prior to further revelations that would come later in the series, Sam Anders is a sports legend when it comes to the game pyramid (a card game in the original series, as opposed to triad, which was inadvertently confused in the writing of the new show), and he’s someone enjoying fame with his teammates. Until everything is changed when the Cylons launch their attack and he suddenly finds himself transformed into a freedom fighter. He also ends up getting romantically involved with Kara Thrace, which goes about as smoothly as one would expect. Playing him is California native Michael Trucco, who, beyond scoring some guest-starring roles on TV shows, was also one of the stars of the series Pensacola: Wings of Gold.

  MICHAEL TRUCCO

  Early in the process I initially auditioned for the role of Apollo, and rumor has it that I got very, very not close at all. I had done this show years ago called Pensacola: Wings of Gold, where I played a firefighter. I was like, “I was on a syndicated television show with James Brolin, dammit. I should be on this show.” Apollo, I just wanted that so desperately and I didn’t even get close to it. Coming up a year later, I still remembered this audition for what was supposed to be two episodes. So as you do as an actor, you go in for a guest shot and recurring. I was just lucky to be there, and so I said, “Yup, this is great,” and went in for this character called Anders that was meant to meet the girl, sleep with the girl, fall in love with the girl, and then get kicked in the ass out the door by the girl. That was the arc of the character. It was just sort of a deflection from the Starbuck and Apollo love story. I was going to be this third leg in that triangle for a couple of episodes, but something incredible happened: The majority of the people fucking hated my character. They hated me, and I think that fueled Ron more than anything. He was like, “Oh, you don’t like Anders?”

  RONALD D. MOORE

  Now he’s coming back!

  MICHAEL TRUCCO

  I mean, talk about the chat rooms in the early days of the internet. People are mean, man. Really mean.

  RONALD D. MOORE

  They’re still mean.

  MICHAEL TRUCCO

  They said some horrible things, and that just kind of fueled the storyline. Then it became, “Well, you’re going to come back for another episode.” I said, “Oh, cool, I’m doing three.” They go, “Might be two, could be four, but five at the most. No more than six. Seven. Could be eight episodes. Just the first four episodes of the next season, but that’s it.” Then it just kept growing and growing and suddenly I found myself in this club—in their sandbox—and getting to play with this family. My first contact was Gracie and Tahmoh and Katee, and they treated me like one of their own from day one. That has resonated with me to this day.

  I always looked at Anders as the Tom Brady of the Battlestar game pyramid. So he was a put-upon hero. An unsolicited hero in a way, not meaning to save the day, but this team that I was working with in the mountains was doing high-altitude training and that’s when the bombs started dropping. We’re a bunch of pampered athletes, looking for our team trainers to get us out of there, and now there’s bombs dropping. So now these characters had to shake a whole life of celebrity and privilege and athleticism and all the things that go along with it. It was all gone. From there we had to pick up guns; my character had never shot a gun before. So Anders is wielding these guns and being in a situation where I’m going to put on the strong face; I’m the team leader. You know, all that bullshit talk. But underneath he’s just shaking. It was being out of my element. It wasn’t the military like Starbuck and Helo or Apollo. Those people are trained for that. My guy was an athlete. So I had to evolve into this freedom fighter to fight the very thing that I would eventually be revealed to be.

  13.

  ROOM SERVICE

  “The story of Galactica isn’t that people make bad decisions under pressure, it’s that those mistakes are the exception.”

  By the time he been hired to write and produce Battlestar Galactica, Ron Moore had acquired a great deal of exp
erience, much of it coming from the rich creative environment of Deep Space Nine. Early staff hires for the new show’s writers’ room were David Weddle and Bradley Thompson, the team Moore had worked with on DS9; Toni Graphia, whose credits before then included China Beach, Cop Rock, Chicago Hope, Dr. Quinn, Medicine Woman, Wolf Lake, and, with Moore, Roswell and Carnivàle; and Michael Angeli, who prior to Galactica had worked on Now and Again, Cover Me: Based on the True Life of an FBI Family, The Twilight Zone, Playmakers, Touching Evil, and Medium. Angeli had worked with Moore previously, hiring him for Touching Evil, and worked with David Eick on Cover Me and a pilot they had done with Shaun Cassidy.

  RONALD D. MOORE

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

  What I learned was the fundamentals of trying to have a room that could function as a team, you know? That was really important to us on both Star Trek shows. Especially Deep Space Nine, where it was a tight group of guys, and we were very loyal to each other and to each other’s shows and to the show in general. We hung out a lot, we ate lunch together, we fought and laughed, and cried and did all that stuff in the writers’ room. It was a really formative experience for me as a writer and a producer. As I looked to put a staff together for Galactica, I very much wanted to replicate that experience.

  TONI GRAPHIA

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

  The staff the first year was really only me, David Weddle, Bradley Thompson, and Carla Robinson. And Ron. I liked the way Ron ran the writers’ room. Most of the time when you’re on staff, it’s way more people. Maybe twelve or thirteen people on a drama staff, and you usually have to sit around a big conference table, like a boardroom table. But we had a couple of couches, some club chairs, and a very small whiteboard. It was very intimate, probably the most intimate staff that I had been on. We went to lunch every single day, and we took a walk—we were on the Universal lot and we would take a walk around it every day after lunch. A lot of our best ideas were not even in the writers’ room. They might have come while we were taking a walk. We would still keep talking about the show, because it wasn’t the kind of show you wanted to get away from.

  MICHAEL ANGELI

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

  There was a lot of competition in that writers’ room, because all the writers were really good. I’ve been in writers’ rooms where that’s just not the case. That’s the exception that we had a room full of really talented writers. So there was competition, but it was friendly.

  TONI GRAPHIA

  The show was kind of a mystery in the beginning, but Ron had such a strong vision that we were just there to support that vision. And he gave us a lot of freedom. He believed in our talent, and he had handpicked us, so he trusted us.

  RONALD D. MOORE

  With Galactica, the solution was to go to people that I’d worked with before. People like David Weddle and Bradley Thompson, and then Toni Graphia. I’d never worked with them in the same group, but I’d done two shows with Toni before that and then I’d done Deep Space with David and Brad. So I had a shorthand with all of them and it was easy to kind of picture us all in a room together. I figured we would get along; the staff for season one was very small. But it was a good group and we added people to it as time went on over the life of the series.

  Eventually Toni left. David and Bradley stayed through there the whole run, and they were kind of the foundational writers because of that. I heard when I wasn’t in the room that the writers would be going at each other. Some of them didn’t get along, but generally when I was there everybody played nice and there was definitely a team spirit that we were all in this together, even if there were personality differences between some of them in later years.

  DAVID WEDDLE

  (producer, Battlestar Galactica [2004])

  I’d been a journalist for years and had written a book on director Sam Peckinpah. Ira Behr loved that book and invited me to Paramount to walk through the sets, which was amazing. Brad—I went to film school with him—was a Star Trek fan, and I asked him if he wanted to pitch Deep Space Nine, because Ira had said we could. So we went in and pitched the show. Ira Behr was incredibly generous to us and spent a lot of time with us, and we sold a story. Then the next year they gave us a teleplay, which they loved, and then we sold another teleplay and they put us on staff. So it was very happenstance that I ended up a science fiction writer, but I have grown to love the genre since I’ve been in it. I love Westerns. In fact, in the Battlestar room I was constantly referring to Westerns, because I think that there are tremendous parallels. Westerns are existential dramas, because people are moving across an uncharted territory, a frontier. Roddenberry made these analogies with Star Trek and there’s no civilization in place to say, “Here is the moral structure. Here are the laws that govern your behavior and the decisions you make.” Instead, you’re traveling through an existential void and you have to make choices for yourself about what is the moral choice? What is the ethical choice? I was constantly referring to Westerns for archetypal patterns and structures/templates for telling stories.

  BRADLEY THOMPSON

  (producer, Battlestar Galactica [2004])

  The influence of real-world military on this show was tremendous. Both David and I studied history; both of us came from families that have veterans in them. I’ve always been interested in it. Actually at the time I had started teaching military tactics. I learned to fly. I was a combat shooting instructor back then. Not for the military, but for a civilian organization. We wanted the guys to behave properly, getting them to behave in a real way. To not have people swinging gun muzzles around. Give the fighter pilots an actual language of their own, which they got to use. For example, a lot of the stuff with the brevity of language our fighter pilots use is actually Air Force brevity language.

  RONALD D. MOORE

  I’d done a science fiction series with them before. They were conversive in the genre itself. I also knew that they were both interested in history, and that Brad in particular had a lot of military knowledge and a lot of contacts. He was very well versed in a lot of military aspects of things for the show. I just knew what it was like to sit in a room with them and pitch ideas, and they were both willing to mix it up and try different things. I like a very improvisational room where everyone’s just kind of pitching some stuff out. The best story, theoretically, should win, and I knew that they could thrive in that kind of environment and that their first drafts would be solid first drafts. As the show went on, I wanted to get them more in touch with the production side of things so they could be producers and go up to Vancouver and produce their individual episodes. I wanted them to step up and sort of experience responsibilities.

  DAVID WEDDLE

  With Ron there’s a quality of trying to harvest the mind of the room, and getting the group to focus on a problem and solve it together. If you have a really good writers’ room, it elevates everything beyond something even Ron Moore could come up with. Ron wanted you to have ideas of your own; he wanted to innovate. With drafts of scripts, he wanted you to surprise him. And that’s quite unusual. There are a lot of showrunners where you do something that wasn’t in the story break at all, and he might say, “I don’t want to go in that direction,” but he’d never criticize you and say, “What the fuck?” In fact, a lot of times he would say, “That’s fantastic,” and it was something that wasn’t even in the break at all and it could be a radical difference and Ron would embrace it. In the case of some of the writers he let go, he said, “You never surprised me. It wasn’t that you were a bad writer, but you never surprised me.”

  That’s a key difference with Ron. I’ve never known anybody quite that adventurous and encouraging. The writing experience became a journey of discovery, and instead of having everything mapped out, he knew what the big milestone episodes were. He knew how he wanted the series to end, more or less right from the beginning. He knew in the middle of the s
eries he wanted to find Earth and it was a smoking radiating ember; a dead civilization, but he didn’t know how the journey went. He knew from the beginning that he wanted Starbuck to be a kind of guardian angel who has more to her than she even realizes, but he didn’t have a concept of how that would play out. We discovered that all together.

  CARLA ROBINSON

  (story editor, Battlestar Galactica [2004])

  All the writers had a voice in the room. Even if they were bad ideas, you were allowed to share them and every idea was considered, explored. Sometimes, sure, they would go down some divergent path and sometimes we’d follow along to see how far we could go with it and then realize, in some cases, I just remember blurting out, “I hate the way this is going.” Somebody else spoke up: “I don’t like it either.” And I think it was Ron’s idea: “What if we make Lee Adama a Cylon?” “No!” We were all free to do that, which is something I loved about being there. We all had the same goal in mind, to make a good show and service the characters living in their world. And every writer who worked on this show had a real respect for the fans. We knew our fans.

  MICHAEL ANGELI

  We were given so much latitude with what we wanted to break. Things that just out of nowhere we decided we wanted to do, and this is without Ron. Ron would come, and we’d pitch it to him. You know, “We want to do this,” and he gave us so much freedom. He had such a great bedside manner, too. If he didn’t like something, he had a really droll way saying, “I don’t know about that…,” and you’d just get it right away.

  RONALD D. MOORE