So Say We All

by Mark A. Altman

  Toni, just a great, pure writer. She’s always impressive, she always delivers really great stuff on the page from the first draft on. She’s really capable of throwing it out and doing a page-one rewrite if you ask her to. I just kind of knew that you needed that kind of person on staff that, no matter what, was going to give me a great draft. She has a good sense of character and a good sense of story. I’d worked with her on Roswell and Carnivàle before that, so she and I had a shorthand. I knew her strengths. She was a little overwhelmed by the science fiction aspect of the show and it took a while for her to get to a place where she was comfortable writing it. At first she kept thinking of it as such a different genre; that she had to be a “sci-fi writer.” I kept trying to emphasize to her, don’t worry about that, just write it as a drama. And then you also had the military aspect on top of that, which she was also not as familiar with. I think she had to work hard to catch up to sort of feel comfortable in what she was doing.

  Michael Angeli is a fascinating guy. There was an interim period when I was at Universal before they picked up Galactica to series. I was on a deal and just waiting, and they said, “In the meantime, we want you to go help out on this show called Touching Evil,” which was a U.S. version of a U.K. show. Michael was running the writers’ room and I came over to do a script. That was the context in which I met him. He was funny, cynical, really well read. He used to be a journalist. But he has great chops in terms of writing on the page. There’s an intensity to it and a beauty to the language. He’s a writer’s writer, like Michael Taylor, who came aboard later. You read their stuff and you’re really drawn into it … sometimes to the detriment of the show, because you’re reading it and you’re like, “Wow, this is unbelievable.” Then you have to step back and go, “Wait a minute. Does this work as an hour of television?” It’s that kind of thing. But Michael is fun in a room. He’s got a vivid imagination. He’s not afraid to pitch out crazy ideas, things that are really transgressive or challenging to the show. So he became one of the members of the staff.

  MICHAEL ANGELI

  There was some diversity in that room. Like Bradley was kind of a super conservative gun freak and heavily into the military, which is strange because he was a rocker. In fact, we play in a band together; an incredible bass player. Then there were people like me—we were, like, crazy, radical liberals. Then there were people who had families. It was just a really eclectic mix of people, and somehow it worked out. It was a perfect storm. In the time that I was there, I think two people were fired, or their contracts weren’t renewed. I’ve never been on a show either prior or after where there just wasn’t a huge turnover of writers. It really was an unusual place.

  RONALD D. MOORE

  Carla Robinson was an intern on the show. She was wild and funny and you loved having her in the room. You kind of got the sense that she was out of her mind, but that’s why we kept her. She would just have tales … she was bawdy, she would tell the dirtiest jokes but with the sweetest voice you can imagine. You couldn’t believe some of the stuff that would come out of her mouth. She would start telling you the conversation she had with some one-legged prostitute that was outside her apartment last night. Like, “What?” She was a character and kept the room lively.

  One of the paramount rules of the writers’ room was to avoid the technobabble that had somehow become a substitute for genuine science fiction on other genre shows.

  RONALD D. MOORE

  Technobabble was such a bane of my existence in Trek. I mean, it got so crazy in Next Generation. Just pages of it. I’m writing dialogue and it has the word “tech” all over the place. You know, “Mr. La Forge, can we tech the tech main engines?” And Geordi would say, “Well, Captain, if we tech the tech then the tech will overload and blow the ship apart.” Data would say, “Captain, there is a theory that if you tech the tech with an alternative tech, using the tech from the tech, you might be able to actually make it work.” “Will it work, Mr. Data?” “It’s just a theory, Captain, but I’m willing to try it.” It was just such bullshit. At the time, fans complained. The actors definitely complained. But we were kind of straitjacketed in certain aspects, because Rick Berman really thought that that’s what gave authenticity to it, and that’s what gave it credibility as science fiction—as a science fiction piece as opposed to the fantasy. It just became a crutch on the show, where you’re going to tech your way out of all kinds of bizarre situations. You’re sitting in the writers’ rooms having these long, tedious arguments about what the warp drive can and cannot do, and I just didn’t want to do that anymore. I was sick of it.

  One element that he wanted to embrace was the military aspect, raising the question of whether or not the show was based on true military history.

  RONALD D. MOORE

  Actually, a lot of it was drawn from my memory of military history. I was someone who was always interested in military history, and especially U.S. naval history. I had read a lot of accounts of the Carrier War in the Pacific in World War II. And I’d read accounts of Vietnam, and I was always fascinated with naval aviation and aircraft carriers and the military and marines. So I knew a lot of that stuff. When I remembered a story, I could go back and get more of the details either through books I already owned or could get. A lot of the way the Galactica operates was based on my knowledge of aircraft carriers and how they worked, especially in the Second World War. From the way the squadrons were organized and the relationship of the captain—the CAG, the commander … you know, how they launched attacks with fighters protecting bombers and torpedo bombers. All that kind of stuff was just happening. I knew it pretty well and could kind of inject it into all the different stories.

  DAVID WEDDLE

  We watched some documentaries on aircraft carriers and their crews, and Ron talked about how he really wanted the show to be analogous to our own armed forces today, and for the ships to have lots of real-world problems. There were not going to be any replicators that could make food, like on Star Trek. There weren’t going to be dilithium crystals so that they wouldn’t have to worry about fuel. So right away they’re running out of shit and stuff breaks down.

  TONI GRAPHIA

  (producer, Battlestar Galactica [2004])

  Ron would always say, “To me, a great episode is … what if they run out of paper? What would you do if you ran out, because there’s a finite amount of paper on the ship and you can’t produce more.” We never wrote what we called the paper episode, but we did write an episode about running out of water and them having to go to the water planet. But Ron liked focusing on the small things, even though those small things became a big crisis because of the situation they were in. He was interested in the minutiae of life on that battleship.

  MICHAEL ANGELI

  As you know, the military is a very organized system. It felt at one point that the show became more and more left-leaning and rule-breaking, with mutinies and so on. In the beginning, it was really buttoned-up from a military aspect. It made me a little edgy. I know where the influences came from; there were probably two of them. One of them was Ron himself, who was in ROTC, an experience that stayed with him. He was able to capture some of the verisimilitude of the military. And, like I said, Bradley was just a total theater-of-war and weapons freak. He knew every type of weapon imaginable. He knew military history backward and forward. We used to say that he could disassemble a German tank and put it back together again.

  RONALD D. MOORE

  In the second season we did an episode called “Fragged,” about these guys stranded on a planet with Baltar and then a character named Crashdown being the de facto leader and trying to act like a leader. There was something fascinating about taking a character like Crashdown, who was really fun and had been really great in the show—a beloved character there for humor and some fun beats—and suddenly have him unable to step up and to command. The traditional way you do this story is that guy, the funny guy, is suddenly in command of the squad behind enemy lines. At firs
t he stumbles; then the squad members lose faith in him and then he remembers some sage advice from Adama or something, and he steps up and by the end of the show everyone rallies around him and he goes back to the Galactica a hero.

  We didn’t want to do that. I wanted to go against that normal narrative and go with the idea that he would be unable to lead this group. He really wasn’t that guy. So, yes, he’d gone through officer training and he had all the basic infantry tactics, but then suddenly behind enemy lines you have to rally these people to you and you have to carry out this plan that he just wasn’t up to. And that ultimately he would have to get to the place where they would have to kill him. We were drawing on stories from the Vietnam War. You know, the term “fragged” is a war hero’s term for when the guys decided to put out an officer that was putting them in danger. They would throw a grenade into his tent, or do something like that. They would frag it. So that’s where the title came from.

  MICHAEL ANGELI

  Tigh, of course, in a lot of ways was the face of the military. He was like MacArthur in a lot of ways, and some of the audience loved him and some of the audience hated him, so it worked both ways, but you’d watch it anyway. As the show became sort of more egalitarian as far as the military goes, I really began to enjoy it. In fact, the last season with the mutiny was my favorite.

  RONALD D. MOORE

  In “Resurrection Ship” there’s the scene where Lee is floating in space as the war plays out. One of the inspirations for that was a real incident that happened during the Battle of Midway in the Pacific, where a U.S. Navy pilot was shot down early in the Battle of Midway. He survived, got a life raft, and literally was in the water and watched the American dive bombers destroy the four Japanese carriers and turn the course of the Pacific War. He was an eyewitness there, bobbing in the water and watching it happen around him.

  TONI GRAPHIA

  History itself was a big influence. In season two I wrote “Resistance,” where Sharon Boomer has recently been found to be a Cylon. When we broke the story in the writers’ room, the ending was supposed to be that she was being taken out of her cell to be transferred to another ship to do some testing on her, because she’s a Cylon that looks like a human. The end was just that she’s taken in handcuffs and kind of walked through this gauntlet of everyone. But when I was writing it, somehow that ending wasn’t satisfying. Now, this is something that writers rarely do, because you have to follow the outline that has already been approved by the powers that be, but I knew that Ron was a history buff like me. We were both very obsessed with the Kennedy assassination, and the conspiracy theories around it. It occurred to me that while you would never kill on TV a main character without checking with your boss or the network, I thought the Cylons were a unique situation, because if we kill one of them, we can have her again, just in a different body.

  So I made the decision when I was writing the script and took direct inspiration from Jack Ruby shooting Lee Harvey Oswald. And then I said that everybody on the ship hates Boomer right now and is really angry at her. But I’ll take the lowliest person, who was the character of Cally. And even though she seems like a really meek and mild, soft-spoken, timid, young kind of not-very-high-up person, have it be her, that she’s so angry over what’s happened, and I made it a Jack Ruby situation, where she comes out of the crowd and unexpectedly shoots Boomer and kills her. I was nervous doing it, but thankfully Ron loved it.

  Both Moore and David Eick were determined that the directorial style of Michael Rymer, which had been such a standout on the miniseries, would carry over to the weekly show as well.

  DAVID EICK

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

  During the miniseries, I remember talking to and debating with Rymer a lot about trying to figure out how to describe the show to directors. The director’s care package that they would get before they get on the plane should consist of DVDs for 2001, Blade Runner, and Black Hawk Down. Those three films, you put them in a blender and that was Battlestar Galactica. We took forever to settle on that, but by the time we did have a series and had directors coming in, I could sit down with every one of them and explain to them exactly how each of those films applied to what we were trying to do. I think a lot of them found that really helpful.

  MICHAEL RYMER

  (director, “Daybreak”)

  As much as there were science fiction references I turned to, there were war movie references, because it struck me that this was as much a war movie as anything else. Black Hawk Down was a film that I had greatly admired as well as Band of Brothers, which are basically very docu-style treatments of recent war events. So I looked very carefully at the way those things were shot, and I always try to approach the visceral quality that those films have, but those films have an extremely high body-part count, and planes being shot out of space is a little more remote. But we tried very hard to show that when someone dies, there are consequences. That there is a body in there that is destroyed. Not to be gratuitous, but to make it feel real and not like a video game where the violence has no consequence.

  Like I said, a lot of those things were shot docu-style, long lens, there is some grain in there, no one is worried about fill light, they don’t mind if something is silhouetted; war correspondents don’t worry about good lighting. Hopefully that’s how the show feels. One of the things that I was working very hard to do was show that outer space is an extremely hostile environment. You are not meant to be out there. There are all these people floating around in these tin cans being bombarded by radiation and living in air-conditioning with no windows and no light for years. We wanted to try and get a sense of that. The thing that I admire now has mostly to do with things that ground us, connect us with our world, whether it’s relationships, politics on the ship, or the fact that we see Eddie Olmos with a mouthful of noodles when he’s interrupted. Just little details. We even showed a scene, which didn’t make it into the cut, of him on the can.

  That’s one of the other things that I love about it: Half the bad things that happen to the human beings are self-inflicted. They certainly in the larger sense created the Cylons, but there is a sequence where Adama is nearly killed in an accident as they are loading ammunition. We spent a lot of time researching the reality of what it’s like to live on an aircraft carrier, and these are extremely dangerous places to be. People as we were shooting were dying on routine exercises, and that’s true in this story. There is a sequence which he had to cut for time which was where two characters are out putting this new window into the landing bay, because it’s being made into a museum. Bitching and moaning about how battlestars don’t have windows, and their welder gets loose and slices open his space suit and he decompresses, dying in a gruesome way. That was in the opening act and it was saying that bad shit happens in this place, because it’s a hostile, scary place to live—it’s like living on an oil rig somewhere.

  DAVID EICK

  In television at the time—it was starting to change—directors were not very respected. There were some, obviously. There were the handful that you could get a pilot made if you got them, but other than that, you didn’t really build your pilot sale around a director or the director that was going to be there when you got the series made. Now that’s become very important. That’s become almost a critical piece of any package; if you really want to go in and create an auction situation on a pilot, you need that. However, I cut my teeth working for a film director—Sam Raimi. I always liked directors and like their input. Even on TV things when it wasn’t popular to do, I liked them and liked talking to them and including them. I found that they worked harder, because they were pleased to finally have the opportunity to do something other than direct traffic.

  MICHAEL NANKIN

  (director, “Maelstrom”)

  Ron Moore was a man who hired people who he respected and let them do their jobs, which is rare. Battlestar afforded me the ability to work in film the way I thought it should be, no
one looking over my shoulder. I had only collaborators. Ron Moore’s marching orders to the director were, “Go make a movie.” We would talk a lot about the script in prep, and then he would just wait for the dailies. I had a lot of collaboration with the writers. I did a lot of David Weddle and Bradley Thompson scripts, and we bonded instantly and had pretty much a love affair on set.

  DAVID EICK

  That was one of the things that Ron shared. It was unusual, because Ron came from more traditional television, where directors get beaten up a lot. He shared that sense of, yeah, the guy’s smart, and if he’s a real filmmaker and he’s not just a traffic cop, but he has stuff to offer, we weren’t precious. There are guys in my job, in Ron’s job, who will tell the directors what lens to use, whether to be on a dolly or sticks or Steadicam. We didn’t do any of that, not just with Rymer but with any of the directors. There were ranges and boundaries and parameters that I would sit down with them and explain, but we would invite input. Rymer was the first to show us that that could work. You didn’t have to have it all figured out like some dictator. Before you got there on the set, you could say, “Hey, what do you think we should do here,” and really listen and get some great ideas that way.

  RONALD D. MOORE

  In some ways, the beginning of the series were the most fun days, because I had a strong sense of where the show should go that first season. I knew we were moving inextricably toward this place where Laura is going to be thrown in jail and Adama is going to stage a military coup by the end of season one. That was a pretty solid direction and everybody was into it. I’d written that whole show bible, so there was a lot of depth of stuff for the writers to dig into with everybody’s backstory—who Adama was, who Kara Thrace was. You had a lot of great characters to work with, and at the outset we told ourselves that there were going to be different stories. It was going to be that we’d go to the hospital ship, and we’d go to the prison ship, then we’d go to the ship where there’s a serial killer on the loose. We’d go to the ship with the murder mystery. There was just this idea that the fleet was going to generate all these episodic stories, and then within that we were going to tell the longer arc, and then the shorter character arcs.