Writerly Words of Wisdom

I'm still reading Writing Science Fiction and Fantasy Television, and still enjoying it muchly. I thought I'd share a couple of what I thought were highly amusing quotes.

Paul Donovan of Lexx, upon being asked whether he was insulated from charges of sexism concerning the character of Zev due to the fact that she starts out as "fat and unattractive" and is, after all, still exactly the same person after her transformation into the beautiful love slave:

We're not that inclined to defend that position because I just think, 'What would I like to watch on television?' I'm more inclined to put the remote down when I see a cute girl on screen. I looked at a number of television shows at that time, and I was thinking, what are they doing? Didn't they learn anything from Hugh Hefner? I find it humorous that other filmmakers deny that they do this on purpose, but yes, every time we do a shower scene, there's a naked girl in it. That's what we do. It's gratuitous; all our shower scenes are gratuitious, but I don't have a problem with that. We're pandering! It's the same with Kai. He is a very cute guy, and he is a female fantasy and very much constructed as that. We chose Michael McManus to play Kai in part because I've worked with him before, but he's also suffered perversely in Canada. He'd be cast as a lawyer and the people in charge would say, 'No, he's too good looking to be a lawyer, he's not believable,' and I'm thinking, 'Are these people retarded?' They don't care, because their money doesn't come from ratings.

You've got to appreciate that kind of honesty! And, OK, I admit it, Kai's sheer eye-candy value was probably a large part of the reason why I didn't pick the remote up, myself, during some of the stupider Lexx episodes.

Ahem. Moving right along.

Here's Star Trek's D.C. Fontana on the subject of technobabble:

One of the classic examples when I go back to the first show -- and people have told this story before and so have I, because it's true -- was when Theodore Sturgeon, bless his heart, had written an entire page of dialogue for... I think it was 'Amok Time', to turn the ship about so that we could go back to Vulcan. Ted was doing it out of technical expertise, because he had been a merchant marine sailor, and he knew what was involved. So he literally wrote an entire page of dialogue to turn the ship around. Gene [Roddenberry] looked at it, and he struck out the whole thing -- I was standing there next to him when he did it -- and wrote in one line: 'Reverse course!' That's all you need to do, so I don't necessarily agree with techno-babble, because most of the time you really, really do not need it.

Ah, if only some of the people who worked on certain later Trek shows had just followed Gene's lead...