So Say We All

by Mark A. Altman

  RONALD D. MOORE

  It was pretty amazing for network television. It was far beyond what Star Trek had been able to do ten years before that. So, I was pretty impressed with the production quality. I remember just feeling, “Wow, this is a big, giant, epic show that’s willing to spend some real money and is gonna do big things!”

  5.

  LAUNCH WHEN READY

  “They’re waggling.”

  The September 17, 1978, Battlestar Galactica three-hour premiere on ABC drew an estimated audience of over sixty-five million viewers, finishing with a 27.8 rating and a 42 share. The stellar ratings success, however, would not last. By the critical November sweeps, the series hailed by Newsweek as “The Son of Star Wars” dropped dramatically to a 28 share. Over the course of the season, Galactica would ride a wave of popular highs, spiraling budgets, and, mostly, critical lows.

  Transforming Galactica from event programming to a weekly television format would present a series of almost insurmountable challenges for the producers and may have ultimately sealed its fate as a short-lived but beloved cult TV series. Time and budget would be key considerations. With the pilot, “Lost Planet of the Gods,” and “Gun on Ice Planet Zero” already in production, it also became necessary to rethink the dynamics of the show on a smaller scale as midway through the filming of the pilot, ABC and Universal made the decision to expand Battlestar Galactica to a weekly series.

  RICHARD HATCH

  (actor, “Captain Apollo”)

  It was originally supposed to be a seven-hour miniseries; then, halfway through the opening three-hour pilot, which they told us was also going to be a movie, they picked it up as a series. The hard part was that it was not constructed to be a series. They hadn’t thought it out; they didn’t know where they were going with it. They hadn’t developed the sets, the shots, the special effects, and so they were working overtime. They had to just cram it.

  LAURETTE SPANG

  (actress, “Cassiopeia”)

  In the beginning, it was always exciting. We were on the cover of Newsweek and People and Us magazine. It was coming on the coattails of Star Wars and it was a great thing. I think everybody was sort of in awe of the project. It was wonderful. All of us were just thrust in there.

  DIRK BENEDICT

  (actor, “Lieutenant Starbuck”)

  A lot of that buildup and hype worked against it. If an athlete comes in and he is the number-one draft pick, he is going to save the franchise. If the franchise isn’t saved, even though he has a good year and by any other standards it would be an exceptionally good year if not spectacular year, and he doesn’t win the MVP, then he is a disappointment. Going to the Super Bowl and not winning it, you’re a failure! We went to the Super Bowl and we didn’t win it. Although we did very well, we were a failure in some eyes.

  Joining Glen Larson to help launch Galactica as a full-fledged television series was Donald Bellisario, a former advertising copywriter and a protégé of Larson’s who would later go on to create such hit TV series as Magnum, P.I., Airwolf, Tales of the Gold Monkey, Quantum Leap, and JAG, and the NCIS franchise. He got his start as a story editor and, later, producer on Baa Baa Black Sheep, starring Robert Conrad. As a young man in the Marines, Bellisario had served alongside Lee Harvey Oswald, who would later be arrested for the assassination of President John F. Kennedy and be shot by Jack Ruby.

  CHRISTIAN I. NYBY II

  (director, “The Long Patrol”)

  Glen was really pretty hands-on, particularly in the beginning, but [supervising producer] Don Bellisario became very involved as the series went on.

  DONALD BELLISARIO

  (supervising producer, Battlestar Galactica)

  That pilot started off so dramatically and so big and there was an enormous amount of money spent on it that could never be spent on subsequent episodes. Some of the two-hours that followed did have a decent amount of money spent on them. Then when you got to the one-hour episodes, they had to start pulling back, and that affects the types of stories you can tell, the type of scenes you can write, and that affects the dramatic quality, the look, the tone, everything.

  DOROTHY FONTANA

  (story editor, Star Trek)

  I pitched verbally on the original Battlestar Galactica once. Not hired, never tried again.

  RICHARD HATCH

  The hard part was that it was not constructed to be a series. They didn’t know where they were going with it. They hadn’t developed the sets, the shots, or the special effects, and so they were working overtime. Here is the biggest production ever on television and all of a sudden it’s thrown into a series format without any lead time to develop scripts, story arcs, or plotlines. That’s why the first year was such a conglomeration of good and bad. There were wonderful things, there were cheesy things, and there were horrible things.

  MICHAEL SLOAN

  (producer, Battlestar Galactica)

  Once it got down to an hour, it became more difficult to maintain that production value. What we would do is take a lot of the cockpit shots and some of the fighter shots and try to use different parts of them and flip them and put them in different places. We had to take a lot of stuff from the movie and the two-parters and use that like stock footage, because there was only so much we could spend on it and we were always waiting for opticals. We had no video effects, so every effect was a major optical. I remember John Dykstra saying to me that trying to maintain this on an hour is going to be really rough, and it was.

  In addition to the challenges of mounting such an ambitious series on a weekly basis, Larson and Bellisario also had to contend with a situation not unlike one that had developed on Star Trek ten years earlier: two unhappy lead actors, one of whom—the presumptive lead actor (and number one on the call sheet)—resented the growing popularity of the other.

  DIRK BENEDICT

  Richard was always intended to be the star of the show. It was him and Lorne, father and son. I was just one of the pilots, but the audience loved Starbuck and they got a lot of mail, so they brought that character more into the show.

  DONALD BELLISARIO

  I remember Richard having a problem with Apollo being so square, so to speak, and so morally straitlaced, whereas Starbuck was this character who smoked cigars and drank liquor and loved women. He’s a fun character, but the difference was that Starbuck had no stability to him, which came out in a show that I wrote with Fred Astaire [“The Man with Nine Lives”], where you found out that his father had disappeared and left him and he really was looking for a father. That kind of explained his instability. The Apollo character played by Richard Hatch had stability. He was the one you want at your side when you really get into trouble.

  DIRK BENEDICT

  Much of the problems and the fighting, the egos that went on, happens with any show, and it went right by me. I didn’t get involved with any of it, and there was a lot of it. When I went to work the first day, I was in a tiny little dressing room the size of a broom closet. I never said anything. After a while my character got popular and I got a lot of fan mail, but I was still in a broom closet. Richard and Lorne were in big motor homes, Jane was in a beautiful dressing room and I was in a broom closet. My agent wanted to say something, but I said, “No, no, no.” One day I showed up to work after about four months and I had a motor home. Somebody decided we should give him a motor home, because I was working every day and I was doing the same amount of work and was contributing to the show. But I never asked for anything. I didn’t get paid much, because the network didn’t want me, and so I never made much money doing that show, but none of that bothers me.

  RICHARD HATCH

  I just felt like I was always there to drive the throughline with the main A-story and that it allowed the other characters to have a lot more fun, especially the Starbuck character. I don’t want to take anything away from Starbuck, he is a great character. You want to give every character as much as you can, but then I felt you also need to balance that off with t
he Apollo character—he isn’t just a straightforward leader.

  TERRENCE MCDONNELL

  (story editor, Battlestar Galactica)

  Starbuck was a fun character to write. That kind of thing is always fun. I think that given the fact of where Apollo was when we came on board I am not sure there was anything we could do with the character.

  ALAN J. LEVI

  (director, “Gun on Ice Planet Zero”)

  Richard and Dirk were both nice guys. They were competitive. If Richard had four words more than Dirk he’d say, “Why didn’t I get those four words?” I think they liked each other and they were respectful of each other but there was a little competition there. Dirk had the lighter character, but he was the character that everyone wanted to be. He had the girls, he had the romances, he had the fun. If it had been twenty years later, he would have been the one in the corner smoking dope.

  RICHARD HATCH

  My question wasn’t about doing more, it was about my character having a little more dimension and challenging me more as an actor to bring out more of the layers and levels of this character. In the first year a lot of characters get neglected, and looking back, had they had a second or a third year, I am sure they would have worked out those kinks like they did toward the end of the first season. They started doing interesting things again and giving my character dimension. In fact, they started to give the Starbuck character more serious things to do, to show the other side of his nature, to balance his laid-back cigar-swaggering character by giving him some emotion, and they were trying to loosen my character up and give him a little bit more romance and a little bit more of a sense of humor. I had told Glen that I felt a little frustrated.

  ANNE LOCKHART

  (actress, “Sheba”)

  Richard was very frustrated.

  TERRENCE MCDONNELL

  He was the first actor that ever came to [story editor] Jim [Carlson] and myself that wanted to sit down with us, the writers, and talk about this character. How we could improve the character, what little pieces we could give him, little things like that, and he was very concerned, as any good actor is to get the most out of who they are portraying. He would come up to the office from time to time, and we would have little chats. I remember he had complained because Dirk was getting all the comedy lines. Well, that’s the character of Starbuck. And he wanted some funny lines; that’s not the character of Apollo, but we took it in stride.

  RICHARD HATCH

  Many people said that after the first couple of episodes, where I was very strongly positioned in the show, my character kind of moved to the side. That was frustrating to me. Looking back, it just takes time when you are dealing with that many characters. And yes it is hard for an actor’s ego when writers tend to lean toward one or two characters that they seem to have more fun writing for, but if I was the writer I probably would have had fun writing the Starbuck character or the Baltar character, too, because it’s the bad boy and the bad guy.

  In order to save time and money and take advantage of the expansive Universal Studios backlot, Larson decided to expand on the Wagon Train thematics and set many of the storylines in frontier towns. “The Lost Warrior”—a thinly veiled knockoff of George Stevens’s Shane in which a damaged Cylon under the thrall of an evil rancher faces off against the mysterious stranger who’s come to town—and “The Magnificent Warriors,” a ham-fisted homage to The Magnificent Seven, both utilized Western motifs, right down to the swinging barroom doors.

  GLEN A. LARSON

  (creator/executive producer, Battlestar Galactica)

  If you can then treat space and its environments more as frontiers, you’re preparing a setting for a kind of drama that traditionally has a larger audience than science fiction. I had a certain concern about dropping down to a soundstage and finding some creature. I always wanted to try and find themes that allowed us to be much larger.

  Star Trek was always at its worst when it was monster of the week. I wanted to avoid the pitfalls that might narrow the appeal of the show. People have always made a big deal out of the fact that it was Lorne Greene and were we trying to do Bonanza? Not really. We just wanted to push these people into situations where the people become important to us and their existence becomes important and that the shows are playing on a human—or heart—level that transcends science fiction.

  GLEN OLIVER

  (pop-culture commentator)

  Battlestar Galactica often felt like a series fueled by atypically lofty ambitions: to explore the human condition, survey the importance of spirituality versus pragmatism, examine our tendency toward greed versus a far more elusive altruism—but it was sometimes marginalized by not remaining a hundred percent dedicated to this exploration. Its uneven fusion of genres undermined its own core intent. I think Battlestar, on the whole, was very much headed in the right direction. There’s some great spirituality and truthful, genuine drama to be found in it. But it was often clumsy in its balance, and failed to smoothly merge disparate visions.

  ALEX HYDE-WHITE

  (actor, “Cadet Bow”)

  The set had a collegial, soap opera feel to it. Kind of like a nice big community preparing for a long haul of a run. No one really knew that the stories were too thin to justify the big production value, because it was a new show, with high expectations, supervised by veterans but produced, actually produced on a daily basis, by this fraternity of creatives, some of whom were used to the other shows on the lot like Rockford Files, Quincy, and The Hulk that were built around the alpha male lead and had a strong central authority figure. Richard Hatch was supposed to be the star; he was a kind and gentle man. The set was well run under Don Bellisario’s command. Glen Larson had a lot going on and he left the day-to-day to his lieutenants.

  CHRISTIAN I. NYBY II

  First thing in the morning, all the actors come in, the crew reports in—whatever scene it is, ex: scene fourteen on the bridge of Galactica—and then you get Lorne [Greene], Terry [Carter], Dirk [Benedict], and Maren Jensen or whoever you’ve got in the scene. You’ve all got your scripts, you’ve got the cameramen with you, and the assistant director, and then you very carefully go through the scene. Generally, I had it blocked out in my mind to a certain extent, but I allowed the actors the freedom to move where they would like to move. I usually started them where I liked them to start. Often in the script, there was a scene where it would dictate to them where to go. During that time the cameraman or the director of photography will determine with me where the best place is for the camera to go. Maybe at a certain point we’ll move the camera with them, or decide that this is a great time to use a crane, or a great time to maybe do a dolly shot. Or maybe it’s a very tense scene and we’d like to do it handheld.

  All of those are determined when you are rehearsing, and then the actors go away. They continue to get made up, and get in their costume, and so forth. Then the director of photography with the gaffer, the key grip, and the stand-ins light the scene. You rehearse the camera moves with the stand-ins and get as close as you can to shooting it without the actors. Then of course you bring the actors back in and refine it all. By then everyone, the actors and the director, has contributed to the construction of that scene.

  ROD HOLCOMB

  (director, “The Man with Nine Lives”)

  I used to spend hours and hours on homework. Sometimes never going to sleep, getting ready for the next day because I was insecure. At the time, I didn’t have a lot of experience, but I watched a lot of episodes when I was a producer on Harry O. The other thing I learned was how to cover so many characters in a scene. Sometimes there could be ten speaking characters in one scene, so you really had to work out who you would spend time shooting and who you didn’t. You’d need to decide who had to work in a three-shot as opposed to getting a single. You always paid homage to Lorne and made sure you gave Lorne his close-up, and Richard as well. The other times, you could use nice two-shots. The material itself required work on your part to find the nuance
s. The forward motion of most of the episodes was fairly straightforward. It was a really simple three-act play. And Glen did a good job of writing, since he never wrote from a whole outline. It was a big operation. How they got it on the air every week was beyond me.

  CHRISTIAN I. NYBY II

  My dad [Christian Nyby, director of The Thing from Another World] put it best when he said, “Do your homework before you go to work the next morning and plot out every scene,” which I always did. He said, “But leave it on your desk, because when you get to work, you don’t want to be locked into something because if an actor says, ‘You know. I don’t feel right sitting in this chair. I’d like to sit over here,’ it throws everything off. So the best thing is to know the scene as best you can, know how you’d like to do it, and then as best you can cope with the actors.” In my career it worked ninety-five percent of the time.

  Once you were set on a scene, you could do multiple takes, obviously, because you wanted to get the best take. You had a little time for coverage because you wanted to get in closer, or do the reverse angle, or so forth, but you just didn’t have that much time. In television movies, you do have more time. Instead of doing eight or ten pages a day, you might do four or five. There are a number of ways to film any sequence, but once you make your mind up you just go forward with that.