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Ricky Manning - Farscape's Co-Executive producer and writer of many sterling episodes.
Introducing Mr Manning
Can you tell us who you are and how you're involved with Farscape?
I'm Ricky Manning, I'm an Executive Producer and writer on Farscape, and I executive produced and wrote.
Can you give us an idea of what that entailed?
Basically I follow in the footsteps of the multi-talented David Kemper and basically wrote stuff, kept an eye on other writers, dealt with actors, watched rough cuts, did all sorts of things down there in Australia on the creative side of the business.
Shanghaied into 'scape
How did you start working on Farscape?
I actually came in to pitch an idea to Henson way back when I pitched to Marcie Ross. I had a space series in the back of my head that I was flouting around town and Marcie said, "Well, we love your idea, it's really good except we've got this other space show that's been in limbo for a couple of years and we're thinking it just might come out of limbo soon. It's called Space Chase." I nodded and said "Okay, fine, when it goes please think about me," and lo and behold it actually happened and they did think about me and I came in.
I'd known David Kemper from Star Trek. He'd come in and done a freelance script on Star Trek when I was on The Next Generation, so he remembered me, but in spite of that he brought me in. I met Rockne O'Bannon and pitched some ideas to them and wrote one of them into a script called Throne For A Loss.
They must have liked it because the next thing I knew I woke up in Australia and I was on the show. They shanghai-ed me.
Working with the boss
Was Rockne very hands on?
It varied as the series went on. The whole thing evolved � the first season the writers were mainly here in the US and sending pages down to Australia, and Rockne and David would be back and forth. Even toward the end of the year I was back and forth to Australia in season one.
I've done that on other shows and generally it works better if all the writers are down there with the production. It's more fun, you get more immediate feedback, the actors can come into your office and complain about lines and it's just simpler. Besides the fact that there's a seventeen hour time difference, which makes phone calls a little bit tricky when the writers are in one place and the show is in the other place.
So come season two it was decided that we were all going to be down in Australia all together working on it, which was a terrible hardship because Sydney is just a horrible place to work and I miss it! Rock decided not to come down to Sydney so he stayed up here [in L.A.] and helped us out with some scripts and rewrites and things like that.
It's the people that make it
Could Farscape have worked with a different cast?
It's hard for me to imagine that at this point, because to me the cast and the characters have merged, they've fused into one large indistinguishable grey mass and it's really difficult to imagine anybody else playing any of the roles.
Part of that is because when you start to write for a specific actor you start to see what they bring to the character. They've got their own ideas and their own little twists on what you write and you start to write to that. Sometimes the analogy I use is a composer who writes a concerto for a specific concert pianist, knowing that it will suit that person's particular skills. Then hearing it you say, "Oh they've really done much better than what I gave them." So it's hard to imagine with any other cast for me.
The thought is sort of mind boggling unless it was an alternative reality Farscape, which is certainly not beyond us to try that.
Creating characters
Did the cast have much input into the development of their characters?
Definitely, the cast had a lot of input. Which for many of the cast was new, and not something they were used to.
There's a whole gamut of television shows, [where] sometimes the actors are just, "Come here, stand here, stand on this mark, say your lines, go home, take your pay check". Other shows are much more open on bringing the actors in and saying, "What do you think about this? Is this working for you? Is this not working for you? What can you bring to it?" Farscape was more toward the latter, which was a lot of fun for everybody involved, because we would have actors coming up and saying "I like this, I don't like this, could you do this for me? Could you do that for me?"
That really only works well when you have a committed cast who are in it more for the show than for their own egos, and that was certainly the case on Farscape. It was never a case of an actor coming over to us and saying, "I don't have enough to do," or, "I think I should be doing this." It was more like, "What about this? Would this be fun?"
We had a very generous cast that would also not hesitate to say, "Look, I think this is more something Chiana should be doing than what I should be doing," so it was always about the show first and never about themselves. Which is marvellous.
Those who lead
In some ways would you say it's fair to say it's been quite a cast led show?
I think all shows are that way to some extent. Whenever you bring on somebody you have a certain conception of what their character is.
Certainly with Farscape, even from the beginning the idea in Rock and David's heads was, we're going to start these characters at an almost stereotypical place. we've got D'Argo the warrior, we've got Aeryn the soldier, we've got Zhaan the mystic, the peacenik [and] so forth. We're going to start with that, so when people come and see all these funny looking people in funny looking make-up at least they've got something to hold onto right from the word go.
We knew the characters weren't going to stay there, they were going to get off that very quickly, but at least we have a common starting place. [So] now you're going to get a surprise, okay, D'Argo was a warrior but he's also got a wife and child, or had. Zhaan is a mystic and a peacenik but she's also got a temper. We'll let the writing take the characters where they want to go and we'll also see what the cast brings to it. If we see that someone has a great way of playing X we'll start writing in X.
There is that great � going to use a big word here - synergy that happens, or hopefully happens, where everybody's making music in one big happy family.
Best episode
Which are the episodes that you worked on came out the best?
Oh boy. it's hard to pick one because, as I'm fond of saying, [my writing] got improved quite a lot on the show.
Normally the lot of a television writer is, you write it, it's in your head, it's magnificent, it's large, it's got scope, it's got perfect acting because you're hearing all the voices in your head and then there's the actual mundane necessity of actually getting it on film with actors and props that don't work and tight shooting schedules and not enough money and so forth.
So almost always you're looking at it saying "Well that's an 60 per cent of what I imagined it would be, or 70 or 80 per cent." On Farscape more often than not it was 110, 120 per cent of what I wrote down. People actually took it further than the miserable pages that I handed in, which is marvellous.
So it's hard to single out a particular episode because I think almost universally we were all amazed by what everybody brought to the table and how everything came up as a result. That said, probably the one I'm fondest of is Won't Get Fooled Again because there was just something about that one. Everybody just jumped into the insanity of it and really got in the spirit of it. It was very strange, it was a frightening episode for everybody involved.
Farscape did a lot of those where [we felt], "This one worries us, this one could really be good or it could really be awful," but Rock and David always encouraged us, "We've got to go for that, we've got to take chances, we've got to go out there. If we're going to fail we're going to fail big". So in that way they are all my favourites.
Greatness from grief.
Which was the worst episode to do?
I wouldn't say that there were any...
Which one gave you the most grief to do? Gave you the most hassle while you were doing it?
Oh well, that's a different question because sometimes the ones that give you the most grief turn out well.
I was often given the task of resolving the previous season's cliffhanger which was always a huge amount of grief, because David would do such a fine of writing me into a corner. So for instance Season Of Death was an absolute bear because I had a main character who was on a table with his head open, who'd lost the power of speech. The only creature that can save him is lying dead on the floor, or so we think, the villain has what he wants, he's accomplished his goal and there is no reason on earth he should stick around, he should be gone and doing is nefarious things on the other side of the galaxy, oh, and by the way I've got a dead Interion that I've got to resuscitate, somehow or other, by the end of forty-four minutes of film.
So with all that and more it was like, "Okay, this is an interesting puzzle to solve." David didn't exactly have all the solution on place when he wrote us into this corner. He was quite fond of that every season, he'd go, "Okay Ricky, here's one I'm going to give you this season to deal with." So a lot of sweat went into those sorts of episodes.
Terra Firma was another that was very very tough to write, possibly because it was going to Earth for real and not as a fake, not as a gag, not as an alien trick or any of that stuff, but for real. We also knew where it fell in the course of the season and what was going to happen next, and so I had again forty-four minutes to get in everything that could possibly be said and get out, which was very very tough. That episode to me almost should have been a two-parter because there was just so much to get in and so many things that one would have liked to have said there.
They are all challenging in that regard. There's never too little to do, there always seems to be too much, and that's just part of Farscape.
Talking heads
Did you also work on Constellation of Doubt?
No I didn't. David had come up with a number of character for Unrealized Reality, and had showed me a tape of some of the interviews and said, "You can use any or all of these people in 4.13 [Terra Firma], and it would be nice to have some continuity." We looked at the tape and said, "Oh well this character I can use," or "This character maybe or maybe not."
So part of the thought process that went into 4.13 was which of these people did I want to see again, like Olivia. Sarah Enright was a character who we just thought was wonderful.
I never would have thought in Terra Firma of dealing with Crichton's sister, without having seen Sarah Enright do her interviews early on. Caroline, the ex-girlfriend, was another one, [I felt], l definitely wanted to deal with an ex-girlfriend of some sort and since it's Caroline that's been set up in [Unrealized Reality], she'll come back in 13.
Then David turned around and used some of those people again in 17 [A Constellation of Doubt] and came up with new ones, filled in some of the gaps and [covered] some of the issues that I couldn't address in Terra Firma because I just didn't have the space. So it was a little bit of a tennis game there.
Battle for Earth
Do the writers fight over who gets to do the earth episodes, because they seem to be the ones that stick in peoples' minds the most?
To some extent they're also very tricky. They're also tough from a production standpoint because you've got locations involved, so they're an extra amount of work just on the getting it on film part of the equation.
I remember Justin [Monjo] sticking a flag in Kansas very quickly. I think that was one that he just warmed to immediately, and said "I want to do that one", and so it was, "Okay, you've got it, it's yours." So, yeah to some extent, but we do enough episodes on Earth that there were enough to go around.
A different universe
What's the difference between the or ethos of Farscape and other shows you've worked on?
The ethos of Farscape was pretty much anything goes, which for a writer is extremely liberating. It was actually tough for some freelancer [writers] that came in to give in to that anarchy, that free willingness.
We learn to write television in a certain way, a very artificial television way, and we don't even realise that we're doing it until we're challenged to break out of that mould, to not write the standard clichés and not write the standard scenes with the standard buttons on the end and the standard ad breaks and all the things that television tells you to do and all the things that television also tells you you can't do.
It's like, "Well you never do this in television so you can't write it here," and we'd be saying, "Oh go ahead and write." It's a thought process to get beyond saying, "Okay, they actually want me to go in this direction instead of pushing me in this other direction."
So it was a lot of fun in that regard, and like no other show that I"d really worked on, it was constant encouragement to push the boundaries as far as you could, and even fall on your face if necessary.
Do you think you have fallen on your face anywhere?
Oh now and then certainly, but I would defend our batting average against most anything else I've worked on. I think we've got enough pretty good shows to forgive us our less than pretty good shows.
Naming names
Farscape has the most wonderful episode titles. Was there ever a competition to come up with the best ones?
Funny you should mention that, because when we started the series there was no thought to titles at all, because we weren"t running titles on the screen. So the scripts would have titles of just whatever it was to remind us what the episode was.
PK Tech Girl is not one of our finer titles I don't think, and if you look at some of the first season titles they're pretty hopeless because there was never a thought that they would go anywhere.
What we didn't realise in this age of the internet and so forth, was that the Sci Fi Channel would run a schedule box listing the episodes, and they would have the titles there. So the titles would immediately get on the internet and everybody would say, "Okay next week's is called such and such," even though the title didn't appear on screen. So it became clear to us that we'd better start putting some thought into our titles, which we did. Usually, oftentimes in the rough cut stage if not before, we'd all look at each other and say, "Okay, twenty bucks to the guy who comes up with the best title," and we'd bat things around.
Sometimes we knew what the title was fairly early on � the writer would have one he or she felt strongly about. Other times we'd be literally in the rough cut, and the thing would still be untitled and then we'd have a little bit of friendly competition among us to come up with it. Sometimes Andrew [Prowse] would pop one out or David would pop one out or Justin would pop one out and we'd say, "That's it."
It was kind of a freewheeling process. "Okay, please title this episode for us somebody".
Old favourite
Do you have a favourite appalling pun title?
Throne For A Loss is dear to my heart because it was my first one. I was pretty much ready to hand in the script and I said, "You know I really don't have a title for this thing yet," and I just came up with a list of about 30 of them, again not knowing how the show was going to go in terms of titles.
I came up with some serious and meaningful [titles] and some just silly, and some just all over the board and I gave them the list and David and Rock both got Throne For A Loss and started laughing and said "Oop, that's it, that's the one" so I said "Okay, that's it then".
Then down the line I grew fond of simple one word titles that had double or triple meanings, like Nerve and Incubator. I love those simple titles that work on several levels and I'm also not beyond the occasional wave to sometime else. Nerve is a Dick Francis book - my wife is a Dick Francis fan so that one was a really backhanded wave to my lovely wife Sheryl as well.
Sex, death and destruction
Would it be fair to say that the other writers do the sex and you deal out the death and destruction in Farscape?
No it wouldn't be fair. Oh you mean in the writing part?
Yes
I'd have to look at the episodes and see. It would be interesting, somebody should probably sit down and make a chart of whose episodes are the most this versus the most that.
It wouldn't really mean that much though because there's a lot of rewriting that goes on. The audience really doesn"t know, nor should it, how much each of us contributes to an episode, those that don't have our names on them. It's not as though we deal them out, saying, "OK, this episode has to be a Justin Monjo episode, so he gets to do it." To some extent yes, to some extent no, it's like "Well, Justin's free, so he's doing episode whatever, hope you like what you have to do in this part of the story Justin."
Certainly there are some episodes that we say, "Oh yeah, I want this one, or you can have this one," but other than that [not really]. And David always likes to do the season enders because he likes to end on such a happy note all the time.
Never enough time
How long does it take you to write a script.
As much time as I have minus two days, basically. It varies.
There's never enough time. Sometimes, usually on the early episodes in the season, one has a little more time, just because the train hasn't started rolling that hard yet. It's hard to say because we're all doing so many different things at once, it's not like we go away and have an unbroken block of time to write.
I would say generally, roughly, that usually we'll meet en masse for about three or four days to break the story in a group, either in the office or, in the off-seasons, usually in David's kitchen. [We have] a big whiteboard and say, "What's this episode about, what are the major story beats we're going to have, what's the body count going to be roughly, how many holes are we going to dig ourselves into." The show in the round numbers.
The writer will then go off and take a couple of days to a week, not unbroken and come up with a beat sheet. Act one scene one is this, act one scene two is this, here's the ad break, here's the big scene in act four. Then we all look at that and mark it up in blood and red ink, and the writer takes another shot at it.
Once we get the beat sheet in roughly workable shape, [so that] pretty much the bones of the story are there, the writer goes off to do a draft, which can be anywhere from a couple of weeks to, when we're in dire straits, three days or less. I should say, three days and nights. Then there's the generally interminable re-write process, which happens all the way up and through the shooting. Sometimes the script will go through a couple of drafts and be filmed, and sometimes the script will go through a couple of drafts and many, many colours [i.e. different drafts] of rewrites.
I have written a first draft in as little as a long weekend. On average I would say that if you give me two weeks I'm a happy writer. Because then I can postpone it for a week and a half and then write it in three days.
Fleshing out Scorpius
Tell us about writing the character of Scorpius.
Scorpius was actually a character that Dave and Rock had talked about way way back, before I was even a gleam in their eye. So they had ideas about the character, and of course, by the time that we got around to doing the character, the show had evolved to a certain point, and those ideas had changed. [Then] Wayne Pygram came in and added so much to it, and Dave Elsey's design brought so much to it again, that the synergy made the character so much more than was originally envisaged.
I think I was the first to write casting sides [descriptions] for the character, and I had written a scene, which later I used most of in Nerve, of Scorpius interrogating John in the Aurora Chair, where Scorpius goes into a big rap about his life. Basically John says, "I'm not telling you anything, go away," and Scorpius says, "Let me explain something to you, Mr Crichton," and goes into this big spiel about his life. I believe it still exists in the script, intact, or maybe it got cut out later on.
He talks about being a half-Scarran, half-Sebacean, in the script, he says, "Let me tell you how patient I was. I had this jones against the Scarrans and it took me ten years, and a lot of research and a lot of resources and I developed a virus that would kill all Scarrans and I gave it to them, and now the Scarran species is entirely extinct and I killed them all. And that's been my life's work, so therefore, Mr Crichton, I can well afford to be patient with you." Basically, this is the big bad guy you're dealing with.
Rock and David loved that back-story, and said, "Let's not use it up, let's not let him succeed, let's keep the Scarrans alive. We're going to want to see these people some day, we're going to want to keep that as his motivation. Let's not use it all up in a back-story speech." So, that became the character in a different way than I had envisioned. It became an open business in his life, instead of a closed case.
Keeping Promises
Tell us about writing Aeryn's return to Farscape, in Promises.
Promises was an interesting departure because [I thought], "OK, for once I'm not going to write the season opener, I'll let David clean up his own mess, and then Justin will come in for a two-parter, and then we'll go off on another adventure and it won't be until episode five that I'll come back."
Then we discover that by episode five, we still haven't resolved very much of the back-story, that had been left hanging in the cliff-hanger, so I had a lot more to do than I had originally envisioned. This time, to some extent, I took the Kemper approach, which is, ignore most of it and leave it until later, hoping that somewhere down the line we'll explain it. And hopefully, somewhere down the line we will.
It was fun to bring the couple back together again, but, of course, in the twisted Farscape way of including Scorpius into the mix, and the fun and games that that involved. Going in, we knew there were certain things we wanted to do. Scorpius is going to come on the boat and be around for a while, [and] having Scorpius and Harvey around is probably going to be a little much.
It makes sense to lose Harvey, for the moment at least, to try and keep things a little bit simpler so that someone watching the show for the first time isn't absolutely completely confused, they're just 80 to 90 per cent confused.
So those were the rough parameters I had, and after that it was up to me what to do as far as where [Aeryn] had been and what she'd been up to and so forth. We do get some explanation of it, but not that much. In true Farscape fashion.
Aeryn in rubber
What were the reasons behind putting Aeryn in a coolant suit in Promises?
That came to me along the way, because it felt like since she's going to keep closemouthed about what she's got into, and what she's doing with Scorpius, John's going to be wondering, as the audience will be.
In Farscape fashion, we want to see some of those worries. Instead of [John] just saying to D'Argo, "I'm worried that he put a thing in her head," let's see that, let's show some of the nightmare scenarios. Then it hit me. If putting a chip in Crichton's head turned him into Crichton/Scorpius, if he fears that something similar is happening to Aeryn, she's been brainwashed or chipped by Scorpius, then let's put Claudey in the make-up as well. Give her a chance to see what fun hot flesh [the particular make-up technique] is.
It was a thing which almost didn't make it into the episode, because it became such a production problem. There's so much in each episode that it's tough to squeeze it into ten days, and to take Claudia and, for a two page scene, to have her spend three hours in make-up just became very tough to schedule.
But the director fought for it, and said, "No, we're going to do it even if we have to go back and pick it up on some other day. You can't go through an episode like that and not use that great visual." And, by god, we got it.
Revenging Angel
Did you work on Revenging Angel at all?
A little bit. I was certainly watching David and Andrew as they tried to push that stone uphill.
It was an uphill fight early on, to do an episode that was half-animation, because it was a particularly new and fearsome thing for the production company to deal with. There was concern that it was going to be very expensive, that it wasn"t going to be done on time, it was not going to look good, so it was a bit of a fight for David and Andrew to get that one through.
There was, I won't say resistance, but there was a lot of concern, that this one could be really great or really horrible, and it could be really horrible and wind up costing us a lot of money and being a major problem.
It was to their credit that they did manage to keep a rein on it, and to get it to look so wonderful, and have such fun with it. Also, Andrew says this, and he's not alone in thinking it, until we actually saw the episode in the final mix, we didn't know if it was going to work or not. Seeing the temporary animations, seeing the storyboards, seeing the rough cut, with the animation roughed in... It wasn't until Guy Gross' music was on top of it, and the sound effects, the whole episode was together, only then did we look at it and say, "Oh, this has worked, this is good, this is funny."
So, it's certainly the episode that kept us all scared for the longest. Because usually by the time you see it in rough cut you feel, "Oh this is really going to work," or "We'll make this work." You find it in the cutting process. Sometimes the rough cuts are disappointing, and the next cut you look at and go, "This is worlds better now that we moved this, and got rid of this, and tightened this up and added this."
From then on, when you see the final mix it's all great, now here it is with all the icing on the cake. But that was an episode where you couldn't taste the cake without the icing.
Crackers do matter
What one scene do you think sums up what Farscape was all about?
I suppose you could probably pick a ton of scenes, but probably the one that jumps to mind is Crackers Don't Matter, practically any scene from there. Particularly the notion.
The thing that Farscape did best, I don't know that we ever came up with an original idea, but we certainly came up with ways to turn that idea on its head. Every show does the body swapping. Original Star Trek did the body swapping episode. There have been movies about body swapping, sitcoms about body swapping. Everybody, but everybody, does the body swapping episode.
I don't know that very many shows have done it with six body swaps going on, with six people exchanging. Then trying to keep track of all of them. And then, in true Farscape fashion, the scene that really makes it Farscape is three-quarters of the way through when we nail them again, and they all swap a second time.
That to me is Farscape pushing the idea right over the cliff edge and into the sea.
The cancellation
How did you learn about the cancellation?
It was very strange because we knew there were negotiations going on, we knew there were concerns. That's really normal on a television show. It's usually one year at a time, and even a year is sometimes a question. I've worked on shows that you start out and you have a thirteen order and you wait to see if you're going to have an entire season. And oft-times, you don't.
Every year to me it's like, "Well, that's been a good year, I wonder if we'll get another one." And three years running we did get another one. This time, there was a two-year pick-up, so we felt a little more confident than usual, but even then, this is television. I didn't know the specifics of the deal, that there was an out clause or anything else, but it didn't surprise me at all. There almost always is.
So, I knew there were discussions going on, but it seemed to be going well. The mood was, "Any day now we're going to lock it down. Any day now we're going to get the official word, and then your agent's going to start making the deals for next year."
Then we were at Spectrum films one morning for a rough cut, and it was a good cut, we took some notes, had some thoughts, everything seemed to be going wonderfully. I noticed David was just a little quieter than usual that morning. Then we all went out into the cafeteria area and David sat us all down and said, "Guess what, we've just heard this morning that there's not going to be a season five." "Oh, now I understand why he was a little subdued."
We just all sat there and looked at each other like, "What happened?". Because it had been so - "Looks good, looks good," then, nothing. So it was a bigger shock to all of us. It wasn't like, "Doesn't look good, and here's the confirmation," it was all, "Looks like things are going to work out," and suddenly they don't. It was a big shock to the system.
What was behind the reason to announce the cancellation in a live chat?
David felt that it was important to tell people about it. We'd had fans who had been with us for so long, and given the show such devotion and such energy and such faithfulness that we should be the ones to break the news to them.
So he called up Ben and me and said, "Let's get online and do this." Which for David, who's not the most technically adept person, was a challenge. But it was something he really wanted to do, so we did it.
Intelligent fandom
Did you expect the strength of the fan reaction to the cancellation?
I think I probably expected the strength of the fan reaction. What I didn't expect was the depth of the fan reaction.
Fans have gone to such lengths, there has been such intricate campaigning going on, such intelligent work going on, and so much thought and effort has been put into it. It hasn't just been a deluge of letters, or the sort of things you might expect. They're taking out ads, they're making commercials, they're doing all sorts of interesting things. This is very impressive.
That, I think, is very new. In this internet age, that so many fans could get together and mount such a concerted, thought-out effort to bring the show back is impressive, and very gratifying.
One of the suggestions that's been made is that everyone could subscribe to fund a fifth season of Farscape.
Well, if we had the numbers, maybe it would work, maybe it wouldn't. It's one of those ideas that ten years ago would have been outrageous on its face, but in this day and age, with landscapes changing and distribution methods changing, maybe it's possible. You can put me down for twenty bucks.
The future of Farscape
What do you see as being the future of Farscape now?
Right now, your guess is as good as mine. I've heard things being bandied about, I've heard talk of this, talk of that, but nothing concrete. So I'm with the fans on this, I'm just hoping for good news, but right now it's all talk. Unfortunately in this business, talk is voluminous and very cheap.
I'm of the old school which says, "I'll believe I have a job when my first paycheck clears the bank." Until then it's all, to me, not quite as real as when I'm actually working and actually getting paid for it. I hope it returns in some form.
Would you return to Farscape?
Well, what are the hours?
I'd love to return to the show in some capacity. We'll just have to see how it goes.
What Ricky did next
What are your plans for the future now?
Oh, I thought I'd get some lunch, and then I think I've got to get some light bulbs. Then I'll probably sit down and try to do a little work at the typewriter.
Wider term than that, I'm coming up with some ideas of my own for series. Trying to take some of the lessons I've learned on Farscape and apply them. Push the boundaries, get weird, do some fun things that haven't been maybe seen before on television.
But right now, I'm available if anyone has a job. I've never been to England.
An enticing proposition
Ricky has some fun with his poor interviewers.
Ann : What question have you always wanted to be asked in an interview. You tell me and I"ll ask it.
Ricky : Would you like to come upstairs?
Ann : Ahhh... I can't ask that. (Much flustered giggling).
Ricky : Lies! Lies!
Ann : Have you got anything for Ricky, James? Would you like to invite him upstairs?
James: I'm just too terrified to ask anything.