Destination: Moonbase Alpha (40 page)

‘We went through the shut-down of the country, which had all kinds of interesting ramifications. There was the miner’s strike that took place in 1974, which caused the general blackout [of] the entire country. They went on a three-day work week, a sort of critical time in English economic history. All of the shops and streets were without light. They unplugged the National Grid. If you think about it, there is one electrical source in England, called the National Grid, and they pulled the plug! So there were a lot of kerosene lamps in all the shops, the street lights were down and businesses were functioning three days a week.
We
were declared an essential industry. Plus, Sir Lew Grade – later
Lord
Lew Grade – had influence in the government, and because he was employing so many people, it made a case for allowing us to shoot on a five-day week. That sounded great. We had our own generators in the studio and weren’t dependent on the National Grid. But, the labs were down to their three-day week. So we could produce, but we couldn’t get our stuff back. We had these interesting kinds of problems. At least a year went by that first week; it
seemed
like a year.’

On the same subject, Prentis Hancock recalled, ‘
The series was given a lack of structure in the first weeks because of the three-day working week in the United Kingdom. At one time I had the right to get petrol coupons, because oil was rationed at the pumps and I could get two gallons a day to get to Pinewood and back, and I would give Zienia a lift. That affected the first episode. That was imposed upon us. All the pre-recorded video that was on the [computer screens] was pre-done on the national grid, the electricity system. But it wasn’t the same speed as the five-day system we had from ATV television, which was Lew Grade’s way of allowing us to work for five days. So we worked for five days, while the industry was working for three …

‘
Lee Katzin, I loved him; I thought he really was the director who had the vision, and the right vision, for the series. But he shot so much film through the camera that he would waste footage like it was going out of fashion. But in spite of all that we got it made, and we had 15 months of fun and games.’

Martin Landau had issues in dealing with picture elements being added in post-production: ‘We’d always have to ask whether something [on the Main Mission screen] was going left to right, or right to left. Very important, because if the looks were wrong and [we were] looking at nothing, [it wouldn’t work]! You couldn’t flip [the picture], because most of those things had numbers on them. Very often in things you can “Turn a horse around.” The director makes a mistake, let’s say in a Western, and the horse is going that way and the people are looking this way, you just flip the film. You couldn’t do that here.’

Barbara Bain was also troubled by the big screen in Main Mission: ‘A big blank! And the problem was that, because they were working at Bray – the studio down the road about 20 miles – on all the special effects, we didn’t even know what they had conjured. So [the script] might say it was a wild-looking blah-blah-blah, and that’s what we were looking at. When they finally matted it in, either it was, or it wasn’t! That was difficult. It was a big, blank, black screen, which was matted in.

‘That studio [at Bray] was incredible! We were seldom able to get over there, but Brian Johnson was a brilliant genius, photographing glass fibres and all kinds of incredible things, and having the best time. We never saw what they were working on simultaneously. They weren’t on the set with us, so we didn’t know what they were producing until we saw a rough cut.’

Martin Landau recalled having to re-dub numerous lines of dialogue : ‘Very often in speeches I had to get all the numbers right. They had to match up. “Eagle One landing at Pad Three, and ready for lift-off.” All those numbers had to be right, always. The words usually were crippling, and much of the time I would have to say those things on the move, very quickly. Much of the time, because of problems, I would have to go to the dubbing room and post-sync. If I had a speech and talked in about this rhythm [he speeds up] I tended to run my words together, and we couldn’t make loops. Most of the time, we had to do one line at a time. I used to have to basically lip-sync to an entire speech on one of those. I think in one of the early episodes I’m walking by a computer bank. That one is dubbed. It was miraculous that I could do it because I don’t think I said the lines exactly as written. I added a word or two, but I had to say it walking up the steps, and I was walking down the bank of computers. I had to finish this long, black speech. In that
Space: 1999
, which Charlie Crichton was directing, he wanted me to move off camera just as the last word ended. I had to get it in there, so I had to talk fast.’

Difficulties were not confined just to technical areas of the production, as Christopher Penfold recalled: ‘The problems were more with the American writers working with us. It was actually a silly idea to try to conduct script conferences over the telephone with people living and working in the
United States, and after a while it became unworkable and we stopped. The only American input that we continued to have was through an American writer living in England at the time, Edward di Lorenzo. He became another script editor on the series, and wrote a couple of episodes himself.

‘When the series was set up, there was a very short lead time, which is a problem of television production. Once the money becomes available, you have a certain space of time in which the money has to see a return. So we didn’t really have enough time to prepare the scripts before the series went into production, [and] we were always running to catch up. As I see it, there is little distinction between story consultant and story editor, or the term I promote now, which is script editor. In the context of a multi-episode drama series, the script editor would be responsible for choosing the writers who are going to contribute to the series; for providing a kind of overview for those writers of what the series … is going to do. Each individual writer is primarily, if not solely, concerned with his or her own episode, but they have to be educated into the wider, larger context of where their episode is going to fit. That’s the function of the script editor, and the function I would have expected to be performing on
Space: 1999
. The [fact] that the lines of demarcation became blurred was entirely due to the pressures of actual production. I found myself in a position of commissioning writers too late to provide that kind of overview for them. So the scripts, when they came in, really often weren’t fitting with the overview of the series, as it was constantly developing. By that time, it was already in production, so even when writers were commissioned, it wasn’t possible to give them a Bible for the series, which would have contained, for instance, Barry Morse’s biography of Victor Bergman (the character I was most interested in). Those things were constantly changing. So it was a difficult role. I would normally expect the script editor not actually to be writing or re-writing the episodes for which other writers are credited. It was a set of circumstances that brought that about. Sometimes it was something I regretted, but some of the episodes that as a story editor I effectively
completely
rewrote, for which I didn’t get a writing credit, I feel pretty good about – “Black Sun”, particularly.’

Johnny Byrne also commented on the difficult production schedule: ‘Every script I wrote came completely from myself. There wasn’t time for other people to come to me with ideas, because we had ten days or three weeks to make a new [episode]. To have it designed and to have it ready for the actors, prepared to be shot. It was an impossible situation … Not one story idea was dropped, because there wasn’t time. There wasn’t time to look at all the scripts and say, “This is a good one – that’s a bad one.” We needed every single one we did.

‘There was a very short turnaround on all the scripts we had to do. There wasn’t time to stop and stare. We had to really push on. There was certainly no idea about what the overall story arc was. We didn’t [use] words like that. We probably didn’t know about words like that. We were just concerned with creating episodes one by one as they came along, and being excited about the stuff that we would learn, at least in my case, episode by episode. I distinctly remember rushing into Chris’s office saying, “What about this? This has happened. I’ve written this and suddenly all these implications are obvious.” And he would say, “Get the script done. Press on.” And so it went on, right to the very end, pretty much. It never let up. It was a wonderful master class for a writer like me, because we were making a film. I had daily contact with people like Keith Wilson and Brian Johnson. It was a wonderful thing for a writer. You could see; you could focus and get everything in perspective. Although it seemed to go at a very fast pace, in effect it was a wonderful thing for me.’

Martin Landau recalled some of his difficulties with the series: ‘Another problem was, of course, when you’re dealing with English writers, scripts are written [as if] for the BBC, and they don’t have commercials. That leads to 12-and-a-half-minute acts, and some white knuckles. If you have a good script, you could have a 22 minute first act.’ [Examples are in the episodes ‘The Infernal Machine’, ‘The Taybor’ and ‘All That Glisters’.] ‘It’s terrific, but you’ve got to break it. I’d say, “You’ve got to break it here.” And they’d say, “You can’t break it there.” I’d say, “It’s a natural break!” Well, there was a lot of that. Charlie Crichton would sit there drinking scotch with Chris Penfold, Barbara, me, Barry and sometimes Gerry until
one o’clock in the morning. I would say, “I don’t understand this script! It doesn’t make any sense. It’s cryptic. I need a Rosetta stone! I don’t know what the hell it means. What’s going on here? What is this scene telling me?” In the script, [I’d have to] say, “Okay, let’s go! Let’s get out of here!” We don’t have to talk about it! If you walk out the door, we know you’re going! When I say we were there until one o’clock in the morning, I mean the only thing we doctored at that point was the stuff we were shooting the next morning. We had to regroup the next night and work on the other stuff. Hopefully, those guys would get some of that stuff done during the day. If not, that meant one o’clock in the morning again. And I had to be back at seven. I had to
learn
some of that stuff, too! Sometime in there I had to catch a little sleep. You know, at the beginning of
Space: 1999
, I must have been sleeping maybe three or four hours a night. I worked in practically every shot all day. So you’ve got to have an enormous kind of energy, and to keep involved it takes a particular kind of thrust. The English take a longer time to shoot. They don’t work as fast as an American crew. At least, we were used to that.’

Barbara Bain recalled a similar difficulty with the scripts: ‘We had a lot of lovely, talented young writers who just came out of
Cambridge. They were very bright, very gifted and very imaginative – but the form was elusive in that they were used to writing very slow-built material, finally to a climax. They wanted to take their time in telling their stories and things like that. We had a lot of trouble getting them to understand that they had six minutes …’ [Barbara claps in tempo.] ‘And
bam
! What is going to happen, and get it going again? It was a struggle that was never really properly resolved. Therefore when we did go on to the set – they call it the floor – we weren’t as prepared as we were on
Mission: Impossible
. We were struggling all the time to write as we went along – even though, in many instances, we achieved some wonderful kinds of stuff. It could have been
more
such, if it had been a tighter production. It was very hard to get that right, to get that idea that we were in jeopardy every six to eight minutes.’

Martin Landau continued: ‘A lot of the critics used to say there wasn’t a lot of humour on the show. There wasn’t a lot of humour written
into
the show! I used to yell for humour. When you’re in trouble, that’s what you need. You can’t get blood out of a stone, and there was very little fun! On the whole, no-one paid attention to that. They said they were going to do it – humanise the scripts – but they didn’t. Now, the bottom line with this was that there was nothing frivolous about going through space and not being in control of your own destiny. Not having control over your trajectory, and basically being 20-some years into the future. So – technologically, emotionally – the people on Alpha were not ready for deep space. Whereas in
Star Trek
they were moving around on their own and were much further in the future. So, basically, the conditions were that of a pressure cooker. But it needed humour. I said, “These guys are people. They need battleground humour, or death-row humour.” There were a lot of inconsistencies in the writing. It’s very easy to act well-written material. Shakespeare is easy to act. It’s not hard. Well, it’s hard for some actors, but only because they can’t hold their breath that long! The bottom line is – bad writing is hard to act. You could do some of your best work and would still not like it. You compensate a lot for it. Sometimes you succumb to it. But good writing is a piece of cake. A lot of the writing on
Space: 1999
was very bumpy … I said, “I would never say this.” A man walks into a room and says, “Hello, everybody! I’m embarrassed!” You don’t do that! You do everything in the world not to do that. Lots of times, we had that [kind of thing]. I was a pain in the neck, part of the time, because I’d say, “What the hell is this? I’m wearing everything on my tongue here. I’m saying everything when we don’t have time”!’