Has There Been Any News Re. The New B5 ~2016+~ Theatrical Movie?

[Triple F]

Warner Bros. Home Video division were the ones who put the money up for The Lost Tales – as mentioned in the interview with John Copeland.

jms has unequivocally said on more than one occasion if there’s any new Babylon 5 produced it has to include him or it doesn’t happen. This seems to be partially held up by the fact that even though they wanted to produce more, the Lost Tales came to an end after jms declared he wasn’t going to do any more.

TNT pulled the plug on Crusade due to a combination of it not being the “action based drama” they were led to believe it would be, and jms’s absolute refusal to even view any of the early notes which they had sent. – as highlighted in a 1999 article which included input from both jms and Scot Safon (TNT’s senior vice president for marketing).

http://old.post-gazette.com/tv/19990606crusadea4.asp

"They went over the first five episodes and tried to give notes on those," he said. "They were on one side of the table, and I was on the other side. They went to turn the notes over and I said, 'No. No to the first, no to the second, no to them all.'

jms takes, what sometimes seems to be great joy, in pointing out how stupid studios are. After not receiving any notes from Warner after season 2, it does look a bit like he took a very arrogant stance when it came to TNT…… He knew best, they didn’t…….. That was a fight he was never going to win.

Mongoose, the last of the known licensees (I don’t know what the status of B5Books is), decided to drop that licence after jms publicly ripped into them for planning to use a couple of unfilmed Crusade scripts as books – after first checking with Warner who gave permission. Behind the scenes Straczynski then went on to cut Mongoose out the loop when the Lost Tales came out, refusing to let them see ship designs or put flyers in the DVD cases – as mentioned during the interview with Matt Sprange.

After Crusade got cancelled, jms contacted Sierra and announced that he was going to be much more closely involved with the development of the PC game, even though it was almost completed – and had just survived the recent cull of projects at Sierra.….. One of the things jms wanted to do was to completely change the game format…….. It’s probably just a coincidence, but shortly after this Sierra cancelled the game after a multi-million and three year investment.

 

[Jan]

TNT pulled the plug on Crusade due to a combination of it not being the “action based drama” they were led to believe it would be, and jms’s absolute refusal to even view any of the early notes which they had sent. – as highlighted in a 1999 article which included input from both jms and Scot Safon (TNT’s senior vice president for marketing).

http://old.post-gazette.com/tv/19990606crusadea4.asp

"They went over the first five episodes and tried to give notes on those," he said. "They were on one side of the table, and I was on the other side. They went to turn the notes over and I said, 'No. No to the first, no to the second, no to them all.'

Never understood why you seem to think that JMS refused to look at the notes - given that he's published some of them. The fact that he was in a meeting and refused their attempt to review the notes with him one at a time doesn't indicate that he'd never seen them.

Mongoose, the last of the known licensees (I don’t know what the status of B5Books is), decided to drop that licence after jms publicly ripped into them for planning to use a couple of unfilmed Crusade scripts as books – after first checking with Warner who gave permission. Behind the scenes Straczynski then went on to cut Mongoose out the loop when the Lost Tales came out, refusing to let them see ship designs or put flyers in the DVD cases – as mentioned during the interview with Matt Sprange.

The issue with Mongoose was hardly just about the Crusade scripts. It was also about the poor quality of the proposed novels that were written. After an initial kerfuffel over the scripts, JMS did review some of the manuscripts and declared them unprofessionally done and that he could/would not endorse them. Having seen three of them, I agree with him wholeheartedly. Two were unreadable dreck and one might have been salvaged with a decent editor.

After Crusade got cancelled, jms contacted Sierra and announced that he was going to be much more closely involved with the development of the PC game, even though it was almost completed – and had just survived the recent cull of projects at Sierra.….. One of the things jms wanted to do was to completely change the game format…….. It’s probably just a coincidence, but shortly after this Sierra cancelled the game after a multi-million and three year investment.

First I've seen of this. Proof, please?

Jan

 

[Triple F]

Never understood why you seem to think that JMS refused to look at the notes - given that he's published some of them. The fact that he was in a meeting and refused their attempt to review the notes with him one at a time doesn't indicate that he'd never seen them.

Semantics, and arguable, and doesn’t invalid the point. He was digging his heals in, refusing to even discuss the notes for the first five episodes provided by those who were forking out millions to make the thing. Now you can say that was courageous or even ethically the right thing to do. But if you stick both your fingers up both nostrils of those who are paying for stuff, you can’t act surprised and hurt if they take a deep breath and blow.

The issue with Mongoose was hardly just about the Crusade scripts. It was also about the poor quality of the proposed novels that were written. After an initial kerfuffel over the scripts, JMS did review some of the manuscripts and declared them unprofessionally done and that he could/would not endorse them. Having seen three of them, I agree with him wholeheartedly. Two were unreadable dreck and one might have been salvaged with a decent editor.

Yeahhh welll, again its debatable. Preventing them from seeing the early designs of the new ships for TLT– the sort of reason they pay for a licence – wasn’t cool either way. Though remembering the whole mess, jms looked very much like he was lashing out over money more than anything else. (WB and the German DVD boxset release) Bringing it out into the public forum was decidedly most uncool and looked like one of those examples of him wanting the local fan base on the newsgroup to react….. and quite a few did…. It was shameful, especially as jms didn’t respond when Mongoose tried to contact him, and when Sprange was eventually forced to go on the newsgroup, they, and you if I recall correctly, tried to rip him a new one…. Weren’t you the one who initially brought the book thing to jms’s attention to begin with.

First I've seen of this. Proof, please?

Off the record unfortunately on that one. Though not from one of the contributors to B5Scrolls this time. Spoken to a few folk connected with the game now….. I’m trying to remember what it was referred to (it was a few years ago)…. It was something like the I’m taking over this project email….. It was quite famous / notorious. If you ever get the chance to talk with someone who worked on the game, ask about it.

 

[Jan]

I got an email a little while ago:

I was alerted to the conversation going on at B5tv.com about Crusade and wanted to dispel – once more – some absolute and provable inaccuracies about what’s being put out there (again). So feel free to repost.

The five scripts which I told them I wouldn’t do were the LAST five, not the first five. I takes a particularly amazing kind of stupid to suggest such a thing because the end of that conversation was “then there’s no show.” That was the day they pulled the plug. Had this been a meeting about the first five episodes, and they pulled the plug, then there wouldn’t have been a first five episodes, now would there?

What the clown posting here also fails to understand is that sometimes articles and interviews get it wrong: they misquote, they get things out of order, especially a post like the one referenced here.
To the point that the notes were not read: again, do you really think, for even a second, that I would wander in and be given notes for the first time and I’d simply refuse to read them? No, of course not. I had been given the 20+ pages of notes at the tail end of a process that had dragged on for roughly a dozen episodes by then. I was sent the notes, read them, realized that I could not do them and maintain any kind of integrity for the show, and went in to the meeting to tell them no. I never said I didn’t read them, I said I wasn’t going to do them. But the pinhead who posts here with seeming “inside” information gets that wrong as well, which is especially astonishing since there are so many OTHER interviews and articles out there that do give the correct chronology. But it’s easier to make a straw man argument when you just ignore the other 99% to cherry-pick the one you want to believe.

There are reams of correspondence between myself and TNT over the notes that season. Where we could, we tried to accommodate; where they violated every principle of drama, we didn’t. But the notes got increasingly egregious. What we didn’t know at the time was that during B5 TNT did a survey of their audience and found out they didn’t like SF. TNT then began looking for an excuse to pull the plug and get out of the contract. The key way to do this was to demonstrate that we weren’t giving them the show they wanted, and the way you do that is to give notes so awful, so terrible, that no producer in his right mind would oblige. Like the notes on “The Well of Forever” that instructed us to solve the problem by having Gideon – the star of our show – arrange for one of his crew members to be raped by the episode’s antagonist so he could be caught with his pants literally around his ankles and blackmailed.

Let me repeat: TNT insisted on having the star of our show, the hero of our story, arrange for one of his crew members to be raped to solve a story problem.

And that was not the exception, that was emblematic of their notes.

As for Mongoose…some of the folks who were there have been picking and sniping at me for decades since that whole debacle, and I can’t believe it’s still going on. Why did I have a problem with Mongoose publishing B5 novels? BECAUSE THEY DIDN’T HAVE A LICENSE TO DO B5 NOVELS, THAT’S WHY. They had a license for nonfiction books and print material supporting the games but that’s all. They kept trying to turn this into a novel license by just doing them and sneaking them out. I didn’t want any company that was not an established publishing firm with a solid track record in quality novels to get anywhere near B5. Despite that, I still went so far as to read the stuff, wanting to give them a chance to prove me wrong, and it was just dreadful. Some of the proposed Mongoose “novels” were fan fiction they found ON LINE which they wanted to then just publish and charge people for what they could be (and had been) reading for free.

The job of the licensor is to assure the quality of the product never falls below a level representative of the show’s quality. So I wasn’t about to let crap get out there because ultimately it would reflect badly on the show that we authorized something like that, which would have been especially galling since WE NEVER AUTHORIZED IT.

As to the B5 video game…no, I never asked them to do it all over again, and the idea is profoundly ridiculous because Christy Marx and others who were there at the time have gone on record many times saying exactly what happened inside the company when suddenly they were hit by cutbacks and budget shortfalls that ended up torpedoing the game.

But it’s easier to blame an “egomaniacal producer” and spread repeatedly-debunked rumors than to actually do the work entailed to find out what really happened. Normally I wouldn’t even bother to respond but this particular nonsense has been going on now for twenty years and I’m tired of it.

Grow the fuck up and if you’re going to start making accusations or spreading stories, take the time to do your homework to find out what really happened, because in the 20-plus years since B5 and Crusade, it’s all in the public record. As another show was wont to say, the truth is out there.

And apparently, so are the idiots.

And both, it seems, are eternal.

Note that JMS didn't become aware of this conversation through me.

Also, I was in contact with Matthew Sprange back in the day and he showed me some approvals for novel covers. I mentioned that to JMS and got this response:

There were cover approvals because WB was asleep at the switch and they weren't keeping track of this stuff. The cover approvals for nonfiction books went through the usual process. So some covers were approved, some weren't, and the novels were definitely not approved because they didn't have the rights.

As for TLT, again, and you can quote me, Mongoose *never had a license* for The Lost Tales, so of course they wouldn't be given permission to use anything. This nonsense is being put forward by someone who, for years, has had a mad-on for me and keeps reposting the same debunked information over and over out of a personal obsession with smearing me. Sorry, TS, this stuff is no more true here than anywhere else you've posted it. Have you considered finding a new hobby? Golf? Knitting snoods, perhaps? Anything that doesn't involve twisting the facts to fit with the narrative you want to possess? Because this one's getting old.

Note again, that the above matches my memory of Matthew Sprange. He seemed like a nice guy but...well, sometimes challenged in either the memory department or the truth department. He'd been the one to contact me after the spat with JMS, and offered any and all proof of his 'side' of things but he never was really able to do so and I kept finding inconsistencies. Not saying he lied, just was never persuaded that he ever was completely accurate.

Jan

 

[JonFrain]

It's certainly not a coincidence that Joe has left projects due to creative differences.

Crusade
Jeremiah - actually improved the story by speeding things up
Red Mars
Captain Power and the Soldiers of the Future
(World War Z - movies often have multiple writers so this isn't uncommon. but he was apparently much more faithful to the book and TBTB didn't want that)

I'd say it's a fair statement that he is difficult to work with from a studio/network point of view. In many cases it's probably a situation where the people hiring him didn't communicate clearly or listen to him. Or they assumed they'd be able to push him in the direction they wanted. He's seen what network meddling often does to a product and probably doesn't want his name attached anymore.

I believe Joe's side of the TNT situation. He still turned in subpar scripts, did some miscasting and made a poor choice for the composer. The special effects team wasn't really up to par at that point. I wasn't really impressed with the unfilmed scripts either to be honest. But if they actual asked for a female cast member to be raped, well damn how can you defend TNT. In retrospect, Crusade was a terrible fit all around for TNT. And the quality of the product produced was pretty embarrassing. Although the quality of LOTR was even worse.

I have a hard time believing that JMS had anything to do with the Sierra game being shut down. Games get shut down all the time and Sierra was a mess. B5 wasn't a major commodity either.

Mongoose came across as very sketchy, didn't they infer that JMS approved their books at one point, but they were probably barely holding on.

 

[Jan]

It's certainly not a coincidence that Joe has left projects due to creative differences.

Crusade
Jeremiah - actually improved the story by speeding things up
Red Mars
Captain Power and the Soldiers of the Future
(World War Z - movies often have multiple writers so this isn't uncommon. but he was apparently much more faithful to the book and TBTB didn't want that)

I'd say it's a fair statement that he is difficult to work with from a studio/network point of view.

What have you heard about 'Red Mars'? I've only heard that JMS passed on it - that it was the second show-runner who left because of creative differences.

As for him being difficult to work with...

The work, and the quality of the work, is what ultimately makes
the difference, if you're willing to stay with it and if the qualitiy
is, in fact, there. I'm an annoying person; I'm a perfectionist; I'm
cranky and far from politic. By all rights I should be hard-core
unemployable; I've always been this way. And I've always worked.
Because when the moment comes to put black marks down on a white sheet
of paper...I do it fairly well.

jms

Mongoose came across as very sketchy, didn't they infer that JMS approved their books at one point, but they were probably barely holding on.

Their claim was that the novels would be 100% canon. In a podcast he also seemed to indicate that JMS was involved. I don't have a link to the podcast any longer but JMS responded to questions about what Sprange said here.

Jan

 

[Triple F]

I was alerted to the conversation going on at B5tv.com about Crusade and wanted to dispel – once more – some absolute and provable inaccuracies about what’s being put out there (again). So feel free to repost.

The five scripts which I told them I wouldn’t do were the LAST five, not the first five. I takes a particularly amazing kind of stupid to suggest such a thing because the end of that conversation was “then there’s no show.” That was the day they pulled the plug. Had this been a meeting about the first five episodes, and they pulled the plug, then there wouldn’t have been a first five episodes, now would there?

What the clown posting here also fails to understand is that sometimes articles and interviews get it wrong: they misquote, they get things out of order, especially a post like the one referenced here.
To the point that the notes were not read: again, do you really think, for even a second, that I would wander in and be given notes for the first time and I’d simply refuse to read them? No, of course not. I had been given the 20+ pages of notes at the tail end of a process that had dragged on for roughly a dozen episodes by then. I was sent the notes, read them, realized that I could not do them and maintain any kind of integrity for the show, and went in to the meeting to tell them no. I never said I didn’t read them, I said I wasn’t going to do them. But the pinhead who posts here with seeming “inside” information gets that wrong as well, which is especially astonishing since there are so many OTHER interviews and articles out there that do give the correct chronology. But it’s easier to make a straw man argument when you just ignore the other 99% to cherry-pick the one you want to believe.

There are reams of correspondence between myself and TNT over the notes that season. Where we could, we tried to accommodate; where they violated every principle of drama, we didn’t. But the notes got increasingly egregious. What we didn’t know at the time was that during B5 TNT did a survey of their audience and found out they didn’t like SF. TNT then began looking for an excuse to pull the plug and get out of the contract. The key way to do this was to demonstrate that we weren’t giving them the show they wanted, and the way you do that is to give notes so awful, so terrible, that no producer in his right mind would oblige. Like the notes on “The Well of Forever” that instructed us to solve the problem by having Gideon – the star of our show – arrange for one of his crew members to be raped by the episode’s antagonist so he could be caught with his pants literally around his ankles and blackmailed.

Let me repeat: TNT insisted on having the star of our show, the hero of our story, arrange for one of his crew members to be raped to solve a story problem.

And that was not the exception, that was emblematic of their notes.

As for Mongoose…some of the folks who were there have been picking and sniping at me for decades since that whole debacle, and I can’t believe it’s still going on. Why did I have a problem with Mongoose publishing B5 novels? BECAUSE THEY DIDN’T HAVE A LICENSE TO DO B5 NOVELS, THAT’S WHY. They had a license for nonfiction books and print material supporting the games but that’s all. They kept trying to turn this into a novel license by just doing them and sneaking them out. I didn’t want any company that was not an established publishing firm with a solid track record in quality novels to get anywhere near B5. Despite that, I still went so far as to read the stuff, wanting to give them a chance to prove me wrong, and it was just dreadful. Some of the proposed Mongoose “novels” were fan fiction they found ON LINE which they wanted to then just publish and charge people for what they could be (and had been) reading for free.

The job of the licensor is to assure the quality of the product never falls below a level representative of the show’s quality. So I wasn’t about to let crap get out there because ultimately it would reflect badly on the show that we authorized something like that, which would have been especially galling since WE NEVER AUTHORIZED IT.

As to the B5 video game…no, I never asked them to do it all over again, and the idea is profoundly ridiculous because Christy Marx and others who were there at the time have gone on record many times saying exactly what happened inside the company when suddenly they were hit by cutbacks and budget shortfalls that ended up torpedoing the game.

But it’s easier to blame an “egomaniacal producer” and spread repeatedly-debunked rumors than to actually do the work entailed to find out what really happened. Normally I wouldn’t even bother to respond but this particular nonsense has been going on now for twenty years and I’m tired of it.

Grow the fuck up and if you’re going to start making accusations or spreading stories, take the time to do your homework to find out what really happened, because in the 20-plus years since B5 and Crusade, it’s all in the public record. As another show was wont to say, the truth is out there.

And apparently, so are the idiots.

And both, it seems, are eternal.

……. OK.

jms says the article – including those quotes it contains - got it wrong. That it was the last 5 scripts rather than the first 5 as stated in the article. I obviously didn’t make it clear, the opinions I have are rarely based on just one thing. For example, here’s a couple of extracts from one of jms’s newsgroup comments which were made 2 years after the article – emphasis added by me.

http://www.jmsnews.com/msg.aspx?id=1-5177

I think they would've kicked over the table and shown where the production, and the story, was going. They're also the ones I wrote after "Apperances," which is where I decided, "Fuck it, fuck TNT, fuck the notes, I'm just gonna go back to what I was doing for the first 5 and write what I want." I got pissed, and sometimes I write best when I'm angry about something………

………. Crusade is a good show. It got beaten down after the first five, stayed kind of beaten down through network notes and my own fatigue fighting fights that I shouldn't have had to fight, then picked up with the two post-fuck'em scripts because my energy was gearing up again at that decision. But overall it was a good show.

So in jms’s own explanation – like the article - he points out he ignored the notes on the FIRST FIVE scripts, and wrote what he wanted. He then did a few with notes - then ignored them again for the final TWO SCRIPTS……

So just to be clear about where I’m coming from, so to speak. jms had STARTED Crusade, ie the first five scripts, with the decision that he was going to ignore the notes from the studio. He only returned to the “Fuck em” attitude towards the end. Regardless of what he just typed.

Taking in isolation, that’s one thing. Taking it in the often repeated context of jms’s assertions that studio execs don’t know shit about sci-fi and aren’t very bright… it does come across as a bit of an arrogant stance. Of course there would have been some discussion at some point, but he didn't say that…. He’s saying “fuck em”, and he wrote what he wanted in the first five scipts….. and that's what's said in both the article and his own comments two years later……

I’m deliberately just focusing on that one point because a discussion like this always goes off on all directions, and jms has already picked the areas he wants to respond to, so I’m just witling it down a bit further – in order to try and explain why I have the opinion that I do…. It isn’t something just pulled out the air.

Though saying that. While you have the clown here, Jan, watching this discussion (I’m assuming that’s a term of endearment btw!, or does he pefer to be called idiot), and you’re obviously in contact with him. Can you ask him to clarify his various statements about any new B5 project has to include him or it doesn’t happen….. I’ve always wondered exactly what he meant by that, and how it might possibly impact on things like the Lost Tales and other stuff..

 

[Jan]

So in jms’s own explanation – like the article - he points out he ignored the notes on the FIRST FIVE scripts, and wrote what he wanted.

Search a little further. You'll find the post where he talks about the biggest flurry of notes starting after the first five episodes.

So just to be clear about where I’m coming from, so to speak. jms had STARTED Crusade, ie the first five scripts, with the decision that he was going to ignore the notes from the studio. He only returned to the “Fuck em” attitude towards the end. Regardless of what he just typed.

You're deliberately mis-reading or misunderstanding. Show me exactly where JMS ever said anything of the sort. Because he didn't.

As stated, go back and actually do some research. As JMS said, it's all public record. There were some notes (and I'm going by memory here) during the first five and those came from one of the TNT offices (Los Angeles, I think). Then, after the first five were shot, TNT Atlanta got involved and that's when production was shut down for the new sets and uniforms. Ah: Found it: http://jmsnews.com/msg.aspx?id=1-5842

Though saying that. While you have the clown here, Jan, watching this discussion (I’m assuming that’s a term of endearment btw!), and you’re obviously in contact with him. Can you ask him to clarify his various statements about any new B5 project has to include him or it doesn’t happen….. I’ve always wondered exactly what he meant by that, and how it might possibly impact on things like the Lost Tales and other stuff..

Nope. Ask him yourself. I quit taking requests for questions about 15 years ago. And I don't consider details of his contracts to be any of my business.

Jan

 

[Springer]

So in jms’s own explanation – like the article - he points out he ignored the notes on the FIRST FIVE scripts, and wrote what he wanted. He then did a few with notes - then ignored them again for the final TWO SCRIPTS……

So just to be clear about where I’m coming from, so to speak. jms had STARTED Crusade, ie the first five scripts, with the decision that he was going to ignore the notes from the studio. He only returned to the “Fuck em” attitude towards the end. Regardless of what he just typed.

Or, he wrote the first five scripts the same way he'd written B5 where he wasn't getting notes, and he thought that would be ok. Then having seen those scripts, TNT started interfering, requesting changes in the scripts that followed. JMS accepted some of them (like the new uniforms) and refused to implement others - we know which ones and why. Then for the final two when he'd had enough, that was when he decided to "fuck em" as you and he so colourfully say, and go back to his B5 style of writing what he wanted.

Never mind the point that he couldn't have had notes from TNT on the first five episodes before he'd even written them.

Trying to be objective about this, it seems to me that's what he's saying. I don't see where he's saying he went into Crusade already with the stance of not playing ball with TNT and being arrogant. That seems to be something you're reading into it, but I can't how you've joined the dots. If there is some piece of information (not opinion) that I'm missing I'd like to know what it is.

Do you think TNT were right in the way they acted and with the changes that they wanted?

 

[Triple F]

You're deliberately mis-reading or misunderstanding. Show me exactly where JMS ever said anything of the sort. Because he didn't.

Deliberately?! Interesting viewpoint.

OK. I can accept the possibility that I’m misinterpreting what is quoted in the 1999 article which indicates he wasn’t interesting in working to notes in the first five episodes.

"They went over the first five episodes and tried to give notes on those," he said. "They were on one side of the table, and I was on the other side. They went to turn the notes over and I said, 'No. No to the first, no to the second, no to them all.'

and

"They're used to doing in-house productions, so when the word 'no' was used, they had to have someone come in to explain it to them."

I’m also open to what jms asserted, that the article writer just got it wrong, and the above meeting refers to what happened at the end rather than the beginning, and mentioning 5 scripts is just an accident. And I’m equally open to the suggestion I’m again misinterpreting what appears on the moderated newsgroups two years later which seem to confirm the above when jms says -

which is where I decided, "Fuck it, fuck TNT, fuck the notes, I'm just gonna go back to what I was doing for the first 5 and write what I want."

I’ve seen posts where jms indicates that the first five scripts were - in fact – more or less left alone.

Some succeed more than others; but all would have been better *without* the kind of interference we received, the day to day battles, the war of attrition, the confusing and contradictory notes, and so on. That's why 101-105 are overall the best episodes, because they were troubled the least by outside forces.

The issue seems to be not that TNT was sending notes, but that after the first five scripts it became relentless, overwhelming with all kinds of stupid and contradictory shit going on…. His posts indicate he was given notes in the first five scripts, but he then went on to ignore them, wrote what he wanted and TNT didn’t do anything about it… hence the least troubled by outside forces.…. It was only after he’d done that that TNT suddenly went into overdrive. They ONLY began to act like tits after he’d started it by ignoring what they were suggesting in the first five…… Do you see where I’m coming from in this?

Over on that article , even the TNT Senior vice president of marketing, Scot Safon, indicates the way jms was responding was the issue. By ignoring every note….. ie those in the first five scripts!

“"I don't think it was the nature of Joe's deal with us that he would consider all input and agree to none of it," Safon said. "The actual execution was the flash point here. The creator and the network had fundamentally different expectations in not only what the end product would be, but what the process would be."

It was childish and petty, but TNT only began the overkill in notes AFTER jms had refused to play ball with the first five scripts. jms has a few times talked about how the first five had the minimum interference - and that, when taken in the larger context, really does seem to mean, they sent a few notes, he ignored them, TNT didn’t say anything…… and this is one of these conversations that’s going to go round and round in circles, isn’t it.

You want to view each jms post, or statement, in isolation, and take what is said literally. But when you take a step back, put a few of them together, take into consideration what others said, a slightly different picture is revealed…. Or at least a different interpretation is possible, and that’s what I’m doing. Is it wrong – is it correct. Bugger knows.

Anyway. It’s just an opinion shared in an existing thread on a discussion forum. I’ve shown why I have the opinion. You disagree. Though getting jms to join in was a new twist… Fair enough. It’s no biggie.

 

[Jan]

His posts indicate he was given notes in the first five scripts, but he then went on to ignore them, wrote what he wanted and TNT didn’t do anything about it… hence the least troubled by outside forces.…. It was only after he’d done that that TNT suddenly went into overdrive. They ONLY began to act like tits after he’d started it by ignoring what they were suggesting in the first five…… Do you see where I’m coming from in this?

Only because you're trying to look at things through your own desired interpretation. NOplace does JMS ever say that he ignored any of their notes. In fact, why don't you instead read this post which would seem to indicate that JMS gave due consideration to notes and complied when possible.
http://jmsnews.com/msg.aspx?id=1-6148

It was childish and petty, but TNT only began the overkill in notes AFTER jms had refused to play ball with the first five scripts. jms has a few times talked about how the first five had the minimum interference - and that, when taken in the larger context, really does seem to mean, they sent a few notes, he ignored them, TNT didn’t say anything…… and this is one of these conversations that’s going to go round and round in circles, isn’t it.

You're completely ignoring the fact that (after the fact) JMS discovered that TNT received results of an audience study (which JMS referenced in the email I copied above) that showed that B5 did not increase their market share.

The real issue seems to be you want to view each jms post, or statement, in isolation, and take what is said literally. But when you take a step back, put a few of them together, take into consideration what others said, a slightly different picture is revealed…. Or at least a different interpretation is possible, and that’s what I’m doing. Is it wrong – is it correct. Bugger knows.

Well...yeah...I read what he writes. He's a writer. He writes exactly what he means (though he mis-types on occasion like anybody). That's not hard to understand. No convoluted 'interpretation' needed.

Anyway. It’s just an opinion shared in an existing thread on a discussion forum. I’ve shown why I have the opinion. You disagree. Though getting jms to join in was a new twist… Fair enough. It’s no biggie.

Don't look at me, I didn't alert him to this conversation (you must have missed the first time I said that). I sure didn't the last 3 times we had pretty much this exact discussion, did I? Another...interpretation?

Jan

 

[JoeD80]

It was childish and petty, but TNT only began the overkill in notes AFTER jms had refused to play ball with the first five scripts. jms has a few times talked about how the first five had the minimum interference - and that, when taken in the larger context, really does seem to mean, they sent a few notes, he ignored them, TNT didn’t say anything…… and this is one of these conversations that’s going to go round and round in circles, isn’t it.

It's not so easy to say one way or another since we don't have a lot of visibility into internal memos, but at least one Crusade script has been published ("Racing the Night"), and the entire 4th act was changed for that episode. Joe attributes that to notes he received. That could have been based on all of their notes, or only some of them.

 

[Jan]

I wish I had the time and patience to compare all of the drafts of the Crusade scripts that I have. I've got every draft that was released to the crew for all of the episodes. Of course, without the notes that accompany them, I'm not sure what it would show. Maybe someday.

 

[vorlonlovechild]

back to the B5 movie situation, with JMS's current health problems and him reigning back his work, will a B5 movie ever get made? I was thinking about this the other day, and looking at how we get such crappy movies released at cinema nowadays it's a crime that B5 has still not seen the big screen.

I'm amazed that with JMS being buddies with the warchowskis they didn't ask if they could have a go at making it. Surely it would be right up their alley? Then again maybe not.

 

[Jan]

JMS doesn't have any current health problems that we know of. His eye issue is completely fixed. And he's changing the focus of his writing from comics to novels and plays, not necessarily scaling back at all. I'm not sure he could if he wanted to!

ETA: Thinking about the Wachowskis, I'd think that joining with JMS to do Harlan Ellison's ""Repent, Harlequin!" Said the TickTock Man" would be more playing to their strength. I'd love to see that combination of talent!!

 

[JonFrain]

Is this why there's never any new merchandise? Every year at SDCC there are all kinds of models, action figures and collectibles from all manner of older or obscure SF shows that still have a fanbase, but never anything from B5. I could never figure out whether it's because people have just forgotten about the show or whether JMS or Warners were somehow an obstacle to it.

What's majorly disappointing to me, though, is that I've been told by trustworthy sources that Big Finish, the folks who've done some wonderful audio dramas (especially Doctor Who) have asked about a license and were told none were available. It's as though WB just wants the show to disappear.

Jan

I was looking to see if Big finish ever addressed Babylon 5. Their official twitter indicates the cost alone would be prohibitive. If they were told the license wasn't available they could have created a campaign to get fans to at least write to WB.

https://twitter.com/bigfinish/status/556412075506171905

"Q: Any ideas on a Babylon 5 series? A: We might go back to it, but actors fees on a reasonable budget would be really difficult for ensemble"

 

[pine22]

I get migraines so news about tweeting and retweeting untweeting or whatever doesn't bother me. Plus I don't tweet anyway....Facebook takes up way too much of my time.

I did see people posting and mentioning a B5 movie in 2016 in the B5 Facebook group that I belong to, but there really wasn't much more than speculation and questions.....not much info given.

 

[Looney]

I did see people posting and mentioning a B5 movie in 2016 in the B5 Facebook group that I belong to, but there really wasn't much more than speculation and questions.....not much info given.

Not really. Basically JMS announced a few years ago that he was in the process of moving forward with a theatrical movie because he has the theatrical film rights to B5. He thought he could raise enough interest (money) on his own for the project, but he wanted Warner Brothers on board to match what other investors he could come up with. He wanted them on board, but if he could raise enough on his own he would move forward if they didn't have interest in the project. He fully recognized that he needed to gain more "street cred" to raise these funds. I think he was hopeful his current projects, at the time, would help to grow that "street cred". To date he has said he hasn't been able to generate as much interest (money) as he hoped to do the movie the right way. Health issues slowed him down the last year or so, but he has some big projects on the horizon. Basically we're still waiting to hear him announce that the screen play is finished, which is likely something he won't do until he knows the project is moving forward with at least a budget of one hundred million dollars. I can't confirm this is the truth, but it seems I read a year or more ago that he said he was only at about sixty million. Again I can't confirm that is the truth, but it seems he said something like that; maybe it was something like he thought he could raise around sixty percent of what he wanted or something.

There has been a lot of speculation that he has given up because of certain things he has said, but I have never heard that he said he is abandoning the idea. All I've heard is that he is struggling with the problem of what to do with the fact that every day that passes makes the franchise interest grow colder.

What info you can't find here you can find over on JMS News forum. There you'll find more specific answers and exact quotes. I will tell Jan over there and see if she has anything to add to what I've said over here. She'll be able to correct any mistakes I've made.

 

[Jan]

A couple of things - almost quibbles. Yes, for the past two years JMS has said that he's working on building his 'street cred' in order to be able to attract investors to the project. He didn't say that he'd raised $60M in investors, only that he thought that was how much he could attract at that time. His feeling was that he'd need more in the way of feature films and/or TV shows in order to gain that credibility. As is too often the case, projects in the works (Midnight Nation series and Rising Stars movie as two examples) never seem to move very quickly so there's little change since last year.

As for WB, he's said he'd invite them in but if not, he'd go it alone. One thing to note about this is that even though JMS owns the feature film rights, WB owns all TV and other rights. If WB won't participate, it's unclear what secondary revenue streams would be available for the B5 movie such as TV or DVD sales.

At this year's San Diego Comic-Con appearance, JMS mentioned that he's aware that as time goes on, the less the show is in the public consciousness and he's trying to work out how to deal with that.

 

[Looney]

A couple of things - almost quibbles.

Where are the "quibbes"?! I didn't say anything too far from what you said. I mean I said I couldn't remember exactly what was said about $60 million.

(THANKS)