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Reasonable or Out of Line?

KoshN

Super Moderator
I submitted a post to rastb5m asking JMS a couple of questions (in quotes below):

JMS, Questions About The Crusade Scriptbooks
rec.arts.sf.tv.babylon5.moderated
Friday, July 20, 2007 12:27 PM

Joe,

Are you going to go into what things were like on the set during
Crusade, before, during and after the TNT notes, and the general mood on
the set? It had to be a tough working environment for everybody
involved, or were you able to partly shield the cast and crew from
the TNT BS and as professionals they expect stuff like that from a
network? Just wondering what things were like on the set while all the
TNT garbage was going on.


Regarding "Racing the Night", would you please put in the scriptbook,
the script pages of how the episode would have opened when it was still
planned to be the first episode aired, e.g. the last revision before it
was changed to be aired ninth?


I just wondered if they seemed like reasonable questions to ask him, or was I out of line? I didn't want to put this in the form of a poll, nothing so formal, but get an idea of what other B5ers thought about it. What I asked is stuff I'd really like to know, and I hope he includes it in the scriptbooks. Yes, I know he's almost certainly not going to answer my post, but I had to ask.
 
How can you be out of line for asking questions about the series you'd like to know :confused:

If he doesn't answer then obviously he's a skallywag :)
 
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I don't see anything out of line about the questions. Whether he'll answer or not probably depends on how busy he is. And maybe whether he's even looking ahead as far as the Crusade books yet.

That said, he's used some pretty early drafts in the script books already so I'd say it's at least a possibility that he'll include the earlier draft. From my copies, the Writer's Draft and First draft have one Teaser and the Final Draft and Blue Revisions have the one we saw.

Jan
 
To both crazyhorse and Jan,

Thanks for the reply. Sometimes I can ask brusque questions that didn't seem that way when I wrote them. Didn't want the Great Maker miffed at me, and was trying to word it in a way that I'd more likely get a reply and/or get that stuff in the scriptbooks.
 
Will somebody just ask the daft git if the Black Star was destroyed in our Solar System between Mars and Jupiter or not?

Bloody things been bugging me since I talked to Joe :LOL:
 
Regarding "Racing the Night", would you please put in the scriptbook, the script pages of how the episode would have opened when it was still planned to be the first episode aired, e.g. the last revision before it was changed to be aired ninth?

As far as I know the basic opening of the script was always the same as the final episode. Neither was changed to reflect the change in broadcast order because nobody knew that the broadcast order was going to be changed until long after the ep was not only written, but shot and edited. The first five episodes were in the can before TNT Atlanta first swept in, halted production, and started tinkering with the show. There was neither the time, the money or the inclination to go back and change episode one so that it would fit in the episode eight slot, especially since it was never intended as some kind of "origin story".

Crusade was intended to begin in media res, in the midst of the action, without any elaborate set-up or introduction. The first episode was always set six months or so into the mission, with the crew already having meshed, so there was no need to change "Racing" to fit a later slot. (In part this is because the original plan was to air it immediately after a showing of A Call to Arms, so the background would be fresh in everyone's mind.) As a "first episode", "Racing" still needed to introduce the cast and characters (most of whom do not appear in ACtA), but it does that as it is, and it matters not whether it airs first or eighth.

"Racing" not only does all that, but does it brilliantly. The characters are each introduced in the teaser with a brief, vivid scene and sharp dialogue as Gideon moves through the dig, and the relationships are instantly established. The exception is Galen, but by keeping him off-screen until the opening of act one, JMS made him something mysterious and exciting and still tells us something about his relationship with Gideon.

Regards,

Joe
 
As far as I know the basic opening of the script was always the same as the final episode. Neither was changed to reflect the change in broadcast order because nobody knew that the broadcast order was going to be changed until long after the ep was not only written, but shot and edited. The first five episodes were in the can before TNT Atlanta first swept in, halted production, and started tinkering with the show. There was neither the time, the money or the inclination to go back and change episode one so that it would fit in the episode eight slot, especially since it was never intended as some kind of "origin story".

Crusade was intended to begin in media res, in the midst of the action, without any elaborate set-up or introduction. The first episode was always set six months or so into the mission, with the crew already having meshed, so there was no need to change "Racing" to fit a later slot. (In part this is because the original plan was to air it immediately after a showing of A Call to Arms, so the background would be fresh in everyone's mind.) As a "first episode", "Racing" still needed to introduce the cast and characters (most of whom do not appear in ACtA), but it does that as it is, and it matters not whether it airs first or eighth.

"Racing" not only does all that, but does it brilliantly. The characters are each introduced in the teaser with a brief, vivid scene and sharp dialogue as Gideon moves through the dig, and the relationships are instantly established. The exception is Galen, but by keeping him off-screen until the opening of act one, JMS made him something mysterious and exciting and still tells us something about his relationship with Gideon.

Regards,

Joe

Racing the Night - JMS Commentary:
...Later on it was decided to make a different pilot, which would show those characters coming together, the more conventional way to go, and as a result, this got pushed back.
....
The flashback scenes you're seeing here, were actually were modified from what we at first shot, things cut here and there to make it more accessible for something that was not meant to be therefore a pilot. Otherwise, it would be redundant with what was now established in the course of the show. So, this section was truncated a bit.

I was asking to see what was there before it was truncated.
 
Whether he'll answer or not probably depends on how busy he is. And maybe whether he's even looking ahead as far as the Crusade books yet.

I just realized I posted that in what is probably the pre-SDCC dead zone, where a lot of people are getting ready to travel to SDCC. There's been very little traffic on the usual B5 groups/sites, and JMS probably won't even see the question let alone answer it. Oh well, bad timing.
 

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