 So it's my pleasure to open up the second annual Julia Schwartz lecture. Those of you here last year knew we know we launched the series with a talk by Neil Gaiman, which I think was a really exciting experience for all of us here. This series was launched thanks to gifts of friends of Julia Schwartz. Julia Schwartz was a long time science fiction fan, one of the first agents in fandom, one of the first agents to represent specifically science fiction writers, one of the founders of the WorldCon, one of the fathers of the Silver Age DC comics, an extraordinary person. And if you've enjoyed any of the DC stories in the last 50 years, I think you have benefited from the creative imagination that Julia Schwartz brought to the table. So we've launched the series as a way of paying tribute to Schwartz and to bring top-flight genre creators to the MIT campus to engage in thoughtful conversations about science fiction, about comics, about popular culture more generally, which in a way that we think really reflects the excitement that MIT community has long had around those genres. MIT is the right place to be having a regular tribute to Schwartz. It's my pleasure to introduce our speaker, and I'm going to keep the introductions brief because I'm planning to grill him extensively about the whole body of work that he's been involved with. But again, you know, you probably, if you're like me, were enjoying the work of J. Michael Strasinski well before you knew who he was, that he was involved in writing He-Man and Real Ghostbusters, the new Twilight Zone, murder she wrote, Babylon 5, Crusades, Jeremiah, and comics he's been shaping the career lately of Thor, of Spider-Man. He's done originated series like Rising Stars and The Twelve, which is up for an Eisner Award this year. He's now, you know, he's also been involved as a screenwriter, most recently, Changeling, and he's got a whole suite of other projects in the pipeline that we're going to be talking some about later in the program tonight. So that, to my money, he's one of the most imaginative, visionary, far-reaching creators in the space of science fiction and fantasy and comics working today. So it's exciting. I'm really excited. The fanboying me is enormously thrilled to be sharing the stage with JMS and hope we'll have a good discussion and gradually we'll open up to the floor for your questions as well. So with that said, let me turn the floor over to JMS. Yeah, I was I was told this was a seminar for top-flight creators, but none of them could make it. So we were kind of stuck with me. As a disclaimer, I am more comfortable with giving informal talks and answering questions and interacting with you guys than I am giving a formal talk. I suck at these. Particularly when I have to come to places like MIT, where everyone in the room is smarter than I am by several orders of magnitude. Guys who do chi-square analysis in their heads, you know, and I tried to find, you know, a couple jokes about engineering students, but I'm not that fucking funny. Two engineering students walk into a bar, so it's Monday, you know. What's your point? And in coming up with a topic to discuss, I could tell them ways to succeed, but as they can get on with their lives and do great things. No, I'm gonna talk about failure instead. And getting in touch with their inner failure. And the topic being called, it's never too late to fail. See, the military has this point of view that you have to do something over and over again until you fail at it. If you don't fail at it, you're not doing it right. Because that's how you learn where the wall is. And once you find where that wall is, you learn how to adapt and change and get over the wall. If you don't fail to get over it, learn. And this applies to life as well, I think, and to studies and to work and to careers and to television. If you don't fail once in a while, you're not doing it right. There's a sort of box that we all carve for ourselves, things we know we can do that we're safe at. And we tend to stay in the box, because to go outside the box is scary. You could fail. And that's terrible. The idea of failing is ingested in all of us as being something much to avoid. And it's really wrong. You have to embrace the idea of failure. I mean, granted, you can't fail all the time and achieve anything unless your dad was a president or something. But it holds you back. When I was at San Diego State University, a much smaller IQ school than MIT by several orders of magnitude. I used to work at the Daily Aztec, a paper there. And there was a young woman who worked there as well for a semester before she went off to a better school. And she was stunning. I mean, just blonde life, attractive. If Lee Harvey Oswald had seen her through the eyesight of that gun, burned his eyes out, it would be a better world today. That's what we're talking about here. And after about a month, she began going out with the photographer at the Daily Aztec. And it wasn't that he was scuzzy, but you had to peel off levels of awfulness to get to this scuzzy. And he didn't even bathe. And so, toward the end of the semester, I asked him, why are you going out with her? And I'm not making up his reply. This is his actual honest to God words. His hold, as deep as he went, was, I like blonde pubes. That was his only answer. So I asked her a week later, almost afraid of the answer at this point, why are you going out with him? She said, well, nobody else asked me. Because you were all too intimidated, I guess. Especially you, she said. And, you know, because we were all afraid of failure. We were all afraid of asking her out and being told to get a life. But during the seventies, and the seventies skews the data enormously, by the way, there was a study done where a guy would go up to a woman just casually, a psychology department experiment, and say, listen, I've seen you on campus before. I think you're very attractive. Do you want to go to bed? And nine times out of ten, they would get slapped or she'd walk away. One time out of ten it was the seventies. She would say yes. But you had to be willing to put up with the nine slaps. I learned that suddenly. Shit, that ups my auntie enormously. I was always at risk of diverging for the topic at the moment. Failure, well, failure in women and women to me is a pretty good combination. I was clueless about women. I had no fricking idea. I was at a Farrell's ice cream parlor with a woman I was dating at the time. It was like 22, 23. And this woman walks by very softly, very well built. And my lady I was with says, nice tits. I said, I didn't know you noticed. I said, well, I like women too. So, well, it's good that you're open minded in terms of being not competitive with other women. And I wrote, no, idiot. I like, oh, just, it's Joe Locke. I mess with you. But the back to the topic, we're afraid of failure. And the problem is we have to wake up in our own lives. We tend to fall asleep in our lives. And we do the same thing today as yesterday and the day to follow. And every so often you have to jolt yourself awake and do things that really scare you because you have to ask yourself, is this the life you were promised? Is this the life you expected? When you were 12 years old, so what do you want to be when you grow up? Is this it? Are you there? Or are you on your way to get there? Either way, you must, again, confront the possibility of failure if you want to achieve the goal of getting there, which is why, incidentally, a lot of folks that I know who say they want to be writers, for instance, they work on a screenplay or a novel or a book or whatever it is, short story, for years and you never finish it. And it's a reason why they never finish it. Because when it's done, they can be judged. While it's in process, they can't be judged. Well, it's a work of progress. So those folks in the audience who want to be writers, there's probably one of your reasons for not finishing what you're doing. And me, I always knew I was going to be a writer from this high. And the odds were very much against me ever getting here because I come from a lower and middle class, upper lower class, blue collar background. My first 17 years, we moved 21 times. So I was always a new kid. But whenever from this high it on, I said, when you grow up, what do you want to be? A writer. Written anything? I'm not ready yet. And I took four years of typing and just, I always knew it. There was one brief window where I almost became something else, where I thought I wanted to be an artist. I was about six. And I was living with my grandmother for a while, who had a border lived in the basement named Pondraffle Rofaiski. Pondraffle is a form of respect. I mean, mister or sir. And he was a border. I was told he was a border. What really went on, who knows? She was widowed, so there was, it ain't going to be going on. And Pondraffle was a painter, a really good landscape and portrait painter. And he had been assigned a commission, very expensive, to do this one great landscape. He put months working on it. And I would watch him work, and he finished it up, and was going to go get to my grandmother to show her his finished work. So he goes off. I'm lucky at the painting. It needs something. What does it need? It needs a kitty. So I get the brush, and I dip it into black ink, and I am up there painting a cat. Pondraffle comes back to my grandmother in Togasi, and stops seeing this. My grandmother begins using terms I'd never heard before at that point. It was very scary. And Pondraffle says, no, no, stop, stop. He steps back, looks at the painting for a minute, says, you know, he's right. He needed a cat. And he said, this one's for me. He puts it on the shelf, and says, I will begin again. But this is my painting now. And I was impressed, even at six, with what a man that was. Also the first person who ever died. I couldn't quite understand that way. I went to the funeral and said, Pondraffle, come on, let's go. He had fun doing what he did, and he showed me at that time the passion of art. And for me as a kid that's very important because no one growing up believed that I was ever going to be a writer. Because where I came from, the street, I came from nowhere and nothing. Patterson, New Jersey, Newark, New Jersey, 37 miles of universal fart, just awful environments. And kids in my neighborhood didn't become writers. You grew up working at a gas station, and in some ways, when people say to you around you, don't do this because they don't want you to fail. They say, you know, if you do this, you're going to disappoint yourself, you're going to get hurt, it's not going to work out. I'm trying to protect you. They're more protecting themselves. Because if you follow your dreams and achieve them, then they have to say to themselves, what didn't I do? You have to accept them. You have to do what scares you. It's important. It's necessary even though and especially though, you may fail at it. When I was back at San Diego State, I kept myself college related to the audience. I think, of course, in science fiction writing from Elizabeth Shader, and I was terrified of public speaking. Still am, by the way. And she said, you have to read one of your stories in front of the class. It's absolutely beside myself. And came the day, I wrote the shortest story imaginable. If I could have had a title in a period, that would have been fine. It's Art Nouveau. It's experimental fiction. It's called Dot. I would have done it if I could. I began reading the short story and I got faster and faster and even more incomprehensible than I am right now. Sweating and turning pink and people saying louder from the back of the room. And halfway through, Elizabeth Shader said, that's not if you can stop now. It's like the worst thing you could possibly do to somebody. I thought, this cannot stand. I can't keep doing this. I now know what scares me. Therefore, I now have to do it. So I signed up that semester to do orientation classes where I had to sort of walk, what is it, counseling, pardon me, to walk 30 or 40 students at a time through the campus, and given for six hours every day, a talk about the university, threw up every day for weeks, but did it. Not in spite of the fact that it scared me, but because it scared me. Because I knew that this is something, I was outside of my box, if you will. And we all try to find lives where courage isn't necessary. There's only one problem with that. It's not possible. Once upon a time, courage was going out and hunting bear and bison and other people. Now it's yelling at your boss. It's having the courage to stand up for what you believe in. When I was, again, at San Diego State, I was taking a class in writing. I took a lot of classes in writing to prepare myself. And I was getting all A's, but it was one instructor who was difficult, shall we say, with women. He had a problem with women. Dressing down as one female student, just an abusive, offensive, out of line kind of way. And from the back of the room came, leave her the fuck alone. And I was surprised to see that it was me. And we had words. And he tried to bounce me out of the school and they said, look, privately, we know this guy has a problem, so we're going to let it go. But my grades all went down to D suddenly. So I cede the class over the course of the semester. And in the semester, he said, you're never going to be a writer. Now, the temperament for Mr. Shryzinski. And making him say, Mr. Shryzinski was half of the revenge for me, because even I can't say about blowing up an incisor. And so, after I graduated, I began sending him articles, short stories, plays, whatever I published, I sent him a copy. After a while, I'll collect. And I heard, finally, that he passed away. I'm very sorry to hear that. And where was the funeral held? And he told me, and I went there. And I had one more article. I wrapped it around a pencil and shoved it into the ground at his burial place, like staking a vampire. Not that I hold a grudge. I've, you know, another story in, part of the divergence in the stories that I've told you before. Again, I always knew I wanted to be a writer. At San Diego State, there was a professor named Norman Corwin who was visiting a lecturer. And does anyone here know Norman's work? Some of you do, a couple of you do. It's not a one-pan clapping. This is a guy who wrote a cantata for the U.S. and human rights who was bigger in the radio age than Orson Welles and Arch Older put together, who was one of our nation's finest writers who got re-listed in the 50s and went off the edge. But he was a writer's writer. Guys who learned from him were like Rod Serling and Ray Bradbury and Walter Cronkite and Edward R. Murrow. These are guys who said we were Norman's kids. We learned from Norman. So I wanted in his class, desperately. One slight problem. He was in the telecommunications and film department. I was in the psychology department. I got my first degree in psychology, second in sociology. And I wanted in. But you only had to be in the department to get the computer control cards. Back then there were control cards. You had card punches, you know. And you had to get my hands on them at the beginning of the department, but I wasn't. So shit, what am I going to do? So I broke in. Thinking stupidly that if I got the cards, nobody would question it. Nobody would notice. So I got the cards and I made a sample of my writing to Norman to read. So the first day of class I'm sitting there like you are right now. I'm just proud of myself. Up comes this Leo 9 dignified figure at the door. Is there a Joe Srozinski here? Can I see you outside please? So we go outside into the hall. I understand you aren't actually entitled to be in this class. I said, that's correct. How did you get the cards? Well, the back door doesn't lock really well. And he was fighting a smile during this whole conversation. He said, why did you do that? I've seen your resume, sir. I want to learn from you. He says, well, they all want me to kick you out of here. Out of the university if at all possible. But he said, I read your writing and it's really quite good. And could you stay and help me with the other students? And if I had not risked the failure of being a caught out, be expelled, see it's not working. Norman, if there's an icon in my life that taught me what is to be a writer and taught me how to write is Norman. I wouldn't be standing here today if I hadn't learned certain things from Norman about how to write. And the odds and failure were huge. But you have to do it. And this is why I go back to the notion that you have to do things that are risky. You have to take chances. You have to be willing to fail and make decisions that will often come back to haunt you later on but they're the right decision at that time. When I was working on a show called Jace and the Real Warriors, I have to go lie down now. I got called in by the French head of the company to say that they've just been picked up a show called The Real Ghostbusters based on the movie. I've only done science fiction and action shows at this point and never any comedy. And Jean in his accent system, I speak to ABC, to Jenny and Amy. I tell them you are the funny man. Do not make from me a liar and that I want the job. I've never written comedy. What's the worst going to happen? I'll fail. They can't kill you. They can't eat you. They can't put you in TV jail who knows that show ended up being a very popular one in Emmy and all of a sudden I became more visible suddenly. I had them before by virtue of wind to say I don't know but I'm going to take a chance. Now if you know you can't do it and you lie that's different. Then you're a producer. But give yourself the benefit of the doubt. I worked on Captain Power another TV show that came into this season and said the toy company wants to have more input into the show next year and they want you to stay on. I said morally I can't do that I can't let the toy company have that much say. I said if you do that you'll lose your first live action show when you walk off of this you'll never work on another show again and say well I got to do what I got to do. And I opted for failure and ended up working on Twilight Zone because they heard that this guy stands up for storytelling which is how I got into that show in the first place. Word kind of got around town. Babylon 5 a story that was done in a five year arc the first one to do it the first show was a shoot in widescreen the first to use CGI on a regular basis in television first with kind of foreshadowing and the novel structure that we use that no one had ever used in America before our chances of failure were breathtaking. I was excited by that I can fail all over the place now and oddly enough it worked. You have to push yourself past where you are you have to embrace the possibility of failure you have to look out and see where that line is because most people never see it and they don't know that it's there but they live in that constraint they live in the box and only by pushing yourself to failure can you discover where it is and adjust yourself and take a chance that's moving somewhere else taking a different job asking someone out on a date with the Lapland pubes we are put here to be magical we are put here to do extraordinary things where you are may or may not be where you want to be and if it's not try and get there you may not get all the way there but you get halfway there and you're half as half as happier as you would have been had you gotten all the way you have to be fearless which is I guess courage more that's what it says, courage more and when I finished working in television on Jeremiah well I was a journalist for many years gave that up after a while was in television for a number of years worked 20 years did that what else can I fail at what happened I done well I've never written a movie I've written television movies but never a real honest to God no kid in future film and well this is a chance to fail spectacularly so I spent a year researching a story that I heard about years before and wrote a screenplay called Changeling which I sent to my agent unaware as it was coming in he runs on his desk one morning and I never expected it to come out of it I figured it's going to flop and not go anywhere because the point was the doing not the result and it went a week later to Ron Howard who bought it and to Angelina Jolie who read the star in it and then to Glenn Eastwood who directed it and suddenly I've gone from Mr. TV Guy to Mr. Ailis film writer overnight and nobody knew who the hell I was that was the best part of it you know honestly I wasn't being self-indulgent this is what the person actually said to me I have all these meetings afterwards with studio heads and one of them said who the hell are you where did you come from how did you learn how to write like this you know and the cool thing about it for those who are nice writers in the audience not one of them cared how old I was didn't care if I was 20 or 60 it was all the words on the page and that's key to hope for those who want to be writers in this area that in the end it's the work that counts so it doesn't matter if you come from a good school a bad school a grand school like MIT it's all down to the quality of your storytelling and the quality of your words and since changing I've kept on with the process of risking failure because it's fun after a while the Wachowski brothers are friends of mine I get around and they called me one day on a Monday I said we have a project that's six weeks away from camera we need your help can you come out and see us so we know Warner Brothers to say hi to them and they said we have a script it needs to be rewritten stem to stern page one will be right and we're again six weeks off from camera it's okay how when do you have to have it whole new script well has to go out to actors on Friday this was Tuesday can you do it and there's that moment when you know everything sucks up inside of you and if you had a sinker it's gone you know and I said sure I'll do it and I went home and in 53 hours two hours to sleep a day for three days I turned the script around and they shot the son of a bitch without notes it's called Ninja Assassin and it comes out in November with Rain the Korean pop stars one of the stars and I've been working since it with Tom Hanks and Tom Cruz and Ron Howard and Jim Cameron and Steven Spielberg all these guys and it's because I was open to fail I was open to failure and I remember sitting at Cannes Cannes was amazing I'm there with Clinton the gang and alright I know how it sounds alright me and Angie hanging out with Brad and the best part before I get to that part was we have the premiere and there's like 16 black cars lined up alright and there's French police have their picture taken with Clint because you know it's Glacewood and they drive us to the streets of the south of France you know running lights in sirens normally in the cops are behind me lights in sirens is a bad thing and go out to this thing and afterwards I was sitting on the beach in the south of France thinking I've woken up in someone else's life because I'm just a kid from Jersey and that's the extraordinary thing a lot of taking chances you get to live forever when I was a kid this is the last story you're relieved there was death all around me I come from a Russian family where death was a motif my grandmother loved death she was at a funeral so people she didn't even know that's where they got and then the reception afterwards I complained about the food they would bring me to funerals of other kids who misbehaved see before I was born there was a brother born Joseph Michael who the name was a compromise solution to relatives who wanted the right name and the brother passed away in childbirth and they recycled the name and one day I was brought to my mom I was like this big to the cemetery and there's my name I realized for young I have to become immortal I have to live forever so now and to do that I realized in a child's thought I have to leave the planet I have to get off the gravity well I gotta somehow get into space because somehow in space things live forever that was my idea stage one of the rocket was journalism that carried me a long way 10 years LA Times, Time Incorporated The Herald Examiner, many other magazines National Publications but that far we had to circle back toward the ground again so I lit up stage two television and that carried me even for the Babylon 5 Murderer Road I'm sorry I'm sorry I'm sorry I keep a guy at logline together they fight crime after Babylon 5 Chrissie kind of petered out and Jeremiah was just the nightmare from start to finish and rocket began to go down I thought I'm now 50 years old 3 years ago 4 years ago almost 5 I'm 50's and I may have one last stage left in me but at this age you don't know if it's going to work or not you know ignite or it will take me anywhere so I thought well take a chance if I lit up stage three we're changeling and I held on and it was rocking and shaking like a son of a bitch I closed my eyes and I can see the curve of the earth and I am weightless that's a damn good place to be thank you I should note that Norman Corwin just celebrated his 99th birthday last month so he's still teaching at USC and still inspiring students Norman is still teaching and his dad looks to be 105 and we call him every day but he was keeping busy would you go home go online and check out the elephants and the use of language is stunning Ray Bradbury admitted he was trying to do Norman and Rod Serling said when he first started writing he was imitating Norman Corwin's voice there are writers who understand language as no one else does Norman is one of those there's a documentary that came out about him a couple years ago one in Oscar as a matter of fact and do check it out I and a lot of other writers learned from him and became what we are today and I cannot credit him enough I would not be as good a writer as I am or as decent a person as I think I am he was an amazing guy so Rod Serling he was another person you just mentioned and you worked on the new Twilight sound any thoughts about Serling his long term contributions well Serling he does require validation from me whenever I get too cocky with my own writing I pull down a Rod Serling script read it and then I go kill myself because it's just so astonishing there's a weird link by the way with me and Rod I was a student at Southwestern College I was there on a Saturday I'll go back before that I wasn't at college as a student I was there as a high school student every year the high school was in the area I was going to chilebus the high school would have career day and they would bring the best athletes the best dancers the best singers the best writers they had to go to college for a career day to show what these people could do and they had all the writers as far away from civilized companies as possible they shoved us off in a building by ourselves this is like 71 72 and I'm saying there are my short stories in front of me like no one's coming by who wants to sit there and read a story on a hot summer day and this gentleman comes in wearing corduroy blazer and slacks sort of a salt and pepper less better voice of god suddenly appeared salt and pepper hair was this on during the thing at all by the way I can start over did the guys in the back hear me okay earlier the first time I was alright that's the only way to leave me unsatisfied which usually would happen my relationships are that way leaving unsatisfied it's like thank you so anyway this gentleman comes in and walks down the line of tables and comes to my table and picks up on my short stories science fiction horror story big big jump there you know sits on a lawn chair, reads it, comes back only like six seven pages long picks up another one, reads sits down, comes back and looks at me for a long time he says you have a great and abiding talent for someone of your age I have two notes for you first cut every third adjective which I am still working on by the way second never let him stop you from writing the story you want to write and leaves the advisor over there comes like a rocket sled what did he say I told her what he said he looked kind of don't you know who that was I said no that's Rod Serling he's here to talk today at the University at the college and he it's like two minutes he's gone like a fucking apparition just gone and I could even afford to buy a ticket you know and my first validation you know so years later I'm working on the new Twilight Zone and I say we found an outline by Rod for an episode that he never put in the script form would you like to collaborate posthumously to Mr. Serling yeah so I wrote the episode our Selena is dying and I try really hard to recreate Rod's voice because he had a very distinctive voice and after it aired I got a letter from Carol Serling his widow to say that she watched the episode and it was if Rod had written it and of all the correspondence I've received over the years that's the only one I have framed in my office that one means the most to me and when I finished up working on the zone I always buy a gift for myself to remember something like a project there was an art deco circle pick a little piece in the valley watches art deco some beautiful stuff gone now and I went in and they had one of the Hamilton Ventura watches that came out in the fifties which they were about to reissue but this was the originals but I said I want one of those so he's wrapping it up for me and he said he's got one of these recently and last one I had was years and years and years and years ago and what do you do by the way so I'm a writer so the last one I had was a writer really who was that Rod Serling and later on they asked me to do an introduction to some of Rod's stuff for Quantla Press so he's been a constant factor in my life over the years and again I just I love language I love ticking words slamming them together in whole new ways and seeing what happens what kind of explosions you get as a result and Rod was a master of that and if you you learn from Rod and you learn from Norman you learn from Harlan Ellison you actually acquire those skills in your toolbox it's all about acquiring tools writing, artistry, whatever it is you're working on it's all about acquiring tools as you go along because if you only have a hammer every problem is a nail so the more tools you have the more things you can build with them so I learned a lot of things from Norman I got a lot of tools from Rod and tools from Harlan and now I can make a bookshelf very good there are stories that you were a painter as a child were you also a reader and if so how did you get interested in science fiction and comics? I've always been a comic comics taught me how to read I grew up reading science fiction stories before than comics because going to different different school every six months you kind of fall between the cracks of the curriculum and so comics taught me how to read they taught me my moral center which is a silly thing to say but it's also absolutely true I'll come back to Superman in a second remind me if I forget Superman my aunt my parents were not the best parents in the world so they would shut me off to my aunt and grandmother and my aunt knew I love comics so she would in the in-between times just load up with comics to keep me busy while I was there because I was always a pain in the ass so I would come into my aunt and there would be a stack like I'm this high and the comics were this high I would just dive in and you wouldn't see me for days I would just read them and I'd start from the beginning again read them again and absorb the words and that was sort of my first dalliance with learning that people make these things don't they that's your writers write on these things I mentioned that my values and my morality with the rest of it comes from comic books when I was at Comic Con in Chicago a number of years ago women's brows you've seen the original comics fans are huge they just go on for galactic measures and rows and rows of tables and at one end and I hear a commotion from the far end of something like stop him, stop him, stop him in the young guy 20s comes running this way he just stole some stuff very expensive stuff from the guy's booth and of course the crowd cars like the Red Sea nothing to do with it I just tackle the motherfucker like a gazelle I bring him down and me and the guy hold him for the cops and the convention organizer comes up and says why did you do that you could have been hurt I said of course I was just the guy in the ground the guy made up on five just captured and I said the organizer of the con look where I'm standing what happened I'm below a 10 foot tall Superman cut out how could I stand here in front of him and do nothing you have to that's just those are the rules I learned the rules from comics so speaking of the rules you worked for He-Man which was even in prison if I'm off we're good behavior so at the time He-Man was being criticized by child advocates for being half an hour commercial for a toy line but odds are that a lot of people in this audience grew up on He-Man and remember it fondly to the present day so there had to have been a kind of relationship how did you think about how did you think about the relationship of commerce and creativity how do people working on He-Man think about the tensions between those two goals it's like a Nazi hunter a hunter and a Nazi which is which I'll leave to you yeah I remember being in a toy store with my friend at the time Larry Dutille who also worked on the show and it was just He-Man merchandise as far as the eye could see and kids yanking their mom saying buy me this buy me this buy me this and I said to Larry if they knew who we were they would kill us on sight yeah yeah it was driven by a toy company who financed it but you can as I said in sopranos you can live on the good side of that you know and you can find ways to tell stories that are decent within the parameters of that as long as you don't sell out in the process and yeah patrons of the arts have been around for a long time the best works of all time were commissioned by popes and by kings and rooks and bishops a few aces along the way and so you know there was a patron involved a fantasy only to a certain point it's when it gets in the way or I have to sort of take what I've done and bastardize it that I draw a line when I was working on Ghostbusters there was a point where after the first season of that show which was ABC's number one show huge ratings, great reviews they had to fix it suddenly so they brought in experts child psychologists who didn't understand that I have a degree in psychology and could argue with them and so they've been giving some advice for instance make Janine the character from the Ghostbusters movie more mommy like make her less strong, more nurturing and and lose the pointy glasses cause children are frightened of sharp objects at least said I show me your research on that it's not professional opinion, I don't care what your opinion is show me your research, show me your data, show me your homework and they couldn't of course and then they said all the characters should have their own distinct roles in the show so Janine is the mommy Ray is the hands Peter is the mouth Egon is the brains and Winston the black character is the driver I'll tell you what said I what you may go into a bar downtown in south central and you repeat what you said to me if they let you walk out of there alive I'll do it and I said finally if you do these things you have to leave the show because it's immoral it's wrong and I said oh no it's a top ten show you don't walk up wrong I have very few rules one is I don't lie, I don't bullshit and I never ever bluff and they did it and I walked and the next season came out with other diverse hands on it and it went in the toilet and half way through they said we're in trouble Kel Kel surprise and I said can you come back and help us out on one condition I write the shows the way I want to with the characters as they were before period and the junior ghost busters I'm running a truck over them they're not going to appear in my shows and they said yes so the first things I wrote was an episode called Jean you've changed it starts off with her in the new look and she realized that she's been falling prey to pressure from people around her in her own self doubt and it keeps changing form to the whole episode back and forth to different things and it ends up finally as she used to be accepting herself as she is rather than trying to make other people happy they were pissed at that one but you know I love working in television here's why I love working in television you know I work with me on this no no prior preparations with anybody in this room I will say nine words and when I finish those nine words some people in the audience will begin spontaneously breaking out in song and others will join them so the whole audience will be singing and bursting out in applause at the end just sit right back and you'll hear a tear well yeah let's not put the courage to the pair let them know what they lost come on you gotta get organized but the fact that you know those lyrics most of you those who weren't afraid of failure to come out and sing is why you work in television because I can't remember how to do a co-analysis of the variants but I know the Gilgit's Island theme song except season two where it's the professor and Mary Ann versus you know so one of my favorite one of my favorite moments in Babylon 5 was Garibaldi's fascination with Duck Dodgers which is just that and it's it's one of those moments that suggest that pop culture today will survive hundreds of years into the future so I wondered what so I'm wondering what aspects of our popular culture today you think will be around in the 23rd 24th century the stuff that the critics call popular crap when Mark Twain was at the height of his skills the critics as a rule didn't like him much and there are other writers around him who were considered to be much better literary writers but they've all gone to dust and most of them are forgotten but Mark Twain lives on Stephen King will be read 100 years from now against your will sometimes but you'll read it in literary class I think that that which speaks to the human condition will be remembered and will live on that which has some element of truth to it will live on fiction is best when it reflects the personality of the person creating it Mark Twain said that we all contain within us the same fears and enemies and hopes and ambitions and love as everyone else on the planet so if you write something that is right for you the odds are it'll reflect in somebody else's eyes and that kind of fiction that kind of entertainment that kind of immediate will live on that which is done to be literary that which is done to make writing groups happy or critics happy that will fall by the wayside and Babylon 5 so speaking of Babylon 5 one of the things I really impressed me at the time was the construction of the alien the previous science fiction shows each race seemed to have a single personality Vulcans were stoic Klingons were warlike but you represented multiple people from the same planet and the alien cultures have as much complexity as the human cultures so I'm wondering if you could say a little bit about the breakthrough that you made in thinking about aliens for Babylon 5 I don't believe in monolithic cultures I don't believe the same things and there's a reason to keep that tendency just ourselves that there would be disagreements among alien cultures as well that the notion that they're all one is to fall into established cliche which is not to say you can't have a hive mind which is all controlled from the top like the White House a few years ago which that can happen on occasion but you get more interesting things happening treat them as unique individuals and themselves in terms of creating those cultures and races I kind of peel off parts of myself there's a lot of me in Jakar there's more of me than should be in Lando I wish I was as good as Delen but I'm not there's not much of Sheridan in me that was always the hardest character to write the human character of your main lead hero who you can only do so much to you can't spin him around too far that's always the hardest thing to write but the aliens I love writing Lando I mean I could I'm sleeping and Lando's still talking making him talk wasn't hard making him shut up was the hardest so it's the same with Jakar but Lando more than anything else so it's just a matter of looking to treat characters authentically and trying to follow some kind of realistic voice in doing so that's a crappy answer to your question that's the best I got we'll take it again sorry man for himself so in many ways Babylon 5 was absolutely the landmark in the history of American television it's really set the stage for a lot that's happened since so some of the innovations were structural so the use of an ensemble cast on science fiction the sort of dynamic development of characters who change over time the notion of serial the sort of story long season story arcs and a five season plan or all the things that are part of the structure of Babylon 5 so could you say a little bit about the thinking that went into pushing science fiction in that direction I grew up a fan and I come to Babylon 5 or came to it as a fan and I thought what did I always want to see and I love British television I love listener and Blake 7 tripods but the British will give credit to their audience for having attention span of more than a half a minute and we'll set up something and pay it off weeks later what if you took that to a slideshow extension and set up something in season one it paid off in season five we'll audience stick around and remember let's just for a change of pace bank on the intelligence of the American audience and let's start trees as a book so the first move was to structure it along the lines of a novel introduction rising action complication and that became each season and once I had that structure in mind the rest of it fell to itself the other parts of it were again looking for innovative ways to make the show different I figured if I'm going to fail in doing this I want to fail big number one and I may as well do all the stuff at once that I wanted to do I want to shoot it with a lot of CGI I want to shoot big ensemble characters and try to get away from the funny forehead stuff so it really was rolling up all my opportunities into one basket because I might not have another basket to put it into so one of the this idea of multi-season design that you set out to do was you still have to deal with the vagaries of network television including the fact that you get canceled prematurely and then had to come back from the dead how did that affect the original plans for Babylon 5 we had to obviously show some of the 50s into the 4th season we were told shut it down but there were always some vagaries and whenever you're working with a network there's always going to be some give and take to them the good thing was that in our case because they trusted me God knows why they actually began leaving us alone so after episode 2 of year 2 we almost never got notes one of the right few times they called in season 2 was the script came in and they said there's a scene where Landa was cheating at cards and he's do I read this correctly says the guy from Warner Brothers that he is using his genitals to cheat at cards yes and there was this real long pause and he said you know we trust you I know well what we're going to do is you pretend you didn't write it and I'll pretend I didn't read it okay that was a huge help to us in fact they would trust us in that fashion but because of season 4 glitch there's a chunk of season 5 the start of it that is lumpy and irregular it's you know the colonic test kind of a thing and had they not said shut it down I think cleaner fifth season but they did and we had to adjust to it we fought to get our fifth season on and we got it on so the story was completed but not without a few bumps on the road so one of the hallmarks of the series is you wrote 92 of 110 episodes and you have a staff on 5 so what's the trade-off between individual authorship and collaboration working in television there's when you have a staff working for you there's more chance for innovation and people who can say to you up front this sucks and keep you back on track of course you had the actors for that they were really good at saying you really suck but for me Bad One Five was a novel which had to be written as a novel and after the first two seasons it became so interwoven that I had a hard time pulling out different threads to say that writer A you do this part and writer B you do this part it all became one big tapestry and so I decided to go ahead and write them all or mostly all and what I didn't know at the time was this had never been done before and there's a reason why no one had ever done it because this is impossible and writing the show at the same time so every day I was also editing prepping shows when you're making a TV series you are writing one episode prepping the next shooting the third episode posting the fourth episode delivering the fifth episode all at the same time and so that was my days and I would go home and just write until I passed out I got about for five years I got about three hours of sleep a day I had not a gray hair in my head this was in two years what happened but I would not do it again because it would kill me but I would relive the experience because creatively it was an amazing opportunity to have one singular voice not to say it's the best voice not to say Ron Moore Chris Carter anybody could have done a better job than I did but for me to enjoy the process there are no parallels it was one of the best creative experiences of my life well somewhere along at the same time you were doing all of that you managed to go online and interface with your fans one of the first producers to really use cyberspace to create a different relationship with the audience so what did you learn from that process and would you do it again? Hell no yeah it was yeah I understand I was on the nets long before I was anybody I was on the nets as a fan I was hanging out in chat boards and message boards and small local 300 BOD connections remember 300? yeah K-PRO 2 yeah 178 K on a disc I was home so I was there long before I began doing the show and then I got Babylon's power well now what do I do because everyone else I knew who was a producer said don't go online it's scary they're mean well look at myself nothing would have been more wonderful for me than to get an email from Rod Serling or Ray Bradbury or Harlan Ellison not that I am fit to carry those gentlemen's pencil boxes but the theory is there number one I wanted as a fan to have that discussion number two I want to create a document which is now being archived in book form of a conversation with fans about the making of a show because my sense is that unless you understand why things are done the way that they are done you will never have the opportunity or the chance to change it and get what you want so I tried to open up a door not just to use it for publicity purposes which a lot of folks do now but to say here's what we did today and here's why it happened this way and here's what went wrong to try and again inform the audience because that again I would have appreciated having as a fan most of my decisions are driven by this would be cool that's as deep as I go and that process was often hard there were stalkers that I got there were email bombs I got I got a troche that wiped out my hard drive one day it was oh yeah you have no idea it was ugly and the Trek fans you know there were days I said why the hell am I doing this no I made a promise to stay with this so even with the stalkers and the hassles it's worth doing it to create that conversation and a lot came out of it I still get emails from fans who were discovering the show for the first time on DVD and I respond to them which scares the hell out of them and correct their spelling and I've told this story elsewhere and I can actually tell it now without dissolving in the pier but as an example of what the show did there was a email I got one day from a gentleman who said we're fans of Babylon 5 and our daughter was very small it was born troubled and for some reason when our Babylon 5 came on I could hold her in my arms and she wouldn't be flailing around and she would actually watch the show and she was quiet I saved her those moments with her when she was here to have that and she said she passed away about a long ago and I go down into the Babylon 5 episode I hold the cushion in my arms and healing for me and when you realize you've touched someone's life like that you know, what is there is no measure to that there is no corollary to that there is no judging or weighing that that's the impact in television and that you could tell a story that touches someone and makes that bond there another email from a woman who said her brother had been dying of AIDS and he asked her to put a tape together of all of Jacar's speeches about not giving up hope and he played them by his bedside in the hospital and she said I want you to know that he passed away last night to the sound of Jacar's voice you cannot hear those stories and not be moved and remember, you know what all the shit, all the spam all the Trojan viruses all the hate mail it was worth it all the stories and that's how you judge yourself it's the work and the impact that you have the poet who sits down one day and writes beauty is truth and truth is beauty this is all you know and all you need to know he's done for the day he can knock off he just bought immortality so it's the work and the reaction and the television gives you the widest reaction possible to know that there are people around the world who have learned Jacar's Declaration of Principles has been used in wedding ceremonies and church sermons and synagogue sermons using speeches and pagan prayers it's extraordinary so speaking of church services this better be really good looking back over your work getting ready for this I was struck by just how often themes of religion cropped up not just in Babylon 5 but on a number of the shows you've worked on given science fiction history is a kind of rationalist science genre religion usually gets short-tripped and I wondered if you could speak some to why your persistent interest in faith and stories of faith in the shows that you wrote the first obligation you have as a storyteller is to be honest is to tell the truth and that's the writer's job as well and there's a lot about Sargewreck that I like that religion will vanish 200 years hence is foolish religion has been with us since the first stories were told around it a campfire about the forces moving in the dark and they were with us a thousand years from now new ones will come along to replace old ones but they'll always be something new they'll always be something new they'll always be something new to replace old ones but they'll always be something new if I want to have that assumption then I have to have characters who believe one thing or the other and I'm not a believer myself I'm an atheist therefore I'm equal opportunity offender but if I want to be honest in the storytelling then those who I show of faith can be equally good or bad and we have more characters of faith who are decent guys than bad guys most of the were good guys in fact there was some write-ups in Catholic papers about Babylon 5 and we had a minister of a priest showing a monk on a regular basis and this happens a lot on Babylon 5 but again that's part of being honest and it puzzles the hell out of people why is an atheist writing about where this guy is in an honest way the moment you start putting up strawmen call it a day you're done you have to be honest so another of the ways that Babylon 5 was innovative is you expanded the story beyond the core series and to stand alone movies into the spin-off series like Crusaders today we're seeing this more and more with Battlestar Galactica has been exploring launch new series after the end of the original has done mobasodes online so could you say a little bit about how you think about these extensions of the story and other other series or other media on one level it was a fun thing to do we had the opportunity to do it and when Tina picked up the fifth season they said you want to do some TV movies and I said sure in retrospect I should have said no and I should not have done Crusade for the following reason I set out to do a five year story and upon telling that story I said early on it's five years and out I should have stuck to that but there is a lure and an attraction of working with people you like we had a great crew we had a good environment and my own personal fear came out because I thought having done this I had developed a reputation for being shall we say difficult paying the ass is another word and what if someone doesn't hire me and I fell prey to the one thing I've always fought against which is the fear of failure while I stay in this universe I stay in this box I can go on a little further and that was a failing on my part that was when there were a few times I capitulated to failure the fear of failure and did Crusade and while there was much to commend that show and there were some good stories to be told and there were just better stories yet to come it was still in the very rough nascent stage of development when TNT pulled the plug for reasons that had nothing to do with the show but more through the demographics I should not have done them I've learned from that in the aftermath and it took the last DVD to make me understand that I was still holding on to part of that fear because there's a part that says I want to prove that it wasn't a one-off that I could do this and there's a part that holds on to what is familiar and when I finished directing that directed DVD moving I looked back and I said have I just added to what I have created or have I subtracted from that which I created I subtracted from I said I shouldn't be doing that shit so I told warners look I'm not going to do any more of these if at some point in the future they want to do a Babylon 5 massive feature film with a massive budget will they back up the money truck for me and for the show you know where we have a chance to give the show it's proper due because the DVD was like $3 million which is nothing where I can give the show it's proper due and respect I'll consider it but if I can't give the show it's due for what it was for those five years I shouldn't be doing it and I mean that very firm commitment to that so Jeremiah your sideways are astonishing what am I going to do I am in awe they are also in awe some might call a silent laughter I ever heard they gave it as awe so anyway Jeremiah Jeremiah set in a post apocalyptic universe which means it's a somewhat different genre than the sort of space opera you worked with in Babylon 5 so as you thought about that project what was it you wanted to accomplish in that space what kinds of stories did that allow you to tell you tell as a genre that you couldn't tell in Babylon 5 the best part about post apocalyptic fiction is it erases the rules and it reduces humanity down to its most fundamental elements and we take a lot of that for granted I mean we all have the notion of property rights but there was a time when that what you owned was that what you could hold on to and someone was bigger and stronger than you they could take it away from you and so it was only like last 200 years when you had property rights as a real big important thing for the average person and so the chance to enact those rules to me is the most exciting part of that genre because you can have fun with it and really sort of reexamine the big questions and to me writing is all about the big questions it's all about why are we here and where are we going and what does it all mean and we're going to get changed for 20 or 30 o'clock so it's all about exploring new areas and for me that was a new area that's why after changeling the first movie that I took on was to adapt Max Brooks World War Z for Brad Pitt's company and we have a director Mark Forrester attached to it and I met with the guys at Paramount he said why do you want to you just did changeling this big Oscar worthy thing why would you want to do zombies zombies zombies are cool shoot them in the head you know because I have seen 9 of the living dead at least 100 times without exaggeration dawn of the dead almost as many day of the dead, tea time of the dead I've seen you know all of them all the way through and I love zombie movies and I go where the fun is this movie could be fun they said this is a drop down my age said don't do it mainstream drama I think you have to go where the fun is and to me the post-apocalyptic was fun zombies was fun I also did there was a book called The March in the Sunlight based on the campus rights at the University of Wisconsin Madison which was a chance to go back into that period for me and explore the 60s and there were no monsters, no zombies except for Melinda Johnson and I took that one on and so I don't show any noticeable pattern maybe he's trying to get me in a straight line to do just genre stuff or just mainstream or just historical stuff I'm all over the map I'm doing Forbidden Planet right now for Warner Brothers just finished up in Ninja Assassin I'm on tap to do a drama right now there's a project I can't talk about top secret that I'm really excited about it's also mainstream drama I'm doing Lensman for Ron Howard big science fiction franchise thing yeah so I'm just I don't settle I'm like a moving target and the good thing is if you're in one area if you're just in superhero movies everything we do one of those in a row your salary goes up enormously if you do a drama over here and in a horror story over here you stay at the same level you don't jump up I don't care it's not about the money Stephen King once said that if you write for the money you're a monkey for the fame you're a monkey if you write because you love writing you're still a monkey you write because to not write is suicide and that's where I come at this you know it's fun for me it's exciting that's why I live for I 10 hours a day every day and when I've taken two vacations in 20 years I mean not even a weekend two vacations and the first of those was after Captain Power and my wife at the time we were with the London and she said now you're just going to go and you're going to have a good time you're not going to write leave all your stuff to shit at home all right fine so we went to London and within two days I was vibrating so badly from withdrawal that I went to a pharmacist and got a little spiral bound notebook and a pen and I was in the bathroom at night working on my next novel you know what are you doing in there like when you were in high school nothing nothing by the time I got back from England I had outlined my next novel which I went on to sell to be beat up I can't not write I go insane but to do that because writing is a hard lonely job you've got to do things that are fun and writing should not be homework writing should be fun writing should be effortless and that's where you want to get to some effortless after a while the example I tend to use is you've got two guys in a dance room and you've got the guy over here who just got out of the Arthur Murray dance school and you can see him in his head going one two three one two three and over there you've got Gene Kelly he's just dancing you've got trying to dance and dancing you've got trying to write you've got writing that is the goal of my aspiration sometimes I'm over there a lot that pisses me off but when I'm over there there's something holy going on and that's what you live for and you write ten hours a day one or two hours in that corner of the room and the rest is over there but for those two hours it's worth any sacrifice that's the best thing in the world so clearly at some point superhero comics represented how did you make that transition from doing TV to comics they asked me I was working in some TV show and DC said you want to write a film for it's one time I did it for DC and I like writing comics the time I spend putting it on comics I could spend writing two or three movies and make a gazillion dollars more but ain't about the money I like writing comics I enjoy reading comics so again it's all about following the fun of it and having grown up on comics and seeing what the impact was on me as a young kid to get a sense of morality and reading from comics there's an obligation to get back so I try to always tackle issues of morality in my books and issues of controversy and issues of when 9-11 happened Marvel called and said we need someone in the Marvel Universe to address this and Spider-Man is a logical choice because he's a New York native would you write an issue for us that deals with this and immediately the fear of failure thing came in and I battened it down because the whole world would be watching this one if I screw this up I'm going to get hammered and I'm sure the words are going to be dictionary somewhere for what that story would be but what order to put them in I have no idea give me two days to think about it and then we're going to move on so I thought about it for two days and I just can't I don't know what that story is and I was on the set at Jeremiah and I was taking a break from shooting and I was in the producer's trailer in snow and early snow I thought I'm going to try one more time and the words there are no words came out and suddenly this prose poem meditation happened in a style I've never written in before since by the way and I wrote the whole thing in 45 minutes and sent it off to Marvel as was no editing, no nothing and they got published with a black cover and that issue has been one of the most importantly received Marvel books I've ever done I hear it still to this day from firemen, from priests from people who were there what it meant to them and how honest it was and that it was not jingoistic it was more questioning than anything else why weren't we here, what were we paying attention to and the chance to do that story alone is worth everything else and trying to do things in other ways that are not expected when Marvel said you want to write Thor I thought sure, why not I love the character but it could be fun and he said we want to bring back Asgard, what do you want to do with that I said I want to put Asgard in Oklahoma why? well you can see it from a long way off but what I wanted was that dichotomy there was a time in mythology when you could be walking across a field somewhere in Greek mythology and come across Diana or Hercules or any of the number of Greek and Roman gods of the time and I wanted to have that mix of things so that you could be working at a gas station in Oklahoma and turn around there is Heimdall standing behind you and the best part that was having the Asgardians there for town meeting when they were discussing plumbing problems and indoor plumbing which is the new concept of the Asgardians and what do you do you haven't got toilets there no, we sling it over the walls the goats love it the neighbor is not so much so it's again playing with the contrast and doing what hasn't been done before because if you're doing what's been done before then you're competing with all the guys who came before you you strike out on your own and you can't be judged against that so part of the fascination with Thor is that in fact he's a mythical figure who also now is a superhero and invites us to think about the relationship of classic mythology to the superhero genre so I wonder if you could say something about what do you see as the carryover from ancient stories into modern superhero comics outside Thor or only inside Thor where do you want to go with it I shouldn't throw down a challenge to this guy compare and contrast ancient Aztec civilization with a suit of baker one has wheels and those are the Aztecs that's why they died well Thor I have no good answer for this I'll be honest with you my brain went absolutely blank I could lie really well should we find out how well he lies I don't lie I don't bullshit I never bluff fair enough we will keep moving forward so as I was asking around for questions to ask you I had a number of reader I never saw it before in my life it doesn't resemble me at all people asking whether Rising Star was an influence on the 4400 or heroes and other people said Supreme Power was clearly derived from DC's golden age so those both sort of invite this question of how much do authors borrow from the genre tradition where does the resemblance go too far so forth there was a as I recall those who are comics fans correct me if I'm wrong wasn't there a point when DC the Marvel characters there was like a swap that they arranged ahead of time to make supreme power happen on the other side as well heroes was not the same situation there was Rising Stars and heroes was a great deal like Rising Stars there are other terms for that but I will be nice Babylon 5 Space 9 just saying so this show that has normally a big old starship is set on a space station with a big old bar and gambling areas and casinos and trading that goes on really ambassadors son of a bitch the same time my show is going on I thunder struck the hell was the question oh yes theft look to some degree we are all standing on the shoulders of giants to some degree we all owe a debt to what preceded us some more than others some I would check Michelangelo once said that bad artists borrow good artists steal and it took me a while to figure out what the hell that meant a bad artist takes what someone else did and imports it whole cloth just sort of borrows it understanding it and you'd be reading his stuff and come across this lump that's borrowed from over here then they go on to the next part a good artist steals in the sense that you take what was done over here and you morph it into yourself you make it part of yourself a permanent part of yourself and it comes out in a new morphed kind of way that is emblematic of yourself so there's not been a science fiction story ever written about robots it didn't owe something to the three worlds of robotics nothing about the space it doesn't owe something to Heinlein but there's whole cloth theft and then there's homage and I try as much as possible to avoid theft I have done the occasional homage there were homages to Tolkien and Babylon 5 to Alfred Bester he's the name of the character many others but I try where I steal I leave my knife behind so I steal from Alfred Bester I use his name to say you know and I know where this came from to be honest about it so quite apart from stealing can we talk about working for licensed characters so you've created a lot of original material you've also written for characters like Thor and Spider-Man what are the challenges of working in someone else's sandbox I think you have an obligation when someone says to you here's this character who is a trust of ours and been around for 50 years and don't screw him up you have an obligation to treat that character fairly and to hand him back to the company as good a condition as he was when you first got him with their own characters it's more of a freedom to experiment to do different things a little bit more fiction done properly is about putting your character up a tree and throwing rocks at them and when it's a franchise character the rocks are very small and they don't leave lasting marks when it's your own character you can cut off an arm who gives a shit so that's probably the biggest difference is the amount of creative freedom and to know that you're working on hollow ground hollow ground it could be a hollow tube it's not a mole man then it's hollow if it isn't the mole man then it's hallowed and you have to respect where you are and there's a lot of people who come into a book and see I will put my fingerprints all over this screw you it's not about your fingerprints it's about respecting the character and trying to find some corner of it that no one has explored before that's cool but you don't remake the character just because you can't you have to respect what goes before you you faced a fair amount of reader controversy over some of the things that happened on your run on Spider-Man you lie, Jenkins so what obligation as a writer do you have to the readers of a long-standing series quite a part to the character I challenge you not to use the word so for the next half hour every time we do a buck for charity so the stories I've done that were controversial tended to be things where I tried again to find new areas to go into for instance some people didn't like the totem aspect of Spider-Man that it was like a spider-god kind of thing but it occurred to me to look at his bad guys his enemies, his villains they all tended to have animalistic or totem powers you know the rhino the croc, the vulture the sand crab the muscle it went on for me the dreaded oyster with a pearl inside of them it was this is a higher animal villain percentage than any other character that I'm aware of there might be something here to explore in terms of why them and why him and during that story I find though never to have Peter buy into it at no point does he say yes you're right it's all about totemistic powers coming from elsewhere he being a rational character would never go there so he never quite buys into it which is my license to get out of it you know I can posit that all I want those around him can posit it all they want but because he is who he is he has to go that's great that's interesting I'm glad you feel that way but I don't agree with you and the one more day thing my end run on spider-man was not my story that was Joe's story and I respect that he wanted to tell that story I can't believe that a superhero would sell a soul to the devil that just doesn't work for me but it's not my call when you are working on an established character for a major company to some degree you are a hired hand and so I did what I was asked to do and then left the book we'll just keep the rest of it out speaking of being magical this reminds me I'm really not a magic trick it's not different I'm really big on creating moments where you'll always remember it because again we are here to be magical we are here to do things that bring life into a room add to a room rather than sucking life out of it I was speaking at the Icon convention in Long Island a number of years ago and there was going to be a dinner on this one particular day and we were going to have all the guests there and make presentations and whatever and it was due to start at 8 o'clock so we don't have a big dinner all set up so we arrived there at 8 o'clock just famished there by the commons and there's delays and this person wants to go first and there's no food remember it hasn't even started yet 8, 8.15, 8.30 8.45 and those at my table were sorry to pass out and the food was in another room wait a minute we're sitting in a room next to the commons which has a cafeteria and there's food there I should go where the food is so I leave the room I go a lot and bring it back into the room and my table has food now now the rest of the tables are all passed off because they didn't think of it so I said you bring enough for everyone no says I but I can fix that so I leave the room again back to the cafeteria kitchens close but they have snacks so they have baskets about this size filled like this with snacks I want that all of them like 200 yes so they sell me and the basket to go with it so I get this basket of stuff and I return back to the room and I go from table to table like a demented Easter Bunny and the con organizers are pissed at me at this point you know I'm making light of their situation but everyone remembered that day in fact about 2 years ago I was at San Diego Comic Con and a guy came up with a little snacky a snack from Icon which I've kept to remember that amazing moment would you sign it but people will remember that moment when you make moments like that when you step out of yourself and make a little tiny piece of magic that big people will remember for the rest of their lives isn't that extraordinary isn't that wonderful looking forward to the next con you're up for an A.I's dinner for the 12 3 3 yes oh win them that's okay because they're much better writers working out there than me right now so can you tell us a little bit about the thinking that led to the 12 you're bringing vintage World War II style pop protagonist into contemporary culture what are you wanting to explore as you juxtapose those two worlds all your questions are serious I like the idea of bringing back and reinventing characters that have been dormant for a long time and there were a number of characters from the Marvel early years that were just extraordinary particularly because they looked so bone headed there was the blue blade whose costume was this big old hat with a feather pantaloons no shirt slippers and when Marvel had me debut the character of Comic Con and his superpower is the ability to hang out in men's rooms in parks after dark they were not happy rock man rock man his power is like a rock but again it's a chance to have fun with it in here's a rock man which is the most stupidest thing for a hero ever created there was the origin given that he came from this land far beneath the earth and was separated from his people and is now up here somewhere and fighting the good fight I thought ok let's keep that origin for a second and I show that origin in a book and I said to the artist when you draw the panels draw them in just this way you see him fighting the bad guys into the tunnels you see the ground caving in you see him coming out above his kingdom and it's all gone so I wait an issue or two down the road and I tell the real story which this guy they've been asleep in this suspended animation for like 60 years they all come to us from 1940 approximately 1941 and he was a minor as in the minor who works on the ground and he was down there digging and they were trying to organize a union and they were opposed to it they tried to kill him he was a union organizer an accident happened the thing blew up and the whole mind collapsed including the houses above it killing his family and the shock of this was so horrific to him that he couldn't face it and he created this whole fantasy world to surround himself he talks about trying to find his people and find the princess which is his daughter it turns it it turns the diamond it turns the whole different side of it you take this goofball of a character and you feel sympathy for him and that's the fun of it that draws me to those kind of characters there's a chance to dig my hands in there and pull out the stone and say we all look at it this way how about this way in just a minute we're going to open up the mics for questions from the floor so if people want to line up at these two mics we'll be happy to alright so we're getting stampede's but got three Daniels what can you tell us about Linsman and about Forbidden Planet what's motivating a return to these vintage science fiction stories right now I love it I love it Forbidden Planet is one of my favorite films of all time those who've seen Forbidden Planet know what a great film it is and I thought of a cool way to approach the story again that no one's done before so I'm playing with that and Linsman is one of the great classics of science fiction and then on the scale that you really couldn't do 20 years ago so and as an example one okay don't tell anyone this scene imagine if you will two ships big old fleet battle 100 ships over here, more over here fighting it out in the depths of space two ships locked down with the gravity beans like scorpions in a bottle from one ship out comes a boarding party often this ship comes a party to fight them back so you have hand-to-hand combat two ships fighting it out in the middle of a big fleet fuck me I mean to see that on the screen is going to be pretty cool alright we'll start over here issue there you said in battle on five you got to work a lot with computer graphics and you know one of the whole big show part of the show was the music by Chris Franke I thought it really gave the show depth that Crusader didn't match later on how much do you like to get involved in that how much do you think it's important to your work to select the backdrop and say no really doing all these graphics get a different music artist how much does that aspect matter in your work huge I love music I love cinema music whenever a script this first script comes along I sit down with Chris and say this is kind of what I'm thinking about the tone of it my line was always this is opera think of this as being one big opera and he would go away and then send me tracks which I would then play against the scene to make sure it was right and there are moments when in the final mix I'm in there again hands and tongues adjusting the music because I said give me separate tracks percussion here you know wind instruments here so I can ride them up and down so we got a big battle scene going on and we have percussion going on through part of it pull the percussion out then you have this sound effects of the ships fighting replacing percussion or serving the purpose of percussion but keep the rest of the music going throughout it or you take all the percussion out all the warfare fighting out and just play the music so I'm always playing all the different stems of the music as we go along so I'm very much involved with the part of the part I love that part and of course there's a series that might be doing down the road as well and if I do that series, Chris will definitely be a part of it I'm glad to hear that why don't I give you a choice between three questions okay well we were talking about those interesting similarities interesting similarities in writing I can't help but notice one between between, well, you know Babylon 5 and remember Journey to Babylon and the other thing I want to ask you about is I could swear that Delann originally was a man and lastly, or if you prefer just tell us about Manny Faces Manny Faces as in Manny Faces is my favorite character on He-Man just from my own knowledge, notification, what's the penalty for murder in this state well you said I could answer any of those three I chose up to you all or any yes, Delann had been a man at one time as had Jenkins no, yeah that was always the intent to start off with her as a hymn and then the first season go and make her into a hymn hymn into her I suspected that with the whole point of the whole transformation but they already turned her into a woman before then yeah, because it wasn't working out too well the amount of makeup to put on her to suggest male was killing her performance and she was kind of flipping out about it because she puts a lot of stock in her female persona as most actresses do for good reason and I can handle it and I agree with her and we change the dialogue hymn into her and feminized her head of schedule yes, precisely there you go okay, thank you thank you and a question first just maybe in GMs don't kill characters yeah, we do kind of like sci-fi writers you lie I even killed more times playing Call of Cthulhu day four is always so if I can make your shirt lie just go ahead that's off of a good note I just wanted to thank you I grew up on those shows he and I knew I'm not that old man at a younger age I grew up five years old alright, I'm just giving it a hard time I'm a professional writer I don't know if that makes you feel older excellent I want to thank you for that because that did shape a lot of the way that I think and I write I'm so sorry with therapy I'm slowly recovering what are you writing? I'm currently a freelance writer for White Wolf I do some stuff for the role playing line excellent, good work and I also teach what I'm doing right now I'd love to continue it but I also want to someday make the leap into my own stuff and I would just love any advice on that go for it the moment there are guys I know who live on the East Coast say I hate the weather, I hate the climate my neighborhood sucks my job move, go somewhere else do it just do it if you're at a point where you think do it and you will never think you were at that point unless you decide to do it now stepping away from your job and following your heart is the hardest thing in the world to do but if you really believe it hard enough and you have the skill to back it up you can do it tomorrow it's not my call it's when you look into your heart and say I'm going to take that chance of failing I promise I won't kill your character if you ever game with me thank you over here it was very small and that was huge I was looking more this way I guess so you say you prepare yourself for failure do you prepare yourself for controversy I mean you handle controversy really well during the discussion of Susan and Talia's relationship in Babylon 5 you had some really elegant eloquent statements rather about the nature of storytelling and telling your character's stories but are there any controversies that arise out of your work that surprise you or are hard to address there's always something you didn't see coming I try and if I do something that I know will be controversial I prepare myself for and again you have to be fearless you have to not be afraid of these things you have to stir things up once in a while otherwise there's no point to writing so all you can do to prepare yourself is just steal yourself to be attacked and have bad things say about you the hardest part was the surprise to me really when when Claudia left chose to leave the show she'd been fired I've been having a dialogue for fans for five years and been absolutely 100% honest with them all that way and suddenly I was like well she said she was fired therefore she was fired no she quit and I got death threats I got stalkers, I got hit mail I got physical threats for two years so she said in an interview oh and by the way I quit where were you two years ago so that kind of thing I wasn't prepared for but other than that the train came in my way I know I know what I said in motion so I'm okay with it thank you there's a saying in the NBA that a lot of the hot flashy young players don't know the basics what is a basic that you don't see in a lot of common in published writers a basic I don't see spelling I guess a real love of storytelling I know a lot of writers who give into it because I think it's a way to succeed way to get chicks a way to prove something to somebody else they're not there because they want to be writers they're not there because they want to spend every day of their life writing they want the pointy hat that says I sold something and there's a real lack of appreciation for the basics for the simple structure I think you have to know the structure of a story well enough to then break the rules you can't break the rules and then learn the structure and there's lack of patience and lack of understanding there's a difference between the bon mot and the most just between the funny word the appropriate word and you see a lot more people going for the bon mot the funny word rather than picking the exact word and the exact word makes all the difference between lightning and a lightning bug it's this huge a distinction so it's taking the time to find exactly the right word and because it gives a slip shot fast writing I think that's the answer to your question thank you over here why yes it is thank you do you have a note also no I don't do you have a hotel room Keaton I watched Babylon 5 when I was like a fairly young boy the one scene well I actually have two questions the one scene one scene I remember is when Garibaldi orders the coffee and the waiter won't give him the coffee with his meal and my dad does the same thing and I always think of that scene and I was wondering has that ever happened to you yes and then really but when I was working for TV cable week which is the publication of Time Incorporated the editor took us out to Michael which is a really fancy restaurant in Beverly Hills where the Reagan's would die a lot of blue-haired ladies and I was writing all night my eyes were like this and I sat down and waiter in a tux comes over and says what would sir like to drink I'll have a coffee no no no what would sir like to drink coffee and like I'm the idiot he says sir there are drinks and then there are appetites and there are after-dinner beverages this is a drink what would sir like to drink sir wants a coffee get me a fucking coffee if Reagan were here he'd get a coffee and you make a note of these things so later on when Peter Parker wanted a coffee I'm gonna get this motherfucker and my other question is um it seemed from what you were saying that sort of a fear of failure was a big force in your life and how do you try to bring that out in your stories or do you think it's just unconscious or is it sort of just a normal thing I think I constantly try to bring it out once in a while where I have the characters face something that they think they can't handle and surrender to that sometimes Peter often would find himself in positions where he doesn't know what to do and I think in part five when Sheridan has to make the decision to rise up against his own government we do that push in and dolly back on him which reinforces him being alone in that moment and that's the one time you see real fear in his eyes I know I have to rise up against my own government can I do this can I really pay this off is it the right thing to do so I think that if you don't have your characters doubt themselves and confront that fear then the viewers looking at them won't think to do the same thing themselves so I think that's the part of how you develop the characters yeah, thank you over here I was wondering if there's any concept that you've seen for example 24 that you wish that you had thought of oh constantly yeah I am not envy free so very often there are shows that look at it God I wish it ex-piles I developed a show with Chris Carter for a while and fascinating very talented guy he would always meet this very dark shadow room and so be off in the corner and you hear this voice coming from the shadows giving you suggestions very peculiar but brilliant guy and I watched a show just in absolute awe of how smart it was tutors, dexter I watched him open my wrists afterward because they're just so good and how much marketing and networking do you do to promote yourself and what you're writing sadly almost none I'm not a networking kind of guy I don't like people there's fictional characters and real people why is it a little bit like the best so I'll back it up if you have a more serious answer I lack people skills growing up and will be 17 times 20 times in 17 years you don't learn how to talk to people I went through high school from grade 1 to high school never talking to much of anybody when you go to the beach with friends and you set up a campfire and you hang out the first time I did that I was 18 years old the second time was never and so I lacked networking skills if I had great skills I could probably be a much more professional and successful person than I am but I don't so I stay home and I write 10 hours a day and I talk to my cat and he likes me I bring him food it's all about the food you mentioned the pizza and the snacks I'm good with snacks so I've never been a network there are lots of guys who are really good at networking and shitty writers I will not name them but the cool thing is the studios are now saying we're tired of working with children and we want to work with adults looking now to writers who are over the age of 40 who aren't necessarily the good networking guys well spoken guys and I was the geek in school I went to my high school where not one person remembered me not one but then that's because I was busy watching them and making notes about them and burying grudges so you know I've always been a geek, I always will be a geek thank you for bringing it up come join the microphone be one with the microphone I noticed the last character that you talked about him being a minor with an unusual history and when you described it I just was wondering if you were a huge like Cervantes Don Quixote fan because it seemed very similar Cervantes I love Divine Mad Men I love Don Quixote any character who was demented write what you know so yeah the musical version of Don Quixote Marible Mancha I can do every lyric, every line of that musical I'm not going to don't start don't start with me so yeah I do yes those are great characters you broke it didn't you in continuation of what she said how did you get people with bad social skills and good work, how do you get lots of people to see your work put it on television they turn it on and it's there we deliver I was wondering if you have plans for any new creative comic book work whether new series or returning to some of your old stuff like the Marvel A-Con series The Book of Lost Souls I have a contract with Image to do two creative titles just questionifying the time to do them but I do want to get back to do some of those any chance for any more Book of Lost Souls to enjoy that not the structure now that book is going to be a reward for being exclusive to Marvel and I ain't no more over here just to talk about the geek thing by the way I'm still a geek to this day while I was working on Jeremiah do we have time for this by the way we'll stay here as long as you're willing oh while I was working on Jeremiah up in Vancouver I used to like to go and walk around downtown because you get to walk into Vancouver at night and it's totally cool and safe and to make the story work you have to understand there's even though I love writing I love words there are some words I just won't use I just don't I mean in my personal life I'll write it but I won't use it myself and one of them is a term for female genitalia begins with the letter P let's say pretzel for the time being so I'm walking that's connect trust me I'm walking at night at downtown Vancouver and Vancouver their ideas on prostitution are very liberal and they don't get involved much and I was walking through after a long day at the set and there were three young ladies of the evening standing on the corner doing what ladies of the evening do and one of them as I walked by says would you like some pretzel and I turtle and she said what and I said would you like some and she said it again and she said what and I said well there's some terms that I don't use and she said do you mean like and she said it again I said yes she said bullshit say it no I'll give you a free one no so now all three have gathered around me and they say why won't you say it and I realized I'm about to have a discussion about linguistics with three hookers on a street corner who in my crew driving by right now would believe that I said what what do you ladies call yourselves when you work it's over hookers all right are there other less pleasant words for what you do and they all darkened they're gonna kick my ass all the way downtown so why don't you use those terms and I said well it's icky icky good that's a good start what else well it's disrespectful so why don't you use that word and they kind of blinked for a second aww what a free one no not your question me too it kept me going and it kept me dreaming and it made me start thinking about writing for myself so I did this is my first novel I have a signed copy I'd like to give you a question for you is when you get the germ of an idea for us you know a new TV show or a new movie or whatever how long does it usually take to grow inside your head depends on how big a germ it is um sometimes it like it took a long time took a couple of months to take it through um there's a little still voice in the back of your head that you have to listen to that it takes time to be quiet to be still and if you are quiet and still long enough the story will come whispering in your ear and how fast it walks is never under your control but um that's the hardest thing to do to learn is to be patient and wait thank you follow the life saved in the first novel this is no good no pressure so there's this quote from you about when you're writing B5 it's like you're writing a novel and every day you're slapping a page on the wall and you can never go back and rewrite any of those and um I'm a continuity guy I like really long running stories I like stuff that goes for years I'm one of the three people that likes Wheel of Time right and one of the things that I always remember is I'll be sitting there reading book 8 and they'll be like oh yes and we've been friends for 12 years and I'll be like what? in book 1 they've never met I'm the guy that remembers that crap and every now and again it's a long way to say it sadly for me I'm like this without coffee anyway um so I'm showing B5 to some of my friends right and so I'll go through and I'll watch dude I know is more surprised than me stop no one is more surprised than me it's okay how many times have you seen Night of the Living Dead? so I'm the guy that sees all the continuity hours and in B5 you got 110 episodes you got like 3 continuity hours and then you got in the beginning and there's like 12 but we'll ignore that how do you do that? how do you write that and know that 4 years from now I'm gonna want to write a scene where I'm gonna refer back to this how do you see that that far out? cause you didn't write every script right? you just had an outline? I wrote 9-1 out of 110 but you knew when you were writing season 1 that you were gonna want to foreshadow this like piece of dialogue in season 4 how do you see that far and that detailed? you gotta have a mind like a bucket of snakes which I do it's just a glitch I'm very detail oriented I used to belong to a commune back when I was like 18 years old and religious commune we were charged with a task of this does relate trust me putting a new carpet into the youth ministry's floor in the building and we went dumpster diving from dumpster diving to this and all these big carpet pieces back to glue them down and everyone's got these big old swasts they're working putting things down I'm working with little tiny pieces in the corner by myself very psychotic that's perfect we finish it up and the youth minister looks at this whole thing well I can see part joe worked on it's just when my brain goes and the cool thing was two different guys from American created a B5 chronology went through the entire series looking for continuity things and they put together a timeline from the birth of the universe I'm not even lying about that the birth of the universe to crusade and during B5 got day by day month by month core by hour in some cases and they couldn't find any real glitches in the thing I just kept it in my head I didn't write it down anywhere just in my head I'm hardwired that way you said as a vanished creator you've made choices based on that would be cool and it sounds like some that kind of process could lead to a sort of vacuous action sci-fi explosions in space kind of thing but you got something better and so why is your that would be cool better than say JJ Abrams that would be cool it's not it's not JJ is really pretty good I'm guessing that there is one moment at least one moment of you in Sheridan and it's the moment where Dylan says I imagine you on the beach with nothing to do and your head exploding my wife said that to me there's two parts of that the cool part comes in as a person you think this would be really great to do then you take that mass that gelatinous thing and then the writer part comes along and says well yes this could be good but you must move it over here and slice that part off and move this over here and structure begins to apply itself and as long as you are honest with your structure and honest with your characters then the result is honorable if you just stay with the cool stuff and then disregard logic or characterization or that stuff and you just only focus on the cool then you go astray but guys like JJ and Ron Moore and others don't do that they stay with what makes sense for the story although the ending of Galactica I wasn't entirely sure about but that is that aside the professional part of it comes out to reign in the cool impulse and makes it work better and actually that adds to annoying the rules, you see that basketball and you didn't have rules it's less interesting game the rules give it structure and make it more competitive and more interesting so that's the question about what author writers don't know it's to respect those rules that they're there for a reason I know what you mean I'm from Mississippi and for years after I got here I would walk down the street and go wait a minute I'm in MIT how the hell did that happen two questions I know I should have taken a ride at Albuquerque two questions one I'm going to try and stand on the shoulders of giants without wearing cleats here Asimov and Clark both said something to the effect of find a smart person or the experienced person ask them what should be done or what's impossible and go do it two things that you did at B5 really took off one was pre-planning your storylines and having developing storylines which people didn't want to do and now they do and the other is interacting with fans online where we now have Ron Moore recording the weekly podcast so you already have your DVD commentary almost the day after the show airs and so part of your legacy to television so what aren't we doing in pre-planning and fan interaction what should we be doing what how are we bone hits the technology wizards out there let me give you a preview of things to come this is where I think we're going to see happening in about five years we're going to see a complete merging of the internet and television even more so than it is now so for instance a game and series will be launched at the same time the internet component of that let's say Babylon 5 as an example just to use as a structural point Babylon 5 game you live on the station on the platforms avatars the whole bit then an episode airs at the same time the episode airs they download a new component into the game so you can now live in that environment, that story six days before the episode airs and all the material in that episode the tactical maps, information characters, the new worlds they visit all that stuff is downloaded to your system then a week later you watch the actual episode and you can choose to stay in that world when the new episode comes along live here or live in the next episode and a complete synthesis of the online community with television you stop treating television as linear and treat it as a data pool which can be extracted and used in different ways online and in gaming and environments and communities and avatars and second life that kind of stuff all at the same time and it's one consistent unit that's what you're going to be seeing that can include behind the scenes all of it fantastic second question there's a phenomenon that it can happen to any writer but it particularly happens to some successful writers and Stephen King is one that comes to mind Robert Jordan George Lucas where the the writer has had a success or is perceived as successful or or they just freeze up or something and not only do they stop editing themselves but people around them stop editing themselves stop editing because they don't want to touch it it's so good if I touch it the magic smoke will come out and then the magic smoke does come out precisely because no one edited it and they didn't take out every third adjective and things like that so why do you avoid that trap and how does someone else avoid that trap you are right in that it is much to be avoided there are some writers who it becomes being about themselves not about the story and they start writing the same sort of thing over and over because that's what worked and so they're having 10 years of experience versus 10 years of experience 10 times and you need to have people around you who are sarcastic and know you for a long time and we'll call you on it when you start falling prey to that stuff I used to casually know the actor Victor Buono back when I was a reporter I was a big huge massive actor physically just like massive and he loved going to the old globe theater he was a television actor and playing there because as he said to me at the time they know all my tricks and at the time I didn't quite know what that meant and over time I figured it out that didn't let him fall into the easy way of doing certain things they always challenge him and anyone whether it's a writer or an artist a producer or a politician anyone needs someone around them who will be honest with them and when you stop having that person you're screwed and unfortunately all my friends have high verbals and smart asses so I have no lack of modesty imposed on me by others I'm the most modest person that I know thank you thank you I heard thank you very much for the lecture and just as a comment I'm sure every geek in the city and in this country is deeply proud to count you among them thank you my question goes back to your being detail oriented in much of your writing in difference to some other science fiction writing you very elegantly avoid getting into details of how energy sources work how human alien how human alien biologists might interbreed or not when you do have to get into yellow cells versus green cells and the telepath virus which was genetically unsound I'm sorry but do you do a consult do a consult with textbooks or professors or I realized there wasn't google or wikipedia at the time you wrote how do you approach this areas you might not have expertise in but have slightly less expertise in you're a man I'd strike you no it's absolutely valid question and what you refer to in the first part of your question about not quite getting into the details of how things work I tend to refer to that as water skiing where you have to keep moving as fast as you can because if you slow down what your arm won't support you and there was a fair amount of water skiing in Babylon 5 that went on and I will be the first to confess that in any science fiction show there's a certain amount of rubber science that's involved and I found you can go out of your way to explain it if you really choose to do so but you're dealing with fictional constructs and after a while you fall into the parallel where you have a 5 paragraph long description of inverting the rays of the system therefore the system will now work in different ways I can either do that or I can have a really funny joke and I tend to go for the latter now which is not to say I don't use consultants during crusade as a matter of fact we had a deal with JPL to supply us with astronomers and engineers and so on who would come and work with us and planetary geologists who would sit down with us and walk through what the lighting would be like on a set if you had a binary system what the biology would be like we built one set which is set in a cavern and we asked what kind of strata this kind of planet would have and he had to show it up the day he said that's mine I did that and I did set out to do a different plan I sat down with a bunch of guys from the Mars Society to say what would the civilization be like a million years hence what would it look like so I do try and where possible do the research on it but there are times you gotta fudge it and those times I rarely get nailed on them but every so often I do it's a right and proper thing to do throw her out over here now that Galactica has finished its run could you talk about the differing strengths and weaknesses of sort of free form seat of your pants creative approach with the more structured approach used on B5 I didn't see enough of Galactica to make a formal analysis of it and Ron is a friend and I don't believe in the sickly someone else's show I don't mean that so can I pass on that part of it one one a free one I didn't mean it as a knock to either show just different approaches and different styles that's all I meant I don't know that style well enough to do a compare or contrast is the cat you were talking about before the one you pulled out of the storm drain back out by the more famous than I am you've obviously touched a lot of people's lives but you couldn't have known that that was going to happen back when you were that hot why did you decide it was important to tell stories I don't know how to not tell stories ever since I was a kid I would just start making up stories and shit it's just what I started doing early on and again that's how you live forever because the books in the library are there forever forever and libraries that's how I fell in love with writing also because he moved 21 times in 17 years it was always different school, different neighborhood, different teachers different everything but the books in the library were always the same so I'd be on page 17 a Ray Bradbury novel in Madeleine, New Jersey moved to Texas go to the library, same books, same cover pick up page 18 and keep writing and reading and it gave me continuity words became continuity words and stories became those important things in my life and I became hardwired for stories so I think that the question is I don't know how to do anything else if we're living in a different society that didn't value stories I'd be out in the street I have no other skills at all there's a reason that I have an ex-wife I have no skills at all it's seriously I'm mechanically inclined I'm not personable I'm not a very good speaker I can be okay but not great there's nothing else I can do but write which is why I do a lot of it thank you so you've been Catholic for about two and a half hours Joe finish up those who were here and I'll be there that's great if they can handle that alright over here you said so what the seamstresses do okay hi I'm a artist who's currently going to an art school good place for it and I'm interested in becoming a comic book artist some day and I'm wondering about what it would take to become a good storyteller in the comic book business you are so asking the wrong guy I wish I had an answer for that the art world is outside my comprehension where art comes from is baffling and mysterious and magical to me it's God I wish I had a good answer as long as it takes for you to understand how to tell a story in graphic form to get the flow of it the hardest thing for our comic artists to do is the actual storytelling part of it it's not just drawing the person being there it's how that panel relates to the next panel next to it so that the eye follows the story across when you start selling I guess is the obvious answer when you start selling in the comic area then that's when you've acquired it or you're working for image okay stop what about working with the artist one on one how often did you do that I'm weird because I write full scripts meaning page one, panel one, interior Peter's room, he goes to the door and reaches for the knob he turns the knob panel three there's a monster outside so and the artist draws exactly what I write out because I'm very detail oriented on this stuff so there isn't really a collaboration there not to undermine what the artist brings there's nothing in the book without the art and people like Gary Frank and others I work with are terrific but in terms of the storytelling part of it my corner of it I write specific detailed scripts and other writers work one on one some work in collaboration some just work off of plots and the artist draws it, they write the dialogue afterwards there's a whole range of ways of doing it I wish I had a better answer for you that's okay, thank you though I failed over here something that fascinates me about these sci-fi shows that are ostensibly set in the future is that in the same way that old Trek is really set in the 60s Babylon 5 is set in the 90s just to give one example there's this big influential news network that everybody watches passively in the real world that sort of thing's been laid out since the 90s and may never come back so my question is how aware are you when you're writing something set in the future of the ways that it's tied to the present and do you gleefully embrace it or do you try to get away from it what do you feel about that? I know that I'm writing for a present tense audience and I know that I am blinkered to some degree by my current cultural situation we all live in the fishbowl and trying to imagine what the reality is inside the fishbowl is tough and if you try and go too far you'll often be wrong so I try and write for the relevant audience now this example I can give to that there's a great scene in one of the I think it's the Buck Rogers serials that they had way back in the 30s or 20s actually they're in visualized they're in their ship flying way up in the sky and they're hit and they're starting to go down they have to evacuate the ship grab your anti-gravity belt so they get these three slim silver belts they put them on that could be anti-gravity belts seems reasonable get your ray guns and they could be proper ray guns get the portable radio and they bring out this box because they knew what a radio was anti-grav belt could be anything but they knew what a radio was and they were limited by that they couldn't imagine a radio this size there's a point at which you cannot go laptops in almost no science fiction up until a certain period of years ago they missed the personal computer completely so we missed the obvious stuff so I try and think if I'm going to be wrong over there I may as well stay over here and be more right and write for the contemporary audience and hope that those parts of it that are relevant will last I scare them off I was going to ask a touching question about the episode of Babylon 5 passing through Gethsemane but instead now that you brought up this terrible thing that happened at ICON and a convention I've been attending without fails since 1984 I was going to ask you that dinner that I've never gone to oh you weren't there no I never go to that just my instincts tell me not to go to that dinner no matter what I was from out of town they actually gave me a free pass one year was that the worst I wonder where you were he didn't show up I was heartbroken your mother and I were very concerned Mike we almost had the exact same conversation at the New York Comic Con I spoke to you before yeah I'm sorry about my mother really how is the old lady she's not doing good still turning tricks was that the worst that happened that weekend or was it the airplane oh the airplane this is great so I make it through ICON okay good and we're in the van going down the freeway heading back toward the city and the airport and as we're driving along I hear a motorcycle engine and really loud I'm looking around and don't see anything and I said to Catherine do you see motorcycles? no I don't see it's really loud and we see two wheels appearing over the top of the window never a good sign as a private plane about to land on an emergency and live at ten feet in front of us and we get out of the way of this thing and it was just the most astonishing sight the only moment I had that same feel to it to me I can't believe this but it's true I was getting a cab back to my home in Los Angeles we were on the 405 going on to the 101 and I had the strangest feeling come over me and I said to the driver be very careful for the next two miles my death is looking for me and it was still processing this and about a minute later two cars in front of us slammed into each other the re-comes this way he jigs that way another car goes past us and it's another car and there's just a driver like a maniac that avoided damages and says I'm getting off the freeway so I think it's a good idea and we get off and this is a driver I use to use a lot I have never seen him since true story, absolutely true it was the strangest at the world closing in kind of moment and I said my death is looking for me and a minute later I just wanted to thank you for all the lucky people to receive an email from you and it was a very magic moment thank you for that I wasn't rude? it was wonderful I was compelled to write you because it was something that happened and you answered me I also wanted to ask you one of my favorite scenes in Babylon 5 is when Sinclair's girlfriend goes off to survey a planet and she finds very large creatures that end up attacking her ship and she meets Jakar and she asks what were they and he picks up an ant and moves it to another leaf and says how would the ant explain this to the other ant I was wondering if you could tell me what your most magical mystery still is the human heart I cannot figure out the human heart I probably never will someone in a Nobel speech said that what's worth writing about what's worth the blood and the sweat and the effort is a human heart in conflict with itself and whenever I look into my own heart I am baffled by the inconsistencies and the slip-shot workmanship and other people I am constantly I meet someone for the first time encountering a whole new galaxy and what planet do you come from you know what works inside of you because I guess the way I grew up I never really understood people very well so I think that's probably part of it I was 17, I had moved 17 times and no one knew me I had ringing either so it's the human heart and I imagine right before I die I'll figure it out shit I'll write something really fast over here hi Joe I just wanted to say it's like meeting God for the first time if I were God I'd have more hand or deeper voice I'll play the English well played sir, excellent I am a writer throw them down the stairs I've written one novel now myself I haven't brought it with me I'm sorry I'm very nervous very nervous person I haven't smoked in 24 hours I'm less than meets the eye but anyway I haven't been watching much Babylon 5 lately it's usually one of my other addictions lately I've been watching a lot of Babylon XXX which you know you know puts where did that come from what the fuck are you talking about so pussy is on my mind Joe well there's a great line in Abbot and Castel meet the wolf man where Lon Cheney Jr. is trying to explain his dilemma every time the wolf the moon comes out I turn into a wolf and Abbot says you and 10 million other guys okay okay so now for the serious questions that I have you wrote them down chapter one I am born in small log cabin most of us know your pension for dark chocolate milk chocolate milk chocolate wait a minute I thought it was dark chocolate can you switch opinion he's telling me what kind of chocolate I like I came 4,000 miles for this I know it's like 500 miles but my United Airlines it's 4,000 they came by way of Latvia what is your question we are all waiting here it's 9,000 hours since we've been here what is your official favorite food you got the line to have my favorite food what kind of tree was I what would I be if I came back as a tree I do have a shrink by the way she's not very good so your question is what's my favorite food is that what you're saying your peers you wrote that down I wrote that down I'm a burger guy I like a really good burger are you happy now you've harshed everyone's buzz the follow up question to that is you follow up question eat me if I were a bird wait his follow up is Shakespeare once said that's my point of your friend what do you want to know would you eat me if I were a bird I want an honest answer Joe alright not next question seriously ok serious question Babylon 5 into the fire what were some of the reasons the fallout between the right, the yourself the actors the producers whatever was going on why did ITF fail why did it what fail Babylon 5 into the fire video game that was being produced with Sierra oh the video game I'm actually representing the first ones.com I actually don't remember anymore you don't remember Babylon 5 into the fire come on alright that's enough you have to move on I sterilize that if I were you I'm one of those people who may have made Dylan female ahead of her time I actually saw you briefly at Springfield, Massachusetts at a convention no no no the window was open the blinds were up you had a really good leather biker jacket and you showed a preview of the gathering that had Mira Freelan's real voice and you said we haven't done all the post-production we're going to lower her voice in post-production I didn't work and because she had such an unusual accent because we didn't have all that many Eastern European in Hollywood at the time and she had that fabulous voice so yeah you ended up going with everyone saying she's got a really great voice keep her voice I thought that was a pretty cool idea and actually my husband and I got married in May of 98 and it's significant only because we were really serious B-5 fans and I had been looking for five months for a Caucasian blonde bride and groom cake topper and the weekend before I was like going out to look for model paint Dylan and Sheridan in our wedding colors because I almost didn't find one I found one literally the week before the wedding so you almost got like photographs sent to you of Dylan and Sheridan on top of our wedding cake this fashion is like a train it acquires perspective in the distance it has a horizon line the terrible thing is that I was I hope I don't do burgers beef is bad beef is bad for you yes there is I started writing what was supposed to have been a short story in November of last year it is now approximately 180 pages double space manuscript format and that's approximately only maybe a half done and what I thought was going to be a real straight forward story sort of like not exactly a space opera but a small space opera ma'am for the audience get to your question they have been cruelly abused by me for the last two and a half hours they need a break it could be worse not really the question is that what I thought was going to be simple and straight forward has gotten very detailed and very complex I see your problem how do I how do I edit how do you end it stop writing the earth explodes and they all die ma'am I cannot provide you with an ending no no no we're not going to hear it what is your technique or what is your I know what the ending is before I start well I have that you have that? yes I have two follow up stories you have two volumes of ending? no I have two follow up stories with the same characters finish the first one first this is like when I was on one level I have no answer for you you're on your own you have to fight this battle on your own I've done exactly the same thing you just did when I was in college I was having a hard time with my own writing I thought I will go to someone as you're going to me right now for help so I knew that Harlan Ellison had published his phone number in one of his books foolishly so I thought I'm going to see it this is a real number so I called it this is the conversation that ensued yeah Mr. Ellison yeah my name is Joe and I'm a writer and I'm having a really hard time right now and I can't finish my stuff and my stuff is in selling and I don't know why and what would you tell me as help and he said not selling well I can fix that right now here's why I thought selling my advice stop writing shit thank you Mr. Ellison here's later we are friends and over dinner one night I said do you remember this conversation from years ago and he says yeah I do remember that conversation were you offended I said has you been wrong I would have been offended hi there I completely understand what you mean about living and doing what scares you and I just wanted to know what was your motivation for the original idea for making Dylan transgender why do you think that has been so lacking in terms of portrayals of transgender characters on television and in films are we just not there yet or are we I think that we're not there yet and we should be if we can accept an alien why can't we accept someone of ours who decides to live in a different way that is more natural to them and Warners was very nervous about this but they actually said we'll back you up let's have a transgendered person on the show and look at that issue from the alien perspective you can do it more easily with an alien character than with a human being rather than one of our species and that to me seemed like the right way to do it because again you have to take chances this came back to haunt me later on with the Andreas I had to go joke that I pulled on how many of you don't know that story all right it's the last long story I want to tell you all okay all right again I don't much like public speaking scares the shit out of me beneath this jacket sweating like you wouldn't believe and we were at a convention it's like 3,000 people and I'm the follow Peter Andreas and I'm behind the set and they're talking, I don't hear what they're saying and I hear the applause, they're done my turn comes up, I show a big video which is always my lead in because if I suck the video we'll be able to like and I walk out on the stage silence nothing not a reaction, not an applaud, not a you nothing maybe they don't know it's me so I say hi I'm Joseph Rosinski nothing crickets it would have been hurt and I try immediately JMS leaves the stage and Joe is behind and I flop sweat the whole thing I'm dying and I try and tell jokes but that's silence imagine standing more 3,000 silent people and if I after like 10 minutes of this Peter leaps up onto the stage and says this is a joke that Andreas I cooked up for the audience earlier and now they can respond now that you've been let in on the joke so everyone say hi to Joe and applause happened and I turn to Peter and said you realize of course this means war because you have to get revenge that's the first throw you must get revenge or you'll never be happy but you have to wait you have to time it just right you have to let enough time go by so they'll forget so you're safe, they'll kill you regardless but you have to be you know so they'll forget a month goes by another month goes by the Christmas party comes up Andreas comes up we chat think of the convention we were all over that oh that's long ago I'm dead aren't I no you're not dead another month goes by now I figure I'm safe now I can do this so I write an episode and here is the subplot in the council room talking to Lita all of a sudden he's having a strange pain he collapses to the ground and then what's going on in a movement to the emergency room and they're doing tests on him and we see the body begin to move beneath the sheet slightly in strange ways and we learn that among Narns they can change their gender under stress cut to Lando's quarters to car vanishes by the way cut Lando's quarters in bed begins to see someone standing over him and it's jacar in female form to say as a man I can never forgive you as a woman I can forgive you you conquered my planet which you never conquered me until now gives them a big wet kiss cut away come back there in bed in the afterglow Lando's saying are you tired tired goes on from there so I put the script out now understand that the crew assumes I'm always legit and they know I'll do bad shit stuff they remember to lend so I walk out on the set and the first thing I see is I remember the crew and this is the part that kills me she walks over and says thank you I have friends who are transvestites and transgenders and no one understands and thank you for bringing this to light I feel like an assassin and I go on my way and the crew begins to move in its ways and Jerry Doyle comes by the stage having gotten the script says I happen to be in the area we were shooting in an old spot tub factory with a gravel pit over here an orange bang factory there is no here to be around happen to be in the area still I read the script very funny, great gag it's not a great gag we're going to shoot it even in bugs bunny cartoons they'd be a person in a dust where they were standing a moment earlier you know so I go over and I call on the wardrobe people we're going to need to have a wardrobe created for your car and they're taking notes why not what kind of wardrobe would you like same kind of colors as the non-colors the whole thing I bring it in for a fitting I call down to the prosthetics department I want a full chest cast of Andreas which you have to shave by the way and it's a brutal process and they say what kind of breasts would you like, you want A cup, B cup, C cup, D cup well whatever it works with the silhouette and be very serious no one knows this is a gag Joe is doing this so Peter shows up at the end of the day happen to be in the area says to me, read the script, great gag no, we're shooting this this is revenge for what happened at the convention I've been sitting on for four months yes you're right, it's revenge but we're still going to shoot it because I don't have time to write that which we're not going to shoot we're shooting it I play this out for a week Andreas has his chest cast he comes in for fittings Peter is sweating bolts the cast are talking on the phone back and forth, he's lost his mind we have to intercede it's embarrassing, can't do this lost control so five days go by I put the real script out minus that scene walk out, the first person I see the same crew member I saw on the way when I first put the thing out I feel so betrayed now it's funny now Peter comes by, it's a great gag and very funny and I haven't heard a word from Andreas in that entire time he's never communicated with me and about two days later I saw him in the parking lot and he walks toward me with something in his hand and let me find it here I guess it'll carry with me it is a newspaper article with a picture of me and it's here somewhere I'll find it the article says, it's a picture of me it says five years or nothing, it says Strasinski life in space, five years with luck, it says creator Strasinski and he hands this to me and says I carried this on my wall for four years it's yours now and walks off and I realize I have no idea what that means and I still carry it in my wallet thinking someday I'm going to figure it out and then I'll have a laugh that's my story I want to say, even if the makeup didn't work out, thank you for trying I appreciate it very much I'll ask questions thank you actually I wanted to ask about the Harlan Ellison thing that you had mentioned that he had kind of berated you early on, but then I think I recall him being orally in one of the episodes being very difficult to caribaldi he was parking at the computer how did his involvement in the show happen? I asked him was your fear of calling him up again I'm afraid of that after I moved to LA we became friends while working on the Twilight Zone so when I did Babylon 5 it was no big deal to call him and say you want to help out as a consultant on the show he's a pal we get in trouble a lot he gets me in trouble we're at a restaurant called Chacha Chow South American cuisine in Los Angeles and they had a magician going from table to table and Harlan says what, I hate magicians I have a good conversation I want to be interrupted want me to take care of it for you if you're ever with Harlan and says to you the answer is no not knowing better, I said sure so he gets up he's an actress he's whispering to her and she's looking at me and her eyes are getting bigger and bigger and he comes back and I said what did you say to her it's all taken care of she goes to the magician whispers in his ear he's looking at me eyes are getting bigger and bigger he doesn't come over whole dinner never comes to the table on our way out I need to know what you told them well I said that we were celebrating the fact that you were recently out of prison and that you came from a showbiz family and your father had represented mimes and clowns and magicians and that your father was killed by a magician over a business dispute and that if you came over there might be an altercation and I might be back in prison I can never go back