In LA for B5, Part 2

Originally published December 2, 1994, in Comics Buyer’s Guide #1098

(Continuing my sojourn to Los Angeles to watch the filming of an episode of Babylon 5 written by your humble scribe:)

Friday, Oct. 28. It’s a good day in that the producer who seems to have targeted me is nowhere to be seen. I try to survive the disappointment.

There’s a delay in filming, as the immediate area experiences a power failure. The source of the disruption (judging by all the trucks) is barely two blocks from the studio. Humorous speculation is that Paramount is behind it. Arrangements are quickly made for the emergency generator which keeps the filming going, although without some of the customary items such as the loud bells that usually ring to signal a take.

One particularly nifty scene gets filmed today. It’s the first major confrontation between Security Chief Garibaldi (Jerry Doyle) and Matt Stoner (played by Keith Szarabajka, formerly of The Equalizer). Stoner is Talia Winters’ (Andrea Thompson) ex-husband, and Garibaldi—who has something of a crush on Talia—interrogates Stoner to find out his business on B5. But the tension builds quickly, and at the emotional climax of the scene their faces are bare inches from one another, as Stoner—in a calm, almost Hannibal Lecteresque voice—goads Garibaldi.

As the camera rolls, Keith—as Stoner—responds to Garibaldi’s query of “How long do you intend to be on Babylon 5?” with a quiet, baiting, “Ohhh, you don’t care about my itinerary, Officer. You want to know what she was like. What she likes to hear. Where she likes to be touched. The little noises she makes; whether she cries out or sighs softly…”

Garibaldi yanks Stoner off his feet, ready to slug him, and only barely manages to regain control. Stoner saunters towards the door and, as Garibaldi warns, “I’ll be keeping an eye on you,” Keith responds with Stoner’s exit line: “Use both eyes. You’ll need them.”

He walks out, and director John Flinn immediately makes his satisfaction with the take evident. He doesn’t yell, “Cut!” Instead, he practically explodes from his chair, shouting, “God, that was great! Yes!” That’s John’s main drawback: no enthusiasm.

To hear the accounts of some people who have written scripts for Star Trek: The Next Generation, the televised versions of their scripts contained maybe a handful of lines that they wrote, the rest coming from a variety of sources. Naturally, there were changes in my B5 script (including a reworking of the fourth act, since my original resolution bore a strong resemblance to a sequence in the following week’s episode). But for the most part they’re my words. So it’s nice to see ‘m treated well.

Saturday, Oct. 29. Socializing. Visit with Harlan and Susan Ellison in the morning; jam with Bill Mumy in the afternoon on a proposed comic book project.

Sunday, Oct. 30. Go to Disneyland with Paul Dini. Arrive to discover that the one ride Paul hasn’t gone on—The Roger Rabbit Car-Toon Ride in Toontown—is out of commission. Paul promptly does his impression of the new Disney animated characters, The Gargoyles: He doubles over and screams, “Nooooooo!” in agony.

Lion King parade is new. Hit a few rides that I rarely go on—like The Jungle Cruise (wherein Paul and I beat them to a few of the jokes, such as when the guides say, “There’re some elephants, some zebras, and—hmmm—some animal I’ve never seen before,” whereupon Paul and I immediately said, “Must be gnu.”) I don’t think the guide liked us overmuch.

We also go on Snow White’s Scary Adventure. There is literally no one else on the ride—so Paul and I spend the entire two minutes of the ride screaming in “horror” at everything we encounter (including the chirping birds and singing dwarfs). We come out and get weird looks from the people running the thing. Hey, it said “Scary.” What’d they want from us?

Find a nifty-looking Lion King safari vest and buy it. Lots of pockets will make film storage easy.

Monday, Oct. 31. Halloween on the set of Babylon 5. How can one tell? It’s business as usual.

First up are scenes with Andrea and Jerry. John the director kicks off the morning’s shoot by mistakenly calling Andrea “Claudia.” Finally, in exasperation, he has little pieces of tape made up with the names of various actors and then tapes “Andrea” and “Jerry” to the video monitor so he’ll have a perpetual reminder. At one point, while John is distracted, Jerry promptly substitutes the “Claudia” tape for “Andrea,” but John doesn’t fall for it.

I wear my Lion King vest. Two crew members ask me excitedly if I worked on Lion King, since a lot of people tend to wear their resumes. (I spot crew jackets or shirts from Batman Returns, Ed Wood, St. Elsewhere, etc.) I say no, I bought it in Disneyland. They look disappointed.

When I first met Bruce Boxleitner the previous week, he had come across as cool and reserved. Yet now he comes over and starts chatting with me, talking with erudition about the SF genre, particularly films. An utterly unpretentious, down-to-earth kind of guy. I’m not entirely sure how seriously he treats the make-believe of acting. (He’s not nearly as intense as, say, Andreas is, but he clearly takes the genre itself seriously: enthused by its possibilities and impatient with SF products that fail to take advantage of those potentialities.)

Also meet Peter Jurasik, who plays Londo. It’s very odd to hear him speaking in an ordinary voice, rather than his broad accent—although, as the day goes on, I notice that even in casual conversation he is talking with Londo’s voice. It’s as if, the longer he stays in costume, the more he’s submerged in the part.

Peter, Bruce and I also spend some time speculating on the cast of Babylon 5, if the show had been made in the 1950s. Leslie Nielsen or Ronald Reagan as Captain Sheridan. Bela Lugosi as Londo. Peter Lorre as Londo’s assistant, Vir. Yvonne DeCarlo as Delenn. And so on.

Bela Lugosi is still fresh in people’s minds around the set, thanks to another of the running gags. Ed Wood, a film that is not lighting box office fires, is nevertheless popular in the industry—particularly because of Martin Landau’s performance as Lugosi. And every so often, for no discernable reason, a crew member will shout, “Pull the string!” in a Lugosi voice (that being one of the more memorable non sequiturs from the film). This will prompt responses of “Pull the string!” I’m not sure why they do it—but they do.

Scenes with Londo’s three wives start today. In a past episode, Londo referred to them as Pestilence, Famine, and Death. “Pestilence” is Lois Nettleton, acclaimed screen actress from the 1960s and 70s. “Famine” is Jane Carr, best known as the single-minded group therapist on the sitcom Dear John, who always queried every tentative voicing of a difficulty with a hopeful “Is it a… sexual problem?” And Blair Volk, she of the distracting nude scene, is “Death.” Seeing the three of them together is enough to stand a mere human’s hair on end, much less a Centauri’s.

It’s Halloween night. Santa Monica Boulevard has been closed to traffic to accommodate a major walking-about parade. It’s a popular gay activity on Oct. 31. I’ve never seen such a big drag strip without any cars around.

Tuesday, Nov. 1. All the major scenes with Londo and his wives are shot today. During the rehearsals, the crew is laughing loudly at the dialogue. This is something of a relief. When serious scenes are being filmed, silence is an acceptable response. But these are fairly comedic sequences, and, if they were met with stony silence from onlookers, that would no bode well.

The actresses are playing wonderfully off each other, but the scenes definitely belong to Peter Jurasik and Stephen Furst (whose memorable work graced Animal House and St. Elsewhere). Peter milks every moment to maximum effect, and Stephen comes up with all sorts of little physical shticks. Looks, body posture, everything comes together and makes it nearly impossible to avoid laughing out loud and blowing a take.

At one point, Jane Carr (as wife Timov) disdainfully says to her “husband,” “Do you seriously expect me to join in your sexual Olympics?” But the London-born actress pronounces the word “seksoouhl,” evoking memories of her therapist character on Dear John. Although the consensus is that fans of Dear John would no doubt cheer upon hearing Timov utter the word “seksoouhl,” Jane nevertheless forces herself to say the more American version of the word.

The scene is only three pages of script, but it takes forever. There are 14 “segments” composing the scene to film: two “master” shots (long, uninterrupted filming with some camera movement) plus a dozen or more shots of “coverage” (close-ups, over the shoulder shots, inserts, and so on). This gives the film editor a good deal to work with. It also means a lot of filming time is eaten away—hours upon hours. A pool is started around 11 a.m. as to when we’ll finish filming the scene. I pick 3:30 in the afternoon.

As the day wears on, no one is laughing at the jokes that seemed so amusing earlier on. Peter Jurasik comes over to me around 5 p.m. and, only half kidding, says, “You know, I used to like this scene. I don’t anymore.”

Actual finish time: 5:45 p.m. And that’s just for that scene. Two more still need to be filmed.

It’s amazing anyone ever finishes a TV show.

Another crew member asks me if I worked on Lion King. Maybe I should leave the dámņëd vest back at the hotel.

(Peter David, writer of stuff, will wrap up the Los Angeles journal next week. Also, by popular request from all parties, he wishes to get Scott Lobdell off the hook by officially stating that it was, in fact, Fabian Nicieza who was the disgruntled writer of mutant books complaining about “Xerox Hour” on the computer board America On-Line. Furthermore, Fabian also crashed the Hindenburg, inadvertently caused the Great East Coast blackout of 29 years ago, and was reportedly spotted on the grassy knoll. We will return to Unsolved Mysteries after this.)