PLUME: What are your thoughts on the furor that erupted over some of the lukewarm reviews that accompanied Crusade‘s run?
STRACZYNKSKI: I could not disagree with some of them, because – in some of the early episodes in particular – when someone says, “Either you change these lines or the show doesn’t go on the air…” You have to change those lines. You have to put in what they ask for, that you can’t morally object to, but are basically just notes. The first few episodes -which were not the first ones shot but the first ones that were aired – were cumbersome and they were burdened down by exposition, because they wanted everything explained in painstaking detail, because they assumed the audience were idiots. I never made that assumption. Those episodes were originally designed to fill in individual characters after you’d met the whole group – which is why the first one started off focusing on one or two characters for the most part, and in the later ones you get broader character things where you see the whole team working together – it was ass-backwards. One can not fault people for saying that there was something wrong with these episodes – yeah, there is, and I agree with you… Unfortunately, that’s what we’re stuck with.
PLUME: Were you surprised with the vehemence with which some fans responded to those critiques?
STRACZYNKSKI: It was unfortunate, because the reality is that the reactions were not that different from the first 13 episodes of Babylon 5. The first 13 was constant grief from people saying, “It’s not that good a show. Where is the arc? What’s going on with the story? This is terrible!” With any show, you need a certain amount of time to hit the ground running. It doesn’t matter that you’ve been doing another show continuously for five years – it’s different characters, different scenarios – it takes a while to adjust. It’s like, “Didn’t you guys learn from the last time that something can be started off initially one way, but you have to give it time.” Here, we have the added factor that some of the shows were just screwed up because of the notes that we got and were being broadcast out of order… Which is why, in the last one we shot – “Appearances and Deceits” – I finally said, “Fuck it. I’m throwing out all the notes, and we’ll do the show the way I wanted to in the first place, and I’ll make fun of their notes.” I knew the axe was coming. I could smell it, which is why there is a lot of satire poked at TNT in that last episode that we shot, because I finally just didn’t give a shit anymore. “I know they’re going to pull the plug, and I’m just going to go out and let the audience know that these people were fucking with us.”
PLUME: As far as the future of Crusade was concerned, did the fan mobilization help, hurt, or have no impact on the show’s chances?
STRACZYNKSKI: Well, with TNT, it became a testosterone thing, so that there was no way that any amount of letter-writing campaigns, phone calls, or e-mails were going to make a difference. Sci-Fi Channel wanted to acquire Crusade, and they also asked to have the B5 reruns as a package. TNT, afraid that SFC could make Crusade a successful hit, asked for huge amounts of money for the B5 reruns, which they had for another year or so. Far more than anyone would ever conceivably pay, which they knew. So they killed it and salted the ground to make sure it couldn’t grow elsewhere. As for B5 now that it’s finally at the Sci-Fi Channel, there’s no way of knowing. They may want to do something down the road with B5… They may not. It will all be a factor of how the ratings do for the show. I just found out yesterday that they’re going to be running the show in widescreen, for the first time, on Sci-Fi Channel – which is very cool.
PLUME: Wasn’t it said at one time that the special effects for the show would have to be re-jiggered to run in widescreen?
STRACZYNKSKI: Some of that will have to be done, but we can get by pretty well. I’ve seen the transfers years before when we started doing them for the overseas market and they look just fine. We never did much with the top and bottom of frames deliberately to keep them safe for widescreen realignment, so you don’t really miss anything in the CGI transfer.
PLUME: Does this bode well for widescreen transfers appearing on DVD in the near future?
STRACZYNKSKI: Yeah, because Warners didn’t want to pony up the dough to take the PAL widescreen versions and transfer them to NTSC, but now with Sci-Fi Channel apparently coughing up the money for this, those versions now exist in the NTSC format – which will allow them to do them on DVD. It would have cost WB $1,200 an episode to transfer them from PAL widescreen overseas versions to NTSC, and they just didn’t want to pay the money for it. That has always been the hold-up on DVDs.
PLUME: So it’s something we very well may see in the near future…
STRACZYNKSKI: It’s possible. I mean, I don’t know that – I may be talking out of my ass to a certain extent here – but I would be surprised if it didn’t happen.
PLUME: I wanted to touch briefly on the comments that Jerry Doyle has been making about possible new B5 projects potentially being in the works. Is there anything you can comment on about that?
STRACZYNKSKI: A lot of people have been trying to revive B5 in one way or another -as a TV movie, a direct-to-video movie, a feature film, a series – there’ve been at least half-a-dozen attempts by people to do that. This is one more of those, and I think it is neither more nor less valid than any of the others. Nothing is concrete. He’s making some exploratory phone calls, but nothing really has happened. I wouldn’t put too much stock in it.
PLUME: In your best case scenario, what would you like to see happen with the future of B5?
STRACZYNKSKI: I don’t know. I honestly don’t know. My job was to tell that first story and get it out the door. There are times that I wonder if what happened with Crusade was the universe’s way of saying, “You said five years, now walk away.”
PLUME: In hindsight, do you feel you should have taken a break between B5 and Crusade to rest and recuperate?
STRACZYNKSKI: I don’t think it would have a made a difference in that respect. The only thing I question is if I should have done it at all – if I should have just walked away. The problem is that when you have a crew that you care about, that you’ve kept together for five years, it’s real hard to say to everyone, “Well, I decided it’s a five-year show, so you’re all out of a job.” That’s real hard, and that was what motivated me, largely, to move on to Crusade… That, plus the longing for the B5 universe. So it’s not so much a question of that, but whether I should have done it at all. That question I haven’t answered yet to my own satisfaction.
PLUME: Which way are you leaning at this point?
STRACZYNKSKI: Dunno. I take a long time to think things through.
PLUME: What happened to you after the rug was pulled out from under Crusade?
STRACZYNKSKI: We finished shooting around February or March – somewhere around there – but we still had to do post-production until May/June. I was still working on Crusade finishing up the mixing, the sound, the effects and the editing and everything else through May/June. I think it was around July that Chris Carter’s office called and said, “Do you want to do something with us?” I said, “Sure.” I went down and met with Frank Spotnitz and Chris, and they said, “What do you have in mind?” And I said, “I have three things…” which I then told them, and one that I told Chris, “It will take balls the size of Kansas to pull off…” His eyes lit up, because Chris likes challenges. I explained the concept to him, and both he and Frank immediately got it. They said, “God, no one’s ever done that before in television.” I said, “I know. I don’t know why they missed it – it’s an obvious thing, but no one’s ever done it.” They thought it was a great idea. It also had an arc to it. The next day, they called to make the deal, and we made the deal with them – 1013 and Fox. We began developing the story – I met with Chris and Frank as much as I could when they were doing Harsh Realm, because they were out of town a lot. I wrote the script up, and because they were so busy with Harsh Realm – development season runs from August through October at the networks, and then it’s closed – we started getting towards the middle of October and I said, “I know you guys are busy, but we’ve got to take this thing in or we’re going to miss the window.” So in the last part of October, we go into CBS, meet with Les Moonves and pitch the idea. He loved it. He called the next day to make the deal. Any kind of negotiation likes this takes about two weeks to conclude, and we were about a day away from closing the deal -we were haggling over what the license fees would be if we got picked up – but they had committed to a blind pilot production. The day before we would have closed the deal with CBS, Harsh Realm was cancelled, 3 episodes in. I knew there was going to be some kind of fallout, but I didn’t know what shape it was going to take. When you’re out in 13, it’s a cancellation…. When you’re out in 3, it’s a rebuke. Chris agreed with that when I said that to him. Fox Studios -as opposed to Fox Network – had to find some kind of an explanation for this, because they have a 2 billion dollar investment with Chris Carter. What they finally came out with was that they said, “Look, the reason Harsh Realm didn’t work is that it was not created by Chris. It was based on a comic book created by other people. Therefore, to make the stock owners happy, the next thing that comes out from Chris will be 100% Chris Carter.” So I’m thinking, “Ummm… Over here! Excuse me!”
PLUME: That didn’t exactly bode well…
STRACZYNKSKI: No… They pulled out of the deal, and when they pulled out, CBS went, “What the hell was that all about?” and they got hinky about it – and development season ended, so there was nowhere else to take the project. It won’t start again until August of this year.
PLUME: At which time you plan to pitch it again?
STRACZYNKSKI: Yeah…. I don’t know if it will take or not, but we’ll see what happens. In the interim, I did the Murder, She Wrote TV movie which aired. I’ve written the first novel I’ve written in 12 years, which began appearing on bookface.com on August 14th. It’s also available in a special trade paperback edition from Dark Tales Publications at darktales.com. I’m doing Rising Stars, which we just negotiated a movie deal for with MGM – license fee and script fee. It’s become Top Cow’s second best-selling comic – number one being Tomb Raider. It’s done so well for them, that they asked if I wanted to have my own imprint, and I said, “Sure.” They said, “What do you want to call it? There’s Supreme Comics, Chaos Comics, Awesome Comics…” I said, “Let’s call it… Joe’s Comics.” As in, “I want some of Joe’s Comics.” Or, “Read at Joe’s.” The first title under the “Joe’s Comics” banner for Top Cow, Midnight Nation, will be coming out September 25th. I’m also doing development for a website I can’t talk about that is very high-level big money, but I can’t talk about it yet. And I just signed to write a two-hour pilot for a new series for a pay cable network and exec produce the resultant series. I’ll also be writing a weekly column for psycomic.com.
Continued below…
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