spaceaboveandbeyond.net

SPACE IS STILL THE PLACE

The New Series from X-Files producers Glen Morgan and James Wong boldly assails the final frontier.

While most television shows are enjoying a quiet hiatus - and offices across Hollywood are empty - Glen Morgan's office on the 20th Century Fox lot is abuzz.
Morgan is still ensconced in the same digs he and partner James Wong have shared for several television seasons (their door still reads The X-Files), and today he is welcoming network executives in their jackets and ties as they come through to offer congratulations or to conduct business in the suite.

Behind one of the doors the sound of laser fire and spaceships swooping around in a heated mechanical battle fry of sound effects provides an appropriate soundtrack to all the furious activity.

It's the day before the official announcement that Morgan and Wong's new series, Space, will have a place on the Fox Network's fall schedule, and the problem is that nobody's quite sure yet what it's going to be called.

"I want 'Above and Beyond,' " says Morgan.
"But these marketing guys hate that because they say that it doesn't look good on a toy package."
The working title for the project has been Space, but creators Morgan and Wong hate that, so Morgan is hoping for a compromise of some sort.

"Space: Above and Beyond" is a likely choice. "It'll be some variation," he says.

"I guess it's going to be weird when the network gets up there tomorrow and says, 'Well, we've got this show, we're not sure yet what it's called...' "

At the next day's announcement ceremony the series is called simply Space, but the network's publicity department labels that a "working title."

Glen Morgan is too distracted to worry much about that at this point, as right now his main concern is the time slot the network has given the show: Sunday nights at 7 p.m.
The assumption all along has been that Space would get the highly desirable slot before The X-Files, Fridays at 8 p.m.

"Fridays at 8, that just makes total sense," says Morgan.
"I guess the show that they're putting on there [Strange Luck] is about some guy who has a near-death experience, so there's some paranormal element to it, " he says, trying to rationalize away obvious disappointment.

"It's weird - I think it's sort of, in a way, a compliment, because a lot of the networks place their good shows, the ones they think can draw an audience, on Sundays.
But the precedent for science fiction on Sundays is not too good," he admits.

Indeed just days earlier NBC announced that it would cancel Earth 2 and move seaQuest to Wednesdays in an attempt to keep that show afloat.
Only ABC's Lois and Clark survived the night.

The networks' new Sunday lineups are being designed to appeal to a more sophisticated, adult audience than the usual Murder, She Wrote crowd, with such upscale comedies as Mad About You being moved there.

Do all these changes leave space enough for Space?

"All you can do is go about your business," says sanguine Morgan.
"But I'm worried that since this show is about war, and we want to do adult things were people actually get killed, that people will say we can't do that that early in the evening. <

Twentieth [Television] said, 'We'll back you on that,' but I just got the Standards and Practices notes on the two-hour pilot and they said, 'This might be shown at 7, so these words should be changed,' and all this stuff.
It's just a big headache."

A near-future story of an Earth thrust into war with the first extraterrestrial species ever encountered, the show is touted as the most sophisticated science fiction series ever done by Fox.
The two-hour pilot details the training of a group of first-year military cadets (played by a relatively unknown ensemble of actors) who are hurtled unexpectedly into an intergalactic war when a mysterious alien race decimates Earth's first off-world colonies and dispenses in short order with Earth's most elite fighting squadron.

The concept for the show was originally pitched to Morgan and Wong as "Top Gun in space," but the creators decided to look to another era of military filmmaking for inspiration: the World War II combat movies.

Directors like Quentin Tarantino had announced in the press their desire to put a new spin on World War II films, but no one had yet figure out how to update the often sentimental genre.

Today's too-cynical audiences have perhaps seen one too many Vietnam-era war films to believe anymore in the heroic fantasy figures played by the likes of John Wayne or Henry Fonda.

"We wanted to do a spin on World War II movies," says Morgan.
"But how do you do it in these cynical times?"

Morgan and Wong decided to graft the genre with the science fiction setting of the original pitch where larger-than-life heroes like Captain Kirk and Luke Skywalker abound.
Still, if the pilot were compared to a Mark Hamill movie, it'd probably be more like The Big Red One than Star Wars.

In discussing his inspirations, Morgan is quick to point out, "In no way do we approach the level of these films, but the models were anything by John Ford, Twelve O'Clock High, All Quiet on the Western Front, both the book and the movie, The Red Badge of Courage, both the book and the movie, those Stanley Kubrick war movies, and you can't deny [George] Lucas and all that stuff."

"Jim and I took a 'Fiction of War' class at Loyola, where we read Catch 22, Naked and the Dead, all those kinds of themes.
You have those, and Jim, who's very big on science fiction, saying it's like early Heinlein."

Confirms Wong, "We drew upon the war novels, and when I was a kid I read a lot of Heinlein stuff.
And Joe Halderman's book The Forever War, too.
And all the World War II movies would the film draw."

"Maybe to the audience the World War II movie is just too sappy," admits Morgan.
"But the intention of the whole series is to break through that cynicism.
We can sit here and talk about The Searchers or The Sands of Iwo Jima , but the heroes out there today are Arnold or Die Hard.
Even Star Wars, which is 20 years old, is almost passé to a lot of people."

"When Jim and I were at college we listened to a lot of Springsteen, whose stuff is about believing in just the day-to-day things, but now it seems uncool to listen to that. Everyone's so cynical nowadays. There's Kurt Cobain, a voice that came out of nowhere, and then he shoots himself.
There's something that's out there, that mood, that we wanted to penetrate.
We started looking to when the last time the country seemed united and had a belief in something.
And even though World War II has its gray areas, for the most part that's it."

Another source of inspiration for the 35-year-old Morgan came from the Apollo astronauts.

"For me as a kid who wanted to believe in something, the people in the space program were heroes," he says.
"People say that was all just Cold War propaganda, but that's why we'll show rockets being used to get us into space, that it isn't super-easy to go there.
It's like what the astronauts did. It's heroic."

The central hero making this journey in Space is Nathan West, played by Morgan Weisser. West joins the military in order to leave Earth and look for his girlfriend, who has joined a colony that may have been obliterated by alien forces.
"We had a lot of pressure to get an experienced guy to play Nathan, to get a super-hunk," says Morgan,
"and we were about to go with this stud guy, and again Randy [Stone, who was instrumental in getting David Duchovny cast as Mulder in X-Files] stopped us and said, 'This guy Morgan Weisser is my favorite.'

Jim and David [Nutter] had already left for Australia to shoot the pilot, so I was the only one where when Morgan came in and read.
He did about a third of the audition and I knew he was it. But even though he's a kick boxer and very physical, he's more kind of intellectually driven and he wasn't a big stud guy. We wanted to go against what you expected to see."

Emerging as the leader of West's squadron is Shane Vansen, played by Kristen Cloke.
"The Shane character came from the positive response of people to the Scully character, who was a strong woman not having sex with her partner.
People were saying to us that we should have a love triangle in the pilot, and I didn't want to do that because that was in Star Wars," says Morgan.

"We gave her a tragic back story, and when Kristen Cloke read, while everybody else did it with a lot of anger, she was just really cool and that seemed right for the character."

The third core member of the ensemble is Cooper Hawkes, played by Rodney Rowland. Cooper is a Tank, a man born in vitro who brings with him a troubled past and faces a world of extreme prejudice.
"Rodney Rowland is a print model," says Morgan.
"He's the J. Crew guy.
Randy Stone said, 'I've got just the guy.'
Rodney came in and I just didn't see it.

Randy was insistent, so we brought him in again.
We decided to go with this other guy. But then we had to bring a couple of people in to read to the network, and we brought Rodney in with our guy.

And what was really bizarre is, when Rodney was reading, I realized, 'Oh God, this is really our guy,' which was embarrassing because it was the other guy I had support for, and later I had to tell him he didn't get it."

"The really exciting thing about Rodney is because he's so new [as an actor], he really doesn't have a structured, learned way to go about his performance," says Morgan.
"He's really dangerous, and I like that."

Now that they have their ensemble, Morgan and Wong are going about scripting their adventures in the series.
"We're not working with a bible, which I feel is exciting.
We've had writers come in and pitch from Star Trek, and apparently they have volumes of things that you can't do there, and here we don't have anything like that."

"I'm not going to kid you and say I know exactly were these characters are going to go," says Morgan, "because the actors are going to bring things to it, and the audience is going to respond to certain things."

The pilot film is being screened for test audiences around Los Angeles in an attempt to gauge early on what the audience response is likely to be.

"We tested it in Glendale and it did horrible," Morgan candidly admits. "I thought that the whole theme of exploring one's level of faith was getting through, and then you go out to people who totally don't get it and you get all these weird comments.
My favorite was a woman who said, 'I think it's extremely politically insensitive.'

And the moderator said, 'What do you mean?' and she said, 'I can just imagine how in vitros are going to feel when they see this.' That's like saying Pinocchio's insensitive to puppets or something."

"I don't think it's going to change anything that we plan to do, but I thought it would go over better than it did out there.
I guess what we've learned from it is yet to be seen," says Morgan, who plans to script at least three or four of the initial season's episodes with Wong.

"It just helps everybody else. When you start out you need to turn them out pretty fast, and that's what we need. We're hiring writers who specialize in character. With all respect to those shows, we're not doing Earth 2 or Babylon 5 or Next Generation."

Joining Morgan and Wong are supervising producer Tom Towler (Vanishing Son), executive story editor Marilyn Osborne (an X-Files freelancer) and staff writers Matt Keinie and Joe Reinkemeyer (L.A. Law, Law and Order).

"When we write, " says Morgan of his collaboration with Wong, "we don't sit down and do it line by line, but for all intents and purposes it's done together.
I did a little acting, so I might be more involved in casting, and Jim's a terrific editor, so sometimes he might be more involved in postproduction.
If something comes up, that's how the duties are usually split. Or it might come down to, 'I went to Vancouver last time, and if I go again, my wife will kill me.' "

While such situations might have occurred while Morgan and Wong worked on the British Columbia-lensed X-Files, their spouses can rest easier knowing that production for Space will take place in Los Angeles.

"All the sets for the pilot are still in Australia," says Morgan.
Will they be moved?
"It depends on the cost analysis, whether we break them down or just rebuild them here."
One of the biggest motivations for keeping the production in L.A. was the effects house, Area 51, whose work Morgan feels is essential to the success of Space.

"Their talent is one of the main reasons why we said we had to do it here," says Morgan.
"It came down to the cost of production in Australia versus what we could do with postproduction, considering the time lag, with having the effects done here.
But we can't do it without these guys. We just want to keep everybody close."

Despite the hurdles, Morgan's enthusiasm for his new project with long-time collaborator Wong is palpable.
But don't expect either of the partners to become the highly visible force that creator Chris Carter has become to The X-Files.

Laughs Morgan, "Charles Bukowski said that a writer should be in the dark, alone. That's what I really believe."

Disclaimer: The characters and situations of Space: Above And Beyond are legal property of James Wong and Glen Morgan, Hard Eight Production and 20th Century Fox Television. No copyright infringement intended.
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