Burbank Convention Report Part 1 - Kate Vernon and Bear McCreary
I was flying solo at this con with no one to take notes while I played shutterbug. Yipes! Therefore, any and all use of quotes in this post should be assumed to be descriptive in nature and not anybody's actual words. I also won't bother to repeat those items that I included in my news dump yesterday. But first, a tip of the hat goes to Brandy2Dog who purchased her Gold Member ticket at last year's convention, but was unable to attend and sold her ticket to me only about a week before the event. So thank you Ro, and I hope you'll be able to make it next year.


Kate Vernon

Kate was the first guest for the BSG convention and therefore the first to have to contend with the ridiculously remote placement of the microphones for the audience Q&A. It felt like hopping a train to Siberia in order to ask a question of the person on stage, and it forced the guests on stage to keep shifting back and forth on their chairs from side to side to see the person talking to them at the far side of the room. (Baaaaaaad layout, Creation folks....very bad layout!)

Kate is Canadian and she described the Canadian TV industry as being very different from that in Hollywood. It's a smaller community in Canada, and everybody knows just about everybody. In Canada actors tend to focus more on just staying steadily employed and going from one job to the next, whereas in Hollywood it's all about becoming "a star". She was actually just about done with acting and ready to settle down and focus on being a mom when the offer came in to appear as Ellen Tigh on Battlestar Galactica. She didn't know anything about the show, and was asked to show up on the set the very next day. Since she was just about to give up the business anyway, she wasn't about to kill herself hopping a red eye to Vancouver and scrambling to make arrangements for her daughter. Instead, she told her manager, "If they want me, they can wait till Monday." They did wait, and Kate turned up on Monday for makeup and wardrobe, then had 4000 pages of dialogue to cram for the very next day. When she came to the set, Edward James Olmos (who was directing) came right up and gave her a big hug and from that point on he and Michael Hogan were like her bookends of support. She felt like she was being welcomed into a family, but it was tough work right off the bat. Her first scene was the confrontation in Baltar's lab with tons of dialogue, cameras shifting and moving and cutting back and forth, and she still wasn't even sure who all these characters were and what the heck the story was. Then she had to jump right into getting sloppy drunk with Michael Hogan. The dinner party was both difficult and a joy to shoot, because there was soooo much dialogue, but a lot of the reactions that we see on the screen were completely ad-libbed because the actors were all so comfortable with just being "in the moment" and letting that carry them.

I asked Kate if she could clarify whether or not Ellen was telling the truth about how she came to be aboard a luxury liner on the day of the Cylon attack...because frankly her story sounds like a load of crap, as though she's covering her ass. Was it supposed to sound suspicious because they originally intended to revisit the subject at some point and reveal the truth...or was that fishy tale actually real? Kate said that they did originally intend to reveal more about that subject and possibly have it all uncovered as a fabrication, but the writers just didn't really have a plan as to how to do that and they never got around to it. (Ha! I knew it! Most of us did probably.)

When she found out that Ellen was going to die, she cried. Hollywood tends to shun every woman over 40, so actresses like Kate have very few juicy roles come their way, and Ellen was about as good as they get. She cried for days before her death scene and for days after...although she has been back since to film those flashbacks/hallucinations later in season 3 and will do so again for season 4.

One of the best questions of the session was for her reaction to finding out that Saul (who killed her for being a Cylon collaborator) was actually a Cylon himself. All in good fun, she ranted, "I was furious at him! He kills me for helping them. I even took the poison from him and drank it myself so he wouldn't have to give it to me, the wimp. And then he turns out to be one them! What a bastard!" So this clarified for me that Ellen really did know what was in the cup when she took it. I wasn't sure about that before now.

She was also asked what it was like working with Dean Stockwell and here is an example of where keyboards just aren't sufficient to pass things along (and kids under 17 should skip this paragraph). They first met on the day they filmed the "frak me, frak me frak me!" scene. He's old enough to be her grandfather, and she's supposed to have angry sex with him. Eww! First, she declined to get naked, choosing a kind of negligee instead. Then Dean, who was puffing a large stogie when they met, told her he didn't want to kiss her in the scene. She was okay with that. For the run-through, a stand-in took Dean's place. So this guy had to just lay there...while Kate climbed on top of him and...well, if you saw the scene, you know what she did. It was all supposed to be painful, hurtful and full of spite, and the poor stand-in just had to lay there while she went to town on him. It was very difficult for her to do the run-throughs (for obvious reasons I'm sure) and she just wasn't able to really get into the emotion of it, especially since Dean was standing just off the set, watching and puffing away on his cigar. Then it finally came time to shoot, the stand-in left, Dean came in and laid down and she climbed on top of him. Then she and Dean just pretended to torture each other and it all worked. "Frak me, frak me frak me!" Then they got up, shook hands and said, "Let's have lunch." She describes him as a consummate (no pun intended) professional and a very sweet man...but what an introduction.

Kate was asked if she and Michael were ever given a history for Saul and Ellen (how they met, etc.) or if they had ever come up with one themselves. The writers never did supply them with any back story information, and she and Michael never developed it either, choosing instead to just focus on the moment. But if it were up to her, she thinks that Ellen would probably have run her own company back at the colonies and they might have known each other for a long time before getting married. She thinks perhaps that they tried and failed to have children, and that might be a contributing factor in their dysfunctional state.

Best question of the session: Why doesn't Galactica ever run out of liquor or cigars? Kate agreed it's a mystery. They can't find earth but they know where the stash is.

Bear McCreary

This session started off with a showing of the 20-minute video feature that was premiered at Comic Con, a look at the making of the music for the show. Bear had hoped that this video would be included in the DVD release, but it doesn't look like that will happen now. He intends to make an additional video to coincide with a live Battlestar Galactica concert next April. (So keep your eyes and ears open for ticket info folks!) If they can't get these videos included in the series' DVD release, he hopes to get permission for use of the footage from the show so that they can pursue a separate DVD or Internet release.

There will also be a forthcoming soundtrack CD release that will include music that is not on the previous CD's, extended cuts of some tracks, and even some music composed for the show that was never actually used in the broadcast cuts.

Bear is now hard at work on the music for season 4. He mentioned there is a 5-6 minute sequence that the producers needed some upbeat light-hearted music for...and they couldn't find anything suitable in the show's existing catalog. Three seasons worth of music to choose from, and nothing light hearted and upbeat! So he had to compose something completely original for that sequence. Glad to hear it won't be all dark and traumatic next season.

Next up...Cliff Simon, Michael Shanks, and dessert with Tahmoh Penikett.