PLUME: You received death threats in the past, haven’t you? What happens when you get into that scary side of fandom?
STRACZYNKSKI: There are death threats. There are cyber-stalkers out there who have dedicated themselves to making my life a living hell. One person sent me a file which he said was a jpeg of his 10 year-old son’s drawing of a Star Fury, and could I look at it and give him my reaction… I do that kind of stuff. I answer e-mail from strangers all the time – I still do. I downloaded the file, clicked on it, and just the second I clicked on it, I saw it didn’t end in .jpg – it ended in .exe, and it began to wipe out my hard drive. I shut the system down, and spent the next two months trying to recover all my files. In addition to being a virus, it was also a Trojan horse file, so that I got a double whammy – it left behind a file saying, “Star Trek Rules.” So there was some of that. To this day, there are still a number of cyber-stalkers on the USENET groups who have been trying to cause trouble, but that comes with any form of celebrity, however minor – and you can’t get any more minor than writer/producer. I’ve just come to accept that that’s the price you pay for standing up and creating something.
PLUME: But it’s far outweighed by the positive side of fandom, right…
STRACZYNKSKI: Oh yeah. It’s that 10% which is socially maladroit, deeply disturbed, and emotionally weird, but 90% of fandom is cute and fuzzy and wonderful and great to hang out with. It’s just that 10% that give the rest a black eye.
PLUME: Has it made you more cautious in your dealings than you were originally?
STRACZYNKSKI: Yeah, I won’t download files anymore from people who send to me who are not known to me. I’ve had to put a certain distance on there. I try not to let it infringe on a day-to-day basis – I try and stay open to things. There isn’t a day that goes by that I don’t get an e-mail from a fan that I’ve never heard from before, asking questions, and I still try to respond to it. You try and stay open as much as you can, but you have to be careful because, you know, this person could be a nut. I’ve had disturbed individuals put out the word as I was making B5 that I’d had a heart attack. The phones at the stage were tied up all day long with inquiries from fans who heard about this and were trying to find out what was going on. So this is kind-of the bad part of it all, but you try and deal with it.
PLUME: What was the general feeling as you were winding down B5, and coming to the end of five grueling – but successful – years?
STRACZYNKSKI: There was a measure of sadness, obviously, mixed with one of triumph. Each year that we got renewed was one step closer to finishing up the story. It was like, “We’re almost there, we’re almost there… One more season to go.” At one point where I thought we weren’t going to get renewed at the bottom of the 4th season – after we shot “Sleeping in Light” – I was sitting there by myself. They’d all gone off to have the wrap party behind the stage, and I was sitting by myself on Stage B. John Copeland – walking by, en route to the party, with a beer in his hand – saw me sitting there and came over. “What are you doing in here? The party’s out there.” I looked down and I said, “Was it worth it? For the fans of the show, for the viewers – was it worth it? Did we do it okay? Did we blow it?” He looked at me like I sprouted three heads and feathers and said, “Of course it was worth it. Look what you’ve done with the story.” “But what if we don’t get to a fifth year?” “If it doesn’t come, it doesn’t come, but it was worth it. It was worth doing it.” Obviously, there was angst, there was doubt, there was sadness, there was hope… Every possible emotion that you can point to.
PLUME: Looking back on it now, would you ever go down that road again, when it comes to a time and effort commitment? Or would you feel more like delegating some responsibility?
STRACZYNKSKI: I would go back in time and do it again… I would not do it a second time, because it damn near killed me the first time. It had massive affects on my health. Harlan (Ellison) gave numerous interviews where he said, “This show has aged Joe considerably.” After the third year, they saw what the show was taking out of me physically, and took protective steps. Whenever you begin shooting a new season, you always bring the actors in and have them insured… You send them to the doctor to get a check-up, and then you insure them in case anything should happen to them. After the third year, they began doing that to me – which I think is a first. That way, if I should die, they’d be covered… Which is a great thought. All season, the toll was taken – it was the most physically debilitating thing I’ve ever done. I’ve seen the pictures of myself from that period of time, and it’s just this shuffling, shambling thing walking onto the stage. It’s taken me, basically, a year-and-a-half since Crusade ended to become a human being again. My weight’s back up a little bit, the sallowness is gone from my cheeks, my eyes are a little brighter, the bags under my eyes have retreated a little bit. It was just a heinous, heinous physical marathon, so I would never do it again, certainly. I would relive it, but I would never do it a second time.
PLUME: At what point did you start considering doing Crusade?
STRACZYNKSKI: It was toward the end of B5, when I realized we had this great family… I mean, we kept 80% of our crew together for five years. If you know anything at all about how television works, that’s extraordinarily rare. They liked working, they liked coming to work every day, and it was a great place to work. We had this great machine set up, and I realized I was gonna miss the B5 universe. I’ve always said that there was a side story that could go off from year one… I always talked about it, and maybe it was time to investigate it. Not to keep B5 going, but to do a different show in the B5 universe. Conversations were held and, to my surprise, there was interest there. It began to get together toward the middle part of the fifth year. I just wanted a chance to keep playing in that universe.
PLUME: Was it easier to bring together Crusade than it was to bring together B5?
STRACZYNKSKI: Well, it didn’t take 5 years – which is a good thing all by itself. It was easier to launch. There were three or four meetings required, but then we got off the ground. The problem was that – where they trusted us in year 5 on TNT that we knew what we were doing – this was going to be a new show for TNT, which had never really had a dramatic series before and didn’t have a department set up to handle a dramatic series – they had to create one for us – and they didn’t know what to do with us. After the first five episodes were shot with no notes and no problems, the suits in Atlanta began to get to the process, and the notes that they gave and the ideas that they had were wrong on every possible level. Once again, there came out that part of me which says, “I can not compromise on certain points. I’d rather you fire me than give in.” Some of the notes were simply heinous. There was one episode in which the problem was resolved in a very clever, “gotcha” kind of a way – it was “Well of Forever” – and the note was, “The captain should arrange to have this bad guy rape Dureena…” One of our regular cast members, “… and catch him in the midst of the sexual assault with his pants around his ankles…” This is a direct quote, “… and blackmail him.” I said to them, “You’ve got to be out of your minds. You want me to have the main character of our show – our hero – arrange to have one of the crew members raped? Are you insane?” Most of the notes that we got were of that caliber. They even sent someone from Atlanta to, quote, “Deal with Joe”, unquote. I sent him back to Atlanta with his pants up around his head, tied into a knot. What I began to sense was that they just wanted the show gone. What we discovered as year five of B5 ran on TNT, was that people will come to watch that show but not stick around for the rest of TNT’s programming. They’d also done a survey at that time of their viewership, and they found out that they didn’t really want science fiction. This is my theory, based on what I’ve been told by someone at TNT off-the-record in the time since then – after the fifth episode of Crusade was produced, I believe that a decision was made at the top of TNT that, “We want to get out of this. We don’t want to pay any money for it – we want to take that money and go off and buy Law & Order re-runs. We want out of this. This isn’t the show want. Make life difficult and get us out of this deal.” I think that is where all these notes came from, because they knew no producer in his right mind would go along with them. Then they could simply pull out and say, “It’s not the show we wanted…” and get out – and that’s indeed what happened after 13 episodes.
PLUME: In hindsight, is it your view that the situation was in no way workable?
STRACZYNKSKI: I believe – down to my socks – that if I had given in on every single note that they had asked for, they still would have pulled out at 13. They would have found some reasons to do it, and what would have gone out on the air were 13 episodes that I was ashamed of. I’d rather go down with shows that I felt had some quality to them – even though a number of them were hobbled by network interference and things they demanded be put in – than put out 13 that were just abysmal. If I had taken the note about having the captain arrange for Dureena to get assaulted, I could never show my face in public again… Ever.
PLUME: Where would Crusade have gone? What was your grand plan for it? It was rumored that, about halfway through, they would have found the cure…
STRACZYNKSKI: Or sooner…
PLUME: … and then the problem would have been getting it back. Is that accurate?
STRACZYNKSKI: Not per se. Yeah, they would have found the cure around year two. Have you read the script for “End of the Line” yet on bookface.com?
PLUME: No.
STRACZYNKSKI: “End of the Line” is one of two scripts that act as bookends. That one was the season finale, and the other one (“To the Ends of the Earth”) would upped the ante midway through the season. We discover that there’s a much broader problem even than the plague – it had to do with Earth using Shadow technology in ways they shouldn’t be doing, and who was responsible for the destruction of Captain Gideon’s ship. Suffice it to say that – through a series of incidents – the Excalibur crew would have been considered traitors and have to basically be on the run. Further, the cure that Earth would have believed to be the right one would not in fact work as they think it would have worked. Our guys would find out about this, and no one would have believed them. As things unravel, it’s a larger conspiracy, so basically -after the second year -the show you think Crusade is would be a whole different show, with much more depth to it, more political, more controversial in some ways, and would deal with the impact of technology on society, would cast our characters as renegades and loners without port, and turn the whole series upside-down. The whole plague thing was really just a way to get the thing going and give them something to do in the beginning while we establish the characters before we pull the plug and change the whole nature of the show into something I think would probably have been revolutionary… but we never got that far. You can see the hints of it in those two scripts, that are up on bookface.com.
PLUME: Are you disappointed that you never got to tell the story?
STRACZYNKSKI: Who wouldn’t be?
Continued below…
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