“I write every paragraph four times—once to get my meaning down, once to put in anything I have left out, once to take out anything that seems unnecessary, and once to make the whole thing sound as if I had only just thought of it.”
Margery Allingham (1904–1966)
“Without obsession, life is nothing.”
John Waters (1946– )
“Your success as an artist, to say something new, ultimately depends on the breadth of your education. My recommendation would be to major in an area other than film, develop a point of view, and then apply that knowledge to film. Because if film is all you know, you cannot help but make derivative work. I found that what I had learned about sound, history, biology, English, physics all goes into the mix.”
Ben Burtt (1948– )
“I’m not genius, I’m disciplined.”
Eiko Ishioka (1938–2012)
“I don’t know about you, but I’m kind of fed up with realism. After all, there’s enough reality already; why make more of it? Why not leave realism for the memoirs of drug addicts, the histories of salt, the biographies of porn stars? Why must we continue to read about the travails of divorced people or mildly depressed Canadians when we could be contemplating the shopping habits of zombies, or the difficulties that ensue when living and dead people marry each other? We should be demanding more stories about faery handbags and pyjamas inscribed with the diaries of strange women.”
Audrey Niffeneggar (1963– )
“Let us think the unthinkable, let us do the undoable, let us prepare to grapple with the ineffable itself, and see if we may not eff it after all.”
Douglas Adams (1952–2001)
“Invention, it must be humbly admitted, does not consist in creating out of void but out of chaos.”
Mary Wollstonecraft Shelley (1797–1851)
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.
Suppressing his excitement, Toby thanked Alicia for participating in his telepathy experiment, and ushered her out of the psychology lab. As she crossed the walkway that bridged the third floors of the more conventional, 1950s-built psychology building and the modernist 1970s-nightmare where the physical sciences resided, Toby lost sight of her in a sudden surge of transiting students. He returned to the lab.
Fifty out of fifty, he thought, picking the uppermost Zener card from the stack, that’s statistically impossible. Then he noticed the card: three wavy lines. He consulted the notepad where he’d tracked the actual cards against Alicia’s verbal guesses; a circle was the fiftieth card drawn according to his notes. He checked the forty-ninth—the card was a square, but his notes recorded a star.
Panicking, Toby wound back the audiotape he’d made of the session.
His voice, irritatingly high, confirmed “Star. And number fifty…”
Then another male voice, a much deeper one, said, “Circle.”
“…is a circle,” Toby’s voice concurred. “That’s fifty out of fifty, Alicia. I think you must be reading my mind or something.”
The deep, male voice replied, “Or something.” The deep voice laughed. “I should go; I’ve got a class to get to.”
© 2018 by Jason Davis. All rights reserved.
In 2018, I tried to write a short-short story every day. I was eventually derailed by a weekend away from my desk and mounting guilt that the Harlan Ellison Books Preservation Project was taking longer than expected, and every waking moment should be dedicated to its completion.
With five years distance, I like some of the stories, each one having been placed before me by Facebook for the last week, and I think the exercise is serving a purpose now that it failed to accomplish at the time. We shall see.
Statistically speaking, it must be incredibly rare to have both a friend born one year and a day before you as well as a friend who was born a year and a day after you. Since 1995, I’ve had the latter, and from 2000 to 2010, I had the former.
As it’s the 6th of December 2016, and Gary Anello would have been forty today, I want to take a moment to say thanks to someone who’s been gone for over half a decade now. We were co-workers at Borders in Fort Worth, TX from 2000 until I moved to LA in 2002. Afterward, I stopped in and said hello whenever I was in town, and eventually we caught up on Facebook, and I’m glad we were able to talk a few times on the phone before Gary died.
Our last conversations put a lot in perspective for me, and though our interactions were brief blips in the totality of our respective lives, you don’t have to spend a lot of time with a fireman who pulls you from a burning building to say he had an impact on your life. So thanks to my metaphorical fireman, who should have been forty today; the echo of your voice still resounds in the lives of those who knew you.