eeing your freelance script on the air is an experience fraught with both terror and delight. Terror at the changes from your draft, and the reasons for them. (Did I write something stupid?) Delight at seeing settings and characters coming to life more or less as you imagined them months ago.
I will have this experience on Friday, July 7, when the SCI FI Channel's Farscape airs "Out of Their Minds," written by me. (A disclaimer is immediately in order: although I write for Science Fiction Weekly, I am not a publicist for the Channel, which has no control over the content I am privileged to present to you. I'm sure they could pay me enough to promote their shows, but so far they haven't. Farscape just happens to be my next upcoming project.)
When I say "written by me," I mean that my name is on the credits as the sole writer. This, of course, is nonsense. No freelance episode of any television series, not even an anthology series, is entirely the work of that freelance writer. You start with a given set of characters, a number of settings, a general sense of how a story should be told. In the case of Farscape, which is vaguely serialized (meaning that Episode #2 really should air before Episode #6, but you might be able to switch a couple of others around), you have the added challenge (or opportunity) of fitting a story into an arc. In my case, I needed to do a story that took place after Crais took off with Moya's baby (which didn't have a name at the time).
Farscape and I go back a ways, to the days when Rockne S. O'Bannon and David Kemper were working on a project called Space Chase, which ultimately evolved into Farscape. Actually, we go back further than that. I used to work with Rock on The Twilight Zone; David and I were network suits together at CBS, and crossed paths as writers on such programs as The Outer Limits. We had always talked about the possibility of a script assignment, and when I "became available" last summer (see Cassutt Files #4), we plunged in.
In the room
The first challenge in making a freelance contribution to a series is coming up with a story. I emailed Kemper several concepts while he was finishing production in Australia, one or two of which seemed like possibilities. When he and Rock and their American staff--Richard Manning, Naren Shankar, Gabrielle Stanton and Harry Werksman Jr.--gathered in August at the Raleigh Studios in Hollywood, I spent several afternoons "in the room" with them trying to make mine work.
None of them did, for the usual reasons. It's too close to something else we're already doing. It's too Star Trek. (I got that a couple of times.) It's moronic. (Well, they didn't say that, but you never know....)
Ultimately what happened is what usually happens on a series, where you generate more ideas internally than you can write on staff: they gave me a concept they'd been kicking around.
(SPOILER ALERT! If you're one of those people who doesn't read TV Guide or watch promos, and who likes to stay surprised about the concept behind an episode, skip this paragraph.) What if something happened to the crew of Moya that caused their personalities to switch to the wrong bodies? Not only would this be fun to watch, it would be fun for the cast.
I gave the story the tentative title of "Out of Their Minds," which is actually wrong and should be "Out of Their Bodies." Nevertheless, it stuck: titles don't get on the air, and after a certain point in the process, changing titles just means more work for everyone. Besides, the wrong title had the added bonus, for me, of being the same as that of a Clifford Simak novel I remembered fondly.
So I went off with this, laid out one version of "Out of Their Minds," came back and met with the staff, and repeated this process. Everyone seemed to be having fun with the story. At one point, Claudia Black came on the phone from Oz, and she contributed an idea, too.
Eventually, around the end of September, I was off into script, and having a tough time: the best person to have tackled this concept was someone who knew Farscape and its characters intimately. I had watched most of the episodes, but there's no way I had the day-to-day involvement that the staff writers do.
The Screening
I turned in my first draft in early November, calling it a "rough draft." And it sat for several weeks as the staff finished their scripts and began their seasonal migration Down Under. Eventually I found myself on a two-hour conference call with David and Naren from Australia, going through the script from top to bottom, changing things on every page, but leaving the essential story (which we had all worked out by now, anyway) intact.
And I went back to work. Time was now my enemy. My episode had started out as #5 in Season 2, but for a while it appeared as though it was going to be #3.
So I spent two weeks on my next draft, emailed it off, heard from David that it was fine and that it would be handled in-house from this point on--a total necessity, since I had done all the writing I was contracted to do, and I was half a planet away from the production.
In January the production team emailed me a drawing of my alien, called a "Halosian," which I liked a lot. So I knew that the script was going ahead.
It wasn't until May that Kemper and O'Bannon resurfaced, telling me by email that the episode turned out great. To prove it, they sent me an advance copy of "Out of Their Minds." Not only have I never been on the receiving end of such a thoughtful gesture, I've never delivered one, either! (Usually because there's no time. The challenges of creating Henson-style aliens force Farscape to have a longer pre- and post-production schedule.)
So I gathered my family around me, plugged the tape into the VCR, and sat down to watch. And enjoyed myself. It was clear that the body-switching concept had succeeded for the cast: you could tell that Ben Browder, Anthony Simcoe, Claudia, and Gigi Edgley were having fun mocking each other's traits and mannerisms.
The Halosians were appropriately creepy. The story seemed to play well, and I recognized large bits of it as mine. There were changes, of course; there was one bit of stage magic (a means of smuggling a bomb aboard Moya) that was far cleverer than anything I'd come up with. There were only a couple of places where I saw things I would have done differently--notably a scene between Chianna-as-D'Argo and Aeryn-as-Crichton.
The only thing I didn't like was the sound. Much or all of Farscape has to be looped, and it shows. Words get lost and the presence is wrong. At least, it was on my tape.
But I was certainly pleased to have my name on it. And I hope Farscape viewers will like it, too. Thank you, David, Rock and team for letting me contribute to an episode.
Besides ... I can always take refuge in the freelancer's retort: if you liked it, it was mine. If you didn't, hey, don't blame me! I was rewritten!
Michael Cassutt has been a writer and/or producer for a
number of SF and fantasy television series, from The Twilight Zone and Max Headroom through Eerie, Indiana, The Outer Limits and, most recently, Seven Days. He is also the author of a number of books on space flight, two dozen science fiction short stories and, most recently, a novel about NASA titled Missing Man (paperback from Tor, March 2000).
