Becoming Superman

by J. Michael Straczynski

  After the cast, the most important decision when shooting a pilot is the choice of director. It doesn’t matter how good the script is if the director doesn’t understand it; how solid the performances are if the director can’t capture them on film; or how stellar the wardrobe, props, or set design are if the director doesn’t know how to light them. Just as every writer has a unique voice on the page, a director has his own voice on the stage, so it’s important to find a director whose approach lines up with your own.

  And I made a terrible mistake in my choice of director.

  Richard Compton came to us from one of my favorite shows, The Equalizer. I wanted B5 to have a gritty, realistic look, but there’s a difference between a dark and moody detective show, where directors often use haze and dim-lit alleys to conceal budgetary shortcomings, and a science fiction series, where you want the audience to see the new world you’ve created. Richard could never wrap his brain around the latter, and I didn’t have enough experience to realize he was the wrong man for the job.

  To prevent anyone from messing with his vision, Richard would tell you what he thought you wanted to hear rather than what he actually had in mind. He was a good technical director, but not a good actors’ director. In a pilot the actors need guidance to help understand their roles, but Richard was more about the smoke, the lenses, and the lighting than the characters, and many in the cast were left to find their way alone.

  Had I dug deeper into his credits I would have discovered that while Richard had directed over a dozen episodes on The Equalizer, he rarely directed more than one or two episodes on other shows and was not asked back on subsequent seasons. That’s usually a sign of trouble, but because of my inexperience I missed the warning signs and walked blindly into the trap that was set before me.

  When filming on the two-hour pilot began on August 10, 1992, Richard kept modifying the alien prosthetics at the last minute to make some of them look more cartoony, then pushed them forward to upstage the scientifically accurate aliens that I wanted to feature. Each time I complained he said it was an accident, or that the makeup didn’t look good on camera, and promised to fix it for the rest of the scene. But Richard knew that once he put the extras where he wanted them in the master shot we couldn’t change them later because the shots wouldn’t match during editing.

  John Iacovelli, production designer and head of the art department, had brought a number of amazing sets to life in a very short time, thanks to carpenters, painters, and other crew who believed in the project. They would work all night, taking naps beside their brushes before going back to work, only to find their efforts obscured by the haze and shadows Richard insisted on using in every shot. Worse still, rather than use conventional stage lights that warm the actors’ faces and bring out their eyes, emphasizing their humanity, Richard opted for high-intensity xenon lights set directly above the stage. The harsh, unflattering downward light made the actors look as if they were being interrogated, and threw the rest of the set into a darkness so complete that you could barely see where you were.

  “Don’t worry, we can lighten it up in post,” Richard said, and I believed him. I didn’t understand that lightening the frame enough to dig out the background details would cause the actors’ faces to bloom so much that they would practically glow.

  Filming wrapped September 4, 1992, and as Richard went off to edit the pilot I couldn’t shake the uneasy feeling that I’d lost control of the creative vision for the show. Two weeks later, Doug, John, and I reconvened to view the director’s cut. I’d never been inside an editing suite before and was rather intimidated by my surroundings. Richard described his approach to the cut, then nodded to the editor, and we watched the pilot.

  I hated it.

  The pacing was slow, the scenes more about camera angles and lighting than the people inhabiting them. Whole sequences had been cut to make room for long, slow panning shots that added nothing to the story and rendered what remained incomprehensible. The cast, so lively in rehearsals, had been reduced to a dull sameness. The action scenes were clumsy, the character moments were stiff . . . the whole thing felt depressing. A three-minute scene set in hazy darkness broken by islands of harsh, unflattering lighting isn’t too bad on its own, but extend that over two hours and any show will begin to feel heavy and unlikable.

  When I voiced my concerns, Richard shrugged and said the edit couldn’t be changed because he hadn’t shot alternate coverage. What we had was what we were stuck with. “But hey, if you can do better, go for it,” he said, then moved to a nearby chair and began reading a newspaper.

  I sat beside the editor, my first time in the hot seat. The editor looked at me. Well?

  I didn’t know what to do or what my options were. I lacked even the language to know what to ask for. I felt stupid, flushed and furious at my own ignorance.

  “Roll it back to the beginning,” I said, and we started over.

  Each change I attempted only made the situation worse. Had I been more confident in my position, or more knowledgeable, I would have said Run off a copy, I’ll take it home, make my notes, and come back tomorrow. But I didn’t know to do even that much. I figured the way we were doing it was the way you were supposed to do these things, right there and on the spot.

  By the end I’d made only a handful of changes, none of them substantial or especially helpful. Richard looked up from his newspaper. “We done?”

  “I guess so,” I said.

  A few days later we delivered the cut to Warner Bros., minus the CGI and other effects that would be cut in later. Their response was tepid at best.

  I was sure that I’d killed our chance to get Babylon 5 on the air as a series, and was furious with myself for not having listened to the concerns I’d had during the shoot. To make matters worse, Warner Bros. began moving the goalposts farther away. When they commissioned the pilot, they said we only had to deliver Babylon 5 on schedule and on budget to get the series order; we wouldn’t have to wait for focus groups or ratings. We’d kept our part of the bargain, but now that Warners had a pilot to test, by god they were going to test it. We complained about the unequal treatment, since the other PTEN series had been greenlit without even producing a pilot. Warners refused to budge, but assured us that if the show passed muster with a focus group, we would get our series order.

  Despite its flaws, which were apparently more visible to me than to anyone else, the pilot earned high marks with the focus group. We passed the test! we told Warners. The focus group loved us! So give us the series order!

  “We’ve decided we want to air the pilot first,” they said, “so we can see what the ratings are like. Then we can decide if we want to pull the trigger.”

  This was absolutely contrary to how the television business works. You shoot a pilot, the network looks at it, and if they like what they see, they commission the series, for which the pilot is now episode one. We would have to wait months for an available slot just to air the pilot, with nothing cued up behind it. So even if we hit the desired ratings and began writing season one immediately, there would be at least a year between the airing of the pilot and the series debut, and it was doubtful viewers would wait around that long. Most galling of all, Deep Space Nine would be on the air with weekly episodes for nearly all that time, so when we finally did come out, everyone would think we were copying them instead of the other way around.

  When Babylon 5: The Gathering aired on February 22, 1993, six months after we’d started filming, I could barely watch it, tortured by all the flaws I’d seen in the director’s cut that still remained. But the pilot received a 10.3 national rating, which was better than the debut of all the other PTEN shows, so we were confident we would finally get our series order.

  But Warners still held off on the pickup, saying that we might get a firm decision by the spring. Maybe. The delay made no sense; there had to be something going on in the shadows that we knew nothing about. Meanwhile, our studio liaison said that sales execs from Paramount
were telling station owners that our show would look cheap, that it was a disaster in the offing, and if they bought B5, Paramount would yank the Star Trek series.

  It wasn’t until May 28, 1993, three months after the pilot had aired, that we finally got the series order, and only after considerable pressure from Dick Robertson and Evan Thompson. I was elated, but the news was tempered by the knowledge that much of what would have made B5 the first of its kind had already been co-opted by DS9.

  Still, we were finally in business on a weekly series. The kid from New Jersey who had dreamed of one day creating a science fiction series of his own had actually done it.

  Recent information demands a postscript to this chapter.

  In the years since Babylon 5 went on the air, science fiction fans have debated whether or not Paramount ripped off our show to create Deep Space Nine. My belief at the time was that the studio co-opted the material we gave them only after they knew we were going into production in order to kneecap PTEN in favor of their own new network. I also accept Kathryn’s sense that the Star Trek producers were blameless. But studio executives higher up the food chain can easily shape the direction of a show without explicitly telling the producers the source of their suggestions. Hey, listen, guys, we really like your idea for a new Trek series, but instead of doing another starship show or something on a colony, let’s think outside the box . . . how about a space station, you know, a port of call, with a casino, cargo ships, lots of different alien races coming through . . . a Casablanca in Space kind of thing. Give it some thought, roll it around for a while, and let’s discuss it next week.

  That explanation was the only one that made any sense given what I knew at the time. Then in 2013 an unsolicited revelation appeared via an online statement by Steven Hopstaken, a marketing specialist who had worked as a copywriter and editor for Dick Robertson’s Warner Bros. International Television Distribution from 1993 to 1994, the years that marked the births of B5 and DS9. His job was to design marketing communications material for Warner TV series and films, as well as creating trade show collateral and corporate newsletters.

  His statement, which first appeared on io9.com,* is reprinted below in its entirety:

  I was working at Warner Bros. in the publicity department when Warner Bros. and Paramount were preparing to launch a joint network. Warner Bros. had already decided to buy Babylon 5 for their ad hoc PTEN network (a group of independent stations that agreed to show Warner Bros. shows in prime time).

  Paramount and Warner Bros. both agreed that Deep Space 9 would be the show that would launch the new network, and there wouldn’t be room for two “space” shows on the network. I was told they purposely took what they liked from the B5 script and put it into the DS9 script. In fact, there was talk of leaving the B5 script intact and just setting it in the Star Trek universe. I had to keep rewriting press release drafts while they were trying to make the final decision.

  But then, suddenly, Paramount decided to launch a new network on their own and screwed Warner Bros. over. That sent Warner Bros. scrambling to create their own network; grabbing up any station not already committed to Paramount and getting WGN to show the WB network on cable.

  So Paramount definitely knew about the Babylon 5 script, I don’t know about the DS9 showrunners, but I find it hard to believe they didn’t know.

  If this is true—and an email exchange with Hopstaken in preparation for this book confirms that he stands by his story—then it’s possible that Warners’ reluctance to put Babylon 5 into production was fueled by more than bureaucratic annoyance and intransigence. Perhaps they were worried that the similarities between the shows would reveal what had been going on behind the scenes by both studios. This might also explain their reluctance to take legal action against Paramount. That seems to make sense, but in the end only the top studio brass on either side of the contretemps really know the truth of what happened, and they ain’t talking.

  Chapter 27

  Boarding Babylon

  The Babylon 5 series set up shop in what was once a spa-tub factory in Sun Valley that we converted into a working stage. It was located on a cul-de-sac that included a junkyard and a gravel pit from which a fine cloud of dust constantly blew over the lot, covering everything. To meet studio notes, Tamlyn Tomita was replaced by Claudia Christian as B5’s second-in-command, and Andrea Thompson came on as a telepath to replace Patricia Tallman after contractual differences arose between Warners and her agent. After adding Richard Biggs as Dr. Stephen Franklin, we began shooting in July 1993. The series debut was scheduled for January 26, 1994, over a year after the broadcast of the pilot.

  Most TV series have large writing staffs: executive producers, writer-producers, and staff writers. But our meager budget didn’t allow for such luxuries; with Doug and John aboard as non-writing producers, there was just enough money for me as showrunner and one story editor. In keeping with tradition, I hired Larry DiTillio to ensure continuity of vision, work with the freelancers, and build a catalog of data about the worlds and characters in our series. I also brought on Harlan Ellison as conceptual consultant as a gesture of appreciation and to give me access to his twelve-story brain. As a kid, I used to shoplift his books; now he was working for me.

  Astonishing.

  Showrunning a weekly TV series is infinitely more complicated than shooting a pilot. On any given day I would be writing episode A, prepping episode B, shooting episode C, editing episode D, and doing postproduction on episode E . . . all at the same time. To put that in practical terms: at 10:00 A.M. you’re meeting with wardrobe to review designs for the episode you’re prepping; at 11:00 you’re on-set for the episode you’re shooting right now; at noon you’re chairing a production meeting for the episode due to start shooting in a few days; at 1:00 you eat at your desk so you can keep writing; at 2:30 you zoom across town to the edit bay to finish the producer’s cut of the show you shot last week, cross town again later that day to supervise the final audio mix of the episode you’re about to deliver for broadcast, then grab a bite on the way home to write through the night.

  Network television has never really taken science fiction seriously, so most series had to be sanitized and scrubbed clean of content that was considered too adult in deference to kid-friendly characters free from addiction and prejudice. This was particularly true of the Trek universe, where poverty had been eliminated, nobody had drug or alcohol issues, humans were nearly perfect, and religion had been pish-poshed into irrelevancy. By contrast, I wanted Babylon 5 to delve into controversy, dealing with political, social, and religious issues that would give our universe a hard-edged, gritty texture.

  And then there was the issue of our five-year arc. While network soap operas often had season-long character arcs and a general sense of where they were going, neither they nor any other American TV series had attempted a single overarching story with a clearly defined beginning, middle, and end. Creators of TV series didn’t want the shows to end, as evidenced by General Hospital, which went on the air in 1963 and as of this writing is still being produced. Nor was significant character growth allowed; at the end of each season, and the end of the series, the characters could not be substantially different from who they were at the beginning. This was especially true in science fiction TV, where the bad guy, the hero, the tough guy, the comic relief, and other key roles were set in stone at the beginning and strictly adhered to thereafter.

  In our series, I wanted the characters to evolve in ways that would change the world around them, demonstrating that regardless of our circumstances or how late in the day we can still change that which seems most inevitable about us. As much as B5 was about exploration, wars, and the rise and fall of empires, at its center were issues of personal choice, the consequences that result from those choices, and our willingness to accept responsibility for those consequences. Would our characters behave ethically when confronted by difficulty, or lean into what was more convenient? How do their seemingly small decisions result in
massive events that ripple through the rest of our story?

  To pull this off I would have to subvert the audience’s expectations about how a science fiction show was constructed. I wanted them to take one look at the roles our characters seemed to fill at the start of the show (the bad guy, the comic relief, the hero) and assume they would remain that way, just like every other SF series. I could then start bending the story until the characters ended up 180 degrees from where they started, sending a message to the viewers that anything could happen at any time to anyone. One character would start as a terrorist, full of wrath and bloodlust, and become a religious leader who grew beyond his rage, forgiving the grievances of the past to create a better future. Another would begin as a buffoon with no power but all the choices in the world, and end up as emperor, with all the power he wanted but no choices at all. The commander of B5 would be loyal to his government until forced by circumstance to lead an insurrection against it.

  These character arcs would have to be crafted in secret and rolled out carefully because while I’d told Warners that we were doing a five-year arc (which they still didn’t believe was feasible), they assumed that the characters would end the show roughly where they began. Had they known what I had in mind they would never have approved it. This left a very narrow runway for the storytelling: if the audience figured out too early where this was going, the element of surprise would be gone. If Warner Bros. figured it out too soon, I would be gone.

  As work continued on season one of Babylon 5, a shadow began to loom over the show. It began with small, almost insignificant whispers that something was amiss with our lead actor, Michael O’Hare: reports of inappropriate comments made to members of the cast or staff, glitches in his performance, erratic conversations that went nowhere. The increasingly bizarre reports didn’t line up with the Michael I knew, a respectful and dedicated actor who felt a responsibility to be a cheerleader for the cast and the show.