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The Lurker's Guide to Babylon 5
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lurkers-guide/ftp/CompuServe/cs95-03-15

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JMS CompuServe messages, mid-March 1995 through mid-April 1995. Collected
by darkman@io.com.
[Response to an NBC executive's posting; the man was replying to JMS' comment
that seaQuest DSV had some major problems. Thanks to kilgalen@tde.com]
Subj: NBC exec responds/Part 2 Section: seaQuest DSV
To: Mary Feller, 73234,62 Friday, March 10, 1995 3:48:11 AM
From: J. Michael Straczynski, 71016,1644#137074
Dear Mr. Grill-Marxuach:
I was off wandering in the BABYLON 5 topic and saw a mention of your
note, so I figured I'd check it out. You've requested straight-up and
unfiltered feedback, and explained your own background in the request. Your
interest is salutory, your motives laudable. Like you, I am a fan of SF; my
feeling is the more SF on the air, the better those shows will have to become
by way of competition, with the audience being the final beneficiary.
I also know that there is a difference between a fan of the genre
responding to an inquiry like this, and someone who works in the Biz doing so.
One can find oneself locked out of the executive suites if one exercises
bluntness to excess. Nonetheless, on the theory that I've never been terribly
smart about watching my mouth, and the secondary theory that we're both
fundamentally interested in the same thing, I'll chance it.
Bottom line, Javier...I've worked on a LOT of shows, as producer,
writer, executive producer and story editor. In all that time, I have almost
never seen a network executive's appraisal actually *help* a show. One of the
few, rare exceptions to the rule is Gregg Maday at Warner Bros., who is quite
frankly a very sharp cookie...he knows story, he knows character, he's
willing to let creative people risk failing, he's just terrific.
You mention quadruple-dialogues and defining the franchise and other
netspeak terms...I've heard them before...and for the most part they're
meaningless and less than meaningless, because they perpetuate the notion
that what one is doing is quantifiable and fundamentally productive. You
can't define characters with meetings, or fifteen page memos or changes in
wardrobe or age-range parameters. You define them in the *writing*, pure
and simple. The writing must emanate from one clear source, the show runner.
The more that is diffused with committee-think, and focus groups, and network
suggestions -- however well-intentioned and sincere -- the more the work is
hobbled, and compromised, and watered-down. It all becomes High Concept or
Twitch-Characterization, or Characterization By Way of Phony Conflict/Annoying
People. It seems to me that far too much time is being spent figuring out
who should be watching the show and how to get them, rather than *telling a
story* and letting the audience find you, respond to that story. If there's
anything I've learned in SF, it's that the story andthe quality of the writing
is crucial; everything else, EFX and wardrobe and makeup, can be secondary if
what we see is INTERESTING.
seaQuest has gone through a lot of writer/producer/story editor changes
since its inception, mainly as a result of tinkering behind the scenes. Look
at all the really successful shows...they all have strong writer/producer
showrunners who are allowed to find and use their own voice, a perspective
that informs the show, PERSONALIZES it (something you can't do in a memo),
and makes it special...and the audience responds. Always has. Always will.
You want to make seaQuest better? Go out and find the best writer
producer/show runner you can get your hands on. Preferably someone who
KNOWS SF and won't have to spend the first half of the first season
re-inventing the wheel with stories that those who know the genre could
tell wouldn't work from the git-go. (Is Bob Crais doing anything these
days?) Put that person in the EP's chair, shake his/her hand...and walk out
the door and leave them alone. Encourage them to be daring. Don't sit on
their shoulder and loom. Trust your people and leave them alone. You'd be
surprised how well this works.
Great opportunities have been missed with both seaQuest and Spielberg's
other show for NBC, AMAZING STORIES (which, frankly, was neither amazing nor
a story in most cases). My god, Javier, you work in the business, you know
how utterly uncommon it is to get a guarantee of two seasons from a network.
Because shows get short orders, they're loathe to do anything of moment,
anything of substance; when you've got a guarantee, it behooves you to be
assertive, aggressive, to challenge WITHIN an entertaining framework,
*particularly* if you're doing SF. Giant killer alligators don't do it.
Killer plants don't do it. Giant octopi don't do it. Those are kiddie
stories; SF has generally been the literature of ideas, and inhabited in
the main by bright kids and adults. The whole thrust of seaQuest is
adolescent-oriented...but most kids don't want to watch a show about the
military, don't like watching shows with other kids as the heros (anybody
here want to be Robin, who could already do all that great stuff, or did they
want to be Batman?), recognize that it's bogus, and at the same time you lose
the grownups who are looking for something with a little meat on the bones.
You fall between two chairs.
Blasphemy as this may be, I'd also suggest keeping Spielberg away from
the scripts. Visually, he's a genius. Left to his own devices, he can't
tell a story for sour owl-poop. He goes for the quick image, the flash and
dazzle, and the substance (SCHINDLER notwithstanding) isn't there. His best
work has always been in working from someone else's book or script; if he
gets into the writing process, try as he might, he's just not a writer,
doesn't think in terms of story continuity, but rather in scenes and imagery
that don't always add up to a STORY.
Undertand that SF fans *want* new shows to work; they've generally
been disappointed, and they/we look to each new show riding over the horizon
with the hope that *this* one will be the knight in shining armor that will
make everyone sit up and take serious notice of SF...only to watch the armor
fall off the horse when it draws near, revealing nothing inside in far too
many cases.
The failure of much SF television stems from failure of vision or
failure of nerve. The problems with seaQuest stem from both; a failure of
nerve in allowing the creative people to push the envelope and define the
show without committees, and the resultant failure of vision because there's
no one defining storyteller. David Kelley, Steve Bochco, Chris Carter...
hell, Javier, you know the short-list of show-runners as well as I do, maybe
better. And you know instantly the sort of show you're going to get from
them. Their shows succeed because they're for the most part left alone, and
because they bring a unique voice to their shows. What is the unique voice
in seaQuest?
Every season-end, the networks look to how they can change the show
to make it better...and in so doing, end up causing more problems, because
you've got to get over the resistance of the fans who resent losing
character X; you've got to spend the first part of your season setting up
those new characters and relationships, which costs you whatever momentum you
were able to build up in the prior season...it simply causes more problems
than letting the show continue to steadily find its audience.
From day one, seaQuest has been tinkered with, and adjusted, and
second-guessed, and analyzed, and committee-banged, and thus has for all
that time been drifting from side to side, without identity or clear
direction, whipsawed and staggered until it's dizzy. The show doesn't know
what it wants to be, what it's about, or *who* it's about.
Take some chances with the stories. Don't assume you're making this
show for kids. Focus on the characters...who are they, what do they want,
and how far are they prepared to go to get it? Avoid the gimmick shows.
Break the glass bell around the characters that keeps us to only the most
simplistic motivations. (The best episode I saw of SQ was the one in which
Bridger must defeat a computer program of himself, and along the way must
face emotions, and a past he's been running from.)
Bottom line...leave it alone, Javier. Stop picking at it or it won't
heal. Hire good writers, producers and story editors, and let them have the
helm for a while. Because if there's some other key to success in TV, I sure
as hell haven't seen it. Good luck.
J. Michael Straczynski, Executive Producer, BABYLON 5
[Will Janet Greek be doing any of the upcoming eps?]
Janet was not available to us for most of this season due to illness
(flu turning into pneumonia), but she's better now, and will be
directing our season-ender, "The Price of Peace." We hope to
have her do five or six next year, and will of course try to get her
for our first and last as with this year and the last of
year one; she's kind of our good luck charm.
---
[Any time the rest of this season will we see: Bester, Morden, Sinclair?
Have you decided on a title for the third season yet? What's the background
hum you can hear with good headphones? Tell us about "The Long, Twilight
Struggle."]
I'd hoped to work in Bester by the end of this season for a second
appearance, but it doesn't look like it's going to work out; I'd have
to bend the story to do that, and I won't do that. I would, however,
like to use him more next season, and intend to do so. Sinclair;
not this season. Morden: yes.
Have I decided on a title for the third season? Yes.
We audio map each part of the station and create background sound including
a thrum whose volume depends on how far away they are from the hull, and the
mechanism that rotates the station.
I don't want to say anything about "The Long Twilight Struggle" at this
time, to avoid hyping people. Suffice to say it's a very strong episode.
jms
---
[Are jumpgates shut down during wartime?]
Actually, you've seen the Centauri warships, the Narn heavy cruiser, and
the Agamemnon all make their own jump points. The jump gates are mainly for
use by smaller ships and commercial vessels; of little or no strategic value.
(Nonetheless, during the war, access codes for jumpgates were changed to keep
out anything that might come out the other end as a bomb.)
jms
---
[What are your influences?
Will the death of Commodore (maker of the Amiga) affect the show?]
The most important way of supporting the show is to write your local station.
It's hard to say what my influences were, in that I'm basically a fan of
the genre overall. On the one hand I grew up reading the Lord of the Ring
books, Dune, Childhood's End, Foundation, the Lensman books, all the real
sagas of SF...on the flip side my role models and/or influences in writing
include Rod Serling, Harlan Ellison, Ray Bradbury, H.P. Lovecraft, Arch
Oboler, Norman Corwin, Reginald Rose, Paddy Chayefsky and Charles Beaumont.
It's difficult to say what SF TV programs have inspired me since so few of
them have gotten it right; mainly the original ST, Twilight Zone, the Outer
Limits, the Prisoner, Blake's 7 and a very few others.
Problems with Commodore/Amiga won't affect us, since the technology has
already been imported over to DOS platforms. And yes, it's certainly
seemed that our decision to go CGI has been validated, with more and
more shows going over to this format. (In fact, DS9 has contracted with
the very same people who do our CGI to do some of their stuff. Nice to
see them following our lead.)
jms
---
70/30 odds are pretty good; this time last year I set our odds at
50/50 for pickup on year two.
Again, the best advice is to write your local station.
Re: Blake's 7...what I enjoyed about the show was that you never knew what
the hell to expect from week to week. Regular cast members came and went; Blake (for whom the show was named) just plain vanished for most of the show. They were just nuts, willing to do anything if it served the story. I also enjoyed the character of Avon, someone who would pointedly smile only once per episode...and always at
the *most* inappropriate moment.
("I'm not stupid, I'm not expendable, and I'm NOT going.")
Granted it's a bit rough around the edges, but you may want to check it out again sometime.
jms
---
[Could you send explosives through a jump point and have them appear suddenly
somewhere else?]
Anything entering the gate must go through hyperspace, as we've shown in
the series. You could open a gate, then send through explosives, but
it would only blow up *in* hyperspace, it wouldn't come out the other side.
jms
---
[Have you thought about doing a fantasy show? Why aren't there more of them?]
Well, certainly now we have the Hercules series, which though I can't abide
it, is apparently doing well in the ratings...and there you've got cyclops
and sorceresses and all the trappings of fantasy. There have been other
attempts at fantasy, the one starring Judson Scott (the name of which has
just fallen out of my head), and pilots aplenty, including the Dr. Strange
pilot. Dark Shadows could almost qualify as fantasy, though often leaning
into horror. So there have been attempts (I know of one more in the works
right now in development with one of the new networks, via another writer;
though I'm not allowed to talk about it, suffice to say it has dragons and
all the other elements of fantasy).
SF is better suited in general to TV because most of it is either
contemporary or somewhat futuristic, and in both cases you can either
use or cannibalize contemporary locations and sets. Once you start talking
castles and armies and the like, you're increasing the budget and production
problems by orders of magnitude. The more costly and problematic the
project, the less likely it becomes.
Using some of the tricks we've worked out on B5 could ameliorate a few of
these problems, but not the bulk of them; it's one of those puzzles that we
haven't sussed out yet. (And I've actually given it a fair amount of
thought.) You'd almost certainly be caught in contemporary fantasy, for
which I think there could be no better project than MAGE, Matt Wagner's
graphic novel take on unpdating the King Arthur story.
That said, to your specific questions:
Yes, I've considered it, but not in any great detail. My roots are more
in SF than in unicorn-and-fuzzy-footed-elf-and-exiled-princess literature.
Thus I don't know if I'd be any good at it.
Who would I suggest? Probably George R.R. Martin. Or Alan Brennert,
though he generally tends not to do SF anymore for TV. Michael Cassutt.
Bob Crais, if he could be conned into it. Mark Edens. David Gerrold.
D.C. Fontana.
I think the rules on making a fantasy show work would be about the same
as those I laid out for SF. And yes, I think you'll see several attempts
at fantasy on TV over the next decade. Potentially, it could have an even
larger base audience than SF, since there isn't as much techspeak or
hardware to know going in. It just needs someone to do it right, and do
it responsibly from a fiscal perspective.
jms
---
[When will the third season (hopefully) start airing?]
Assuming we're renewed, I'd expect us to start airing third season episodes
the same time as last time, in November.
jms
---
[Will we see more alien-looking aliens?]
I have always wanted to see a peersons puppeteer as described by Larry Niven
for Example. But any non humanoid with a good complex culture would be fun.
Also, bear in mind that you're hugging the technology curve pretty close
here; the more bizarre the alien, the better your tech has got to be to
make it *real*, and even more important, to make it convey emotion.
If all you want it to do is drool and slobber, then you can make something
like ALIENS creatures (oh, yeah, and bite). But if you want to have any
kind of conversation with it, that's *tough*. Yoda's nice, but Yoda's a
puppet, and there's not much doubt about it (and even with that, it cost
them VAST amounts of time and money to get those shots).
jms
---
[How do you do skin and things that are not geometrically regular?]
Skin is exactly the problem; and the musculature beneath.
jms
---
[What kind of assistance did B5 get from the Minbari? Where's Earthdome?
How big is the EA? What happened to San Diego? Is Harlan Ellison still
providing input?]
1) Mainly financial support, after Babylons 1-4 went south and ate up most
of the EA budget.
2) Earthdome is the capital of the Earth Alliance, located in Geneva.
3) Not including smaller operations, the EA has over 14 colonies and
worlds in over a dozen solar systems.
4) San Diego got nuked by terrorists.
5) Harlan continues to provide as much input as he wants, which is always
profoundly welcome.
jms
---
[When the heck do you find time to read comics as well as produce/write/etc.
B5, spend time online, watch TV, AND read comics?!?!]
a) No sleep
b) No life
c) Massive doses of stupidity
jms
---
[Will we see more of B5's hollow interior? What happened to the CD-ROM?]
Yes to the interior shots; we've seen them before this season, any time
we're in the Garden area, but we do plan on some big ones later.
I think once we get going on year 3, we'll be able to push faster on the
CD-Rom.
jms
---
I'm really rather dismayed that my flame messages have been archived here.
I don't see any need to contaminate this forum with what happened elsewhere.
Since they're my words, I would like the file deleted. Thanx.
jms
---
This is a very hard message to write, but it has to be said, now, before the
error compounds itself further.
Several weeks ago, a number of us -- me, Claudia, Mira and Michael -- flew
out to Chicago for a "dry run" of sorts for the Big Bang, held at Planet
Hollywood. It did not go well; there were many problems behind the scenes,
which we worked to keep the fans from seeing: logistical, organizational,
and other problems. Our experience was that the whole exercise was poorly
run, and there were other concerns raised about
how business was being done.
Upon returning, I have said very little about the whole event, and sent
Tom Christofferson a 4 page fax detailing the items that worried me about
how things were being run, and indicated that unless things changed rather
dramatically, neither I nor my cast could support this operation, because
in the end it was the fans who would be hurt.
Subsequent to that came the capper.
Tom approached us about licensing a product: high quality leather jackets
in rememberance of the Battle of the Line. He requested the original
artwork for all the Battle of the Line patches, which we have never given
to anyone else. The purpose was to make ONE demo jacket to show to Warners
Licensing to show how it would look.
So you can imagine my dismay when I learned, over this system, in messages
posted by others, that he was selling the jackets (which had NOT been
licensed) at Vulkon; selling the patches; that he had taken artwork
provided for use only as backdrops at the convention and had turned them
into posters and was selling the posters. People buying the posters and
other material were told, and was even printed on
them, that all proceeds were to benefit the Starfury Project, which had
never been finalized, no arrangements had been made...buying these items
on the assumption that they were contributing to a worthy cause. They
weren't.
This is not only a violation of copyright, but a violation of trust, on
top of the other concerns we had about the convention. Warner Bros. Legal
Affairs is already onto this. We didn't know he was doing this, he had no
right to be doing this, and this is, as they say,the straw that breaks the
camel's back.
Consequently, we must withdraw all support from this convention; neither
I nor anyone else involved with Babylon 5 will attend. If you were
planning to attend specifically to see Babylon 5 folks, then I strongly
suggest you secure a refund or change your plans.
All of us here are bitterly disappointed, because until our first trip we
had great hopes for this. Primarily, however, we are disappointed and
saddened for the fans of the show, who were looking forward to this as
much as we were. A lot of people were very excited about it, ourselves
included. But once again the theory is proven that sometimes things that
look too good to be true often are. It is my feeling that, even the
pirating aside, the convention would be a total disaster, and in the end
the fans would be the ones hurt by it, and we can't allow that.
With great regrets....
J. Michael Straczynski
---
[Capt. Maynard in "A Distant Star" is wearing cowboy boots! What happened
to Earth, that they need domes? Any plans for posters?]
Yeah, the theory was to make Maynard a bit more eccentric.
The Earth isn't in that bad a shape, actually, the domes are sometimes
functional but often more metaphoric.
There will be a new B5 poster done for later this year.
jms
---
No TV series has ever gotten a 5 year contract, so I never expected to get
one here.
Our budget for year two increased slightly over year one, and will probably
increase a bit more in year three (assuming we're go), but not much in any
event, with the lion's share of that going toward actors and crews salaries,
which is eminently deserved.
We've actually used fewer library shots in year two than in year one,
because the techniques for making them have gotten better, and because we
tended to use a lot of establishing shots between scenes to help establish
where we were in our first year; so we now use fewer transitional shots this
year.
jms
---
[Is the show having trouble getting renewed in some markets?]
No, apparently the show is doing well in most markets, and in most places
we're getting better time slots. We are cautiously optimistic.
jms
---
[Hey, what is this? You're on here BEFORE midnight!]
It was an oversight. I'll try not to let it happen again.
jms
---
The year three title...is classified for the time being.
jms
---
[How would you describe the Shadow ships?]
For me, they're spiders.
jms
---
"What the hell was that?" is exactly the right reaction. In the B5
universe, things have a tendency to blindside you...kinda like life.
Congrats on the new convert....
jms