So Say We All

by Mark A. Altman

  AARON DOUGLAS

  It’s the reflection of the drama of humanity and that we are not white hats and we are not black hats. We’re gray hats. You can believe in your heart and in your mind that you are a certain way, but when presented with information that fundamentally changes your worldview, your view of self will change. You really have to sit back and go, “Oh, shit, what am I? What do I mean? How am I going to go moving forward?” When you watch a show like Battlestar, you see the characters going through these crazy shifts, because they’re presented with new information that totally offends their view of the world, themselves, the people that they love, the people beside them.

  You live beside people all of your lives and the people beside you just happen to be Jewish or Muslim or whatever. Then 9/11 happens and you’re looking at your neighbors going, “Wow, so what are you up to?” The most nonsensical, idiotic thought you can have, but people’s natural reaction is to have that, because all the news stations are going, “Oh, look at what happened. These terrorists are bad people.” The people who live beside you are the same damn people they’ve always been, and they’re lovely. It’s not their fault there’s a couple of assholes out there. Battlestar held that mirror up. I always come back to Ron Moore’s desire to hold a mirror up to the world and say, “Now what do you think?” That’s the power of the show.

  JAMIE BAMBER

  Battlestar Galactica is good storytelling. It’s all the elements of what it is to be a human being, distilled down to their rawest and most essential forms. You take a human race and human history and you distill it down to fifty thousand people, the size of a small village. The kind of community where you can know every significant member of your community, personally, and you stick it out in space, which is the ultimate realm of romance. Looking for home, there are so many stories from biblical to before that, to the modern story of America and the settling of the West and people stretching out into unknown territories, against unknown threats, fleeing something from their past to find the future that will offer them the chance to express and be themselves. It’s elemental storytelling, yet told with such specificity and boldness and prescience. The fact that the story was really a vehicle for Ron to talk about the world as it was, in a very specific time, ironically is what makes it timeless. In removing it from the actual context and yet having it be a specific reaction to 9/11, to our invasion of Iraq, to our colonizing of a foreign country and the seeds of discord that we unwittingly sowed in doing that, that’s a very specific thing that he was writing about. But he’s done it in this beautiful, universal way.

  MICHAEL NANKIN

  (director, “The Ties That Bind”)

  One of the best working experience I’ve ever had. We were making a show, but we were also building a family. That doesn’t happen very often. People in television live a gypsy life, especially in the last ten years, when production has gone so international. But as dark and as tough as the show was, we were all fans of the show we were making. The other thing is we were allowed to go crazy. It’s a show about people pushed to the edge. There’s people getting in their way. A lot of people are being pushed to behave in ways that normal people don’t get a chance to. It’s exciting and compelling to watch these episodes and think, “What would I do in that situation? Is there a point that I could be pushed to poison my wife, or betray my colleagues, or drop a bomb on someone?” It’s delicious to imagine yourself in these situations, and it’s kind of safe, because it’s a sci-fi show.

  JAMES CALLIS

  It’s about trying to make great television, and telling a story. An allegorical story, a story for our time, in a very deft way. One of the things that possibly we did accomplish as a team is that we made people care, and I think care deeply, for fictional characters in a way that you possibly hadn’t done in the same way before. And so they became important to you. They were certainly very important to us, but you had to believe them, and you had to believe the situation that they were in, so that the whole edifice, the whole thing that’s created and that you watch, is just a great example of great television. A great television show. It’s almost kind of a secret alternative history, because it is the world reflected through a different glass.

  ANGELA MANCUSO

  (former president, Universal Cable Entertainment)

  In any of the best television, you relate strongly to one or more of the characters. And I think the vulnerability of those people in that situation connects to everybody in a way that they feel about the world. That we’re vulnerable, we don’t know what’s going to happen, we don’t know who’s coming for us. And the idea that you have to circle the wagons in order to survive—that’s a very powerful idea. I also think we were very lucky to have words put into the mouths of fabulous actors that pulled it off and always made it real. There was never a wink at the camera. It was always real. The threat was always real, the emotions were always real. That’s what makes the best television.

  EDWARD JAMES OLMOS

  The writing of this show was really thought-provoking and very intelligent, and led us into a world that made people, when they were watching it, think about the world that they were living in now. It’s even more poignant today than it was ten years ago when we finished. There’s no comparison. It’s going to become even more significant as time goes on. I’ve said it a couple of times now, and it’s something that causes people to step back a little bit when I do, but it’s a truth: The people who have seen this show, and have taken the journey from the beginning of the pilot all the way through to the very last film, will be able to understand if we ever have a nuclear holocaust and they lose everything; they will be able to reflect on the story and understand that they have to move forward, that they have to keep going no matter what. You know, when you’ve lost everything like was expressed in this storyline, and it was in the original also, but the way that it was reimagined was so profoundly direct. The annihilation of humanity to the point where there are less than forty-nine thousand people left alive.

  MARY MCDONNELL

  The idea that humanity could be reduced to fifty-five thousand people all of a sudden and force a collective group of people to have to see each other as one, to me, is something that continually resonates. With Battlestar we have a reminder that it could go down that path. I think we’re unfortunately living on the edge at the moment on this planet. Perhaps we can stop dividing each other and see each other as one, because there is no difference.

  EDWARD JAMES OLMOS

  We’re on the verge of probably the most difficult moments in technology that we’ve ever had. Meaning that our technology today is our biggest asset and our biggest deficit. No two ways about it. Our sense of security is put forth in a big way by way of feeling secure, feeling that we have computers that can regulate messages coming from outside of our hemisphere and outside of our stratosphere and moving out into the world with satellites and be able to protect us. But in the same way they become the third eye out there in space. They can pinpoint a license plate from thousands of miles up in the air. And then all of our phone systems are now nonexclusive. There’s no privacy, yet everybody wants to be protected, so they’re thankful that there are people who are listening in on everybody else and protecting us from ourselves. That being said, the worst part of the whole thing is that we’re at one of the most crucial times in the history of humanity with a person who literally has no conceptual understanding of how to deal with the situations as they’re materializing, the biggest one being North Korea. We are very close to having probably the worst nuclear disaster in history, even more intense than would have been as a result of the Bay of Pigs and the Cuban Missile Crisis. But this is much worse, because our weaponry is so much stronger now than it was then.

  MARY MCDONNELL

  I just thought there was so much relevant human behavior inside this very big story; that it would be a wonderful place to collectively try to reflect some of what we were actually experiencing culturally and historically on the
planet. Right from the beginning, I loved the pilot in that it also presented us with, instantly, a kind of fascination, love, and terror of the other and the unknown. My character has breast cancer—wait a minute, we’re not that far advanced. It was kind of this giant stew of past, present, and future all at once.

  EDWARD JAMES OLMOS

  Even Ron Moore, who is a critical thinker and an extraordinary storyteller, went to the jugular with it and said, “Okay, let’s see what we’re going to do here; how much can we actually move the needle to understand that we are really headed into catastrophic, monumental misunderstanding about technology?” He went all the way. He left nothing untouched. He annihilated everybody.

  GARY HUTZEL

  (visual effects supervisor, Battlestar Galactica [2004])

  Battlestar Galactica was like serving in a great war. The strategy is set, the forces are tasked, and then you are dropped behind enemy lines. At first there is a sense of hopelessness to the task. Long page counts, huge cast, giant set pieces, constant schedule changes, no money, no time. But almost from the beginning there was a feeling that we are a part of something much greater than our own contributions, and even as the burden became greater, it actually felt lighter. Now I look back and marvel at the men and women that I served with, their sense of duty, strength of character, and willingness to laugh when the going gets tough. To all those whom I have served with on Battlestar, I say truly, it has been an honor.

  KATEE SACKHOFF

  The show was cathartic for a lot of people in the sense that at the time Battlestar Galactica and science fiction were not taken seriously. It’s still not really taken seriously, because one sort of thinks about science fiction and fantasy as not being real. Our creators and our writers and the network and the studio were able to allow us to do things that other shows couldn’t do. We were allowed to do it, because it wasn’t real. We were allowed to depict suicide bombers in a very real way, because it wasn’t real. People were able to experience the loss in a safe fantasy world that helped a lot of people through war. It’s one of the things we hear from soldiers all the time, that they watched Battlestar Galactica while they were serving abroad in the midst of a war, and watching it was cathartic for them while they were actually living something that was so harrowing.

  AARON DOUGLAS

  I have so many military people come up to me and say, “It got me through Iraq, it got me through Afghanistan, because Friday night on the base we’d all rush back from whatever tour we were on, because in the hangar they’d put Battlestar on at 9 P.M. and if you were late, then suck it, you were late. If you didn’t make it, you run around telling everybody to shut up, because they’re talking about it and you’d have to wait your turn to finally get to see it.” For them it was just this really amazing moment. Other people have talked about how they were battling cancer, were bedridden, and Battlestar was the thing that they’d wake up every morning and be excited to power through. I don’t know; it just has that grip and that hold on people. Next week I’m doing a movie and the day after I finish, I go to HawaiiCon, because they still want to sit down and talk about Battlestar. I’ve done so much since then, it’s almost been ten years, but they just want to talk Battlestar Galactica. I’m certainly not complaining.

  TONI GRAPHIA

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

  It was the theme of survival and family that drew me in, and what I believe drew the audience in. When you have a crisis, such as the apocalypse that happens in Battlestar, it strips everything else away and down to what really matters. The essentials of life and relationships. You’re thrown into this situation with people that you don’t know that well, but you become a family. You do what you have to do to survive. Everything becomes hyperreal, and everything matters in a way that you can’t squander anything. That’s because everything becomes way more important, because it means the difference between life and death.

  MICHAEL O’HALLORAN

  (editor, Battlestar Galactica [2004])

  Battlestar was the epitome of a well-written, well-told story. It’s probably the best science fiction show ever made. To me, if HBO had done a science fiction or space show, this would have been it.

  TODD SHARP

  There’s a universality to Battlestar Galactica. It’s about war, it’s about family, it’s about humanity, it’s about our place in the universe, it’s about things that don’t just matter to people on the left or people on the right. It’s a show that I think transcends any particular political point of view. The show plays just as well and has just as much to say under a Trump administration as it does under an Obama administration. The show has just as much to say to somebody who writes for National Review as it does to somebody who writes for The Nation. And I think it has as much to say to an eighteen-year-old as it does to a seventy-year-old.

  RONALD D. MOORE

  People have asked me how I felt when the show was coming to an end. I’m always aware of sets being struck. Of models being put away. The nature of TV is just the constant churning through things. The sets are going to be discarded, that prop will go away and we trash the bridge. I’m hyperaware of the transitory nature of it all. Being at Trek, after doing five years on Next Gen and then suddenly it’s over … that’s, like, “Wow, I’m not coming to work and talking about Picard and Worf anymore. I’m coming to work and talking about Kira and Sisko.” And then realizing at the beginning of Deep Space Nine that this will end, too. And I realized with Battlestar Galactica, this also has its arc.

  But the afterlife of Galactica is enormously gratifying. When you write and produce these things, and sweat them, you tend to forget that there’s a big audience out there. You’re not projecting it into a theater every week. You don’t have that experience of standing in the back of the auditorium and watching the crowd react. You make them, you show them to your wife, show them to your friends, and then you do the next one. And so your circle of audience feedback is very small. Then you go out in the world and someone will stop you and they’ll say, “Did you work on Battlestar?” Or you mention it and they react. It just means everything, because it was just so much effort. You were fighting so hard for a particular vision of what you were trying to do. And ultimately you had to tell yourself that, whether or not anybody else likes it, I like it and I’m satisfied with that. But, you know, there’s a big part of your heart that’s hoping that there’s those people out there that respond to that, understand or are moved, are touched by that and that it matters in their lives. To this day, I still have people coming up and telling me how much that show meant to them, and I love that. That means the world to me.

  MARY MCDONNELL

  When Ron and David and Eddie and I appeared at the United Nations, that was a pretty big indication of the connection the show was making. The show also served as the impetus for the public relations department of the United Nations to say, “Hey, this might be a good way to bring the public into awareness of what we do here. It might be a really good way to get students here.” The place was packed. It was absolutely extraordinary. My feeling about the reach of this show is that it’s not as popular as Star Trek, and I don’t think it will ever be quite as popular, but there’s something really profound going on with this show as a mirror to life. I don’t see the world getting that much better. The mirror that we’re presenting, or presented back then, is only going to have more resonance as we go forward until we work out some of this stuff.

  EDWARD JAMES OLMOS

  I think back to that first day when we were all together, where I unexpectedly led everybody through the chant of “So say we all.” It was the first time we had all been together standing in a room, and it became really evident that, boy, this was going to be a journey that we would never, ever be able to understand again. This was one of a kind, and it proved to be exactly that: one of a kind.

  ACKNOWLEDGMENTS

  First and foremost, this book would not exist without the work and decades of dilige
nt scholarship of Steven A. Simak, the world’s foremost Battlestar Galactica historian. (“Galacticaspert” just doesn’t have the same ring.) Steven has been covering Battlestar Galactica since he first wrote about it as a teenager for the Galactic Journal in the mid-eighties, and we are deeply appreciative for his friendship and willingness to share his extensive archives with us for this volume.

  All the interviews for this volume were solely conducted by Altman, Gross, and Simak with the exception of Jack Gill, Sarah Rush, David Stipes, and Claude Earl Jones, which were generously provided by GalacticaTV.com webmaster, Marcel Damen. Supplemental Lorne Greene and Maren Jensen quotes were drawn from the original 1978 ABC press kit.

  Additional special thanks to archivist Rob Klein, The Archive of American Television, Eddie Ibrahim and his team at Comic-Con International, Grant Moninger at the American Cinematheque. Nick Hornung and Zack Ferleger for being our conduit to the stars (and producers), and especially to everyone who took the time to be interviewed, sometimes for many, many hours, for this volume.

  The other person who needs to be profusely thanked by us is Ronald D. Moore, who provided his complete cooperation and assistance in assuring that we could cover his series comprehensively in this volume as he did previously for The Fifty-Year Mission. In addition, his help with contacting the entire cast and crew of the 2004 Battlestar Galactica was instrumental in completing this volume. We are deeply grateful for his support and encouragement … as well as the bottle of Dom Perignon he sent Altman for the world premiere of his film, Free Enterprise.

  As always, our gratitude to senior research assistant Jordan Rubio for his help throughout the process as well as the assistance and encouragement of Brandeis University professor Thomas Doherty and New York University professor Andrew Goldman.