tu Phillips is remembered by BG fans as the
composer of the series’ music. He also has written music for other Glen Larson
series, including Quincy, Buck Rogers, and The Fall Guy. In
January of 1989 ANOMALY had the opportunity to ask Stu Phillips a few questions about his
work on BG.Asked whether the music for BG ran over
budget, as had been rumored, Mr. Phillips replied, “Studios have a peculiar way of
budgeting things. Generally every one-hour show will come out of a meeting at the
beginning of the year with the same basic budget. At the time I did Galactica,
some things like The Rockford Files had anywhere from six to eight minutes of
music a week, and Galactica had anywhere from twenty five to thirty, and yet our
budget was the same. So obviously we were over-budget for the very first episode. But the
studio would rather operate in the red, over-budget, because if they change the budget for
one one-hour show, the producers of the other shows would say, ‘Hey, how come I
can’t get that much money?’ They have these problems.” I commented in
response that that sounded like a competition, and Mr. Phillips confirmed, “It is, it
is...it’s very funny, producers are always looking to have an edge on everybody else,
especially when you’re working in-house, on the lot at major studios. The other idea
is, when you operate in the red and you’re losing money, supposedly, on paper, then
when the show gets picked up the following year they can try to get more money from the
network. So if they start out with a reasonable budget on Galactica, if they were
to say, ‘Well, let’s face it, the shows run twenty five to thirty minutes of
music and they run it with a twenty eight to thirty four piece orchestra and Mike Post is
using sixteen or eighteen pieces on his show,’ they say, ‘all right, let’s
up the budget by double-x dollars.’ But if they did that and I stayed within the
budget, then come next year it would be difficult for them to get more money.” There were stories that BG’s budget
went down as the series went on, so I asked Mr. Phillips if the budget for music had been
cut. He replied, “No, I was never told that my budget was any less. As far as I was
concerned, the studio would occasionally say to me, ‘Uh, do you really need that much
music in this show?’ and I would say, ‘Call the producer, he asked for it,’
and of course they wouldn’t even bother to call the producer, they’d say,
‘All right.’ But no, they never informed me at any particular point that you
were going to get less money to do the show. Now as for the other operational parts, I
have no idea. You have to understand that the moneys in television is very weird. There is
a license fee paid by the network that is running the show, and sometimes the license fee
from the network is like the edge of a cliff, there is no way you can get five cents more
from them. If they negotiated for you to do twenty two episodes a season, they’re
going to pay you, say, $500,000 per episode, there is no way you can get $500,000 and
fifty cents. Then there are times where networks make deals for $500,000 per episode, with
an open end provided that they approve of the extra shooting, or the extra this, or
sometimes somebody wants to put a particular star who won’t settle for the amount
that’s in the budget for the guest starring role that week, so you go to the network
and say, ‘Well, we’d like to have Lloyd Bridges, but Lloyd wants $50,000 more
than we’re willing to spend.’ And the network says, ‘Great, we want him, go
ahead and spend the fifty,’ and the network pays it. You have to understand that the
rumors you hear from people who haven’t worked in the studios themselves are
sometimes just that, they’re not knowledgeable about how things work. So you may have
heard somebody say that they cut back on it, that might have been one of two things. That
might have been Universal Pictures said to Larson, ‘We will not pay any more,’
because, you see, if the network doesn’t want to put their money up, the next thing
the producer says, is he goes to Universal Pictures and he says to them, ‘Hey, we
want Lloyd Bridges, but the network won’t pay the extra $50,000, how about you paying
it,’ see? Then the studio will sometimes say, ‘Well, you know, really I think
it’s worthwhile. Yeah, we’ll pick up the $50,000.’ Sometimes Universal or
the film company will say, ‘No, we don’t want to pick it up either.’ Now
the producer is left with either he picks it up personally, which means he then takes it
out of his pocket, or he takes it from another area. In other words, there might be
$200,000 for cast, and $150,000 for sets. Now he may be able to say, ‘OK, I want
$50,000 less in sets, ’cause I want to give $50,000 to Lloyd, so we’re going to
switch the money from that category to this one (I should note at this point that I asked
Mr. Phillips if Lloyd Bridges really had wanted $50,000 extra for his role in BG,
but he hastily assured me that he was merely using Bridges’ name as one familiar to
BG fans and not because such a situation had actually arisen). Now when I used to do the
music, what happened was, every week $5000, $10,000, or $6000 would be taken from
costumes, in other words these people would lose a few bucks out of their budget to pay
for the music budget. Because the studio said, ‘We don’t wanna pay for it,
we’re not asking for 48 piece orchestras, the producer is.’ The network would
say to them, ‘Hell, we don’t care if you do it with 20 men.’ And
that’s how it works. I know personally that a lot of the money I was using was coming
from other departments, from costumes or extras or the film editor, from different
areas.” Asked whether ABC interference in BG was
the worst he ever encountered in his years of television work, Mr. Phillips said,
“I’ve done 400 episodes of television and networks will do everything they can
to get input. I sat in enough things where I had enough...I will say that several very
young, immature people, obviously just out of school, sat in the meeting room looking at
something for the first time and making suggestions to a man who had already done 300
episodes of TV (i.e. Glen Larson) and they proceeded to tell him what they thought was
wrong and how it ought to be fixed. And it’s very discouraging on the part of a
producer to do that and know he has to sit and compromise with people who he really
doesn’t respect. He always had long lists of things the networks wanted changed. And
if they didn’t mean a lot, he’d change them just to keep peace.” I
commented that it seems strange that networks interfere so much when nearly all of their
series fail to last a single season and Mr. Phillips vehemently agreed, “If you took
the percentage of shows that they put on every year and say, ‘How much success do
they have, what right do they have to tell anyone anything?’ They are without a doubt
the worst people at guessing or predicting what’s good or bad.” In a Galactic Journal interview with Mr.
Phillips, he was quoted as saying that ABC had wanted him to use humorous music in serious
scenes, and I asked him about that. He said, “I have been asked to do the most
ridiculous things. And sometimes I have been read a memo, by the associate producer, he
will sit down and say, ‘Stu, before we spot the show, I have a memo from ABC that
says in the scene where so-and-so goes down the stairway, or whatever it is, they want
comical music.’ ‘Why?’ ‘I don’t know, that’s what it
says.’ ‘OK, fine, I’ll give them what they asked for.’ Of course
it’s my name on there, and then everyone else has to think Jesus, why in the world
would Stu write funny music going down the stairs?! Well, that’s life...that’s
what’s called compromise.”Music kept recurring in ensuing episodes and I
asked Mr. Phillips about that. He replied, “It was used for two reasons. One reason
it was used was because the producer said to me, ‘Don’t kill yourself on that
stuff, I told you the five or six cues that I really love and would love to keep hearing
as part of the structure of the show.’ That was one reason there was never any fear
about repeating some of the music all the way through the episodes. It kind of helped tie
the series together. Secondly, a lot of times I was given four days to do the entire
score, and there wasn’t sufficient time to compose all the music so we would just out
of panic use old music. Sometimes it was artistically done, and sometimes it was done
because of no choice. It was impossible to do the amount of music in the four days I was
given.” When asked what the usual amount of time given to compose the score for a
one-hour TV episode was, he revealed that it was eight to ten days—and BG
was a show with far more music than most series. “Most TV shows will run sixteen to
twenty minutes for shows with a lot of music. This was unusual in that there was anywhere
from twenty five, we’ve had as much as thirty five minutes of music in the
episodes.”Asked about the pervasive rumors of BG
revivals, Mr. Phillips confirmed, “I’ve heard those rumors too. I even heard
Glen say that somebody had approached him about doing something on Galactica in
the future and I said, ‘What are you thinking about it?’ He said, ‘I
don’t know, I’m thinking about it.’ That’s as far as he could talk
about it. Then, a year later I said to him, ‘You been thinking about the Galactica
thing?’ and he said to me, ‘To tell you the truth, I wouldn’t know what
direction to take it in, what to do with it. I don’t know, I’ve got other things
on my mind.’ And that’s the last I heard about it.” I commented that I knew
some people Glen Larson could call for ideas, and he replied, “Believe me,
that’s not his problem. His problem is other things. After all, you have to remember
it ended up with that horrible Galactica 1980. Aside from the last episode, where
they took an old script and shot it, Starbuck’s Last Voyage....” I
quickly interrupted to ask if that was indeed based on a script written for the original
series and Mr. Phillips confirmed, “It didn’t belong because it was a script
that had been written for the earlier thing and never got shot. And when they cancelled
the show, they still owed the network several episodes, so rather than spend any money
writing one they pulled out this old episode that had been written and they shot that
episode even though it had nothing whatsoever to do with Galactica 1980. And Ron
Satlof directed that, I believe. One of the better episodes, in my opinion, of both Galacticas.”I asked Mr. Phillips how BG is regarded
in Hollywood. “Well, it all depends who you talk to, honestly. I’ve had a lot of
people show great admiration that I had done Galactica. I’ve had a lot of
other people give me a look as though, like, Oh shit, you got caught up in that
piece of crap?! You know, that kind of thing. So I’d have to say it’s
split. Some people consider it an absolute fiasco, other people think it was really a
brilliant attempt to do something. My own personal opinion is that the original concept,
in the original script, the way it was originally shot, it was a wonderful piece of film.
But unfortunately it got cut down...there were six hours of film in the first cut and that
had to go down to three hours less commercials.” I said that that was interesting,
since the script was a three-hour script. He explained, “That doesn’t mean
anything. That’s not that unusual. All the pans were left in, all the endings of
things. The first cut ran six hours, now out of that there was probably an hour and a half
of superfluous junk. Not only that, they had to cut it down to two hours to make a movie
out of it, because it went out to Canada and Europe as a movie. So they had to cut four
hours out of the original to make a movie. So I think that, unfortunately, the thing did
not hold up with the strong relationships that were originally in the thing, when you had
to cut it down. It was just unfortunate. I can tell you that the scenes with the starving
people in the ship, where they go to see the people who didn’t have any food, that
was so much longer and it was almost poetic.” Asked what had happened to the excess
footage, Mr. Phillips said, “It’s sitting around in the vaults at Universal. I
don’t know what will happen to it.”Asked what he is doing now, Mr. Phillips replied,
“Not a thing. I’m in sort of a semi-retirement situation. I right now am only
interested in projects that have a challenge or that I really want to do or that excite
me. If it doesn’t, I’m just not interested in doing any more episodes of another
show of another show of another show. I just finished five years of Fall Guy,
ninety six episodes, that was enough. I’m waiting for something exciting to happen,
and if it doesn’t happen, then so be it.” Asked if he’d like to do film
music instead of TV, he said, “Well, I’ve done twenty seven films, only thing,
twenty six of them I wouldn’t show to my worst enemy. In fact, I started doing films
long before...no, I did televison first. I did the Donna Reed Show and The
Monkees, a couple of Gidgets, things like that. But then for about four
years I did mostly films. Yes, of course I’d rather do films. Which is very difficult
to do after you’ve done television for fourteen years. It’s difficult to get
motion picture producers to understand that you are a composer for all mediums.” I
commented that movie producers don’t seem to take TV people seriously and he agreed,
“Yeah, even though I’ve done all these movies. Unfortunately, none of them were
the type of classic where a guy says, ‘You did that?!’ You know! Galactica
is still considered a television show, Buck Rogers is still a televsion show, no
matter what it seems like. Right now I’m enjoying my life. Enjoying all those years
of working, and all that stuff.”Finally, I remarked that the music for BG
stands up very well, rushed and over-budget or not. Mr. Phillips concluded
philosophically, “I’m happy with it. I enjoyed writing every one of those things
because it was something I enjoyed doing. I wish I could have composed a full score for
every one of them and didn’t have four days for some of them. There’s a lot of
things I wish, but that’s life.”
�1999 Susan J. Paxton