Barbara Bain recalls additional difficulties the production encountered: ‘Gerry Anderson absolutely wanted to photograph a television screen without [a dark] bar flopping [on the picture], which is impossible to do. He wanted a clean shot: he did not want the bar on it, because … that would have been primitive filming. So, at least the first ten days of shooting, all our concern was to try and get this bar not to flop around! So all those intercom scenes when one of us was standing next to the screen chatting to whomever, we were at the mercy of trying to get that bar out. We would do some of those scenes 103 times to get it, and just at the last moment, the bar would show up! Then, when we went onto the generators later, as opposed to the National Grid, the connections were very delicate and it came back to haunt us. We were, again, stopped down endlessly trying to get that shot. So, it was funny that with all this extraordinary technology, we were still at the mercy of that bloody bar going around!
‘We went through the shut-down of the country, which had all kinds of interesting ramifications. There was the miner’s strike that took place in 1974, which caused the general blackout [of] the entire country. They went on a three-day work week, a sort of critical time in English economic history. All of the shops and streets were without light. They unplugged the National Grid. If you think about it, there is one electrical source in England, called the National Grid, and they pulled the plug! So there were a lot of kerosene lamps in all the shops, the street lights were down and businesses were functioning three days a week. We were declared an essential industry. Plus, Sir Lew Grade – later Lord Lew Grade – had influence in the government, and because he was employing so many people, it made a case for allowing us to shoot on a five-day week. That sounded great. We had our own generators in the studio and weren’t dependent on the National Grid. But, the labs were down to their three-day week. So we could produce, but we couldn’t get our stuff back. We had these interesting kinds of problems. At least a year went by that first week; it seemed like a year.’
On the same subject, Prentis Hancock recalled, ‘The series was given a lack of structure in the first weeks because of the three-day working week in the United Kingdom. At one time I had the right to get petrol coupons, because oil was rationed at the pumps and I could get two gallons a day to get to Pinewood and back, and I would give Zienia a lift. That affected the first episode. That was imposed upon us. All the pre-recorded video that was on the [computer screens] was pre-done on the national grid, the electricity system. But it wasn’t the same speed as the five-day system we had from ATV television, which was Lew Grade’s way of allowing us to work for five days. So we worked for five days, while the industry was working for three …
‘Lee Katzin, I loved him; I thought he really was the director who had the vision, and the right vision, for the series. But he shot so much film through the camera that he would waste footage like it was going out of fashion. But in spite of all that we got it made, and we had 15 months of fun and games.’
Martin Landau had issues in dealing with picture elements being added in post-production: ‘We’d always have to ask whether something [on the Main Mission screen] was going left to right, or right to left. Very important, because if the looks were wrong and [we were] looking at nothing, [it wouldn’t work]! You couldn’t flip [the picture], because most of those things had numbers on them. Very often in things you can “Turn a horse around.” The director makes a mistake, let’s say in a Western, and the horse is going that way and the people are looking this way, you just flip the film. You couldn’t do that here.’
Barbara Bain was also troubled by the big screen in Main Mission: ‘A big blank! And the problem was that, because they were working at Bray – the studio down the road about 20 miles – on all the special effects, we didn’t even know what they had conjured. So [the script] might say it was a wild-looking blah-blah-blah, and that’s what we were looking at. When they finally matted it in, either it was, or it wasn’t! That was difficult. It was a big, blank, black screen, which was matted in.
‘That studio [at Bray] was incredible! We were seldom able to get over there, but Brian Johnson was a brilliant genius, photographing glass fibres and all kinds of incredible things, and having the best time. We never saw what they were working on simultaneously. They weren’t on the set with us, so we didn’t know what they were producing until we saw a rough cut.’
Martin Landau recalled having to re-dub numerous lines of dialogue : ‘Very often in speeches I had to get all the numbers right. They had to match up. “Eagle One landing at Pad Three, and ready for lift-off.” All those numbers had to be right, always. The words usually were crippling, and much of the time I would have to say those things on the move, very quickly. Much of the time, because of problems, I would have to go to the dubbing room and post-sync. If I had a speech and talked in about this rhythm [he speeds up] I tended to run my words together, and we couldn’t make loops. Most of the time, we had to do one line at a time. I used to have to basically lip-sync to an entire speech on one of those. I think in one of the early episodes I’m walking by a computer bank. That one is dubbed. It was miraculous that I could do it because I don’t think I said the lines exactly as written. I added a word or two, but I had to say it walking up the steps, and I was walking down the bank of computers. I had to finish this long, black speech. In that Space: 1999, which Charlie Crichton was directing, he wanted me to move off camera just as the last word ended. I had to get it in there, so I had to talk fast.’
Difficulties were not confined just to technical areas of the production, as Christopher Penfold recalled: ‘The problems were more with the American writers working with us. It was actually a silly idea to try to conduct script conferences over the telephone with people living and working in the United States, and after a while it became unworkable and we stopped. The only American input that we continued to have was through an American writer living in England at the time, Edward di Lorenzo. He became another script editor on the series, and wrote a couple of episodes himself.
‘When the series was set up, there was a very short lead time, which is a problem of television production. Once the money becomes available, you have a certain space of time in which the money has to see a return. So we didn’t really have enough time to prepare the scripts before the series went into production, [and] we were always running to catch up. As I see it, there is little distinction between story consultant and story editor, or the term I promote now, which is script editor. In the context of a multi-episode drama series, the script editor would be responsible for choosing the writers who are going to contribute to the series; for providing a kind of overview for those writers of what the series … is going to do. Each individual writer is primarily, if not solely, concerned with his or her own episode, but they have to be educated into the wider, larger context of where their episode is going to fit. That’s the function of the script editor, and the function I would have expected to be performing on Space: 1999. The [fact] that the lines of demarcation became blurred was entirely due to the pressures of actual production. I found myself in a position of commissioning writers too late to provide that kind of overview for them. So the scripts, when they came in, really often weren’t fitting with the overview of the series, as it was constantly developing. By that time, it was already in production, so even when writers were commissioned, it wasn’t possible to give them a Bible for the series, which would have contained, for instance, Barry Morse’s biography of Victor Bergman (the character I was most interested in). Those things were constantly changing. So it was a difficult role. I would normally expect the script editor not actually to be writing or re-writing the episodes for which other writers are credited. It was a set of circumstances that brought that about. Sometimes it was something I regretted, but some of the episodes that as a story editor I effectively completely rewrote, for which I didn’t get a writing credit, I feel pretty good about – “Black Sun”, particularly.’
Johnny Byrne also comme
nted on the difficult production schedule: ‘Every script I wrote came completely from myself. There wasn’t time for other people to come to me with ideas, because we had ten days or three weeks to make a new [episode]. To have it designed and to have it ready for the actors, prepared to be shot. It was an impossible situation … Not one story idea was dropped, because there wasn’t time. There wasn’t time to look at all the scripts and say, “This is a good one – that’s a bad one.” We needed every single one we did.
‘There was a very short turnaround on all the scripts we had to do. There wasn’t time to stop and stare. We had to really push on. There was certainly no idea about what the overall story arc was. We didn’t [use] words like that. We probably didn’t know about words like that. We were just concerned with creating episodes one by one as they came along, and being excited about the stuff that we would learn, at least in my case, episode by episode. I distinctly remember rushing into Chris’s office saying, “What about this? This has happened. I’ve written this and suddenly all these implications are obvious.” And he would say, “Get the script done. Press on.” And so it went on, right to the very end, pretty much. It never let up. It was a wonderful master class for a writer like me, because we were making a film. I had daily contact with people like Keith Wilson and Brian Johnson. It was a wonderful thing for a writer. You could see; you could focus and get everything in perspective. Although it seemed to go at a very fast pace, in effect it was a wonderful thing for me.’
Martin Landau recalled some of his difficulties with the series: ‘Another problem was, of course, when you’re dealing with English writers, scripts are written [as if] for the BBC, and they don’t have commercials. That leads to 12-and-a-half-minute acts, and some white knuckles. If you have a good script, you could have a 22 minute first act.’ [Examples are in the episodes ‘The Infernal Machine’, ‘The Taybor’ and ‘All That Glisters’.] ‘It’s terrific, but you’ve got to break it. I’d say, “You’ve got to break it here.” And they’d say, “You can’t break it there.” I’d say, “It’s a natural break!” Well, there was a lot of that. Charlie Crichton would sit there drinking scotch with Chris Penfold, Barbara, me, Barry and sometimes Gerry until one o’clock in the morning. I would say, “I don’t understand this script! It doesn’t make any sense. It’s cryptic. I need a Rosetta stone! I don’t know what the hell it means. What’s going on here? What is this scene telling me?” In the script, [I’d have to] say, “Okay, let’s go! Let’s get out of here!” We don’t have to talk about it! If you walk out the door, we know you’re going! When I say we were there until one o’clock in the morning, I mean the only thing we doctored at that point was the stuff we were shooting the next morning. We had to regroup the next night and work on the other stuff. Hopefully, those guys would get some of that stuff done during the day. If not, that meant one o’clock in the morning again. And I had to be back at seven. I had to learn some of that stuff, too! Sometime in there I had to catch a little sleep. You know, at the beginning of Space: 1999, I must have been sleeping maybe three or four hours a night. I worked in practically every shot all day. So you’ve got to have an enormous kind of energy, and to keep involved it takes a particular kind of thrust. The English take a longer time to shoot. They don’t work as fast as an American crew. At least, we were used to that.’
Barbara Bain recalled a similar difficulty with the scripts: ‘We had a lot of lovely, talented young writers who just came out of Cambridge. They were very bright, very gifted and very imaginative – but the form was elusive in that they were used to writing very slow-built material, finally to a climax. They wanted to take their time in telling their stories and things like that. We had a lot of trouble getting them to understand that they had six minutes …’ [Barbara claps in tempo.] ‘And bam! What is going to happen, and get it going again? It was a struggle that was never really properly resolved. Therefore when we did go on to the set – they call it the floor – we weren’t as prepared as we were on Mission: Impossible. We were struggling all the time to write as we went along – even though, in many instances, we achieved some wonderful kinds of stuff. It could have been more such, if it had been a tighter production. It was very hard to get that right, to get that idea that we were in jeopardy every six to eight minutes.’
Martin Landau continued: ‘A lot of the critics used to say there wasn’t a lot of humour on the show. There wasn’t a lot of humour written into the show! I used to yell for humour. When you’re in trouble, that’s what you need. You can’t get blood out of a stone, and there was very little fun! On the whole, no-one paid attention to that. They said they were going to do it – humanise the scripts – but they didn’t. Now, the bottom line with this was that there was nothing frivolous about going through space and not being in control of your own destiny. Not having control over your trajectory, and basically being 20-some years into the future. So – technologically, emotionally – the people on Alpha were not ready for deep space. Whereas in Star Trek they were moving around on their own and were much further in the future. So, basically, the conditions were that of a pressure cooker. But it needed humour. I said, “These guys are people. They need battleground humour, or death-row humour.” There were a lot of inconsistencies in the writing. It’s very easy to act well-written material. Shakespeare is easy to act. It’s not hard. Well, it’s hard for some actors, but only because they can’t hold their breath that long! The bottom line is – bad writing is hard to act. You could do some of your best work and would still not like it. You compensate a lot for it. Sometimes you succumb to it. But good writing is a piece of cake. A lot of the writing on Space: 1999 was very bumpy … I said, “I would never say this.” A man walks into a room and says, “Hello, everybody! I’m embarrassed!” You don’t do that! You do everything in the world not to do that. Lots of times, we had that [kind of thing]. I was a pain in the neck, part of the time, because I’d say, “What the hell is this? I’m wearing everything on my tongue here. I’m saying everything when we don’t have time”!’
On this subject, Christopher Penfold has said: ‘Barry Morse was reminding us that we, the writers, had very little opportunity to engage with the cast, and that’s true. I actually very much like getting feedback from the cast. It is they who realise the characters. That’s a cross-fertilisation process that there ought to be more time for. In the case of a theatre production, the play will be in rehearsal for several weeks before it’s actually opened. The writer will be there working with the cast in the early stage – of course there has to be a time when the script is the script – but there isn’t, in television, the opportunity for that kind of engagement. [Having said that,] we did have very useful engagement, or at least I did, with Martin and Barbara. I spent long hours into the night at their house talking about scripts, which I think was useful. It would have been very nice to have had more time to be able to do that with Zienia, Prentis and Barry.’
Regarding the writers, and the writing, Johnny Byrne stated: ‘You had first of all Chris Penfold, who is the son of a vicar and who had a strong moral and social conscience and believed passionately in good. He also was an experienced writer, but these were his personal characteristics … Chris Penfold was also sort of a liberal socialist. He would consider himself a liberal ideologue. He would see himself as someone who would be willing to sacrifice in order to salve his conscience. He was born with guilt. People of that type are born with guilt … The Irish are different. There’s a larger degree of mysticism in our background, and the mystical and the spiritual are very closely connected … I had come from a very Irish sort of Catholic family, with an ingrained sensitivity to spiritual matters … You only have to look at the episodes to see the consistency of our points of view. There’s a running thing through my episodes that never really alters very much. It has many different faces, but essentially we were looking at the equivalent of mystery and miracles – the reassertion of, and the reenactment of, certain basic universal elements, so to speak. These Space
: 1999 episodes were a reflection of that, of two very different things.
‘And there was Eddie di Lorenzo, who was also very interested in mental attitudes. He was a very sensitive writer, a very good one in my estimation. The three of us together almost chemically sparked off the kind of feeling that washed over all the episodes, even those we didn’t write. There was a feeling, a concern … to carry the feeling of the humanity of the people on Moonbase Alpha out there, not necessarily as a spoken dialogue, but something in terms of the situations and [the characters’] responses, and their utter bewilderment. These were our people, our younger brothers and children, who were out there. And they should have echoed our concerns, our feelings of … human beings in a tremendous state of transition and change, with all their weaknesses and limitations. So that feeling carried over and was reflected in some of the stories that might have qualified as soft; certainly they were thoughtful, certainly they were exciting – but it was a good mix. We just went for stories that attracted us. And while some of the stories I wrote Chris didn’t approve of – and some of the ones he wrote I didn’t approve of, and the same with Eddie – that was the way it was. “The Last Sunset”, “The Last Enemy”, “Space Brain” – [those] and I think … one other one [were the ones] I didn’t particularly like …
‘Among the ones I didn’t write I like particularly “Black Sun”. I [also] love “War Games”. I love what everybody else loves about this. You can’t ignore the [ones] Anthony Terpiloff wrote, which are wonderful as well. I love the richness and the variety of the first season. The sense that something greater than the sum of the events we were recording seems to have taken hold of us early on. It showed itself most clearly in those episodes where the Mysterious Unkown Force, or MUF, is presumed to be present; and looking back, it was also there in many others. But it was never the result of any form of preplanning. It seems to have been working itself out below the level of conscious intent.’
Destination: Moonbase Alpha Page 29
