B5 Books

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.