Progress report: 11'2 thru 11'24

A lot of notes that I now have to sum up. This is the second post based on my mid-October thru early Dec bout of note making. It's a bit depressing because I've spent my life this way, making notes for unwritten fiction. By now the process feels dumb even when it's working. Yes, I'm getting results, but couldn't there be a smarter way of doing so, a way that doesn't drag out so long it takes up phases of my life? [ update,  Also, I notice that I have eight days listed with "nothing." Eight days off out of 23 is going pretty easy on yourself. ]

Anyway, I filled a notebook and a half, 320 pages of longhand. 

I recapped maybe the first third of the material here. Now to resume:

Nov. 2    11:47 am thru 4 pm 

  spec about cables underfoot in sound stage, scene between Harry and Constance at Tony's garden party, pretty well fleshed out, lasts 3 pages, back to lot layout, list all tech personnel present for a shoot, where are unused lights kept?, diagram of set and soundstage, diagram of zones of traffic from sound stage door to set, what's difference between head grip and gaffer?

Nov. 3     nothing

Nov. 4     nothing 

Nov. 5     4:50 pm thru 8:50 pm

   lot layout: where Louie's office, where design guys? if shows share building, do Eppinger and Michaelman run into each other on the stairs? layout of show's 2 floors, whose office goes where (makes more sense when I remember to include projection room), list when different producers started, finished

   extras: remarks of thuggish med students at next table, plus notes about possible pop history books 

Nov. 6     12:30 pm thru 5:25 pm

  3 pages of describing Caesar's assassination based on what I remember reading God knows where

  more floorplans for where the offices go

Nov. 7     nothing

Nov. 8     nothing

Nov. 9     nothing

Nov. 10    11:50 am thru 4 pm

   emblem design sketches, plus how the emblem sparked art director to do Outpost: Eppinger insists on summit meetings of design team; costume designer described, his love life; Taj's horn and its last-minute design change; evolution of Taj's part, its alienness

Nov. 11     nothing

Nov. 12    3:05 pm thru 6:10 pm

   more emblem design sketches, Epp's summit meetings again, how he and art director (Palfroy) hit on final design for Outpost, cast changes from pilot to series, CG's views on acting, the actors who were dropped after pilot, Donegal's role in show, back to the layout for Top Deck (Command, Deck 1, whatever it's called).

Nov. 13    1:35 pm thru 5:35 pm

   sketches of Deck 1 layout, now with the double wishbone turned into curve broken in middle by Harry's command post. Still don't know if curves toward or away from Harry's post.

   Harry's buttons panel; Palfroy (the art director) and E, their fizzled friendship; Len's view of his daily life; how Len rallies the affiliates to keep the show on the air -- pages and pages about that.

Nov. 14     2:55 pm thru 6 pm

   table of when different design elements of series were decided; the Hyacinth design guy and how he figured in the process; how his ideas bounced thru Palfroy's thinking to provide key elements of the final sets, but switched around and repositioned; Palfroy's experience of the design process; Epp and Perry Bren, the costume designer; uniforms

Nov. 15     1:10 pm thru 2:10 pm

    first and final cast lineups compared for ethnicity; the Korean cast member

Nov. 16     1:35 pm thru 3:45 pm, 4:05 pm thru 5:55 pm

    rundown of characters' viewpoints;

    CG and Doug; CG and acting, his rise, his character's style; CG meets with producer about giving Taj a "signature"; evolution of character's rationale and schtick, that of his character's alien race (the Suvok). 

Nov. 17     1:46 -- 5:47 pm

    CG's view of acting; Seven Samurai and Taj; more about CG's rise, its ups and downs; more about Taj's style; Harry in 1970s, a king among the fans; CG's and Olsen's acting tics; CG's acting technique, what he looks for in a "good" scene

Nov. 18     2:35 -- 5:38 pm

    Olsen's physical habits when scene is being shot; more on CG's view of acting, how it ties into his view of life; CG's "sucking-in" for Taj; how producers/writers handle CG/Taj; Olsen as actor; Olsen and CG's late-series disgruntlement; CG recalling Len's "Life Is Fair" triumph, making it sound like Len was being obsequious. 

Nov. 19    nothing

Nov. 20   nothing

Nov. 21    3:20 -- 6:20 pm

  [ had to write this on back of pp. 175-79 "Sky Facts" printout because I forgot notebook ]

  Olsen and acting, his "high attack"style, his attempts to impose a rhythm for the whole scene, other people's parts as well, and the resulting conflicts w/ directors; descriptions of some directors; Olsen marking scripts, remarking them after dir shoots down his scene ideas

  Bolton's viewpoint

  matchup between fan memories and real-life origins of same

[ extra: fantasy novel sketch about kids stranded in empire of Sujok Taj ]

Nov. 22  3:35 -- 5:55 pm

   Tony and acting, Harry and acting -- his embarrassment over sci-fi, the pervasiveness of the kiddie-stuff feel and how it bows his spirit; damn boots that don't fit; how his embarrassment shows up in line readings, fan memories of same

Nov. 23  12:45 -- ?, 5:12 -- ?

    Harry's declining role in show; how Harry, Cg and Washington Ferris react to Olsen's on-set power plays

Nov. 24    1:10 -- :55, 2:22 -- 5:21 pm

    Tony and Olsen, course of Tony's career in series; W. Ferris and his worldview, career in series

    [ couple pages about Cafe staff, false starts to short stories about superheroes.

       Nice parody blank verse about being a critic:

  The juice that wiggles, the nose that selects,

   the acumen that admits no lacuna. 

And now someone being a jerk in Joe Mankiewicz-ese:

   I am never wrong. But sometimes my truths are inappropriate to their context.  ]

    ** Still need to go down episode list and mark CG's ups and downs **

Progress report: Nov. 1

This is really depressing. I've been working on my novel for years and years and years, and that's understating it. Now I've added this extra lump of a project, the blogging of my day-to-day progress. How could it be anything but a waste of time? And yet I don't want to back down and lose face with my nonexistent audience. Which is the same reason I'm still trying to write the book.

Okay.

Nov. 1: I find written down: "11:30 am to 2:10 pm, read turq[uoise] folder material, edited book excerpts, Len's waiting for Janey at drugstore, etc." This means that I dug out a turqoise folder full of drafts and notes, and that I wrote in line edits for excerpts from pretend books and for a disturbing little scene where the hero waits for his girlfriend in downtown L.A. and wonders what if she's left him, would his life actually feel like a better fit if he didn't have to love someone?

Then: "2:25 pm to :50, these notes." That means I spent 25 minutes writing two pages of notes: What sets would my fictional tv show have, how many guys would be needed to move a segment of a set, what segments would make up the show's various sets, on what decks would the various locales represented by the sets be found. (My fictional tv show is about a space station that is divided into "decks," as in Deck 1, Deck 2, etc.)

The notes show that this was the day that I hit on an idea I especially like: each major set assigned to a deck would have the same centerpiece: a round, black-metal stand on which is placed a duo of off-kilter almost-rectangles that are made of glass and lit up with a different color, depending on the function of the deck in question (blue for science, red for engineering, I suppose). The idea is that these sites are all redresses of the same basic set. The difference in the centerpieces' color would underline the differences between the sets; the similarity in the centerpieces' shape and position would underline that all parts of the space station belong to a single greater entity.

Then: "10:30 pm thru 12:30 pm." Notes about which sets would be in which sound stage, speculation about how much movement between sound stages there would be -- get all the scenes done in one sound stage before moving to the next, or switch back and forth? More of that sort.

A name for one of the tv show's characters: Valerie Korova.

Parody of a parody of T. S. Eliot:

The unsought corridor, the unwelcome grave,
the smile that yields no deliverance.
Rough calculations to an uncertain end, with failure
the foredestined shrub of our diminutive landscape.

Admittedly, the bit about the shrub and the landscape is a bit rich even for a parody.

Progress report: Oct 24 thru 31

Typical. I stay away from the Internet, so my progress reports become a backlog. Now I have to set aside blocks of time and churn thru the backlog. It's all become a chore.

Okay, to begin:

Oct. 24 I find listed "12:22 noon to 2:25 pm," and then "5 pm to" nothing. I find a list of standing sets for the program (Sky Frontier), and a list of season 4 shows, each marked "ship" or "planet" or "ship, planet" plus a few more less-used terms. The list marks an episode ("Speak Your Name") as having "space storm not called Bronson-Gann."

A page of changes I want to make to "The World Is Fair," a chapter about the shooting of an episode in Sept 1966, just when the show is new and CG's character (Lieut. Taj, the alien) is taking off with viewers.

Oct 25 nothing

Oct 26 This was when I took the morning bus to Ottawa. In my noteboook I started working out a step-by-step progress from the gates of the studio lot inward. That is, I sat there on the floor of the Gare Central at 9:30 am (early for me) and wrote out what you'd find on driving up to the studio gates, then driving to the administration building, seeing the ornamental shruberry between the admin building and the tv shows' building, and so on.

Rectangles drawn to represent the sound stages, bungalows, parking lot, admin building. Wrote questions to myself: "Where's the shade, if any?" and so on.

But we're only talking a couple of pages. I know that I dropped the work after getting on the bus.

Oct 2- ? Nine pages of notes show up, no date. Fairly useful sort. Working out where SkyFron and Tracer offices would be. A list of design people and tech staff for SkyFron. (But also a stray couple of stories about someone recalling childhood with a seer-mother, a bit of Dunsany-ism about "the Virulean Gate.") Then material about studio offices, tech/design people listed again, question of who was unit production manager, a crowded diagram attempting to represent the shooting of a scene in a sound stage. Questions about color sound stages painted, distance between sound stages (Burt Ward sounds like he's saying it was 15 feet). A lot on sound stages and shooting, and every step of the way I've got questions. Yet I sort of like the experience. I've had sound stages in the back of my mind for years now, while working on this book, and it's nice to take a look at them full on. So I take what I've got and lay it out, and then figure ways all the bits together may make sense.

Oct 30 Marked "5:18 pm to 9:19 pm." Thirteen pages of notes, mainly nailing down (probable) layout of sound stage floor, position of generators, how soon cables begin to get underfoot once you walk in the door, where the actors would be sitting, bit of their between-sets behavior, what principles would be applied in the scheduling of scenes to be shot.

(There's also some stray material: the layout for a novelty book about notable personalities; a page of comebacks to people who are being impossible; more of the same; a paragraph about the evolution of social interaction among the members of the world's elites if they had transferred themselves to zeppelins located high above the earth; the title in English of a 1950s French popularization of philosophy, The Deluded Beast. Also, the title and subtitles for a book about how the Roman Republic fell. That's because right about then I was finishing Imperium by Robert Harris. The zeppelins paragraph is some sort of afterbelch to an idea I had 20 years ago and never acted on.)

Oct 31 Nothing.

Progress report: 10'16 thru 23

I've kind of lost track of the day-by-day. But I've lined up 95 episodes in a shooting order that I find plausible. Forget how many I had to invent on the spot -- plenty, since I decided that some of my favorite previously invented episodes were too character-driven to keep the network happy. The network wants alien spectacle and "planet shows," the same demand Star Trek got from NBC.

Bronson-Gann.  Here's a side of things that I like but that any eventual readers may not care about. Star Trek is about a space ship, Sky Frontier about a space station, so I have to think of ways to bring situations to the station. One is the space storm, otherwise known as a "time-warp disruption." It's gobbledygook but useful, and it pops up more often as the series goes on. Eventually a script gives one space storm the made-up name of "a Bronson-Gann disruption," and the name surfaces a few more times, though scripts also revert to "time-warp disruption" and simple "space storm," depending on the attention being paid by the people in charge. Years later "Bronson-Gann" becomes a continuity staple of the franchise and penetrates fan talk ("He's having a Gann" means someone is acting like a flake or pitching a fit).

Mission Tube.  Last night, among other things, I worked out which episodes would feature space storms, disruptions, or Bronson-Ganns. I also worked out which ones would feature the Mission Tube, another contrivance for making plots possible. Sky Frontier should have started out with a teleport device, like Star Trek did. But it didn't, both because I want the two series to be different and because Sky Frontier's creator is a stubborn sort who wants people to come to him. But before the first season is up, he and his team hit on teleporting as a storytelling crutch. Instead of the streamlined teleporting used by Star Trek, theirs is quite a production. A machine with a man-sized portal sets up a high hum and the characters jump thru the portal and into whatever situation they're supposed to get into. The effect is much like The Time Tunnel, I think (because I haven't seen that show). The Mission Tube is not the surefire device the Star Trek crew enjoys; it can send you to the wrong place and is subject to interference from difficult local conditions. "We can scramble them there," the engineering man says tensely. "I just don't know if we can scramble them back."

Titles.  Here are some I came up with. You'll see I got pretty ripe:

"That My Hands Shall Know Their Maker"

"Half a Blindfold"

"The Stars that See, the Sky that Forgets"

Progress report: 10'13, '14 and '15

 

Today's Thursday, so the dates work out like this ...

Tuesday:  4 hours writing notes, mainly about the show but also with a section about two of the characters, CG and Olsen, and how they deal with personal appearances. Back in the '60s tv actors could make more money doing weekend appearances at shopping malls and small-town harvest festivals they made from their tv work. For instance, Leonard Nimoy was a bear about scheduling appearances around the country every weekend, then driving straight from the airport to the studio for shooting. Of course he had a certain amount of stardom; Koenig, Takei and Nichols, for example, didn't have much to say about appearances in their memoirs, most likely because they didn't do as much of that work. For whatever reason, I read their memoirs a few years ago and Nimoy's not until last December or so. Once I had read him, I realized I had to make p.a.'s a bigger factor in CG's and Olsen's lives, and now I think I've figured out how to do that.

The other notes had to do with my show's credits sequence and core gimmicks: the look of the space station, its set-up (Deck 8, Deck 7, Deck 6, etc., all the way up to Deck 1, Command, the High Deck -- the special h.q. with the screens and blinking lights and the regulars sitting at their posts), the neat tricks it can pull (protector rings, offense beams, etc. -- I don't have the notebook with me, but I worked out some pretty good terms).

I was very happy with what I decided for the credits sequence and the station's look. I've been noodling with both questions for God nows how many years, and now I've got answers that I like. They seem plausible for mid-'60s tv and plausible as winners with the people watching the show, and I managed to work them out in enough detail for them to feel solid. 

Wednesday:  Not much at all. I spent half an hour with my notebook while traveling by subway. Unfortunately all I did was write nonsense phrases for fantasy stories: "The red cut glass of the goblin's triangular stare in the dark." Reason: the night before I had read LeGuin's "From Elfland to Poughkeepsie," which contains a few quotes from fantasy authors whom she likes. Not much of a reason, but it turned out to be enough.

Today:  Four hours selecting and rewriting the first 15 episodes to be shot. I don't mean rewriting scripts, because I'm not fool enough to write those, just blurb descriptions. Eighty to go and I'll have enough. I've got a bunch written up, though a count revealed the bunch was about 15 short of what I had expected. The job now is to decide which episodes were shot when, to write more as needed, and to fix the ones I already have if they need fixing. Not fix them too much, because I might get lost in the project and never come out, but enough for me to feel that each episode could have been broadcast and to give me an idea of what the production staff and actors would have had to do to get the thing made.

Progress report: 10'12

Think it was 3.5 hours. I'm trying to decide which episodes will go where in the first-season shooting schedule I made up.

(Clarification if needed: so far the schedule is just a set of dates. The fourth episode starts shooting on a given date, the fifth starts on a given date, etc. But which episode goes fourth? That's the side of things I'm working on now.) 

Progress report: 10'8 thru 11

Okay, Oct. 8 thru Oct. 11 work out this way:

Thursday:  Nothing.

Friday:  4.5 hours figuring out shooting schedule for third season.

Saturday:  2.5 hours drawing up final schedule for third season.

Sunday:  5.5 hours drawing up final schedules for first and second seasons.

Yikes, but at least now those schedules are done. They look pretty neat; if I scan the things, I'll put them in Photobucket and link to them. But it was hair-raising work and I had to feel my way, with the result that a good deal of time was probably wasted. Muddling is a bad approach to precision work.

Progress report: 10'6 and '7

Nothing yesterday, meaning 10'6, and today just a couple of hours. After numerous calculations and recalculations, lean toward the third season having 163 production days for a per-ep shooting time of 6.7 days. In other words, looks like Trek's third season reverted to the 7-day shoots of season one and the first part of season two. This would be the case even though Trek remained on very thin ice for season 3, ice that got thinner every week -- after all, the show was  canceled. The books all say that Trek's budget was cut quite deeply in season three. But unless Trek had 26 days off that I haven't accounted for (days on top of the usual: Thanksgiving, etc.), then we've got the old 7-day schedule again.

Shatner says in one of his books that the series cut back to 5 days per ep, which sounds plausible to me, but see above. I should also note that Shatner tends to be unreliable. His Star Trek Memories gives the wrong month for when his father died.

I may have Sky Frontier, my series, cut back to 5 or stay at 6; either way, forget 7. The point of studying all this Star Trek lore isn't to replicate the history of the series; it's to judge what is plausible when it comes to making up stuff about an hour-long network s.f. drama back in the 1960s. The books all say that shooting time costs a lot of money; if the program has to save money, losing a day's shooting makes sense. 

But could a 144-day shooting season (6 x 24, which is the number of eps) really start on May 21, 1968, and finish on Jan. 9, 1969. Think I've shown that it couldn't. Aw damn.

Left out "Whom Gods Destroy" from my third-season lists of episodes (one has when they were aired, other when they were shot). So a lot of redoing needed tomorrow plus the above mentioned mystery about the 7 days vs. 6. Fuck, and the first two seasons worked out so nicely.

Progress Report: 10'2 thru 10'5

Friday:    5 hours on episode schedule. Two key sets of figures don't match

Sat: I do nothing.

Sun: 4 hours on episode schedule and leafing thru source books. I'm trying to figure out my number problem.

Today: 3.5 hours of same, plus hour of googling to turn up phone numbers for old Star Trek hands; I figure maybe they'll know the answer; no phone numbers turn up. Around about 11:30 pm I hit on a possible answer to my mystery.

The big question was how many days it took to shoot a Star Trek episode. (My novel is about people making a science fiction series back in the 1960s, and books about Star Trek provide my chief guide for guessing how a network prime time drama was put together back then.) The books about Star Trek all say episodes took 6 days' shooting apiece; Shatner's Star Trek Memories says that in the third season the figure dropped to 5. But sit down with calendars for the years in question and the 6-day figure doesn't add up.

Because of the books, and because of the fine Trek site Memory Alpha, we have hard-and-fast dates for when each season's shooting started and decent enough information for when the shooting ended (sometimes dates, sometimes phrases like "mid-February"). Count up the number of weekdays in a given season, subtract holidays, and you come up with far more days than you'll get by multiplying six by the season's number of episodes.

My guess.  Star Trek took seven days to shoot an episode for the first season and most of the second season. Then it switched to six days per ep for the second season's last batch of episodes. The switch happened right when the show was waiting to find out if NBC was going to yank it at mid-season. NBC kept the show, but (I speculate) from that point Trek was on thin ice and trying to keep its costs down so that Desilu wouldn't lose too much if the series didn't make it to syndication. 

Run the numbers that way and it's possible to go thru the calendars and map out a series of shooting dates that doesn't conflict with the fairly scattered information we have on when specific episodes were done. That's for the first and second seasons, anyway. I have to go thru the third season tomorrow.

A journey.  I discovered my numbers problem on Friday and should have just shlepped home and started looking thru my books. But instead I tried to fix the problem by allowing for more days off. No good and a long, tedious process that involved a lot of counting forwards and backwards along rows of dates.

Over the weekend I started on my source books. Grace Lee Whitney's The Longest Trek helped a lot. She was on the show such a short while that her memoir notes exactly when her episodes were shot, from date to date. She says that during the first few months of season one the show had to overlap the shooting of 4 eps: that is, one ep would be finished in the morning, the next started would start shooting that afternoon. Go by her dates and the overlapped eps were all shot in 6.5 days apiece, with the episodes just before them taking 8 days apiece. So it looks like the aim was 7 days. Take a 7-day shoot as standard, and the calendar for season one adds up.

Nothing else turned up until I stumbled across p. 357 of Inside Star Trek, where associate producer Robert Justman recalls the show's brush with death during the second season. In doing so, he quotes himself telling an exec that the series would have 16 episodes filmed as of Oct. 5. Count each of those 16 eps at 7 days apiece, and the remaining 10 eps at 6 days apiece, and season two adds up.

Now season three. 

update,  I should note that Grace Lee Whitney cites Justman as her source for the shooting dates in The Longest Trek. So I owe my grand sorting out entirely to Justman-derived data. 

Progress report: 10'1'09

Yesterday and today spent a total of 7 hours working out when different episodes were broadcast and in what order of production.

Progress report: 9'29'09

Four hours today marking up calendars with dates of script delivery and dates of shooting. Some gaps and anomalies, but on the whole things seem to track. Did the first and second seasons, which is the hump.

Had to go to the cafe just to cut and paste the calendars. Now have them for the years 1966 thru 1970. Should have thought of it the night before, of course.

Progress report: 9'28'09

Two hours, twenty minutes today figuring out what the show's production week would be like (on Mondays we do this, on Tuesdays we do that, etc.) and how long from outline to finished script (up to 6 months, now and then just 6 weeks or a month, usually more like 2-3 months).

Yesterday, nothing. Day before, nothing.

This isn't good. 

Progress report: 9'27'09

A rainy Sunday. Did qi gong while watching Some Like It Hot and It Happened One Night. Walked on Mt Royal for a few hours in the mist and rain. Back home, did Pilates, showered, ate, then slept from 7:30 in the evening to 3 in the morning. I suppose this cannot be considered progress. 

Progress report

Today I finished looking thru the ms, which is 110,000 words. A big stack of unnumbered pages with "Sky" on the title page.

I listed chapters that still have to be written, points of fact that have to be filled in, and points of chronology that need straightening out. The list came to six handwritten pages and 78 items large and small.

Large items: 9 unwritten chapters. Four of these are long, heavy-duty, difficult scenes. The other five are what I refer to as roll-calls, meaning each is made up of vignettes devoted to the different cast members. Naturally, each vignette can turn into a full-fledged scene, calling for days of work.

Medium items: have to make sure I've spread out the material about Washington Ferris and his use of a popular psychology book I made up. Think I've written most of the necessary prose, but it's present as a great lump in one part of the book and then in another. 

Work out why Sandy not only can't go to her husband's get-together with his kids but also sends along her little girl. Why no babysitter?

Small items: about 70 of them, small questions about which neighborhood somebody would live in or where you'd find a pay phone on a Hollywood lot in 1967. I just spent a year reading or rereading 40 or so books about '60s tv, '60s LA, Hollywood of the '50s and '60s, and so on. Reading my list of questions, a few cases jump out where I know I've got the answer. Great! But in most cases, no.