So Say We All

by Mark A. Altman

  RICHARD COLLA

  We didn’t have time for a lot of takes. We did it very efficiently, very quickly, and we knew pretty much what we were going to shoot, and what the coverage was, and what I needed to have to get to the editor, and really did not have the luxury of being able to shoot things from a lot of different angles. Just to get a second camera was like pulling teeth.

  There were times when we would get into trouble, and we would just have to work around it. We never had time to shut down and say, “Let’s get a writer in here and fix this.” We just did it. If the actors had a problem, we would find a way. If they would get frustrated because they wanted to say “Fuck!” and you can’t say “Fuck!,” I said, “Well, then say ‘Frak’! Let’s just say something else. Let’s stop saying, ‘Gosh darn it!,’ because isn’t that stupid in the middle of it? But some other guttural kind of expression that you can just use and it’ll feel okay.” So, in television, you go out and you capture moments. It’s much more like the Jackson Pollock approach to filmmaking—looking and waiting for the happy accident, giving the actors freedom to do what they do as well as they can, encouraging them to surprise you and surprise the audience. It isn’t like Mr. Hitchcock. When Mr. Hitchcock was asked one day who his favorite director was, he thought for a moment and said, “It’s Walt Disney. If he doesn’t like his actors, he tears them up and throws them away.” But we, in television, don’t have the luxury of a lot of takes. We don’t have the luxury of rehearsal. We didn’t get rehearsals.

  DAVID LARSON

  At five, not much registers. You’ve got doughnuts. You’ve got a robot walking around. You have a mock-up of the spaceship. It was amazing walking through that. I remember a sense of being just awed. It’s kind of that sense you get when you’re walking on a backlot alone. I once had to make some deliveries as a gopher for a few years. Just walking onto the Warner Bros. lot and they were shooting Batman and had built Gotham City. You really get a sense of awe of the magic of moviemaking. It took me back to when I was a kid. I’m kind of glad I never really lost that. You get really jaded growing up in L.A.

  However, midway through production, tensions between Colla, who had been Universal’s first choice for the telefilm, and Larson came to a head, and the all-too-familiar “creative differences” arose, which led Larson to fire Colla in the middle of shooting.

  RICHARD COLLA

  Once we had a movie, Glen [Larson], I guess, felt that he needed more control than he had. He then also had occasion to be able to go back and add a scene and rewrite some things. I think it was my outspokenness and anger at Glen [for] coming in at that point, with a lot of little complaints, or unhappiness, or things that he found fault with.

  ALAN J. LEVI

  What was wrong with it [Colla’s direction], I don’t know. I do know that Glen is a very exacting producer, and when he asked for something, you delivered it to him. Television is more of a producer’s medium than a director’s medium. In features, the director is in control; in television, the producer is in control, and that may have been part of it. He did say that he wanted things done one way and Richard did them his way. That was it.

  RICHARD COLLA

  George [Santoro] had always been very good to me, and when he needed help, I was there for him. So it wasn’t about Glen. It was about making this thing work for George, and when in the end Glen kept finding little faults, I just told him he was an ungrateful bastard, because everybody was working so hard to pull his ass out of the fire here, and now he’s in there pretending like he’s the one who has all the ideas. It was his idea originally. Nobody can fault him for that. You know, it’s him and the Mormon church. So if you say, “Okay, this is mine, well that’s just fine,” and I applaud his ability for all of the work that he’s able to do in television, all of those opportunities that he saw in movies and then made television shows out of, all that stuff that he was able to convert. So I could even understand where he would want to feel like he was back in control of it once the major roaring fire of this thing was out, and some hope was in the air, but I just found him very ungrateful to all the people who worked so hard for him.

  HERBERT JEFFERSON, JR.

  It was personally shocking, because we missed him, but as it is with the nature of this kind of show, we just picked up and did what we were told. It isn’t as though we didn’t know the storyline and what was expected of us, but we certainly missed Richard and went back to work.

  RICHARD COLLA

  Glen is the kind of producer who wants the piece to be a reflection of his point of view. And would like the director to supply to him the material with which he can take that material and put it together in a way that satisfies him.

  ALAN J. LEVI

  Richard Colla, as you know in the credits, has credit for directing that show. But about halfway through, the chasm between him and Glen Larson grew. Larson said, “You do have other things to do, don’t you?” And I think Richard said, “Yeah, I do.” He said, “Good, you’re off.” So, he hired me to complete it. Richard shot twenty-five days, I shot twenty-seven days.

  I knew of Glen. We’d occasionally say hi, but he didn’t know who the heck I was, but Leslie Stevens was a mentor of mine. He was a beautiful human being and a man of his word. He first came to me in 1972 and said, “I’ve got a pilot that I’m financing myself.” It was a talk show. He said, “I can’t pay you, but will you direct it for me?” We discussed it and I said I’d love to. I didn’t know Leslie but you hear that all the time. So, I directed the show for him, and the pilot didn’t sell but it was a very good show and he was the interviewer. It was a mostly technical thing, because he was into space and alien beings and it was a forum for the intergalactic and the extraterrestrial.

  In 1975, he called me and he said, “I’m part of the original crew who put together The Invisible Man, the pilot has sold and I’m going to be on it as a consulting producer and I want you to come over and meet Harve Bennett and go up and meet the guys at the Black Tower [at Universal]. If they like you, I want you to direct the first episode, and if you do well then you’re part of the team, and if you don’t, good luck.”

  So, I went over and met Harve and some of the other people, and Harve said, “Okay, direct the first show.” I did, and then I did every other one, and Harve was a great mentor but it was all because of Leslie. So when there was a rift between Richard and Glen, Leslie came in and said, “I think you should talk to Alan about taking over.” And so I came in and talked and he wanted me to take over the show. I said, “Glen, I can’t.” He said, “Why not?” I said, “Because I’m set to direct something else, and my parents, who have been my biggest supporters all of my life, are finally coming out from St. Louis to visit me next week, and they’re going to be here for a whole week, and that’s more important to me than anything.” He said, “I’ll tell you what. I will give you my chauffeur and my car and they will be treated like king and queen and chauffeured all around and they’ll be brought to the studio, they’ll have lunch here, they’ll be on the set with you.”

  I thought to have my mom and dad, who are sweet Midwestern folk, to be squired around as though they were queen and king would really be fun for them. So, I said, “Okay, I only need one thing from you, and that is to promise that you will support a dual credit.” And he said, “Absolutely I will go to the Directors Guild and support that.” So, I took over the show. I called Richard after he had already been told that he was being let go and I said, “I hope you will come in, this was nothing of my doing, I’ll be happy to sit down and chat about where you were going with it so I follow the same thing so no one can tell it was you who directed a scene or me and that I hope you’ll come in and edit your scenes.” He said, “Listen, just do your job, don’t worry about it. Don’t worry about me. You have final cut of the picture as far as I’m concerned. I’ll come in and edit my stuff and if you find out you want to alter it, don’t worry about it, do it.” He didn’t want anything more to do with Glen. Glen felt the same
. So, basically, I came in, I saw all the dailies, and I saw the cuts, which was about a little less than half of the show.

  But he prepped it.

  I’ll be real honest about it: Glen and I had a rift toward the end of the show, because two things happened. Number one, he had me reshoot a number of scenes that Richard had shot, which was okay. But then he had another list of scenes that he wanted to do, and the Tower put the kibosh on it and said, “No, we spent enough money on this.” So, the Tower pulled me off the show and said, “No, Glen, Alan can’t shoot anymore, he’s already shot twenty-seven days, put the show to bed,” and they put me on what they were talking to me about doing next. Glen thought that was my doing. So, he didn’t talk to me for a while. When it came time to take the negotiation to the Directors Guild for my credit, he reneged. He did not talk to them and he told me basically that he never said that to me. And because Richard had prepped the show and shot twenty-five days, and I shot twenty-seven, the Directors Guild gave him total credit. I had a third of the residuals. But, the credit was more important to me than the residual.

  At that point in his career, Levi was already a seasoned director in his own right, and had a reputation at Universal in the seventies as a troubleshooter, having taken over on several television productions that the studio perceived to be having problems. Subsequently, Levi has directed for such series as JAG, Buffy the Vampire Slayer, and ER, among many others in a long and enviable career.

  ALAN J. LEVI

  Before directing [the miniseries] Scruples, I had directed The Immigrants, which was a miniseries as well. I liked doing movies of the week and miniseries almost more than episodic, because in episodic the director is really not the molder of the show, the producer and the showrunner and the writer are. Whereas with Scruples I had to come in and take over four days into the shoot. They walked me through the sets that were designed and so on, and some of them I did not like, and I sat down with them and told them why. They totally agreed and rebuilt the sets. Most of it was cast already. As was Battlestar Galactica.

  There were a number of people at that time who were under contract. I was the only pure director under contract at Universal. There were producer/directors, writer/directors, and so on. The executive producers who became directors and so on, they were not hired as directors. They were hired as showrunners and producers and so on. I became their fix-it man. I was sent down two or three shows, including Miami Vice, because one of the directors who went down there just did not get the style of the show. So I was on a plane to Miami on Sunday night and started directing Monday morning. I read the script on the airplane. That was always very interesting and a great challenge and I enjoyed that.

  ROD HOLCOMB

  Alan did a great job. I always wished he had gotten more recognition for his work and had done more pilots. Couldn’t figure out why I was doing it and he wasn’t. He was really good and a nice guy.

  For the telefilm, Levi’s first directorial call for “Action” was made on the sequence in which the Cylons attack the Carillon gambling casino. Hired less than a week before assuming control of the pilot, Levi had little time to prepare for the massive production logistics.

  ALAN J. LEVI

  I had spent a lot of time with Glen just discussing [it] before I officially took over. I didn’t do a lot of storyboards, because I didn’t have time to, but I did do a lot of prep. If I have a whole day of shooting on one set—let’s say for Monday—then on Saturday or Sunday I will go in and spend between three and five hours on that set, walking it, planning it, thinking about it, etc. I do a huge amount of homework that way. So I had the weekend to plan the first five days, and then I got into the swing of it.

  The scene takes place on Carillon, the mysterious homeworld of the insectoid Ovions, who run an enigmatic casino resort on the deep fringes of space, where no one ever seems to lose and humanity is on the menu.

  GLEN A. LARSON

  I’ve always thought of Las Vegas, with its dazzling decor, glittering lights, and feverish atmosphere, as another world. So when I let my imagination wander into outer space, it seemed appropriate to put it there. Among the attractions at the mythical casino is a vocal trio, the Android Sisters. Each of the girls has two mouths and two sets of vocal cords, resulting in fabulous six-part harmony. That idea was inspired by my own checkered past. As a member of the Four Preps, I wondered how to make our sound bigger, without enlarging the group. The Android Sisters offer one answer.

  ALAN J. LEVI

  I was very fortunate in the first day that I shot, it was an extremely difficult night. It was the attack at the casino at nighttime, with all the tanks outside and everything else, and I was extremely lucky that that was it. Because that night went so well, I was accepted into the crew immediately. If it had just been a day of over-the-shoulders and close-ups and stuff, it wouldn’t have been the same, but it was a difficult night because I had the Cylons, I had most of the cast, I had Boxey, and tanks, and shoot-’em-ups—the whole thing! I had the monkey in the daggit costume. I had everything piled onto that first night that went very well thanks to all the people who were there.

  We shot almost all night, because we were outside of the studio. Inside was the gambling parlor and then the doors opened up and they ran outside and tanks were coming and so on. A lot of people were pulling to make that night work. We had to do it at night because of the pyrotechnics, which don’t show up very well in the daytime. I mean, if a pyrotechnic goes off in the daytime, and you’re shooting day for night, it’s a little sparkler. At night, that lights up the entire field, and that’s basically what we did when the Cylons finally came outside.

  It wasn’t until many years after finishing the pilot and the two-part “Gun on Ice Planet Zero” that Levi finally reconciled with Larson after their falling-out.

  ALAN J. LEVI

  We finally patched things up on the baseball field. I was playing for Universal and Glen was coaching for 20th Century Fox, where he was doing The Fall Guy with Lee Majors. We were on opposite teams. I said, “I’ve got a bet for you. If we win, you and I start talking, and if you win, you never have to talk to me again.” He shook hands on that; at the end of the game we won. Bygones be bygones, and Glen was Glen. If you knew Glen you accepted Glen.

  4.

  BY YOUR COMMAND

  “When Commander Adama sees this, he’s gonna go crazy!”

  Surprisingly, the period just after the release of Star Wars was one of relative inactivity in the effects industry. That would soon change. In the interim, however, John Dykstra was able to bring many of the key players on Star Wars, including effects pioneers Dennis Muren, Richard Edlund, and Joe Johnston, directly onto the Galactica production. Universal also made arrangements with 20th Century Fox to lease the same facility and original equipment used by ILM on Star Wars. The new effects unit was loosely called “MCA-57,” derived from the name of the Universal parent company, MCA, plus the last two digits of the facility’s phone number. MCA-57 would eventually be renamed and was the foundation for what would later become John Dykstra’s privately owned Apogee effects house. With the team and facility in place, effects work on Battlestar Galactica began during the summer of 1977, and the majority of visual effects work on the pilot (three hundred shots in all) was completed before principal photography even began.

  GLEN A. LARSON

  (creator/executive producer, Battlestar Galactica)

  John Dykstra is a genius. No one else could have done what he did in the time he had to do it.

  JOHN DYKSTRA

  (producer/visual effects supervisor, Battlestar Galactica)

  Within the confines of the reduced resolution and format size of television, we were trying to make effects that weren’t there to fit the bill but were in fact themselves a piece of the story. Instead of just saying they were going from point A to point B, which can be handled by a flyby, we attempted to do what is done in features, which is to create an environment which was attractive to look at and spec
ial. It set the piece apart from a master, a two-shot, and coverage.

  CHRISTIAN I. NYBY II

  (director, “The Magnificent Warriors”)

  In those days we didn’t have CGI yet. We could do matte shots, but they were time-consuming and laborious. They did do some miniatures, but they were so much more ambitious than The Rockford Files or a show which would just use present-day stuff—a guy would get in his car and just drive off. We had to get in a Viper and take off, but I truly enjoyed it, because it was a challenge to create a real world with that.

  RICHARD COLLA

  (director, “Saga of a Star World”)

  The timetable to make it to television and get it made and on the air was a tremendous task. How to accomplish the effects? How to build all that stuff? How do you do it? I certainly would sit with John [Dykstra] and all of that stuff was storyboarded, so we knew all the pieces. We knew where the wide shots were, what the close-ups were, and where the actors cut into that stuff—in the cockpit of the Vipers, or on the bridge of the battlestar. All of that was choreographed, so we all knew who’s on first. But we didn’t have a lot of time to think about it, or second-guess, and Johnny was really good at this.

  STEVEN SIMAK

  (journalist, Battlestar Galactica historian)

  The number of miniatures that were created and shot for that two-hour alone is staggering—the ragtag fugitive fleet and all the special effects that turned up time and time again through the use of stock footage of the Vipers and Cylon Raiders. It’s pretty extraordinary.

  Built at a cost of $50,000, the seventy-two-inch model of the Galactica was constructed on a series of steel tubes, which both provided structural support and served as mounting points for the motion-control model movers. Bulkheads on the vessel were created from plywood and covered with a Plexiglas skin. As was the custom of the day, the surface was detailed from individual parts scavenged from wholesale model kits purchased in bulk. Gang molds—detailed sections of a surface that can be recast and rearranged (such as on the Death Star)—were not used. All the parts were individually and painstakingly applied from various armor and ship kits.