In cooperation with the Comics Track, ARTC brings you Mildly Exciting Tales of Astonishment! Ever wonder about the more mundane aspects of superhero (or even supervillain) life? Come explore the extraordinary banalities of life with extraordinary powers with Jonathan Strickland’s hilarious series!
This performance will take place in Hyatt International North!
We’re pleased and proud to announce that we have been selected to perform at the HEAR Now Festival’s Audio Tonight presentation! Atlanta Radio Theatre Company will travel to Kansas City, MO, to perform an episode of our fan-favorite series Rory Rammer, Space Marshal: The Colour of the Shadow of the Outsider Over the Mountain of Madness Out of Space.
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In the “better late than never” category, this month we present Dash Cardigan part 3 of 4, by Thomas E. Fuller.
We’d like to offer some standard advice to our fine listeners – take care of yourselves! Being sick is no picnic, and it’s what caused this episode to be delayed a bit. So take it from the fine folks at ARTC: get plenty of rest, wash your hands frequently, take your vitamins, and stay healthy!
If you’re enjoying the podcast, why not head on over to Patreon.com/artc. and lend us your support? You can also see other ways of ensuring the podcast keeps coming with a few other donation options. Thanks!
This being our 30th anniversary, we thought we’d dip back into the past and recap some of our previous performances, triumphs and tragedies, in a series of posts. And don’t forget our Chronology for a look at our 30 (and counting!) years of live performance!
This week we bring you our appearance at Dragon Con 2007. Check out all the pictures on our Flickr album.
In 2007 we had only one performance at Dragon Con for a change, and so we knew we had to bring a new episode of Rory Rammer. That episode was Madhouse in the Sky.
But more than that, we knew we needed to bring something we knew our audience would enjoy. So we brought The Challenges of Brave Ragnar.
As with many ARTC serials, we have two versions of Brave Ragnar. The version we performed in 2007 was the “short” 1-hour version, but we’ll be bringing it into ARTC Studio in its full 13 episode glory very soon!
Want to know more about Brave Ragnar and other serials from ARTC? Check this page out!
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This month we continue with Dash Cardigan by Thomas E. Fuller. If you’re enjoying the podcast, please let us know!
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Welcome again to the podcast! This month we bring you…
Now…here’s where things are going to get confusing. Dash Cardigan was originally written as a 13-part serial. So why is this just part 1 of 4? Because what you’ll hear on the podcast is the hour-long version.
We get some of our best audiences at conventions. LibertyCon, Dragon Con, 221B Con, and a great many others have all welcomed us. A convention appearance, however, has to work within the convention’s schedule, and panels are almost always an hour long. So that’s how long our shows have evolved to be over time.
We’ll be breaking out of that a little as we continue our work in the studio (the full 13-part series of Dash Cardigan as well as Nairobi Jack Rackham: The Lost Gold of the Atlantimengani are both on the slate and we already have the 5-part The Dancer in the Dark), but you can always count on us having shorter versions of longer stories at conventions!
This being our 30th anniversary, we thought we’d dip back into the past and recap some of our previous performances, triumphs and tragedies, in a series of posts. And don’t forget our Chronology! It’s not as detailed, but it really shows the growth of ARTC over the years. You can see all of the photos in their full size on our Flickr album!
Continuing our annual appearances at Dragon Con, and 2000 was a real doozy. First, it included one of Thomas E. Fuller’s best original pieces, All Hallows’ Moon. But we were also priveleged to perform an episode of Ron N. Butler’s Rory Rammer, Space Marshal series, The Queen of the Spaceways with Ted Raimi, Alexandra Tydings, and Claire Stansfield! All that plus Zap thy Neighbor by James P. Hogan, and you’ve got a stellar lineup!
ARTC doesn’t normally do costumes. It’s actually a long-running debate within the company – how to create visual appeal for a medium that doesn’t normally rely on visual appeal at all! But when you’re performing live, the audience expects to be able to see something and asking them to close their eyes can lead to inopportune snoring, so occasionally we give costumes a try.
Here’s another example of the costuming work for this piece. We have been very lucky to have a number of professional costumers work with ARTC in the past to help us on occasions such as this.
In 2000 we also debuted the ARTC Lifetime Achievement Award for excellence in audio. Presented first to ARTC founder William L. Brown and informally known as the “Brownie”, the award was renamed as the Thomas E. Fuller Lifetime Achievement Award in 2003.
We also had the great honor of performing with three of the stars of Xena, Warrior Princess that year. Ted Raimi hammed it up as Rory Rammer, turning in an uproarious performance…that also happened to be about half an hour longer than we’d scheduled it for! Claire Stansfield and Alexandra Tydings were also spectacular in the roles of Michiko Sakai and Aphrodite DeHavilland.
This performance is still recalled fondly by those members of ARTC who were lucky enough to be present.
We hope you’re enjoying this look back at ARTC! If so, let us know! And don’t forget that your support is extremely important. Tell your friends! Tell your family! Buy a CD or make a donation!
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This month we bring you Dr. Geoffry Stanhope, Investigator of Occult Phenomena: A Vision of Vampires, by Thomas E. Fuller, performed live at Anachrocon, February 22, 2013, in Atlanta, Georgia.
Dr. Geoffry Stanhope currently appears in 5 episodes of this short-running series. Drawn from the journals of Colonel Horatio Fitzwilliams, the adventures detail Dr. Stanhope’s quest to uncover the dark places in the world and bring them to light. It’s a bit like Holmes and Watson meet Mulder and Scully.
In this episode, Dr. Stanhope and Col. Fitzwilliams have traveled to the island of Antigua,where they are told of a number of mysterious deaths. Is it voodoo? And can Baron Samedi help them solve the mystery?
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(Over the past few years, ARTC has been fortunate enough to have a number of well-known actors — Jonathan Harris of “Lost in Space,” Robert Trebor, Alexandra Tydings, Claire Stansfield, and Ted Raimi of “Xena” and “Hercules” — participate in our DragonCon presentations. The vehicle for these performances has mostly been “Rory Rammer, Space Marshal.” ARTC spoke with Ron Butler, who writes “Rory” for the Company, about the series and its productions at DragonCon.)
ARTC: I don’t think those were the usual people at Blimpie’s. Maybe they were doing training.
RNB: I should hope so. I’m not used to being actively sneered at by someone who’s making minimum wage for slapping cold sandwiches together. I mean, this isn’t France.
ARTC: Anyway — We spent most of an hour earlier talking about Rory Rammer and never actually got around to talking about Rory Rammer at DragonCon. Can we correct that?
RNB: Really, I think you’re wanting to talk about the “celebrity” RR shows. ARTC was doing Rory at DragonCon before the stars showed up. Uh — just don’t ask me to remember which scripts or when we did them. Year before last, ARTC’s advertising poster promised “Another Rory Rammer.” I felt slighted by that at the time — I had come up with a title, after all — but I know the performances and the conventions can start to blur together.
ARTC: How does ARTC attract guest stars for DragonCon?
RNB: We don’t. Ed Kramer [Supreme Potentate and Reality-Master of DragonCon] comes up with these notions about guests appearing in ARTC shows. The point where the plans usually fell through in years past was that — apparently and from what I heard at the time — Ed never did tell the actual guests about these plans before they arrived in Atlanta. Bummer. We finally took the step of contacting prospective guest stars ourselves — after Ed told us who he had in mind — to see if they wanted to play. For quite a while there, we got responses like, “Huh?” and “Who are you people?” Disappointing, since there were a number of folks we’d have liked to work with, even some experienced people from elsewhere in the audio-drama field.
ARTC: Was Jonathan Harris [Dr. Smith from the TV series, Lost in Space] the first success?
RNB: Well, a halfway success. We were supposed to have both Mr. Harris and Ray Harryhausen [stop-motion special effects legend], but Mr. Harryhausen apparently thought “radio production” meant “in a radio studio,” not “in front of three thousand screaming people,” and decided to bow out.
ARTC: Did that cause problems?
RNB: We always have understudies. Have to, if only to have someone to read the lines during technical rehearsals. Hmm… I’ve made it sound like we cast department store mannequins as understudies, which we don’t. If nothing else, we’re well aware that any guest might have to cancel out at any time, for paying-work reasons if nothing else. So we cast understudies in the full knowledge that any or all of them may do the actual performance. Daniel Taylor stepped up for Mr. Harryhausen and did a great job.
ARTC: Did you fit Mr. Harris into an existing “Rory” script?
RNB: No, I wrote a script especially for him. [“The Cosmic Cycloplex”] In fact, it’s just about useless without Jonathan Harris. My biggest mistake was to name his character “Dr. Feynman,” a pre-existing character, but completely unlike himself in this incarnation. If I’d had my wits about me, I’d have changed that name. To “Professor Cronkite,” probably.
ARTC: After Walter Cronkite?
RNB: No, it’s a very old joke. “Krankheit” (can I spell or what?) is German for “sickness,” so the doctor in burlesque skits was often “Dr. Krankheit.”
ARTC: So Professor Feynman wasn’t himself that night?
RNB: No, he was Dr. Zachary Smith in all but name. “Cycloplex” is a shameless conglomerate of every Lost in Space reference and in-joke I could come up with. It was cheap, it was crass. I know DragonCon audiences, though — they howled at it. And I think Mr. Harris enjoyed doing it, too.
ARTC: How cheap was it?
RNB: Rory falls off a spaceship (don’t ask) into a black hole-like object called a “cycloplex.” (I lifted that concept, but not much of anything else, from a “Space Patrol” script.) At which Skip Sagan cries, “We’ve lost Rory! He’s lost! Lost in –” And Feynman growls, “Don’t even say it.” And the crowd goes wild…
ARTC: Sure they did. What was it like working with Mr. Harris?
RNB: I didn’t; you’ll have to ask the cast. I missed the single rehearsal, on Saturday afternoon, so I just huddled up at the front of the stage during the performance. And I was astounded.
ARTC: At what?
RNB: At Mr. Harris. I believe he was nearly eighty even then and obviously not in the best health. He got one rehearsal before performing — and he was letter-perfect. I mean, even at age twelve, I hadn’t been overwhelmed by the subtleties of his performance in Lost in Space, but he came through like a trouper. I’m ashamed to say that I suspect he was a much better actor than I’d ever thought.
ARTC: Did you get to talk with him?
RNB: I hopped up on stage after the applause died down and introduced myself. “Mr. Harris,” I said, “I’m Ron Butler. I wrote the script and I just wanted to say — I know how tough that dialogue was — but you did a marvelous job. I couldn’t have done it that well, I know, and I wrote that stuff.”
ARTC: And how did he react to that?
RNB: He stopped pulling on his shoes and growled, “Frankly, neither could I. I faked it.”
ARTC: Will that show up on a tape?
RNB: Very, very unlikely. It’s proven impossible to get a usable voice track from any of the live performances at DragonCon, so we’ve taken to recording separate voice tracks from the celebrities during rehearsals, for Henry [Howard] to meld in with other voice and sound effect tracks later. But we didn’t do that with Mr. Harris, and his health has — sadly — declined since then. “Cosmic Cycloplex” may have been one of his last public appearances of any sort. I like to think he had fun.
ARTC: Next year [1999] was Robert Trebor?
RNB: Yes, the first of our “Hercules / Xena” connections. The script was “The Phantom Menace.”
ARTC: I beg your pardon.
RNB: “Phantom Menace.” No, not that George Lucas thing. Our “Phantom Menace” actually opened, at a convention in Florida, a few days before the movie did. Maybe I should sue him…
ARTC: Why don’t you just take your life’s saving out of the bank, convert it into pennies and melt them into a puddle of cupro-zinc slag? It’d probably be faster and a lot less painful.
RNB: You’re probably right. Anyway — Say, did you realize “Trebor” is “Robert” spelled backwards?
ARTC: It’s a stage name.
RNB: You think so? I didn’t get to attend rehearsals that year — “Menace” has a slightly huge cast and rehearsals are traditionally held in Bill Ritch’s traditionally teeny hotel room — and sat halfway back in the auditorium for the performance. Mr. Trebor certainly seemed to enjoy himself. At the end, “Captain Cosmos,” the space pirate, is revealed to be Skip Sagan’s uncle. Skip was being played by Daniel Kiernan, with a high-pitched, nasal Brooklyn accent, and once Trebor got “Cosmos’s” breathing mask off, he spoke with the exact same accent. In fact, it was darn hard to tell them apart.
ARTC: Space pirates seem to show up a lot in Rory Rammer.
RNB: Probably because I think it’s such an idiotic idea. There’s just no way to make it pay. “Captain Cosmos” is a debt-ridden physicist with an invisibility device, which he uses to pursue a life of crime. But he can’t dispose of his loot and he’s on the point of starving when he captures Rory Rammer.
ARTC: You mean “when Rory Rammer captures him.”
RNB: I mean what I said.
ARTC: Is this one going to be on a tape?
RNB: Almost certainly. We have it penciled in. As I said, Mr. Trebor must have had a good experience, because this year [2000] we got enthusiastic acceptances from Ted Raimi (“Joxer”), Alexandra Tydings (“Aphrodite”) and Claire Stansfield (the shamaness “Alti”). Maybe he talked us up to his co-workers.
ARTC: Was this another specially-written script?
RNB: Yeah. Henry Howard [ARTC Head Technical Producer] called me one evening in May and asked if I could have a “Rory” script with two strong female leads written — or at least outlined — in ten days. If I could, we might be able to attract Alexandra Tydings and Claire Stansfield. I have to admit that female characters in “Rory” are pretty thin on the ground.
ARTC: I’d noticed. Why don’t you do something about that?
RNB: Hey, it’s Fifties science fiction. Women were about as abundant in that milieu as they were at the first meeting of the Homebrew Computer Club.
ARTC: That really sounds like sexist rationalization to me. Just because women were ignored then you have to ignore them now?
RNB: It wasn’t that women were ignored. They were present, here and there, but when they did show up they were treated in pretty set ways. For instance, I’ve had the suggestion made to me that there should be a female Space Marshals cadet written in as a love interest for Skip Sagan. A character like that would have been treated one of two ways: Comically, which gets us into a lot of stereotypical “teen” humor that would make my pancreas freeze up. Or the poor girl — by which I mean a pre-wommin — would be so put upon that she’d resign from the Space Marshals by the end of the first episode and go home to marry an insurance salesman and hatch babies. I don’t want to go either of those places.
ARTC: But you’ve had female authority figures. There are allusions to the President of the United States being female. The Undersecretary for Suprastratospheric Affairs is referred to as “Madam Undersecretary.” What’s the diff?
RNB: Those are distant female authority figures. They give a whiff of exotic modernity without actually having any day-to-day impact on the way things get done. And I have a precedent for it: In Robert Heinlein’s other sci-fi movie, Operation Moonbase, the POTUS is a woman. In fact, she sounded like Eleanor Roosevelt — which is a nasty thought.
ARTC: I think a man who quotes precedents to explain his dramatic choices is covering up like a cat on a linoleum floor.
RNB: And I just think I’m being as true as I can to the genre I’m parodying without getting completely fossilized. I also didn’t think I’d have to justify myself to an EEOC hearing. Do I get any credit for a couple of really nifty female villains? I like Sinead O’Chronos [Episode “Set Loose the Dogs of Time!”] if only for her name, and Dr. Renee Marceau [Episode “The Island of Dr. Marceau”] is just plain fun.
ARTC: You can only deal with strong women if you make them evil?
RNB: Make up your mind. Do you want women characters or not? The lead good guy spot is already filled. That leaves room for strong villains. Besides, it’s the snake who gets all the good lines.
ARTC: The Company has converted some roles from male to female. For instance, “The Green Man’s Burden” has probably had a “Princess Two Moons” more times than it’s had a “Chief Two Moons.” What’s wrong with that?
RNB: Two Moons’ sex-change was a logistical necessity: ARTC, like most theatrical companies of whatever stripe, has more actresses than actors. I didn’t think it worked particularly well and if I thought it was going to be permanent, it would force me to rewrite the script.
ARTC: Oh, come on! Why? Would “Two Moons, Princess of Mars” act that differently from “Chief Two Moons”?
RNB: Probably not, but “Bubba Beacham” would interact with “her” a lot differently, and Rory’s reactions wouldn’t be quite the same. I may be writing parody, but I’m trying not to be a hack.
ARTC: I think you just don’t like women, especially strong women.
RNB: I’ll refer you to my wife on that. But I’d advise you wear padding and to get your ego Sanforized before you do.
ARTC: So, do you think the roles you came up with for Tydings and Stansfield are “strong”?
RNB: One is an over-the-top businesswoman villain. And Ms. Stansfield’s character [“Michiko Sakai,” a female undercover operative for the Department of Justice, Extraterrestrial branch] is probably strong enough to spin another series from. Good enough?
ARTC: Are there references to the actresses’ roles on Xena / Hercules?
RNB: Not really. I confess, item one in my response to Henry’s followup e-mail was “Who are these people?” Ms. Tydings’ character is president and CEO of “Aphrodite Spacelines,” but that’s about the only reference.
ARTC: How did Ted Raimi [“Joxer”] get into this?
RNB: At the last minute. Otherwise, there would have been a character specially-written for him, too. As it was, I thought he’d make a really great Skip Sagan — but Skip didn’t have that many lines. Bill Ritch, I think, first had the idea of making him Rory. It was casting dead against type and not something I was enthusiastic about at first, but it worked out well. He can come back and do Rory for us as often as he wants.
ARTC: You got a little closer to this year’s production, I think.
RNB: I was able to attend the guests’ rehearsal. Yes, it was in Bill Ritch’s even-teenier-than-usual room in the Hyatt. And it was crammed with all of Bill’s audio equipment; he’d stored it there after Thursday night’s production of “All Hallow’s Moon,” so I ended up wedged between the side of a bed and the bathroom wall. Daniel and Clair Kiernan had the remainder of that side of the bed.
ARTC: Was this a tech rehearsal, too?
RNB: Not a chance! Henry had rigged microphones for the guests, though, so we could record clear voice tracks of their lines. If Henry has that, he can assemble voice tracks from the local ARTC-ians, music and sound effects into a complete program. Henry’s really excellent at that sort of thing.
ARTC: So, did this qualify as fun?
RNB: More like excruciating. Audio production involves take after take. I understand the only thing worse is video / film production. The guests seemed comfortable, though, and that’s what was important. Raimi, in particular, looked like he was having a hell of a time. I had to apologize to Daniel Kiernan, however.
ARTC: Why?
RNB: Daniel — who has played both Rory and Skip, by the way — is kind of ARTC’s King of Ad Libs. Which drives me — as a writer — up a wall. But Raimi was just as bad. In fact, he duplicated a number of Daniel’s ad libs from earlier rehearsals.
ARTC: Did that drive you up a wall?
RNB: Sid Jovi, non sid bovi.
ARTC: Huh?
RNB: Let’s just say that Ted Raimi can get away with some things Daniel can’t.
ARTC: Any problems?
RNB: Aside from the cramp in my calf? Well, the script does have one section where Michiko Sakai asks villainess Aphrodite DeHavilland where she found men corrupt and desperate enough to hijack spaceliners for her. And DeHavilland says, “Oh, I had them on the payroll already. Most of them are shop stewards with the Teamsters’ Union.”
ARTC: I think I see. Ms. Tydings is a member of SAG/AFTRA, right?
RNB: So Henry Howard warned me. I was ready to change her response to “Creative Talent Associates,” but with my luck they’d turn out to be her agents. The second fall-back position was “The William Morris Agency.” As things happened, she didn’t turn a hair.
ARTC: And that Ted Raimi story?
RNB: Oh, yeah! There’s a point in the script where Rory and Sakai strap themselves to the side of a disarmed space-to-space missile and launch it at the bad guys’ space yacht. They light the fuse and the missile takes off, Rory giving a cowboy yell and Sakai screaming in — fully justified, I think — terror. Mr. Raimi read that, paused, and said, “Kinda like that Colonel Kong in Dr. Strangelove, eh?”
ARTC: The scene where Slim Pickens rides an H-bomb down, waving his cowboy hat and yelling?
RNB: Exactly. And I sat there feeling like my mind had been read. I hadn’t intentionally used that imagery, but it was perfect. One way or another, almost all the actors we’ve used in DragonCon ARTC performances have surprised me.
ARTC: Were there any other guests working with ARTC this year?
RNB: Joshua Kane did all our narration and announcing for the Saturday night show. What a voice! And as a matter of fact, we also got Michael Sinelnikoff, from The Lost World TV series, at the very last minute. I think Bill had an idea he might want to play with us, because he [Bill] asked me before the convention about copies of an old script of mine, “The Most-Pierced Man in America.”
ARTC: The what?
RNB: Just what it sounds like. It’s one of an occasional series of faux daytime interview show pieces, hosted by women with names based on old British airplane manufacturing companies — Fiona Leonard as “Jane Handley-Page,” in this case. Mr. Sinelnikoff was “Oleg ‘Pincushion’ Penkovsky, the Most-Pierced Man” —
ARTC: ” — in America.” Any relation to the Soviet double agent?
RNB: Now there’s a character name I feel guilty about. No. The script is based on a segment on piercing I heard on NPR a number of years ago, during my afternoon commute. It was fascinating, but queasy-making. I squirmed quite a bit all the way home, but I didn’t turn it off. The object of the script is to make the audience squirm, too, and it’s been doing that successfully for years. We also traditionally give it to newbie actors at ARTC, just to see how they handle themselves under fire.
ARTC: Oh, fun…
RNB: For us, yes. Mr. Sinelnikoff handled it with perfect aplomb, I have to say.
ARTC: Could I ask what sort of —
RNB: Ear piercing —
ARTC: Big deal.
RNB: — nose rings, scalp rings, tongue studs, nipple rings —
ARTC: Ouch!
RNB: –a three-eighths inch diameter hex-head stainless steel bolt with a castellated nut and cotter pin through the wrist —
ARTC: Oh, my — !
RNB: — and something called a “Prince Albert” —
ARTC: I think we can stop right there!
RNB: That’s what Jane said.
ARTC: *Urg!* Plans for future DragonCons?
RNB: Yet another “Rory Rammer,” I’m sure. I believe the next installment in the “Heinlein Project” is supposed to be “Solution Unsatisfactory,” but you’ll have to ask Daniel Taylor about that. I haven’t yet managed to write anything over twenty-five minutes in length, but — who knows — maybe by next year… Say, isn’t it getting toward dinner time?
ARTC: I don’t have much of an appetite for some reason.
RNB: Pity…
[TAPE ENDS]
(Over the past few years, ARTC has been fortunate enough to have a number of well-known actors — Jonathan Harris of “Lost in Space,” Robert Trebor, Alexandra Tydings, Claire Stansfield, and Ted Raimi of “Xena” and “Hercules” — participate in our DragonCon presentations. The vehicle for these performances has mostly been “Rory Rammer, Space Marshal.” ARTC spoke with Ron Butler, who writes “Rory” for the Company, about the background of the series.)
ARTC: Why “Rory Rammer”? Like “rammers,” the Bussard ramscoop pilots in Larry Niven stories?
RNB: That’s probably in there somewhere; my subconscious sometimes throws up things even I don’t recognize. (Ted Raimi reminded me of that during the rehearsal for “Queen of the Spaceways,” and I’ll tell you about it later, if you’ll remind me.) But the name “Rory Rammer” — I grabbed “Rory” out of the air because I wanted a tough-guy name that might have come out of the Fifties, and thought of Rory Calhoun, the Western actor. “Rammer” was just alliteration. If I’d worked at it, I might have come up with something better, but Rory started out as just a throwaway name in a commercial.
ARTC: A real commercial?
RNB: A fake one. One of ARTC’s other series is “The Crimson Hawk,” a parody-of-slash- homage-to boys’ afternoon adventure radio serials of the Thirties. And some of the episodes include embedded commercials for “Whole Grain Flakes — the Breakfast of Americans!” They’re manufactured by the Cedar Springs Cereal Company, and I had an idea for a one- or two-minute piece about what’s happened to the company since then.
ARTC: And what has happened to them?
RNB: Well, they’re now “CSC International Comestibles, Inc.” and they make a breakfast food named “AdverCereal.” It has a sugar- and-testosterone frosting, and the spokesperson is a pit-bull plaintiff’s attorney, a sort of nightmare version of Alan Dershowitz.
ARTC: I don’t see where a Fifties space- adventure show fits in to this.
RNB: I’m getting there. The “AdverCereal” piece starts out with a letter from an old lady — whose name even I can’t recall — writing to ask about [Here Butler assumes a really terrible Monty-Pythonish old-lady voice] “Whatever happened to the swell folks at the Cedar Springs Cereal Company? You know, they used to sponsor ‘The Crimson Hawk,’ and ‘Rory Rammer, Space Marshal.’ ”
ARTC: Will you stop doing that voice? It’s annoying. And ageist, if not downright sexist.
RNB: Sorry.
ARTC: Okay, that gave you a name. A name isn’t a series. It’s not even an idea for a series. Well, maybe in Hollywood —
RNB: Oh, I’d say “Roseanne” tells me everything any sensible person needs to know —
ARTC: As may be. You had a lead character’s name, nothing to go with it, no supporting characters, no background information, and no plots.
RNB: Oh, those are easy. What I needed was a punch line.
ARTC: A punch line? Writing fiction starts with a punch line?
RNB: If you’re writing comedy. If you’re writing drama, you need some central image that the plot builds to and then develops from. C.S. Forester said his novel “Payment Deferred” started with the image of the main character in his bedroom with his wife’s dead body — and there’s a knock on the door.
ARTC: He must have been a hit at parties.
RNB: Is acting obtuse supposed to put me at ease? I said I was writing comedy. “Rory” would be part-homage, part-parody of Fifties radio space adventures, the same way “Crimson Hawk” bowed to boys’ radio adventure serials of the Thirties. Parodies need to be humorous, or they’re just imitations. And I find it easier to write comedy than drama.
ARTC: I thought “drama is easy, comedy is hard.”
RNB: Actually, I think that’s “Dying is easy…” It seems to be the reverse for me. Maybe it’s a matter of expectations. If you write bad comedy, people just don’t laugh at it. If you aim at drama or tragedy, and fail, people go, “Geez, that’s sentimentalist crap.” Or “mawkish.” Or —
ARTC: I get your point.
RNB: The punch line of the first “Rory Rammer” script [“Eye in the Sky”] was the Hubble Space Telescope.
ARTC: Is that funny? I have a calendar in my office of Hubble photographs. They look great.
RNB: This is the year 2000. We’re living in the future now.
ARTC: Huh?
RNB: Never mind. Literary allusion. Remember, this [the first script] was being written in the early Nineties. The Hubble had been launched with faulty optics, and it took a couple of Shuttle missions to set it right. Cost billions of dollars. So the punch line of the script — the only joke in it, really — was Rory saying, “Who would believe the Department of Science would launch a space telescope costing millions of dollars without checking the optics first? Sheesh! What sort of idiots do you think we are?”
ARTC: Ha.
RNB: Look, it took me a couple of hours to write, ran four minutes, and got a big laugh around Bill [Ritch’s] pool table. I know my audience, and that’s all I expected from it.
ARTC: So why didn’t it die there, as the in- joke it was?
RNB: I guess because it had so much potential for better — or at least lengthier — things, the same way that “Crimson Hawk” and Daniel Taylor’s “Bumper’s Crossroads” grew out of little throwaway scraps in Thomas Fuller’s “Don’t Touch That Dial!” proposal. They all tapped into radio genres that we knew well enough to play with and loved well enough to joke about. And a sufficiently robust series framework can also take present-day references without breaking down, so it’s not just all backwards-looking nostalgia.
ARTC: What genre was “Rory”?
RNB: Shows like “Rocky Jones, Space Ranger.” “Space Patrol.”
ARTC: Buck Rogers —
RNB: No. Definitely not.
ARTC: What’s the difference?
RNB: “Buck Rogers” and “Flash Gordon” are from the Thirties, same as “Crimson Hawk.” “Rocky Jones” and “Space Patrol” are late Forties-to-mid Fifties.
ARTC: Like I said: What stands between them?
RNB: The Second World War.
ARTC: I guess I’m missing your point here. Not that you’re being real clear.
RNB: The war was a technological and a social revolution, and it showed in the entertainment products of the two eras. Let me get the nuts-and-bolts technical part of that out of the way first —
ARTC: I’d expect that. You’re an engineer.
RNB: Harrumph. I hope my profession only adds another dimension to my writing, of a sort not to be found in the work of people with – – say — a degree in medieval French poetry. Anyway, what does a spaceship in a “Buck Rogers” serial look like?
ARTC: A little model on strings.
RNB: Which it was. To me, they’ve always looked like silver-painted shoes with fins. My point is that nobody knew what a spaceship should look like. Their best guess was based on Thirties airplanes, which is why you see fixed landing gear and tailwheels on some of them. They were vague about space, too. Fly into space and you might go to Mars — you might go to “Mongo.” Who knew? Space was fantasyland, and they projected the usual sort of adventure stories into it.
ARTC: This was different after the war?
RNB: Rockets turned real, in an awful sort of way. Air forces were still flying open- cockpit biplanes when it started. By the last year of the war, Germany was firing ballistic missiles from the continent of Europe through the fringes of space, to land in downtown London. After that, if you wanted to show a spaceship in your science fiction movie, you inserted some scratchy footage of a V-2 rocket launch. It was a real thing.
ARTC: Science fiction had turned real.
RNB: In a lot of ways. Rockets — spaceships. Radar — seeing things far away, in the dark. Penicillin — magic cures for disease. And the atom bomb. This isn’t my insight. Robert Heinlein, Willy Ley, a lot of others made the same point at the time.
ARTC: Okay, let’s move on to the “social” side of it.
RNB: Sure. Who launched Flash Gordon to the planet Mongo? NASA?
ARTC: I thought it was Dr. Zarkov.
RNB: Two points! A lone inventor-cum-mad scientist building an interplanetary spaceship in his garage, and paying for it out of petty cash.
ARTC: All right, that sounds silly now.
RNB: But that was the popular stereotype of technical innovation in America, pre-World War 2. Henry Ford. The Wright brothers working out of their bicycle shop. Thomas Edison — not that he was really a “lone inventor.” That was public relations. But that’s how people thought about these things. And nobody was going to spend government money on wildeyed space-rocket schemes.
ARTC: Things were different after the war?
RNB: During the war, the government essentially took over the economy of the country, spent everyone into the poorhouse, and did big, big projects. Building an army from scratch in eighteen months. Manufacturing hundreds of thousands of tanks and airplanes. The invasion of Europe. Setting up a global air transportation system, whether they were delivering packages or bombs. Inventing radar and sonar. Jet airplanes —
ARTC: And the atomic bomb.
RNB: Yes. The Manhattan Project was the new archetype for technological progress: Government funding, run by university scientists, and always with an eye to military applications. It’s only with the rise of the personal computer and the Internet that the paradigm has shifted.
ARTC: Para– ?
RNB: Call it twenty cents. Before the war, space travel was wild adventure in homebuilt rocketships. After the war, it was bureaucrats and the military and —
ARTC: Cops
RNB: The Space Patrol. Or the “Space Marshals,” in my case. I tried “Space Sheriff,” but it was hard to say without spitting.
ARTC: Okay, scratch out Buck Rogers. So your background was all pre-fabricated?
RNB: The bare bones, anyway. I had most of my fun during the writing of that first episode with the names.
ARTC: “Skip Sagan,” boy wonder?
RNB: Carl Sagan was still alive and well then. It may look like a cruel joke now, but I’m kind of stuck with the name. And it suggests intelligence, which I want from Rory’s sidekick.
ARTC: Intelligence? Skip? You’re kidding.
RNB: — coupled with incredible naiveté. Okay, maybe the intelligence doesn’t show through too well, but I’ve been trying to avoid the Wesley Crusher-ization of Skip. He gets used a lot as a fireplug for Rory to explain things to.
ARTC: “Professor Irwin Feynman?”
RNB: Is there to explain things to Rory. There is a scientific point to be made in a lot of episodes, you know, and that’s Feynman’s job. His last name is from Richard Feynman, the inventor of quantum electrodynamics — who has also since died. The first name is from Irwin Corey, a professor of a completely different sort.
ARTC: “Kryssa Feynman,” his daughter?
RNB: The maiden-in-distress-to-be-rescued in that first episode. I had intended her to be a sort of Tess Trueheart figure to Rory’s Dudley Do-Right, but it hasn’t worked out. Kryssa’s damn smart and far less impressed with Rory than he is with her. Plus he acts like a perfect jackass whenever he gets near her. It’s hormones. I think. I won’t talk about her name. That part might be actionable, to a sufficiently aggressive attorney.
ARTC: “Rex Gorbachev,” space pirate?
RNB: Please to say “privateer.”
ARTC: Was that supposed to be a Russian accent?
RNB: It was trying to be.
ARTC: “Gorbachev?” Have you no respect for anything?
RNB: Certainly not for things that don’t deserve respect. Mikhail Gorbachev is the Homer Simpson of late-Cold War geopolitics. The man who tried to put duct tape all over the Soviet Union and ended up breaking it. I’d make fun of him even if he was dead!
ARTC: Uh-huh. If Gorbachev is Homer Simpson, does that make Ronald Reagan Mr. Burns?
RNB: Matt Groening would doubtless agree with you, but I refuse to push the metaphor that far.
ARTC: Buck-buck-ba-caw! “Space Station J. Edgar Hoover?”
RNB: It was 1985. Who knew? Nobody is going to name anything after Hoover nowadays without raising a snicker, but back then — and in Rory’s world — what better name for a space station used by a federal law enforcement agency?
ARTC: I’ve been meaning to ask about that. The announcer’s introduction says: “…the far- off future days of 1985 A.D. After men have landed on the Moon!” Why 1985?
RNB: Well, it’s obviously not our 1985, the real 1985 —
ARTC: Aren’t history and reality social constructs?
RNB: Go walk through a wall. This is 1985 as seen from about 1950 or 1955. Think about it this way: thirty-five years before 1950 was 1915. The United States hadn’t yet gotten into the First World War. Nobody had yet flown the Atlantic. Radio was brand- new. Take the rate of technological advance over those thirty-five years, and tack it onto the state of things in 1950, and you get Rory Rammer’s 1985 A.D. Cities on the Moon, colonies on Mars —
ARTC: Hasn’t turned out that way, has it?
RNB: Let’s just say I’m severely disappointed in certain parts of the last thirty years. On the other hand, we managed to get rid of the Soviet Union without going through the Presto War.
ARTC: Wait a minute! The Presto War? Where’s that?
RNB: Well, it’s not in that first script. But it’s in Rex Gorbachev’s character sketch in the “Rory Rammer Bible.” Rex was the Communist Party General Secretary in Sverdlovsk until the Soviet Union collapsed after the Presto War.
ARTC: There’s a scriptwriter’s guide for this? You sat down and made up all these details?
RNB: Yep. It was fun.
ARTC: Out of your head?
RNB: Yes.
ARTC: You must be. Doesn’t a “bible” cramp your freedom to write stories however you want?
RNB: I find it actually stimulates my thinking and suggests new plots, so on the whole it’s an asset. Plus it helps me keep things straight. I keep trying to call Rex Gorbachev “Max,” and I’ve spelled “Kryssa” at least three different ways in different scripts. And I’m not going to hand you any more straight lines like that last one.
ARTC: Any possibility of putting the guide online?
RNB: I don’t have any problem with that. Why don’t you look and see if there’s a link around here somewhere…
ARTC: We still haven’t talked about the DragonCon performances.
RNB: And it’s getting close to noon. Why don’t we take a break and start back after lunch?
ARTC: Fine. There’s a Blimpie’s down the street.
RNB: I prefer Subway, actually, but if you’re buying —
ARTC: I’m not buying you lunch.
RNB: What? I’m doing this big-deal interview and the Company won’t even spring for lunch? What a bunch of cheap —
[TAPE ENDS]
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