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J. Michael Straczynski

Crusade: What the Hell Happened? Vols. 2-3 by J. Michael Straczynski (Synthetic Worlds Publishing, 2023)

For eight years, I was senior editor at B5 Books, overseeing an array of volumes documenting the creation of Babylon 5 and its spinoffs for Synthetic Worlds Publishing and Publishing 180. When I resigned on 31 December 2016, I had one regret: that Volumes 2 and 3 of Crusade: What the Hell Happened? by J. Michael Straczynski remained unreleased, their publication postponed by the author’s busy schedule.

While thirteen may have proved an unlucky number for Crusade the series—cancelled after that many episodes were produced—it’s a luckier one for the story of that ill-fated series, with Volumes 2 and 3 published in hardcover, paperback, and e-books thirteen years after Volume 1, which has been reissued.

While Volume 1 was reprinted as it originally appeared in 2010, I approached the editorial work on Volumes 2 and 3 from scratch, selecting the script drafts after thirteen years of detailed study and annotated each teleplay with information gathered while preparing my own books for the Babylon 5 Preservation Project.

Highlights include Straczynski’s first draft of “The Needs of Earth”, which differs substantially from the filmed episode; early drafts of later scripts, before TNT’s problematic resulted in a production shutdown; a version of “The Path of Sorrows” featuring Lyta Alexander and Lennier; as well as the two unfilmed stories that would have seen the series arc bare its teeth.

These are not the books as originally conceived in 2010 (or even 2022), but I’m pleased to see them finally complete the saga of the Excalibur in print.

For editorial and/or publishing services, please contact me at ellison.editor@gmail.com.

Crusade: What the Hell Happened? Volume 2 by J. Michael Straczynski (Synthetic Worlds, 2023)
Edited by Jason Davis. Cover art by Luc Mayrand.
Hardback ISBN: 9781630771331 • Paperback ISBN: 9781630771348
8.5″ by 11″ / 7.5″ by 9.25″ 354pp.

Crusade: What the Hell Happened? Volume 3 by J. Michael Straczynski (Synthetic Worlds, 2023)
Edited by Jason Davis. Cover art by Luc Mayrand.
Hardback ISBN: 9781630771324 • Paperback ISBN: 9781630771287
8.5″ by 11″ / 7.5″ by 9.25″ 354pp.

To purchase, please visit B5Books.com.

Getting Lost in Babylon

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.

Anatomy of a Spec Sale: Changeling

“It’s all storytelling, one’s just longer than the other, and with a larger budget,” says J. Michael Straczynski regarding his feature script, Changeling. “You still have to keep up the pacing, deliver strong characters, and tell a coherent, internally consistent story.” Despite a varied career of writing for magazines, newspapers, comicbooks, novels, and television, Straczynski’s aversion to film has been based on the industry’s uncertainties. “In tv, when they say, ‘Here’s a series order; go make x-number episodes,’ that’s what you do. When you get into film, suddenly there’re all kinds of things that can go wrong…you have to get foreign investors, there’re various distribution deals; it’s go, then no-go, then go again…it can make you crazy. It’s too much like going to Vegas and betting your house on one roll of the dice.

“Consequently, I only go to the feature world when I think the story really, really merits it…and even then it’s with great caution,” says Straczynski alluding to Changeling, a spec script he sold in June to Ron Howard’s Imagine Entertainment. “For many years, I’d been a freelance reporter/stringer with such publications as the LA Times, the LA Herald Examiner, TIME Inc. and others, and as such you develop a lot of contacts around town,” said Straczynski, recounting the screenplay’s origins. “I’d gotten a call from one source at City Hall who was getting rid of some records from the ’20s and came across a transcript of a hearing he thought I should see. So I zoomed down there and was allowed to read some of it before it was destroyed. As I read the transcript, I initially couldn’t figure out what had been going on, and when I did finally figure it out, thought, this can’t possible be real, this can’t possibly have actually happened. I was able to copy a few pages before they took it away, just some critical pages, enough to get dates and places to launch into several years of research into the events of that story.”

“The main thing with this story—which involves a woman whose young son goes missing, and is later supposedly returned, but there’s something very much wrong here—was just getting it as accurate as possible,” Straczynski continues. “I didn’t want to fictionalize it much, because the story is so extraordinary, so hard to believe, that if you start faking things suddenly you call the whole story into question.” Rigorously adhering to the facts, the writer found his greatest challenge was determining which material would be left out of the screenplay. “I went through several iterations of the script, tried various different approaches over a very long period, then put it away to stew. Finally, one day, it dinged like a toaster in my head, and I sat down and I knew suddenly how it had to be written. I blasted through the script in eleven days.”

Upon finishing the draft, Straczynski ran it past his feature agent, Martin Spencer of CAA. “He was stunned by it,” says Straczynski who notes that Spencer read the script in one sitting. “He was also kind of taken aback by it because, as he put it, it’s ‘outside the box’ of what I’m known for, which is for being a sci-fi kinda guy,” says the writer best known for creating the science fiction television series Babylon 5. Refuting the industry pigeonhole in which he’s often filed, Straczynski notes “I’ve written, and sold, comedy, mainstream drama, murder mysteries, cop shows, sf, fantasy, horror…but in this town you are what you’re most recently known for, and that’s B5.”

On the script’s reception, Straczynski couldn’t be more pleased. “As was expressed to me by a number of folks after the fact, when a spec comes in the door, there’s usually some measure of backing-and-forthing, where one person likes the A-story, another the B-story, this or that needs work. But this one came in over the transom fairly bulletproof, which I attribute more to the original events than my skill as a storyteller.” With one suggestion from Spencer, Straczynski revised the script and the agent sent it out. “I have to say that my agent approached this in a very strategically smart way. He kept a tight rein on the script, and let it only to a couple of people in a very measured fashion.”

“We could have taken it to auction and probably made twice or three times what we ultimately got for it—which is already rather substantial—but my agent believed in the story as much as I did, and wanted not just to sell it, but to do everything to get it to the right people who could get it made—someone who was temperamentally suited to the material.” This led to Spencer sending the script to Imagine Entertainment, the company founded in 1986 by director Ron Howard and producer Brian Grazer. Straczynski continues, “They got the script on one afternoon, the president of Imagine read it that night, called Ron the next day, got it to him, Ron read it that night, and they opened negotiations the next day.”

For Straczynski, “The hardest part of the last stages of negotiation was doing nothing. When you get down to the wire, it’s easy to micro-manage your agent, to take what’s on the table and run, but I know and trust Martin as one of the best.” Thus, the writer did not hover over his agent while the deals were being made. “He’d call when there was something to say, and if I heard from him just once during a day, or not at all, I knew he was in there doing what he had to and I kept out of it.” As Straczynski puts it, “I do what I do, and leave him to do what he does. It wasn’t easy, but I did it.” When the deal was done, Spencer thanked Straczynski for giving him free reign. “I think you hire good people and leave them to do their job, otherwise what’s the point?”

When asked how he feels about having conquered another storytelling medium, Straczynski says, “I don’t think I’ve conquered anything. I’ve written over 200 produced tv scripts, created the Babylon 5 franchise for Warner Brothers, written some of Marvel’s top-selling books with their main core characters, now sold this…but I’m still learning and I’ve never considered myself having ‘made it’ at any point. I think the moment you get complacent, the moment you think you’ve conquered something, that’s the moment you get creatively dead.”

Originally published in Creative Screenwriting, Vol. 13, No. 6 (Nov/Dec 2006).