PLUME: I also noticed in your credits both Twilight Zone and Jake and the Fatman…
STRACZYNKSKI: It seems that I have a tendency to fail upward. I can’t quite figure it out. The more annoying, undisciplined, and pain in the ass I become, the more I find work When I quit Captain Power, I wasn’t sure I was going to work for a while, but literally – like a couple days later – I got a call from Twilight Zone. I’d done one episode previously for the network version as a freelancer a couple of years earlier, and they called for the syndicated version and said, “Do you want to come on as story editor?” Of course, to work on the Twilight Zone in that capacity is anyone’s dream, because it’s an anthology show and you can do whatever you want. So I said, “By all means.” I came on staff, and we did 30 half-hours, of which I wrote 11.
PLUME: Of which episode are you most proud, and what was the difficulties of writing for that series?
STRACZYNKSKI: The hardest part, really, was not walking in familiar territory, because so much had been covered already by the Twilight Zone that it’s hard to find a new angle on things.
PLUME: And, to some extent, isn’t it almost a gimmick show? That people are always looking for that twist at the end?
STRACZYNKSKI: Yeah, it can be that, but what you had to do to avoid that was to focus strongly on the characters. Probably the one story that I’m most pleased with was called “Dream Me a Life”, and it starred Eddie Albert. It’s about a guy in a retirement home who begins sharing dreams with the woman next door, who is catatonic and has not come out. In her dreams, she’s in a room and there’s something behind a door, and she’s pleading with him not to let it through, because if it does, she will die. He begins to realize that the dream is having physical effects on him and it’s just kind-of unnerving. He digs into her background and finds out that she went catatonic after her husband died, and gradually he comes to realize what’s behind the door. To show you the writing process – initially, I thought that it would be a scary monster behind the door, because that’s the obvious way to go. My wife said, “That’s the obvious way to go.” I hate it when she’s right. There’s nothing more annoying than a spouse who hears that she’s correct. I kept battering at the story until I realized that what was behind the door was not a monster – it was the memory of her husband. It wasn’t that she was keeping something out… She was keeping him in. Finally, she allows that door to be opened, they have their good-byes, and he can move on and she comes out of her catatonic thing and she and Eddie can get together now. It’s a deeply moving performance by Eddie, whose own wife had passed away less than a year before that, and he was a widower in the show – so he had to go back and sort-of relive his own wife’s death. It was very cathartic for him , and when you see him talking about losing his wife, the emotion in his eyes is real. So, to me, that was one of the most powerful episodes of the Zone that I’d done.
PLUME: So you’re very proud of the Twilight Zone work you did…
STRACZYNKSKI: Absolutely.
PLUME: With the Twilight Zone, did you leave of your own accord, were you fired, or did the show end?
STRACZYNKSKI: The show ended. Our mandate was to produce 30 half-hours for syndication to round-out the package, which is what we did. When I finished that up, I kind-of wandered in the darkness for a month or two, and then did a show for Shelly Duvall’s company called Nightmare Classics. They wanted to do an adaptation of Jekyll and Hyde for Showtime, which I had to find a whole new angle on to make it fresh and interesting. It was that gig that led me to the Jake and the Fatman assignment which – to be totally honest – initially I hadn’t wanted to do, because it was Jake and the Fatman. My log line on Jake and the Fatman was “He can’t walk. He can’t act. Together they fight crime.” My agent prevailed upon me to go in there and pitch, and I pitched, like, 5 stories – none of them really worked. I thought, “Oh good, I’m getting to get out of here with my skin intact.” I mentioned one last thing, just in passing… I said, “William Conrad is a big guy, and big guys don’t like to walk around a lot. What if we did an episode where he was taken hostage and tied to a chair for the whole episode?” They said, “Great idea! He doesn’t like to walk around much.” I’m thinking, “I’m going to go to hell for this.”
PLUME: See what comments in passing get you?
STRACZYNKSKI: Yep. I wrote the episode, and I faxed over the script at 11:00 on a Monday morning, and when they read the script, by 2:00 they called my agent and hired me on staff.
PLUME: Which, I’m sure, was your greatest dream come true…
STRACZYNKSKI: It was a mixed-bag, because – on the one hand – it was CBS… My first network, real staff, television gig on a major prime-time show. On the other hand, it was Jake and the Fatman.
PLUME: And on yet another hand, it was a job…
STRACZYNKSKI: Yeah, although I’ve never really worried about that. So I went on staff, and I was there for a full season and they wanted to bring me back for another season, but the two exec producers who brought me in – Jeri Taylor, who went on to work on Voyager, and her husband David Moessinger – had a problem with the Hawaii division of the team, where their authority was being challenged and they were being screwed over. They were going to leave. I told my agent, “If they go, I go.” And she said, “You’re out of your mind! This is your first network gig. Universal loves you. Viacom loves you. CBS loves you. Everyone is pleased with your work. They want to bring you back for another season. This is your first network gig – don’t piss them off!” I said, “It’s a no-brainer. My loyalty is to my executive producers. They believed in me. They fought to bring me on to this show. If they go, I go.” And when they went, I went. Then commenced wandering in the desert for awhile -with freelance gigs along the way, here and there. The curious thing is that a year or two later, David was offered Murder She Wrote as an executive producer, and he said, “The first person I want to call is Joe.” Which shows, again, that making the moral choice was the right choice – otherwise, I would have stayed with Jake and the Fatman and who knows where I would have ended up, but by virtue of walking off with David, when he got a much better gig on Murder She Wrote, he hired me.
PLUME: Which, ironically, was another CBS series…
STRACZYNKSKI: Yeah. At first there was some grudginess about that, but then they finally let David prevail and he brought me on.
PLUME: How would you describe your experiences working on Murder She Wrote?
STRACZYNKSKI: Wonderful.
PLUME: Was it a far easier series to work on than Jake and the Fatman?
STRACZYNKSKI: Oh yeah, it was a lot of fun… It was writing about mysteries – it was writing about a writer. I loved that, which is what Angela always liked about my work. In most other scripts, she’d be the least interesting character and would hold everyone else’s purse while they went out doing the colorful stuff, and then she’d come in at the end and here’s the resolution. Whereas in mine, she was a working writer with all the problems a writer has. I wrote a lot of scripts for that show. I was there for two years, and it was just a great time. Angela was fun to work with – she’s a great person – and it was probably the most satisfying experience I’d had in television up until that point. Then I left to do the B5 pilot.
PLUME: Segueing into Babylon 5… When did that concept begin percolating?
STRACZYNKSKI: It was after Captain Power, oddly enough. At the time that I was doing Twilight Zone, I went back to the guys I worked with on Power and said, “Look, when Power’s gone, I want to talk to you about a project that I have because this could be interesting.” When Power bit the big one after a season’s worth of scripts story edited and written by Larry DiTillio among others, I went back to them and said, “Here’s what I have in mind.” And I laid out what I had in mind for Babylon 5, having come up with the basic concept about a year before. They loved it… They said, “This is terrific. Let’s take it out.” I wrote up the pilot movie and a more elaborate treatment, and we began taking it out in our spare time. It took five years to sell that show, because no one wanted to compete with Star Trek – no one thought it could be done. They all thought it would be too expensive. After about four years, even my agent began saying, “Let it go. You could have sold two or three mainstream shows in this amount of time. Or other kinds of shows.” But I was obsessed with this particular story. I knew it could be done. I knew I wanted to do a saga like the ones I grew up reading. I said, “I’m not going to let it go.” Finally, after five years, we had a deal to do the pilot.
PLUME: Percentage-wise, how close was B5 in execution to what you originally envisioned?
STRACZYNKSKI: I would say between 85-90%. There’s always little glitches that come up along the way, but what I wanted to do with the show I did with the show. I got to where I wanted to go. In some ways, I exceeded what I had in mind, but I was very pleased with the outcome. I think it’s a show that no one has ever tried to do before in American television – that was kind-of a saga.
PLUME: It’s very rare for anyone to set an expiration date at the beginning in regards to how long the series will run…
STRACZYNKSKI: Yeah. When we were shooting the last B5 TV movie, Bruce Boxleitner walked past me in the hall, looked at me, and said, “It couldn’t have been a six year arc?”
Continued below…
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