Re: The End of the Line
<BLOCKQUOTE><font size="1" face="Verdana, arial">quote:</font><HR>Did he say
why they did it?
<HR></BLOCKQUOTE>
Because it made the ending too confusing and was, frankly, unnecessary. The story was too cluttered. All they
really needed for the ending was
one alien ship that was going to wipe out the planet if K and J didn't stop the Bug and rescue the galaxy. This is something that
should have been obvious at the script stage, but in typical Hollywood fashion they actually started preproduction with a script the director knew he didn't like (it had scenes in Kansas, an undeground MIB "farm" where aliens lived and a whole bunch of other extraneous stuff), then adjusted things as they went along.
It is a good thing for Sony that the film did as well as it did at the box office, because in many ways it was an object lesson in how
not to make a movie. They were on the point of shooting the ending, with a very expensive animatronic Bug, when it finally occurred to somebody that there wasn't enough action in their "action-adventure/SF-comedy." The original ending was basically a
debate between Will Smith's character and the Bug.
So they decided to make it a fight scene instead, which meant they needed a Bug that could move, which, in turn meant that they had to chuck the expensive, but immobile, Bug robot and spend an extra 4 million dollars doing the whole thing in CGI over a period of 8 months.
To get this back to television in general and
B5 in particular (by way of
Star Trek: The late Gene Coon used to pound one idea into the heads of all the freelancers who worked on the original
Trek, "Production problems are easier and cheaper to fix
in the typewriter than on the stage." One of the reasons that
B5 was a good as it was on the budget it had, and why it did not burn out actors and crew with 16 hour days, is that JMS learned this lesson. A few extra minutes at the planning stage of a project often saves
hours at the work stage.
JMS was very good about making sure things were planned. Although there might be some last minute changes of a line here and there, most scripts were ready
weeks ahead of time. The set, props and costume departments had plenty of advanced notice, so there were few surprises. The cast and crew did not have to stand around waiting for new pages to come down from the writers, with everyone on overtime. (A frequent problem on the last three
Trek shows, which is one reason that
B5 was such a hard sell. Nobody believed JMS and Netter when they said they could and would produce the show on the budget they proposed. Every other SF show since the original
Trek had started with one budget and then quickly exceeded it, forcing the studio to add more money to each episode to keep the thing in production.)
Because the whole season was roughly outlined they could do things like shoot "Chyrsalis" in the middle of S1, giving themselves the extra time that they knew they would need for post-production. If they were going to use an expensive set in episodes 3 and 9 of a given season they had the option of shooting those shows back-to-back.
Given JMS's commitment to getting it right at the script stage, and his and Netter's experience in putting every dollar on the screen, I'd love to see what kind of
B5 theatrical film they could produce with 30 or 40 million dollars to play with. I'm willing to be it would look more like 80 or 100 million, just because they would avoid so much of the waste that the rest of Hollywood just accepts as a cost of doing business.
Regards,
Joe
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Joseph DeMartino
Sigh Corps
Pat Tallman Division
joseph-demartino@att.net
