“You forgot your thruster.” - Penny Priddy

By 1983, I finally figured out that angry men really didn’t turn into the Incredible Hulk, but I was about to learn that aliens wanted to eat us. I’m still not sure how I conned my parents into letting me watch V when I was seven years old since most of it went over my head at that age, anyway, and I had recently been terrified by the ear worms in Star Trek II: The Wrath of Khan. I’ve seen V several times since it first aired and appreciate it more as an adult than as a seven year old (even though I still make that same pouty face). It helps that I’m not afraid of everything anymore (just the vacuum cleaner and babies).

In part one of our interview, Kenneth Johnson talked about developing The Incredible Hulk, The Bionic Woman and Alien Nation for television. Today in part two of our interview, Johnson talks about the original V mini-series, and continuing the story.

PRG: I’ve learned about V: The Second Generation only in the last couple of weeks, but I understand it’s been in development for some time now.

KJ: Oh, you’re not the geek you think you are!

PRG: Dial-up was really cramping my geekiness. I was a little behind the internet times and didn’t get broadband until about two years ago.

KJ: Well, You’re talking to one of the last remaining people who wrote on WordStar!

PRG: I actually learned about it in kind of a round about way. I recently watched an episode of The Greatest American Hero and was trying to figure out where else I had seen the Rhonda character, and her IMDb listing led to V.

KJ: That was Faye Grant. She was 22 when we did V. We had worked together on a movie called Senior Trip a year or so before. It was sort of an autobiographical piece I wrote about my senior class trip to New York City. Faye played one of the characters, and it was quite an interesting bus load of people, actually. We had Scott Baio, Jason Alexander, Liz Callaway. It was an interesting group of kids who have all gone on to have better careers than I had! (laguhs)

PRG: You made V over twenty years ago. Why is it important to bring it back now?

KJ: Over the years, many people had asked me “Why don’t you go back and do V again?” or something like that. I had always just said, “No, I think I did it pretty well the first time.” It became a minor classic and I felt that it wasn’t broken so, I didn’t need to fix it. But, about five years ago, I was putting together the DVD release of my original four hour mini-series for Warner Brothers and it was fun because I got to go back and do it the way I wanted to initially. We had shot in 1.85:1 letterbox and I had never been able to mix it in surround sound, so I re-mastered the soundtrack and everything. I was at the dubbing station and I got to the last scene when Faye’s character sent out a message to deep space trying to contact an enemy of the Visitors, hoping that “the enemy of my enemy would be my friend”. And a little bell went off and I started thinking about what would have happened twenty years later. What would that world look like? Where would we be? What would be going on?

I went to Warner and said I wanted to do a piece that happens twenty years later. Half the oceans are gone, millions of people have disappeared, but on the other hand, the Visitors have cured AIDS and cancer and heart disease. And they have convinced us, because they control all of the media, that they are really here in our best interests, and indeed they are taking our water, but it’s just to clean it, like dialysis on a planetary scale. Unfortunately, the majority of people on the planet have bought into this big lie that the Visitors have put forth: “We are your wise leaders, so trust us and stay the course. Don’t ask questions and we will take care of you.”

The resistance has been continually fighting over the years, but they’ve been beaten down very badly and they’re at a point where it looks there really is no hope. They keep trying to get the truth out about the Visitors and what they really are, what they want, and how they are decimating our planet and our race. By the end of the first act of a three act structure, it looks like the resistance is going to lose.

Then there’s a knock at the back door. There are three people back there, who look like us, but their skin has a different quality to it. They say they’re there in response to the distress call sent twenty years earlier and are there to help humanity. Or are they? That becomes the engine that drives act two of the piece, which is the resistance group trying to see if these three scouts really are on our side or if they have their own agenda. By the end of the second act, we discover that things aren’t exactly what they seem and we’re in deeper trouble than we were before.

So, in co-opting the technology and skills of these scouts, we have to solve all of the problems we haven’t been able to solve in the past twenty years. Only now, they have to be solved immediately, or everything is done with us as a race.

What this does is build upon everything that I created in the original four hours, but takes it to a much higher plane and a different conclusion than we might have expected. I realized that I could do something here with V that was not remaking it, but was literally building upon everything I had done before. Warner loved the idea and we sold it to NBC, who proceeded to drag their feet for two years, and by the time they were done dragging, they had lost a billion dollars of ad revenue because their network had dropped from number one to number four. Suddenly, they were dragging their feet more about spending the 19 million I needed to get this mini-series made.

So, Warner and I pulled V: The Second Generation away from NBC and we’re endeavoring to get it set up somewhere else to see it come to fruition. In the meantime, I realized that it was such a cool story that it deserved to be more than a mini-series, so I transformed it into a novel that will be released this October by Tor books. It was really cool, because in a novel you get to dig even deeper with the characters. That gave me some other ideas, which I then folded into the script for the mini-series. It’s been a real interesting journey! Hopefully, we’ll be able to get all the money together that we need to get the picture made, and people will have not only the novel, but the film the way I’ve envisioned it.

PRG: What were some of the challenges of adapting your script for a novel?

KJ: When you’re writing a script, it’s a bastard form. It’s like showing someone a blueprint and saying “Imagine a building.” There are few people who can do that, and there are even fewer who can look at a script and imagine a film. That’s one of the problems we struggle with in Hollywood. The creative people are trying to make the suits understand why should spend 19 million dollars on something. That’s why you see so many re-makes and stuff going on because so many of the executives who are in the position of being able to push the buttons are frightened about doing something that is unusual, that is different, that is fresh and original. It’s much safer for them to do The Dukes of Hazzard or something like that again because it worked before. Look at my Incredible Hulk series. They tried for twelve years to turn it into a movie, and when they finally did, everyone was sorry that they had. (laughs). It’s a frustration that all of us out here face.

But, the fun part of doing the novel was really being able to dig deeply into the psychology of the characters individually, which is something you can’t do in film. Like I said, I discovered ideas and scenes and sequences that really enhanced the overall story, so I folded those into the screenplay. When the mini-series gets made, it will have benefited from the fact that I was able to go back and do it as a novel.

PRG: It seems like genre programming, particularly science fiction, has gotten significantly darker and grittier and more hopeless since you started making your shows in the 1970s. Is this something you’ve seen as well, and what do you think is behind it?

KJ: It’s hard for me to say because I watch very little television. People have asked what I think of the new Battlestar Galactica, and I’ve never watched the old Battlestar Galactica, much less the new one. In the snippets that I have seen, I think in some ways your assertion is correct. I wonder if it has to do with the fact that the world itself has gotten to be a darker place than it was in the 70s, and particularly in the 80s. The Reagan years were very cushy, comfortable years for the most part. The television in that era reflected that. Certainly there were bad guys, but I think the feeling of the time was a bit more positive and upbeat and if we just held on, everything was going to be OK.

Oddly enough, The Incredible Hulk was not that way. It was a very dark show because it was about a man who was cursed. This is not someone who was excited about being a superhero; this was someone who wanted this thing to go away. His whole raison d’etre was to make the curse disappear so he could live a normal life. No matter how positive a vibe he had brought to the people he encountered, at the end of each episode, Dr. David Banner walked away alone and friendless and hitchhiking up the road. That pathos is part of what made the show successful because people wanted to meet Dr. Banner and help him. So, there were examples back then of that darkness.

The other change I’ve seen is in language. When I was doing Alien Nation, to get the words “bitch” or “damn it” into a script was difficult. The censors were counting those. Now, the stuff they say is just astonishing. Susie and I often talk about the coarsening of our society and I think about the language we hear on television, even at eight o’clock. Do we really need to hear that stuff? Then I see the kinds of things that are presented visually on CSI and Criminal Minds and it disturbs me so much that the show is so popular. Not that I wish my fellow artists wouldn’t have a popular show, but what I’ve seen is so horrible. So often it’s violence against semi-naked women, which really puts me off.

The combination of violence and sexuality is numbing after a while and I really worry about what we’re saying to the younger generation about what’s permissible and what’s OK. When we were doing the Bionic shows and Hulk, one of the things we would be careful of was making instructional videos. As in “this is how you make a perfect murder” or “this is how you strangle someone with a piece of wire.” We left more to the imagination. Now it’s all right there, in your face. Now, I know that doesn’t mean people are going to get up and go strangle somebody with a wire. But, at the same time, after you’ve seen it three or four hundred times, it becomes part of the collective consciousness.

The parallels to the Romans watching gladiatorial games where people were killing each other are there and it is disturbing for someone who tries to take a long view of humanity. I’ve always felt it was better to leave more to the imagination, which often can be scarier than what’s put in front of you. But, do we really need to see women in negligees hanging from the ceiling by hooks? I don’t think so.

PRG: You’re clearly a literary guy. I understand that V came partly from It Can’t Happen Here and that Les Miserables influenced The Incredible Hulk.

KJ: I’ve always been drawn to the classics and have read more 19th century literature than 20th century literature. Susie and I were recently in London and we made our yearly trek to Dickens’ garden where we like to sit and just absorb the vibe.

There are very few people out here who read. It’s scary. I never could have written V had I not the year before read War and Peace. I was blown away by the way that Tolstoy was able to take all these disparate characters who seemed to be living in different worlds, and wound them around until the were all intricately locked in together. It was just amazing. That exactly sort of became my pattern for V. I introduced the characters individually, and then you begin to realize the relationships they have to one another that ties them all together. I never could have done it if I hadn’t steeped myself in literature to begin with.

PRG: Do you think that the changes in television that you were talking about in the previous question are related to the national decline in literacy?

KJ: I think so. It’s very distressing for me to hear that people aren’t reading as much, or at all. I teach at UCLA and USC and I did a master class at the English National Film and Television School in England, and I always encourage my students to steep themselves in literature and also to think about the responsibility they have. So many people in the business are just looking for the hit show or the hit movie. Is it important to do Saw III or is it important to do something that enlightens and deepens our humanity?

I always encourage my students to take the long view and realize that when they’re on the dusty sound stage somewhere, they’re not there alone. There are millions, potentially hundreds of millions of people watching what they create. Think about what you’re putting out there, because what you put out there is going to impact a lot of people of all ages. I also encourage them to choose the more humanistic approach, the approach that Kurasawa or Truffaut or Dickens would have taken. It’s certainly possible to do work that is entertaining and commercially successful, but also has another level to it.

That’s what I’ve been fortunate enough to do as much as possible, is try to fill the seats in the theater, but once they’re there, try to tell them as story that will leave them a little more thoughtful or better off than they were when they walked in.

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