Lionheart Exclusive Interview: George R.R. Martin

Interviews by Fans
Title:	Lionheart Exclusive Interview: George R.R. Martin
Interviewer:	Beth Blighton
Interviewee:	George R.R. Martin
Date(s):	1992
Medium:	print
Fandom(s):	Beauty and the Beast (TV)
External Links:
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Lionheart Exclusive Interview: George R.R. Martin was conducted by Beth Blighton. It was printed in the August 1992 issue of Lionheart.

Some Topics Discussed

• Martin's background in writing
• details about episodes and writing for Beauty and the Beast (TV)
• the "beast" part of Vincent
• fan campaigns
• fan influence
• Ron Koslow's influence
• the violence in the show and subsequent ratings
• Martin's statements that fans are not "representative of the whole audience"
• Martin's statement that fans and "the audience" are not the same thing
• why the show did not go the direction it was intended
• MUCH detail on filming and decisions
• Martin used to identify as a fan

Excerpts

With the episodes "Promises of Someday," "Brothers," and "Ceremony of Innocence" on to "Invictus," you created a wonderful thread of Vincent first questioning his place in his family and his home, and even the dark parts of his own soul. Do you feel that Vincent resolved his journey of self discovery by "Invictus," or were there a lot more stories to be told from that end?

No. I think there were plenty of stories to be told. Of course, we had a curve ball thrown at us when Linda [Hamilton] left the show and we had to deal with that, so any notions that we had about where we were taking the show as of the end of the second season, kind of had to be thrown out the window and we had to regroup and deal with "Though Lovers Be Lost," and its aftermath and the introduction of Diana and working that into... which essentially brought us all the way back in terms of Vincent's romantic development to ground zero, you know, pre-Catherine days In some ways, even further back because now this traumatic and horrible incident bad happened to him. We were trying to treat this fairly realistically, which may have been a mistake on our part, but I don't know.

You mentioned in an interview that the idea of Vincent's dual nature, his beastial element, was touched on as early as Terrible Savior" and China Moon." With that kind of background already going through the story were you surprised at all by the resistance you received from the fans to the ideas being expanded in the trilogy? There seemed to have been a lot of objections like "He's not a beast, he's just a nice deformed man."

Yes. To tell you the truth I am. I've always been astonished by the fans unwillingness to accept that he's a beast. You can make the argument that Ron Koslow doesn't know what he was talking about, but he is the creator of the show, and that was, like, Ron's premise, you know? Beauty and the Beast. She's beautiful and he's a beast. (laughs)

I've always thought that that was the question he was asking. I mean, it's very easy for people to say 'Oh, we love and accept him because he's just a man whose got a few problems.' It's a whole other question about prejudice and what you really believe when you're looking at this, saying, "Now, he may not be a man at all." I think it makes the viewer question the very premise of judging someone on their appearance. Maybe that's what he had in mind.

The thing you have to understand is that many of our fans come at this from a different direction than Koslow did. Koslow drew a lot of his inspiration from the Cocteau film, La Belle and La Bete, which in turn derives from the French fairy tale, the fable by Mademoiselle Beaumont. In those things, the beast is very clearly a beast. She wrote that this legend evolved, in a world in which they believed in a traditional religious system. There were angels and Gods, and then there were human beings, and below us there were the beasts of the field. There were these creatures. They didn't really have the concept that a modern science fiction fan does of alien species and things like that, right? A beast had bestial appetites. In the Cocteau film, the Beast doesn't eat with Beauty because he can't sit down and eat a little cutlet and drink some wine. He goes out and kills his prey and comes back with his hands smoking from the heat of the kill. This was considered a bestial kind of note. Now, science fiction... you know, all this occurred centuries ago. Not the Cocteau film, but the original sources on which it was based, from which it drew its inspiration and from which we in tum drew our inspiration. Now in the last SO years, particularly the last 20 or 30 years, science fiction has become very much a part. And science fiction has the whole concept of intelligent, sentient beings from other planets or perhaps from deep within the earth who look differently from us but think the same. We've had new archetypes, which Mademoiselle Beaumont could never have conceived of. Creatures like Mr. Spock and other Star Trek people. The wookie [sic] in Star Wars, Chewbacca. Alien life forms have become part of our popular mythos. I think a lot of our fans come to this out of Star Trek fandom, Star Wars fandom... the organized fans, I'm talking about. And they saw Vincent, I think almost from the first as an alien. As someone who looked different, but was rational. This whole concept of bestial appetites and all that was not necessarily a part of him. But, it was certainly always a part of Koslow's conception because Koslow was not a Star Trek fan or not a science fiction fan in particular. He was drawing on the Cocteau thing and Cocteau had drawn on Mademoiselle Beaumont. And all notion of the beast there is that not only does he look funny, but there is a bestial side to his nature. There is a side in which he is a predator. Like a wolf would be, you know. Now, you can adopt a wolf puppy, but as a lot of people are learning, you know, it's a dangerous sport. It's still a wolf. It's not a dog. It can be a very nice wolf, it can be a very noble wolf, it can be a very beautiful wolf, but it's still a wolf, and Vincent was still a beast. He was as intelligent and noble as anyone I knew. That was the great mythic power of the character, the division within him. He wasn't just one thing. And he says this himself in some of the episodes, that when he's in his bestial mode and killing, part of him feeds on that darkness.

In "What Rough Beast," Catherine finally seems to be coming to terms with her culpability in Vincent's violent acts. Why was that never explored, or was that another thing that fell by the wayside at the end of second season because of circumstances?

Again, we were finally getting into it.....but, you know... Yeah, just didn't happen....cause that was a pretty interesting prospect, the idea that a part of Catherine fed on that violence too. There was a part of her that put herself in danger to have him come and rescue her. An interesting prospect indeed. That's psychologically interesting, but dangerous. The thing you have to keep in mind about any television show, and certainly about Beauty and the Beast is....it's not like my books, where I can just sit down and I can develop a concept and the characters and I can write words and implement it.

Yeah, you have the network, you have the studio, in this case, Witt-Thomas is a very small studio, but you have Paul and Tony. You have people with their conceptions and there's an enormous amount of money at stake and fans, I think, sometimes forget that. The network interferes not just for the sheer joy of interfering, but to protect their investment, as does the studio. They're very protective of that and sometimes, particularly some of the issues you're getting into... You're getting into dangerous ground because what's always felt in television, and this is like the first commandment of a television series, right, it's up there chiseled in stone on the network executives' walls, is "The characters must be likeable." And there's always a fear, when you explore some of these darker things, is that the audience will not like this character when they see that he does this, you know.

... you're not going to get the same answer [of why the show failed] out of two people, probably.

No, you're not. I know a lot of fans who feel, the classic fans, who feel that it was because we killed Catherine. That was why we failed, pure and simple. But the truth was we were already in trouble before that occurred.

[...]

You know, but [the network] didn't really take it off [the air]. This is a point that should be made. Somehow these legends arise in fandom and no one ever says, 'That's not the way it was.'

Tell us. We want to know how it really was....what's the truth?

Well, some of the fans... I see letters from them about how they saved the show at the end of the second season, and got them to order twelve, by writing letters or something like that, and of course, some of them feel that we betrayed them by then killing Catherine, or coming back differently. That's not the way it was. I mean, I appreciate the fans. They did a lot of work, they contributed a lot to the show. But I was there. The decision to not put us on the fall schedule and the decision to order 12 shows as a mid-season replacement was made the same day. Tony Thomas called me up, I was at home, and said 'They're not ordering 22 but they've ordered 12 as a mid-season replacement and they'll put us back on the air when the first slot opens up.' It was made in the same meeting. It wasn't like we were off and the show was dead and then all the fans got together and they wrote millions of letters and they poured in and CBS said 'Well, okay, we'll order 12.' That's not how it happened.

Didn't happen that way? See, you're exploding a fan myth. Well, the fans won't like it. (laughs)

Well... it won't be the first time or the last.

It’s such a broad range of expectations, do you find it difficult to please all of the fans all the time, or did you just kind of try to please yourselves and hope the fans would follow?

Yeah. We didn’t really.... pleasing the fans is not a major priority and I don’t think it could be. Pleasing the audience is, certainly, because if you don’t please the audience you don’t stay on the air. And ultimately, we didn’t stay on the air, so we must have failed to please the audience.

Do you think the fans are representative of the whole audience?

No, I don’t.

Is it so intense with fans that it no longer is representative of a wide ranging audience? We actually met briefly, at a con in St. Louis between the second and third season , and I got to watch you do your Wild Card panels and things. I can see that you’ve been dealing with fans and the whole fan culture for a while.

I came up out of fandom myself.

Did that make you better prepared for some of the things that happened with the fans than maybe some of the other writers? Because you knew what you were going to be dealing with pretty soon?

I tell you, I was better prepared in the early days. I knew, I told them going in that Vincent and the show would become another Star Trek, another big fan favorite. And I knew that Vincent would become a sex symbol. I told them that. And no one quite believed me. So I was prepared for that. What I wasn't prepared for was the response of the third season. I just wasn't prepared for the way a segment of the fans reacted. I suppose I should have been. But I wasn't.

Some of us weren't prepared either. I mean, as together as the fandom was before that, it blew apart. I was really surprised. The openness that was between the B&B production office and the fans, I've heard was rather unprecedented. Do you think that was ultimately what kind of blew up in people's faces, or was that openness maybe a bad idea?

Well, I don't know that it was a bad idea. I don't know that we were that open but I haven't been on other shows to really compare it to. The fans have amazing resources, which to tell you the truth, alarmed us at times. Actually, there was one thing in the middle of second season, where we got a foretaste of what the third season would be like. We started getting a series of letters about the decision to kill Charles Chandler. Angry and upset letters about the show "Orphans." What was startling about this is not only had "Orphans" not been broadcast yet, it hadn't been filmed yet and it had not been written yet! It was a concept that we were discussing in-house, and Alex and Howard were planning to write it later in the season, and suddenly, somehow, somebody gets hold of it and there's this, like, letter writing campaign, where we're getting these letters about how could we do this to Catherine, and how could we kill Charles Chandler, he's so crucial, and the other thing, these fans are so incredibly attached to Charles Chandler here and this character's appeared twice in the two years of the show! That was a little strange. It makes you a little paranoid, where you say, (laughs) what have we got here, is there a bug in our staff?

I think there was a school of thought that somewhere at the end of this, we would get, "And they lived happily ever after." I mean, I have heard if you start out with 'Once upon a time,' it has to end with 'Happily every after," and I don't think I ever thought that would happen. Maybe the last show, when you knew it was the end....

Ideally, I think Koslow might have wanted to end it that way. But the problem is we were a television show. We were an American television show broadcast in the late 80's, operating on American network television and it just doesn't work that way. Shows are not allowed to really have endings. Because a show that failed, that's getting bad ratings, is just ripped off the air when they least expect it. Like Max Headroom, for example. Just let me give that example because I was a little bit involved with that [show]. I had a script that was in pre-production for their Christmas show. They were actually shooting a show, they were halfway through a show when they got the order, "Nope, you're off the schedule, stop shooting immediately, move out of your offices... It's just like you can't plan an ending. Now that's a show that's failing. A show that's a success, on the other hand, or even a marginal success, they can't plan for an ending, 'cause they never know how long it's gonna last. Like St. Elsewhere thought they were over. They filmed an ending show. You probably saw it. It ended with the big wrecking ball crashing into the hospital. And then, after they write and film the show, they said 'No, we decided to keep you around for one more year.' So they had to come back next season and begin with the wrecking ball and then suddenly someone runs up with a court order! (laughs) Because they'd saved it for another year and then they bad to write another ending show. The only shows that really get the luxury of doing an ending is a show like Cosby or something. One of these shows that last for ten years and then finally everybody gets tired, all the stars want to leave and they say, okay, we're gonna do it. The final episode of MASH. Korean war's over. Then you can plan it, but that's like one show in a thousand.

Well, it's like the whole third season was filmed and in the can, ready to go and people are saying 'they can change it.' No. It's done. To me, it seemed sort of counter productive to be trying to get you guys to change something that was already a finished product.

Yeah. We were still filming some later shows of the third season when the one debuted. But we didn't know when the third season was coming back, too. We were filming 12 shows as a mid-season replacement and you never know when a mid-season replacement is actually going to go on the air. It all depends on how the fall shows are doing. Now, we were rushed on the air in November cause CBS's fall shows were doing lousy, but it could have been like February when we came on the air... in which case, you're right, all of the shows would have been in the can.

When did you realize your original concept was shot - there was no way....Was that disappointing to you? And if things had been different where would it have gone?

TLBL was not the way we were going.

I've already given this answer in my Starlog interview , but basically what we were planning was what we called "The Land of the Dead" trilogy. The original idea was that when Catherine....when you hear her scream Vincent's name at the end of the trilogy, that was because she had found his dead body in there. And we were going to come out with the new season where Father would examine him and he would be dead and they would entomb him in the catacombs with appropriate ceremony and Catherine would be very distraught and think that Vincent was dead and would go back in to lead her life and there would be grieving in both worlds, but meanwhile, we would go to Vincent, who would be in the Land of the Dead, where he would see various people he had killed over the years, including Paracelsus, who would be the ruler of the Land of the Dead. Whenever we did fantasy, we always walked a very careful line.....like with "Bluebird" so you weren't quite sure...was it a fantasy or was it the truth? And we certainly intended to do that with this episode.

At the point where we realized that Linda wasn't coming back. The entire 'Land of the Dead' trilogy that we were projecting depended on having Vincent dead and Catherine alive. We couldn't very well have both of them dead. (laughs) Or one of them dead and one of them kidnapped....or any of the other alternatives. When we realized that we would not have Linda, we also realized that we would have to scrap that idea.

We can just hope [that there will be a movie...]

It may depend on the fans, you know. Look bow long it was for the Star Trek movie. What convinced them to do the movie? There were two phenomena: one was the success of Star Wars, which was completely unconnected, but Paramount just said 'wait a minute, this thing made all that money, maybe we should do something like that, too. Oh, look, we have these old dusty characters over here...oh, look, these fans have been talking about them for 20 years....If B&B fandom continues to continue and to grow....to exist as a phenomenon, the more it does, the more it gives credence to the idea that there might be a market. If the fandom steadily diminishes and in two or three years from now it hardly exists anymore, or its on a level with... there's a fandom for every show on television, but most of them are minuscule....if it shrinks to that level, then probably there won't be a movie.

Fan Comments

I believe that the rupture of the Bond is no more than a device enlisted by the writers as they desperately tried to cobble together a story from the tatters of their original idea. In many respects they did admirably well; but with all due respect to George R.R. Martin, I feel more betrayed by this one aspect of "TLBL" than by any of a hundred other wounds that they inflicted.

I suppose some of GRRM's comments in the excellent interview in this same issue helped to fuel the preceding paragraphs. In particular, his remarks on economic realities and the concessions that were often necessary for survival of the series reinforced my believe that a number of artistic compromises were made in an effort to remain on the air. After all, BATB provided a substantial portion of the income for a large number of people, including Mr. Koslow.