So Say We All

by Mark A. Altman

  MICHAEL RYMER

  I remember when we were editing the miniseries and trying to get the show down for time; it was quite long and we had to lose some visual effects, like a dogfight sequence. We were all feeling extremely pressured about everything in the show, because we loved everything. So I tried to delete this dogfight sequence and it suddenly made the whole act feel more realistic, because we were staying with the politics and the circumstances of real people dealing with a real scenario. Suddenly the Buck Rogers part of it was removed, and it was just something much more real and grown-up.

  RONALD D. MOORE

  When I pitched the show, I wanted the sense of “you are there.” I was obsessed with it at the time. With editing and photography, we emphasized in both of those worlds that kind of rough style where we weren’t going to be too precious about continuity in between shots. It just had to feel like it was really happening and it was happening right now. That came from the handheld quality.

  If you look at the second episode, “Water,” that was the show that we kind of went too far with it. The handheld style was too jerky and too disorienting, and we started losing actors in too much shadow and had to digitally adjust. We had to try to take some of the shake out of the camera in post. There’s a scene in the episode where they’re in the conference room and Adama is talking and he’s on his feet, and Eddie [James Olmos] just literally walked out of the light and walked into a corner where there was no light at all and we just had to keep it, because there was no other coverage of it. Eddie would just wander through set periodically and find a place that was sort of not expected, or the place that the actor should not be, and then he would go give a speech over there.

  TODD SHARP

  On the series, we had an editor named Andy Seklir, and he and coproducer Paul Leonard were able to work with this huge amount of footage. We were shooting shows that were extremely long. Michael Rymer is a very prolific shooter. He’ll do a lot of takes and shoot a lot of film. To be able to comb through all of that and find the show, and achieve the creative vision as evidenced by the script, takes an adept post team and an adept editor. You’ll find no better than Paul Leonard as a postproducer and Andy Seklir as an editor.

  MICHAEL O’HALLORAN

  (editor, Battlestar Galactica [2004])

  I’ve learned an incredible amount about storytelling from Ron, and just the way he approaches editing is different than anyone else I’ve worked with before or since. He has this amazing ability to see the forest through the trees. Often on Battlestar in the editing room we didn’t stick to the script all the time. We would change the script quite a bit in post from what the original was. If you saw some of the first assemblies, say where we actually reassembled it just the way the script is, the directors would come in and make some changes, but for the most part they stuck to the script, too. Then Ron would come in—and he’s said this to me a few times—and he considers the edit the third and final rewrite. The first is the script on paper, the second being what they actually shoot, which changes somewhat from what is scripted. Then the third is the final rewrite and polish in the edit bay. There’s quite a few episodes that I did that are dramatically different from what was on the page.

  PAUL LEONARD

  (coproducer, Battlestar Galactica [2004])

  “Mikey O” was hired by us as an assistant editor season two. He assisted an editor on the episode “Scar.” Ron Moore sat with her and Mikey to give some challenging and abstract notes for his producer’s cut. I was busy with another session off lot and missed that meeting. The editor took too long to execute the notes and was putting the episode in jeopardy of not being completed in time for air. I ran an idea past Ron and David, then executed it. I fired the editor and bumped up Mikey to editor to complete Ron’s notes and help lock the episode for air. I had sat with Mikey working on sequences before then and knew he had the chops to be an editor. We ended up hiring another editor to replace the one I let go, so Mikey went back to assisting.

  MICHAEL TAYLOR

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

  I was new to the show in the third season, and I was in the room with Ron when I had the idea for “Unfinished Business.” There was a lot of tension on the ship, so what if they kind of blew it off with boxing? He liked that and said I should combine it with some flashbacks, and that was that. That became one of the best episodes of TV I’ve been associated with.

  PAUL LEONARD

  With “Unfinished Business” we ran into a similar problem. The script, although one of my favorites, was challenging, with the shifts between time frames and trying to find the right emotional balance to properly tell the story. The director, Bob Young, gave some notes remotely for his director’s cut and wasn’t able to join us in person right away due to other conflicts. I looked at the work in progress and thought it was completely “at sea.” I asked Bob if I could put some fresh eyes on it for fear of never getting the episode where we needed in time for air. He, David, and Ron agreed, so I suggested putting the original editor on another episode and asking Mikey to start over assembling “Unfinished Business” from dailies.

  MICHAEL TAYLOR

  Michael really took it over and it was great. It was a very different experience than I had working on almost anything else. I think Mike would attest to that as well as an editor. It was a very organic writing process. We didn’t write very detailed outlines. We wrote little short stories that sort of summarized the flow of the episode and the scenes and the character dynamics and then we just sort of wrote just moment to moment. Ron likes to say that you write an episode once when you write it and you write it again in editing.

  MICHAEL O’HALLORAN

  It was good, but wasn’t great in the first assembly. A lot of it changed when I put the music in. We had all Bear McCreary’s great music to use for the rough cuts. I put in more orchestrated stuff in the beginning for the first flashbacks where we see Kara and Lee lying down out in the grass alone. A lot of slow motion also is used. The first time I showed that version to Ron, he really took to it. I think it even inspired him a little bit and, in a matter of about twenty minutes, he laid out a completely different structure for it. He said, “Let’s take this part here and we’ll move this up front. We’ll start with this. And then this part that is now the beginning, let’s move that to the middle. We’ll get to that some point in the middle.” And he created this entire new structure and as he’s leaving, he goes, “I really liked the music. Just make this whole thing a lyrically orchestral love poem.” And I understood what he meant. I did that and that was one of the stories where I was cutting with the music as I went.

  MICHAEL TAYLOR

  Michael picked up the ball and ran with it and just really experimented with the whole vibe. I had been a big fan of movies like The Limey by Steven Soderbergh, which was a relatively straightforward, but wonderful, script by Lem Dobbs, but Soderbergh just chopped it all up and threw in all sorts of flashbacks and played with time. It just pulls you in in that much more of a lifelike, organic way. That’s sort of what I hoped to do with that episode, because we were flashing back to begin with. It was just really cool.

  MICHAEL O’HALLORAN

  The first cut we were almost short. I think it was forty-three minutes, because we left a lot of stuff out that Bob Young had included. But he shot a lot of extra footage. When you have the extra camera there, he would make sure the guy, even though there wasn’t a real plan for it, would shoot angles and things that might be useful later. Then, when I finally did Ron’s lyrically orchestral love poem, it came out to something like sixty-eight or seventy minutes. There was an extra thirty minutes added to it. A lot of that was playing out beats much longer than we would ordinarily do. Ron also told me, “Don’t worry about the time.” Usually, especially on a network show, we have the exact time of whatever it was, forty-three minutes and forty seconds. Once he told me not to worry about it, that changed everything, because then I was free to just make
a movie out of it. Eventually, of course, a lot of that stuff had to come back out, but what we ended up with was so much stronger than what we started with.

  When Roslin and Adama are smoking pot, she starts talking about how she wants to build a little cabin, a nice place to retire. That wasn’t in the original. That became a thing he referred to several times later in subsequent episodes. In the final episode, “Daybreak,” they obviously weren’t going to build the cabin, because she was too sick, but that was their hope—that he was going to take her off and go settle in their little cabin together by the stream.

  PAUL LEONARD

  His work was so good on the editor’s cut that Ron asked home video to include the editor’s assembly in the box set. We gave Mikey the full promotion to editor for season four. One of the directors he worked with in season four was Anthony Hemingway. He clicked with Mikey and ended up suggesting to George Lucas that Mikey edit Red Tails, the feature that Anthony was prepping. Ron Moore stepped in with a hearty recommendation, and Mikey was off to the races.

  MICHAEL O’HALLORAN

  I owe Paul a great debt of gratitude always for that. Ron was very much, “Oh, yeah, of course, let’s move him up. Love Mikey,” but it was Paul that put the thought in his mind. Paul took a chance and, thankfully, it paid off.

  TODD SHARP

  All the pieces came together in terms of the crew. The one hiccup was that we had hired one of my favorite go-to producers, Michael Joyce, who worked in features. He had produced Raising Cain and No Escape. He was an executive at Fox on The Abyss and Die Hard 2. So we brought Mike in, and about four weeks before we hit camera, he became ill and had to leave the show. So here we are without a captain at the helm in Vancouver. We’re on the ground, prepping at the studio in Vancouver. We’re building sets and ships and we don’t have a producer. I actually reached out to an old friend of mine, Harvey Frand, who I had worked with a number of times. I called Harvey and basically said, “Help us save the day,” and he came in. Everything instantly clicked; it was like Harvey had been there all along.

  HARVEY FRAND

  (producer, Battlestar Galactica [2004])

  My agent called me to say that a script for the miniseries was being sent out to my house and I had a meeting with Eick and Rymer at 9 A.M. the next morning. I fell into a deep despair, because I remembered the original before Ron Moore reimagined it. Had my career fallen so far so quickly? By 10 P.M. the script had not yet been delivered. I called my agent, who somehow tracked it through Universal Transpo, who claimed it was left at my door at 9 P.M. I went outside with a flashlight and by 11 P.M. discovered it in my neighbor’s flower bed. My agent said that I should just read the first two hours. I couldn’t put it down. I read the whole thing and couldn’t put a script down for the four years. And that’s where it starts—with the extraordinary material. Add to that a cast with incredible talent and a crew that I’ve never met the equal of.

  DAVID EICK

  There were many times Todd Sharp came to the rescue for Battlestar in a whole host of categories, and he happened to know Harvey. So this guy comes in, he’s got a strange sort of limp and, because I’ve already lost a guy to illness, I’m worried. I look at his résumé and we start talking and he’s an odd character. He doesn’t look the part, meaning he kind of looks a little more blue-collar in his general countenance. He doesn’t behave like a slick guy who’s done a lot of Hollywood stuff, which actually appealed to me, and he seemed to really understand the material. So from a creative standpoint—“Wow, this would be so great and I love it”—but also from the standpoint of, “How the hell are you gonna do this?” So I appreciated the fact that he seemed to have a real passion for it and I appreciated the fact that he wasn’t bullshitting me about how hard it was going to be to pull off.

  So I asked him two questions: Can you commit to me that I will be the first call when there’s a problem and not the studio? He said, “Yes, that’s how I always operate.” Which is how I operate. We’re a team and we don’t go around each other and all that kind of crap. The studio, of course, loves access to its line producers, because they figure that the executive producers are going to bullshit them and they want that end-around relationship. And, in fact, that end-around relationship winds up having to exist just as a function of time and efficiency. But what your line producer says, and how he says it or she says it, is crucial. Because if you have a line producer who’s trying to lay a lot of blame and cover his ass, that’s when the exec producers start having trouble with the studio, but if your line producer’s on your side, you don’t have to worry what he or she says to the studio, because you know you’re controlling the information.

  The second question I asked him, because he hadn’t worked in about five years, is why? “I’m looking at your résumé, and it’s been a while…” He says, “You know what? It’s cold out there.” I knew I liked this guy.

  MARK VERHEIDEN

  I can’t say enough about what an amazing person Harvey was to work with, but also what an amazing conductor of this orchestra he was, keeping everything working together on this really tight schedule. We had some advantages in that most of Battlestar was set-bound and that makes life a little simpler, but it was still a good, complicated show. A lot of moving parts. A lot of actors. Where on a lot of shows the line producer will tell you something is impossible, we can’t do it, forget it, Harvey was the guy who said, “Well, that’s going to be challenging, but you’ve got to keep that because that’s the core of the episode.” He was an enormously important piece of the Battlestar family, and it’s tragic that he passed away. An amazing guy.

  RONALD D. MOORE

  He was one of the best line producers I ever worked with. A genial guy with a real backbone of steel. There was a gentleness to him and a sense of humor. He smiled and laughed pretty easily and was easy to get along with and very personable, but unyielding when he had to be. He could really whip the production schedule into shape and draw lines with departments when he had to, and wasn’t afraid to say no to directors and push back. He pushed back with me at times. Not in a bad way, but he’d be like, “Ron, we just can’t do the show. It’s just not possible. I just can’t do it.” And if he said that, I knew he meant it, because he wasn’t one of those producers that just sort of cried wolf all the time and threw up his hands. I’ve run into a fair number of those kind of producers, where they’re just, like, “Oh my God, the sky’s falling every week and the episode’s out of control. What happened?” After a while you start filtering that out. Harvey wasn’t that guy. He’d look at a script and go, “Well, it’s big. We’ll have to make some changes here, but we’ll figure it out.” He was always up to figuring it out in one way, shape, or form.

  DAVID EICK

  It was an unlikely assignment. I never would’ve looked at or met a guy like Harvey Frand and thought that he could’ve helped us realize a show like this—and I say this out of ignorance. But I learned a lot about how not to do that through my relationship with Harvey, because not only did he do a good job of bringing it on budget, but the only time my phone rang was when it was urgent. Unlike many line producers, he didn’t feel the need to justify his existence by reporting every micro accomplishment of his day. That’s a disease some line producers suffer from. The other promise he kept was to love the show, and you can’t fake that for four years, twenty episodes a year.

  TODD SHARP

  Harvey was the producer of the miniseries and, of course, we brought him back for the series. He worked his tail off. He was like the train engineer, the school guidance counselor, the voice of reason, the adult in the room. The one who would tell Ron and David, “You can’t do this.” The one who would tell Ron and David, “I can’t afford this, but we’re going to figure it out, because I love what you’re doing.” He was the one who would roll up his sleeves with David and Ron and figure out how we were going to put this gigantic show into the box every week.

  HARVEY FRAND

  The miniseries was
hard. We were creating a new world and we banged heads often. But mostly because all the departments cared so deeply about the show. I particularly remember a network note that we age down the CIC. Mark Stern came to check the set and Eick hid to avoid a confrontation with him. When he hadn’t heard from me after several hours, Eick called my cell phone to ask about Stern’s reaction. When I told him Stern was giggling like a little kid, Eick came out of hiding. There were a few other times we had issues, but we worked together for years and the head banging decreased but not the passion. It’s a world and journey we all shared.

  DAVID EICK

  It was just so evident in so many ways where he went the extra mile, went overtime, got in trouble with the studio—he knew he’d get yelled at. But when faced with those decisions, I felt like he always chose the show. Before covering his ass, before saving another nickel, before whatever. That is so rare in men and women who do that job. That job tends to invite people who maybe struggle to be creative, or people who maybe struggled to not want to cover their ass. Harvey was not only someone we didn’t have to keep an eye on, but was someone who really kept an eye on the show for us.

  When Battlestar Galactica went into production, there were two very different visions of what was being created. For Sci-Fi, it was a miniseries: a standalone event that could potentially be revisited if success warranted it. For Ron Moore and David Eick, the view was that this was a pilot for a new television series, and that’s the way they approached every aspect of it.

  RONALD D. MOORE

  Sci-Fi was saying that Galactica was a miniseries, but David and I planned it like it was a pilot. That meant we would establish sets that would then later be used in the series. We’d set up the characters that would later be in the series. Even though the network wasn’t making any promises, we looked at it as the beginning of a series. We knew the miniseries story was going to be about the Cylon attack and the escape of the Galactica, and the end of it was going to be, “and we’re heading to a forgotten tribe that went to some place called Earth.”