When the popular Roland Emmerich and Dean Devlin movie StarGate made the jump to TV in 1997, the writing and producing duo of Jonathan Glassner and Brad Wright was given the task of plotting its course. Expanding on the film's premise of an ancient alien artifact that allows wormhole travel to another planet, the Stargate can now be used to travel to another hundreds of worlds--many of which are under the grip of the evil Goa'uld race.
The series recast Kurt Russell and James Spader's roles with Richard Dean Anderson and Michael Shanks and added other regular cast members such as Amanda Tapping as Captain Carter, Christopher Judge as Teal'c (a reformed Goa'uld foot soldier) and Don S. Davis as the base commander General Hammond. Focusing on the first of several SG teams, Stargate SG-1 sees its characters confronting Star Trek-like scenerios from an often humorous and very 20th Century perpective. After an early rough ride from sceptics--including Devlin and Emmerich themselves--Stargate SG-1 soon made its stride and is now one of the most consistent, enjoyable Science Fiction shows on the air.
Glassner and Wright share script writing duties--along with various other writers--including executive produce the show. Glassner has also directed several episodes. Like MGM's The Outer Limits, Stargate SG-1 is made in Vancouver Canada, where Starburst found production was well underway on the third season.
STARBURST: How did Stargate originally fall into your hands?
JONATHAN GLASSNER: Brad and I had been writing and producing--and in my case directing--Outer Limits for two and a half years. And both of us independently, without knowing the other was doing it, went to the President of MGM, John Symes, and said, 'You have this movie in your library that would make a great TV series, let me do it, let me write the pilot'. He didn't tell us at the time but they were already in pretty heated negotiations with Devlin and Emmerich to do just that. He came to us and said, 'Okay, do it together,' being the Solomon-like studio chief that he is.
BRAD WRIGHT: So it was our good fortune when Devlin and Emmerich didn't do Stargate and we did.
STARBURST: Were Devlin and Emmerich in the running to do it?
GLASSNER: At one point they were in negotiations with the studio. It depends on your perspective I think--Devlin and Emmerich would probably tell you something different--but apparently they just couldn't come to terms and MGM just finally said, 'Never mind', and moved on. We were lucky, we got to do it.
Bad Mouthing
STARBURST: Devlin and Emmerich weren't too happy were they?
GLASSNER: In my opinion they were very bad sports. They were bad-mouthing the show in the press and on the Internet. I think it was just sour grapes.
WRIGHT: They also didn't like the way we spun the series off the movie. They probably would have done something entirely different. That's the nature of the creative process. We would have liked to chat with them but they didn't have much time for that. I think it probably didn't serve them very well because the series has proved to be quite successful--and they could have taken the credit for it!
STARBURST: How did you come up with the idea of being able to expand Stargate?
WRIGHT: When wer were individually pursuing MGM saying we know exactly what to do with Stargate--Jonathan and I were both saying exactly the same thing to different executives at the studio. Hell, there're 39 symbols on that thing, you could use it to anywhere. So when we finally became partners we were already on our way to having the same idea of how to make the series work.
GLASSNER: We spent about three months right after they told us it was a go just sitting around talking about Stargate and finding all the holes in the feature--in terms of how they could follow into a series--and filling them one by one. A lot of that automatically gave us out mythology. The idea that there are 39 symbols and it takes any combination of seven to go somewhere--why would they make make 39 symbols if it only goes one place? Why not just seven symbols and you had to figure out the order?
WRIGHT: In fact, mathematically, there are still many more permutations than there are worlds we could ever find, so you couldn't activate if just randomly, necessarily. Then we thought, 'Well wait a minute, that's a fairly dangerous thing to have, a Stargate in this bunker'. The Goa'uld could send through a horrible weapon and that would be that. So we came up with the idea of the iris and a scientific basis as to why nothing can penetrate it.
GLASSNER: And we realized that at the end of the feature Ra was dead and the feature says he's the last of his species, so we had to figure out why they would think he's the last of his species.
WRIGHT: We're saying it was a species and there weren't very many of them. The mythology is expanding.
Making the Myth
STARBURST: How much of the series' mythology was pre-planned?
GLASSNER: We had quite a bit where we were going to go with the mythology pre-planned but as we went along--as the realities of production and as the actors took on the personalities of the characters--some of that got changed.
WRIGHT: A little aspect of a second-season episode that Robert Cooper wrote involved the Tok'Ra--a Goa'uld resistance--and Jonathan and I immediately went, 'Oh! We love those people!' And now they've become a major part of the series and that's really the best way to develop television. If you lock yourself into what you originally conceived, you're tying your own hands.
STARBURST: Did you know you'd be bringing back Hathor as you did in Out of Mind, the second-season finale?
WRIGHT: Funnily enough, no. Hathor wasn't even the original Goa'uld in the first story concept of the cliffhanger. When we realized that Hathor was the only Goa'uld who had seen the interior of the base--which was necessary to pull that off--she became that Goa'uld.
GLASSNER: This is actually a good example of how we planned it... but didn't really. We intended to come to Hathor, which is why she got away at the end of Hathor. We didn't intend to come back to her in that episode--and then we realized she was the only one who could do the story.
WRIGHT: Part of the fun of a Science Fiction series is leaving threads dangling that you can pick up at your leisure!
GLASSNER: Especially a Science Fiction show that's got a large order like we do. We're very fortunate in knowing that we have 88 episodes, so it gives you the luxury of being able to say--let's leave this one hanging and come back to it in 20 episodes from now.
WRIGHT: So, we've left unfinished business on planets. We've left certain unresolved issues. We're going back to revisit a character named Linea--who was from a second-season episode [Prisoners]--but we're doing it in a way that no one could possibly predict. You have to follow your threads but we like to put a spin on them. There have been so many ideas in Science Fiction that have already been done well and you just don't want to automatically go there again unless you can put a fresh face on it.
STARBURST: You've done your own take on some classic themes, like alternate universes.
GLASSNER: One of my mentors, one of the little rules he used to say to me was, of course it's been done, the trick is to do it better and to do it differently. Especially in Science Fiction, there are subgenres of Science Fiction that you're going to touch on; they're alternate realities, you're going to do Time travel.
STARBURST: You did that in your '60's episode, 1969 .
WRIGHT: That's a really good example of taking an old chestnut and trying to put a little bit of a twist to it and not taking it too seriously. It's just not a serious episode.
STARBURST: And you have done your serious episodes--the Season One cliff-hanger was about the possible destruction of Earth.
WRIGHT: And yet part two, Serpent's Lair, was kind of a romp, a B-movie. That's what I love about Stargate, we try to include as much humor as we can. Our cast makes in inevitable. Richard Dean Anderson is a very funny man.
The Mix
STARBURST: How do you establish the balance between more character based episodes and the hard-science ones?
GLASSNER: We try to balance it probably 50/50. Our cast are all very talented actors in their own rights and they don't want to spend just every episode running around shooting guns and jumping through hoops. They want to be able to sink their teeth into some real acting; and the only way to do that is to give them some really strong, character stuff to do--and they do it well--so we keep doing it. If they didn't do it well, we wouldn't. And budgetary constraints--usually the character episodes cost less then the big running around ones, so they help us pay for the bug running around ones.
WRIGHT: Then there are cases where you have a fairly high concept Science Fiction episode like A Matter of Time, the black hole episode, which is a character story inside a big Science Fiction concept. There are degrees of success one way or the other, but I don't think you could do a series of just shoot-'em-up episodes and keep the audience engaged.
GLASSNER: I find the Science Fiction audience is pretty sophisticated and they've seen enough of just rockets and lasers guns shooting. They need to see more than that. They need to grow and fall in love with the characters and want to spend an hour with those characters every week--and you can't do that if you don't develop the characters.
STARBURST: So they care if the characters just happen to get into a spaceship and fly off somewhere?
WRIGHT: Exactly. The season opener of this [third] season [into the Fire] is a really good example of that. There's not a lot of character development in it, it's just a fast paced roller-coaster episode and yet, hopefully, 90% of the audience is emotionally attached to the characters and so the investment will be there while they're on that ride.
