I saw the Mad Men (2007–15) pilot six months before the premiere and did my best to sell everyone I knew on the series, but despite my personal campaign’s success, it wasn’t as winning as the protagonist’s outlook on life:
“You’re born alone and you die alone and this world just drops a bunch of rules on top of you to make you forget those facts, but I never forget…I’m living like there’s no tomorrow, ’cause there isn’t one.”
Donald F. Draper
From 2014 to 2017, WGN—the Chicago-based superstation that gave me Bozo in my youth—became a purveyor of original, scripted television as WGN America. Though short-lived, the experiment yielded a quartet of fascinating series: Salem (2014–7), created by Brannon Braga & Adam Simon; Manhattan (2014–5), created by Sam Shaw; Outsiders (2016–7), created by Peter Mattei; and Underground (2016–7), created by Misha Green & Joe Pokaski. Each had elements to recommend it, but my favorite was Manhattan, a fictionalized account of the development of the atom bomb, that reminded me of the works of Costa-Gavras, Gilliam, and Kafka.
Last night, I was thinking about the television characters that have meant the most to me over the years. I made a list, off the top of my head, without too much thought, and was surprised to find that of the characters—all originating in on television, no adaptations from other media—almost all of the characters from the 20th century were male and most from the present millennium were female. I have no idea what that means about me, my taste, or television as a whole.
Lynda Day, is one of the outliers, and this is one of those cases where I’ve been somewhat arbitrary in selecting the character, because you can’t really divorce her from either the actor who breathed life into the role, Julia Sawalha, or the character’s context in Press Gang (1989–94) created by Bill Moffat and written by Steven Moffat.
I can’t imagine why a relentless workaholic with a one-track mind, an inability to acknowledge her own personal life or those of the people who work for her because a school forces them to, and a prickly demeanor to hide her own insecurities which she can articulate if necessary with the detachment of an over-achieving (and likely suicidal) doctor attempting self-surgery because she thinks every one else is incompetent would appeal to me.
Highlander almost works…as a movie, a television series, a media franchise. Almost; not quite, but I love it nonetheless. (Spoilers for a 1986 movie and 1992-9 tv series below…)
In general, Highlander concerns immortals secretly living among mankind, periodically dueling to decapitation, their only means death, in pursuit of an ambiguous Prize. More specifically, the 1986 film concerns itself with the life of Connor MacLeod (Christopher Lambert), a 467-year-old Scot who’s eschewed love since the death of his wife (Beatie Edney) but becomes the object of a police forensics specialist (Roxanne Hart) obsessed with sword-making while he tries to kill an ancient barbarian (Clancy Brown) who slew his mentor (Sean Connery).
Hey, it’s a kind of magic!
I prefer Peter Bellwood and Larry Ferguson’s re-write of Gregory Widen’s UCLA screenplay to the movie—which doesn’t quite capture the magic on the page—but I appreciate that the script, rendered fully on screen, would lack energy of Russell Mulcahy’s direction. The movie’s mood and tone are perfect, the transitions between present-day and flashbacks superb, and the casting mind-boggling; yes, we’ll have the legally blind Frenchman who doesn’t speak English as the titular highlander and get the world’s most famous Scotsman—who plays all nationalities with his native brogue— to play an Egyptian pretending to be a Spaniard.
(Gary Kilworth’s novelization [written as by Gary Douglas] is also quite good, salvaging much of what was lost from script to screen.)
Ignoring the sequels, we come to the television series, concerning Connor’s younger clansman, Duncan (Adrian Paul), because Lambert wouldn’t commit to tv and wasn’t doing a terribly good job of not aging. Under the auspices of David Abramowitz—who took over in the midst of a muddled debut season—the concept became a meditation on morality with a 400-year-old sword-wielding arbiter of right and wrong. Major conceptual innovations like the Watchers, who are meant to observe and record the activities of the immortals with objective detachment— represented by MacLeod’s decidedly partisan observer, Joe Dawson (Jim Byrnes)— and Methos (Peter Wingfield), the oldest-living immortal add dramatic wrinkles to the format and long-form explorations of the possibilities and varieties of immortal life (almost) make up for the show completely dropping the methodology by which immortals live in an increasingly computerized world and the element of the police procedural that grounded the movie (but was, arguably, one of the bigger casualties of the cuts).
Doctor Who is the most versatile and imaginative of television—or, perhaps, storytelling—formats ever devised.
“It all started out as a mild curiosity in a junkyard, and now it’s turned out to be quite a great spirit of adventure, don’t you think?”
Though Sydney Newman oversaw the conception and C.E. Webber wrote the initial format, it was Anthony Coburn who wrote the first produced script:
In the street we hear two things. We hear the striking of three o’clock from a nearby clocktower and following teat we hear the approaching crunch of a pol iceman on his beat.
We see the policeman only as a vague, slowly-moving figure, coming towards us in the fog.
We pull back to see the policeman against these Gates.
In one of the gates is a smaller entry gate. This is closed.
The policeman flashes his torch on the gates.
We read the faded writing on the gates. I. M. FOREMAN, SCRAP MERCHANT, and a smaller, newer sign: “PRIVATE — KEEP OUT”
The policeman pushes the smaller gate, which opens. He looks through it into the yard. Then he closes it and moves on.
We stay on the gate. We see swirling of fog in front of the small gate and slowly it opens, creaking a bit as it does.
There is all manner of junk lying about the yard.
We see a police box.
Anthony Coburn (1917–77)
Wilson, noting the following requirements for “the Saturday serial,” tentatively called The Troubleshooters:
and outlining its principal cast:
The handsome young man hero
The handsome well-dressed heroine aged about 30
The maturer man, 35 – 40, with some “character” twist
[Sydney Newman would add “a kid to get into trouble”]
The “maturer man” would subsequently age several hundred years and one could argue his “`character’ twist” might be that he was neither a man, in the broader sense of a human native to Earth or—per Newman’s hypothetical suggestion in 1986 or the fact of 2018—in the sense of gender. Nevertheless, C.E. Webber (1909–69) was among the earliest key contributors to a legend.
Sydney Newman was offered a job by Walt Disney in 1938, but couldn’t accept due to an inability to secure a work visa. He returned to his native Canada and found work as a film editor. By 1954, he’d become CBC’s Supervisor of Drama Productions, and exports of his television work secured an invitation to the UK, becoming Head of Drama at ABC before being lured to the BBC where he assembled the team required to create “the Saturday serial.”
“We required a new programme that would bridge the state of mind of sports fans, and the teenage pop music audience, while attracting and holding the children’s audience accustomed to their Saturday afternoon serial. It had to be a children’s programme and still attract both teenagers and adults. Also, as a children’s programme, I was intent upon it containing basic factual information that could be described as educational, or, at least, mind opening for them. So my first thought was of a time-space machine with contemporary characters who would be able to travel forward and backward in time, and inward and outward in space. All the stories were to be based on scientific or historical facts as we knew them at the time.”
Sydney Newman (1917–97)
There are three phases in the production of a television episode: Pre-Production, Production (aka Principal Photography), and Post-Production.
At 6:47pm on Thursday, 2 December 1993, principal photography on “Chrysalis” (112) concluded in Morden’s Quarters. After seven days of work and 19,940 feet of exposed negative, Babylon 5’s first season finale was in the can—halfway through the season, to allow for extensive cgi. While the cast and crew would move on to “DeathWalker” on Friday the 3rd, the aforementioned can(s)—containing the day’s exposed Super 35 negative—would go to be processed at the lab and transferred to VHS cassettes for the producers to review.
Meanwhile, the film shot on the previous days of production had already been loaded into the Avid of Lisa M. Citron, one of three editors who worked on Babylon 5’s freshman season. (Suzanne Sternlicht cut 101, 104, 107, 110, 113, 116, 119, and 122, Skip Robinson cut 102, 105, 108, 111, 114, 117, and 120, and Citron cut 103, 106, 109, 112, 115, 118, and 121.) The editor begins their cut as soon as footage becomes available, assembling the show according to the shooting script, exercising their personal taste in choosing the shots and takes. As scenes are cut together, Citron would report back to the script supervisor, Haley McLane, noting the length of assembled scenes so that the production could keep an eye on the episode’s running time. If the scenes cut together shorter than expected, the episode will underrun and require costly additional photography that will eat into a later episode’s schedule, not to mention the expense of recalling guest actors, if required.
Meanwhile, in Valencia, 19 miles northwest of Babylon 5’s stages in Sun Valley, Foundation Imaging worked on the cgi, but with the footage rendered at roughly one frame per seventy minutes, a second of video material—24 frames—required more than a day of computer processing during the first season. Citron would estimate the length of the shot based on pre-production discussions, placing a note into the episode that might read “EXT. BABYLON 5 – ESTABLISHING” or “SHADOWMAN CRUISERS FIRE ON MOONBASE” as a placeholders. By the end of Friday, 3 December, Citron’s cut would be complete.
From the advent of motion pictures, film editing was both a manual and linear activity. The editor physically cut and spliced the film to create edits. Thousands of feet of footage would be organized in bins, with the constituent shots of the scene in progress within arm’s reach. Until the 1970s, most film was edited on a Moviola, an upright machine that allowed the editor to run the film forward and backward, making cuts and splices as required. Flatbed systems—like those produced by the German companies K-E-M and Steenbeck—became the norm from the 1970s, allowing the editor to sit comfortably during the days and weeks and months of cutting. The creation of this work-in-progress edit is called an offline edit, one in which the original materials are not affected; the editor uses a work print, a dupe of the negative created specifically to be personhandled in the editing suite.
Once the final cut was approved by the required parties, the negative would be conformed to the editor’s notes, a terrifying process where a single mistake would destroy a frame of film forever; this is the online edit, from which there is no return. If one were philosophically inclined, the conformed negative is The Film, the Platonic ideal, the actual artifact from which all copies derive. When you see on the package that a Blu-ray was created “from a 4K scan of the original camera negative,” that means that you’re viewing a clone of the original, albeit one restricted in resolution to the Blu-ray standard and compressed accordingly.
It’s worth noting that most prints you saw in the movie theater prior to the advent of digital projection in 1999 were three generations removed from the negative, usually struck from an internegative made from an interpositive that was duped from the negative. That’s why you sometimes see the strings in special effects shots on Blu-ray when you’re certain they weren’t visible in the theater; until the age of high-quality home cinema, no one ever expected to view the negative (or a compressed clone thereof), just copies three generations down the line.
(As an aside, when cinema enthusiasts lament the lack of a high-definition release of the 1977 release of Star Wars, they are effectively mourning the death of that version, which was disassembled splice-by-splice to create the 1997 special edition. Yes, there are extant release prints—three generations down from the negative—but there is no longer a conformed negative of that movie as it appeared in 1977. The Special Edition is The Film now.)
By the 1980s, filmed television shows were often being edited on videotape. The film would be transferred to videotape and edited linearly, one scene after another, on an apparatus that was effectively two VCRs controlled by a simple computer, accumulating start and end times for each shot, then exporting them to a master broadcast-quality videotape from which further copies could be dubbed, losing picture quality with each subsequent generation (or cloned without such loss in the digital era). This approach would cause problems after the introduction of high definition television. As noted above, a conformed negative can be scanned to obtain an image of higher resolution than a 4K television can present, but the best DigiBeta videocassette of a show finished electronically without a conformed film negative is locked in standard definition forever…unless, as happened with Star Trek: The Next Generation, a studio pays to have the negatives of every shot of the series exhumed and painstakingly assembled into a conformed negative, giving the show a new lease on life for modern broadcast, home video, and streaming applications. (It should be noted that some studios continued to create conformed negatives for their series, avoiding the issues faced by those that took the less-expensive post-production route.)
Avid Technology changed everything. In 1988, the company introduced The Avid/I, a non-linear editing system based on the Apple Macintosh II. Editors could digitize the dailies—at much lower than full broadcast quality, due to the data storage limitations of the era—and create an editorial timeline, dropping shots onto it with a mouse. It was no longer necessary to build the scene in order, splicing one shot after another with actual film, and if the director wanted a reaction shot dropped in the middle of the scene, no de-splicing, cutting, and re-splicing would be necessary. With the Avid, everything was drag-and-drop, and simple alterations were effectively instantaneous.
Additionally, the system allowed filmmakers to experiment with transitions in real time. The creation of a dissolve—where one image fades in while another fades out, typically to indicate a passage of time—or fades—where one image emerges from or submerges into blackness, as usually happens at the beginning or ending of a show, or at commercial breaks—used to require an optical printer. The optical printer was a contraption consisting of one or more film projectors affixed to a film camera, allowing the latter device to photograph the output of the projectors, creating effects in the process; in short, every time you see a picture fade to black prior to 1980, that entire shot was rephotographed via optic printer to achieve that effect. Then it had to be processed and edited into the conformed negative; and because it was effectively a generation removed from the shot preceding it, the drop in quality before a fade or dissolve is often evident before it begins; the image gets suddenly softer and grainier. The Avid could execute dissolves and fades on-screen in real time, at the push of a button.
(Optical printers were also used to superimpose credits over live-action footage. For reasons I haven’t been able to ascertain, it seems that optical printers are infrequently cleaned, and you can see specks of detritus in exactly the same positions during the credits and subtitled sections of Four Weddings and a Funeral [1994] and Backbeat [1994], which apparently went through the same apparatus relatively close together.)
When the cut was finally locked, the Avid would export an Edit Decision List (EDL), a digital account of every cut in the episode, logged by frame numbers on the negative. That EDL, housed on a 3.5″ floppy disk would be taken to the editorial facility where the negative would be conformed to the instructions exported from the Avid.
As with any new technology, the entertainment industry was slow as a whole to embrace the new technology, but television was faster than film, and Babylon 5 was among the first generation of series cut digitally on a non-linear platform. (In 1997, Walter Murch won the Academy Award for editing The English Patient [1996] on the Avid. For more on Mr. Murch and editorial philosophy, I recommend IN THE BLINK OF AN EYE: A Perspective of Film Editing by Murch [Silman-James Press, 2001] and THE CONVERSATION: Walter Murch and the Art of Film Editing by Michael Ondaatje [Random House, 2004].)
On Monday, 6 December, director Janet Greek began working with Citron to create her director’s cut. The Directors Guild of America mandates that directors get two days to create their cut of a television episode. Greek might prefer a closeup to a midshot, favor one take over another, trim the air out of a conversation by tightening the cuts between speakers, delete a line of dialogue she found unnecessary to telling the story, or eliminate an entire scene if it proved redundant in the context of the assembled episode. The director’s cut also offers an opportunity for experimentation, perhaps intercutting two adjacent scenes to ratchet up the tension between them, cutting back and forth, back and forth, and building to a double climax. Depending on the director, their cut may be close to the target running time, or they may leave the episode a little long, deferring to the producers.
With the director’s cut completed, John Copeland and J. Michael Straczynski would review the it multiple times and make notes. They’d then join Citron in the edit suite and begin the producers’ cut. Like the director, the producers adjust shots, vary takes, or perhaps resequence an entire act; the producers’ cut is effectively the final re-write. Unlike the freelance director, who comes and goes, handling maybe three or four episodes of Babylon 5 per season, the producers have the big picture in mind. Their adjustments are made in the context of all the episodes to date and those planned down the road; they see the series rather than the show.
Originally published as the 15 October 2021 installment of the Babylon 5 Preservation Project weekly briefing.
This is where our story starts, in a book review published circa November 2005 in CS Weekly, the online companion to the bimonthly print periodical, Creative Screenwriting:
PAY ATTENTION TO THE MAN BEHIND THE CURTAIN
A Review of BABYLON 5: The Scripts of J. Michael Straczynski, Volume 1
Once described as holographic storytelling, where later episodes retroactively inform the understanding of earlier installments, Babylon 5 told the story of a diplomatic space station where four alien governments—hosted by the Earth Alliance—sought to maintain peace in the galaxy. Conceived as a five-year novel for television, the show used the space station for a microcosm presenting the rise and fall of empires through the fortunes and follies of Babylon 5’s ambassadors and crew. Now, a dozen years after the commencement of the show’s five-year run, creator J. Michael Straczynski unveils the documents that formed the foundation of his saga in a fifteen-part series publishing his 92 scripts alongside a few surprises.
Long an advocate of demystifying the production of television, Straczynski—a veteran of Murder, She Wrote and The Twilight Zone (1985–9)—maintained an open dialogue with his audience throughout the creation and broadcast of his sf opus. That spirit of education is readily apparent in the first volume of his scripts which presents an unfilmed, early draft of the pilot film, The Gathering, alongside five episodes from the first season.
Undoubtedly the centerpiece of the collection, the 1989 version of the pilot offers up a vision at once in sympathy and in conflict with the story’s eventual execution. All the characters and situations are akin to what would be filmed in 1992 for broadcast early in the next year, but alterations illustrate both Straczynski’s personal learning curve as a writer and the application of external interests upon the project. As with the other included episodes, an introductory essay explains the circumstances of each story’s origin with emphasis on the process of narrative development and the execution of the finished teleplay. As Straczynski explains in his introduction, certain elements, such as the shape-shifting assassin were lost in the interest of distancing the show from the Star Trek franchise’s latest entry, Deep Space Nine. Others, like the removal of the character Velana, illustrate a streamlining of the script by bequeathing the excised character’s narrative role to the then-underdeveloped commercial telepath, Lyta Alexander.
After the exotic allure of the alternate pilot, the remaining scripts take the reader into more familiar territory. Aside from a few deleted sequences and slight character course corrections, the season one episodes exhibit a close relation to their final broadcast incarnations. Along the way, Straczynski confesses the occasional misstep like the sf tv stand-by of man-in-a-suit-rampage seen in “Infection” or the lost version of “Soul Hunter” that was recalled the day after publication due to auctorial misgivings that its execution seemed too much like a Star Trek episode.
While the volume clearly presents a writer finding his way in a new world of his own creation, its difficult to appreciate fully outside the context of the entire series. Here, Stracyznski sets the stage for what is to come, not only within the story, but also in the style in which the story will be presented. As a chronicle of television creation, the book—replete with production memos and photographs from the author’s collection—continues his devotion to bringing the audience a better understanding of the process by which his art reaches them. Perhaps the volume’s only failing is in not presenting the alternate drafts of The Gathering and “Soul Hunter” side by side for easy comparison, but that is a minor quibble that will be addressed when both scripts appear in the fifteenth volume of the script-publishing project.
That review was how I first met Jaclyn Easton, the publisher of the book under consideration. She thanked me for the review, included my piece in her press packet, and that was that. End of story.
Over the next year, the script books continued to come out, I continued to buy them, and thought no more on the matter. I should note that the last few script books broke from their steady one-a-month release schedule due to an unexpected development in J. Michael Straczynski’s writing career—the sale of his spec screenplay, Changeling to producer Ron Howard—recounted by yours truly in the November/December 2006 issue of Creative Screenwriting.
A followup cover-story on Changeling ran in the September/October 2008 issue of Creative Screenwriting, and that’s where Jaclyn Easton and I intersected once more.
Universal pictures had supplied a photo of J. Michael Straczynski to run in the piece and the subject of the photo wanted to track down the image’s source with the intent of using it as his standard headshot when such things were required. Jaclyn, having remembered that I worked for Creative Screenwriting (but unaware that I’d written the article), called me and I relayed the necessary information.
In the course of the conversation, Jaclyn asked if I knew anyone who’d be up for writing a Babylon 5 encyclopedia. I happily volunteered for what was—at that time—imagined as a two-month gig.
Then, Jaclyn began having ideas; very dangerous things, ideas…
These ideas evolved into something like 28 other books.