Re: Crusades \"Fifth\" Season-What Would\'ve Happened?
<BLOCKQUOTE><font size="1" face="Verdana, arial">quote:</font><HR>Any way to read these scripts from the end of the first season you guys keep refering to. I feel so left out. And I thought I was a die-hard fan.<HR></BLOCKQUOTE>
They were available in what was thought to be a secure, read-only form at a commercial website called Bookface.com. I read them there at the time. When it was announced (in advance) that Bookface.com was going to close some fans either did screen image captures that they later ran through optical character recognition software or opened a word processor in a window next to their browser and typed them manually to "preserve" them for fans after Bookface was no more.
They circulated via e-mail and were posted on various websites for the better part of a year until JMS became aware of them and asked the fans to please stop circulating his (and Fiona Avery's) copyrighted property. (The studio owns the show, but the writer retains publication rights to the scripts themselves, which are damaged when they're available for free on the 'net.) A lot of people assumed that if they weren't charging for the scripts they weren't doing anything bad or illegal, but this turns out not to be the case.
The fans complied, out of respect for the authors if nothing else, including those on this site. The scripts are no longer being passed around, and I believe Antony has a policy against folks offering to exchange the scripts or directing people to on-line sources for them.
From time to time JMS has made noises about publishing both the filmed and unfilmed
Crusade scripts at some point (as well as his own
B5 scripts.) My copy of his novel
Tribulations actually has a blurb asking the reader to watch for upcoming announcements about the project, but I think for the time being he's got other things on his mind.
He has an enormous number of projects on his plate, and little time to prep the scripts for publication. (Which is more work than you might think. Notes and abbreviations that would be understood by the cast and crew have to be spelled-out for laymen. Working scripts are often printed and distributed with typos and misspellings that would have to be fixed. Etc., etc., etc. If he were going to add footnotes or commentaries to the scripts there would be that much
more work.)
Finally there is now a chance (as there really wasn't when the scripts appeared on Bookface) that the show might come back. If
Rangers becomes a successful series Sci-Fi will almost certainly at least
consider reviving
Crusade, so those scripts could still be filmed, conceivably.
Regards,
Joe
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Joseph DeMartino
Sigh Corps
Pat Tallman Division
joseph-demartino@att.net