TV Zone Article With Jonathan Glassner
"Reopening the Stargate"

Executive producer Jonathan Glassner explains how StarGate went from the large to the small screen.

Fortunate Coincidences seem to be common in the tv business. "I was in the night place at the right time," says an actor or a director (before launching into a long, inevitably dull speech) StarGate SG-1 executive producers Jonathan Glassner and Brad Wright were also the beneficiaries of a happy coincidence, but in their case they just happened to be in the right place at different times. "The partnership came together kind of by accident," says Jonathan Glassner. "I was producing The Outer Limits and we hired Brad as a writer on the show. He very quickly became our top writer and moved tip the ladder very quickly to become a producer with me. "Then, at MGM, we both individually, without knowing the other was doing it, went to the president of MGM and said, 'You know, you've got this movie [StarGate] in your library and it would make a great tv series. I would love to be the one who writes it.' Since we both went to him and he knew we both got along so well, he suggested that we do it together, and there began our partnership."

Attention to Detail

To bring the 1994 film - which followed the adventures of a group of soldiers sent through the StarGate which transported them almost instantly to the sinister planet of Ra - to television, Glassner and Wright spent a long time analysing the movie.

"Brad and I spent about two months in the summer before we did the pilot studying the movie," he says, "pulling it apart scene by scene, and saying, 'So, what does this mean? What are these guys? What do the 39 symbols on the Gate mean? What are the rules? What did Emmerich and Devlin mean?' We read their books, we read their scripts and really researched it because they wouldn't talk to us."

True to the Film

"We tried to be as true to the movie as we could," he continues. "We could have - like a lot of series that are based on movies - just used the name and thrown the movie out, but we were very careful not to do that. It was a great movie. Why throw it out and start over?" Despite this, StarGate creators Roland Emmerich and Dean Devlin - the team also behind Independence Day, the short-lived tv series The Visitor and the forthcoming summer blockbuster Godzilla reacted less than kindly to the series and have publicly criticized StarGate SG-1.

Bitter Pill

"They were very bitter about it," explains Glassner. "They planned it as a series of movies, but the studio never had any intention of doing it as a series of movies. So that made them more angry. The studio decided it would be more profitable and lend itself better to a television franchise, and offered it to them. They wouldn't make the deal the studio wanted to make so the studio moved on, and that infuriated them. They've been bad-mouthing the series which I think is very unfair of them. I think we're doing the movie justice. We've been very careful to do it justice and stick to the mythology that was created by Emmerich and Devlin."

In many respects, Emmerich and Devlin's conception of the film as one of a series has helped Glassner and Wright because the film's somewhat ambiguous ending allowed the tv pilot to pick up directly from the film. "I went to the movie and, after the movie was over, I thought, 'Well, it didn't end. There's more to this.' I just started thinking about the logic of it," explains Glassner.

"There are 39 symbols on the StarGate and any combination of seven is an address to go somewhere, so why would there be 39 of them if it only goes to the one place it went to in the movie? That's what made me say, 'Wow, that's very episodic in nature. You can go to a different world and have a different adventure every week.'"

Tricky Production

However, the episodic nature of the movie makes the production of the series extremely difficult. Because the team can go to so many places through the StarGate - much like the TARDIS enabled Doctor Who to be set almost anywhere - the production team are constantly being called upon to come up with new sets. "Every week we go to another planet," says Glassner. "It's like doing a feature film every week on a television budget. We have very expensive special effects which, in my opinion, are feature quality effects, which is very difficult to do in the timeframe we have with I Stargate SG-1 the money we have. We have completely new sets every week.

"Most television series have the police precinct and, if they need a slum tenement or a hospital, they can go to a real one and shoot it, but we're going to these imaginary, fictional places on another world so we have to build them from scratch. We have four sound stages and they are literally building sets in all of them all the time because it takes several weeks to build a set, but we shoot in a week."

Outer Experience

Glassner used his work on The Outer Limits as a basis for how to approach the shooting of StarGate SG-1. Because The Outer Limits is an anthology series with new stories and settings every week, he found it a difficult show to work on, but the experience was invaluable when facing the complexities of StarGate SG-1. "More than anything, we looked at the way we did The Outer Limits," Glassner says. "In terms of production, that was our model for how to pull this one off because Outer Limits was a very difficult show production-wise. This one's even more difficult as it turns out."

If the series is difficult to produce, how difficult was the casting process? "With Richard Dean Anderson [who plays the role of Colonel Jack O'Neill which was taken by Kurt Russell in the movie] it was a 'no-brainer'," says Glassner. "John Simes at MGM had a relationship with him because he was Paramount when Rick did MacGyver.

He called us one day out of the blue and said, 'What do you think of Richard Dean Anderson to play Jack O'Neill?' We both said, 'Yes! Can we really get him? Get him!' He is perfect for it. I can't think of anybody who could play it better. "For the other three we did a very, very extensive search all over the United States and Canada. We had casting people working in New York City, Chicago, Toronto Vancouver and Los Angeles. I think we lucked out and got a great cast."

Close Cast

On the evidence so far, he is right. As Jack O'Neill, Richard Dean Anderson leads a team of three on their adventures through the StarGate: Daniel Jackson (the character played by James Spader in the original movie and now played by Michael Shanks), Captain Samantha Carter (Amanda Tapping) and the alien Teal'c (Christopher Judge). According to Tapping, the three even hit it off at the audition before they knew they had got the jobs.

Story Arcs

So what kind of stories do Glassner and Wright intend to create for the characters? At a time when story arcs are extremely fashionable in Sci-Fi tv, Glassner cautiously welcomes this approach to writing, while claiming StarGate SG-1 retains a distinct narrative style. "In terms of storytelling, we're very different from other shows. The only one I could say we might be doing a little bit of is Joe Straczynski on Babylon 5," he says. "He also had the benefit of having large orders at a time, and could do story arcs that went over many episodes, which we do." "We saw him doing it and we thought, 'Well, it worked for him. That's about as far as we've gone in that regard, but we don't have the five year arc that Babylon 5 has. We want our audience to be able to tune in to episode 33 for their first episode and be able to follow it."

Money No Object

However, while jms struggled to find the money for the final season of Babylon 5, Glassner and Wright have the security of long-term deals to fund the show. With the second season in production in British Columbia, Canada, the cable channel Showtime have already committed money for another two seasons, while the US Sci Fi Channel have committed for a further four seasons. "I won't even begin to understand it [the funding of the show] hut I'm glad it happened," laughs Glassner. "It definitely makes our show a better show because we don't have to write six scripts and wonder if we're going to get picked up - that syndrome you have on the networks - so we can think ahead."

All of which begs the question of just what Glassner and Wright's plans are for StarGate SG-1 over the longer term. For the first time, the upbeat and friendly Glassner becomes slightly evasive. "Let's just say we start to unpeel the onion of what really is going on out there, and the characters start to learn some pretty amazing things and it changes them," he eventually decides. Through the StarGate it seems, anything is possible.

TV Zone Article featuring Jonathan Glassner: "Reopening the Stargate"
By: Jonathan Wright
TV Zone issue #103