The Stargate TV franchise’s first two production designers and art directors sit down together to open up about their time creating the look for the universe we have come to love!

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TRANSCRIPT
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Bridget McGuire:
When did you first hear about Stargate?

Douglas McLean:
‘Cause he heard first.

Bridget McGuire:
You heard first?

Richard Hudolin:
I heard first. I think I got the call from Ron French or Brad Wright. Ron French was the first production manager. And that’s somebody I knew from here, a local guy. And he called and asked if I was available, and then I met Brad Wright and Jonathan. And they told me what the gig was, and as we were talking earlier, you work all the time. We all love working, which is how and why, I suppose, we’ve all been together so long, and done such great things together. So anyway, I had met with Brad and Jonathan, got the gig, and it was 44 episodes, which was unheard of. Plus building all of these massive standing sets …

Bridget McGuire:
Which we had to move.

Richard Hudolin:
… which we then had to move into a stage that was being built as we were shooting in the effects stage, having had all of the sets ready for day one, because we couldn’t make any noise. When you’re shooting one scene, you can’t build over there, ’cause the effects stage is 460 feet, 480 feet long by, I don’t know, 50, 60 feet wide and 50 feet high. So it all had to be done. Then it had to be moved to the new stage, which was being built as we were shooting. And we were all over there measuring many times, the elephant doors, to make sure that ring would fit through the elephant doors in the new stage that was being built, ’cause the gear itself was very expensive. And I think I mentioned to David, it was built in Seattle, or it was built somewhere in America.

Bridget McGuire:
The first Gate. For the future.

Richard Hudolin:
The gear.

Bridget McGuire:
The gear. OK.

Richard Hudolin:
It was built across the border, I think. And then, at great expense, its shipping, as well as working every time it was used. So anyway, I got the gig. I had been working with Bridget.

Bridget McGuire:
We had just done Doctor Who.

Richard Hudolin:
Doctor Who, right.

Bridget McGuire:
That was, I think, one of the first sort of things being done in Vancouver that used visual effects.

Richard Hudolin:
Yes. Green screen.

Bridget McGuire:
Green screen.

Richard Hudolin:
Now, people say, “AI,” and they go, “Ooh.” Back then it was green screen, “Oh, we’re never gonna work again, for God sakes.”

Bridget McGuire:
Then how do you do it?

Richard Hudolin:
How do you do it? We’d done a little bit, Bridget and I, on Doctor Who. It was great.

Bridget McGuire:
We had our foot in the door.

Richard Hudolin:
They thought we were like wizards.

Bridget McGuire:
We were.

Richard Hudolin:
And this guy had–

Douglas McLean:
We had worked in Calgary… Actually, Toronto, originally–

Richard Hudolin:
No, no.

Douglas McLean:
Calgary?

Richard Hudolin:
Toronto, Montreal, then Calgary. Toronto with I’ll Take Manhattan, Montreal and Cannonball were already– And then to …

Bridget McGuire:
Calgary.

Richard Hudolin:
… Calgary with Pan Am. Because I was living here in Vancouver at that point.

Douglas McLean:
And then I was still living in Toronto, and had decided to move out here, way west of the mountains, scary place that no one was ever allowed to cross over.

Richard Hudolin:
I guess it was there.

Douglas McLean:
Moved here going, “Well, I’ll see if I can get any work when I get out there.” I knew Richard was here, and came and phoned him up and said, “Hey, I’m out here now.” He said, “What’s happening?”

Richard Hudolin:
After about three months, he calls me. Took that long. He didn’t call and say, “Hey, I’m coming. I’m gonna be there.” No, no, no. “How long you been here?” Quite a year.

Douglas McLean:
And we had a fine place to live, do all this. And you had just gotten Stargate.

Richard Hudolin:
Yes.

Douglas McLean:
They didn’t even have production offices. So it was, “Well, come and work with us for a few weeks, and you can work from your apartment. I’ll work from home, and we’ll start on the standing sets.” ‘Cause we knew what they wanted to be, ’cause they had to look a lot like the ones from the …

Richard Hudolin:
From the movie.

Douglas McLean:
… from the feature. So We started doing that. Then they got production offices. And I suddenly showed up and there’s a whole bunch of people I’ve never met. And it was a very weird experience, ’cause I had done a lot of film and stuff in Toronto. And I was in the production office, and I could practically tell you who everybody was. “Oh, that must be the accountant. Oh, those are the props guys. Those have got to be the grips.” Didn’t know anybody. They’re just archetypes. I knew that was the art director, ’cause he told me. Met a whole bunch of people. We started working on the show, and what I figured was a few weeks work, and we were there for five years, and you continued on for another 400.

Richard Hudolin:
But you did Atlantis after that.

Douglas McLean:
You did Atlantis and Universe.

Bridget McGuire:
I did another five years, and did Atlantis. I didn’t do—

Douglas McLean:
Didn’t do Universe?

Bridget McGuire:
I didn’t do Universe, no.

Douglas McLean:
OK. It started on its own.

Bridget McGuire:
That was when I had moved on.

Richard Hudolin:
We did things in five-year increments.

Bridget McGuire:
After doing something for 10 years, it was sort of like, “Maybe I should try doing something else.”

Richard Hudolin:
And she took Atlantis in a great new direction. It was really interesting to see, because by the time I had left, I’d reached the point, as I was saying, David, if I read a script, yet another script that said an alien object I was gonna strangle somebody.

Bridget McGuire:
We need a few more.

Richard Hudolin:
I figured my term was over, and it was time for Bridget, who had been there since the outset, and who was a very talented and wonderful person, and all the rest of those great things I could say, give her her shot. There you go, ’cause me, I gotta move on and do other things. You came with me.

Douglas McLean:
I left with you and, I think, Ivana?

Richard Hudolin:
Yeah.

Bridget McGuire:
It was a whole new team.

Richard Hudolin:
We left her. Wasn’t Brenton there at the time? He stayed with you?

Bridget McGuire:
I don’t…

Richard Hudolin:
Ken Rabehl came with… I can’t remember-

Bridget McGuire:
Ken left to work on Andromeda? Yes.

Richard Hudolin:
Yes.

Bridget McGuire:
That’s a word I can’t say.

Richard Hudolin:
Ken wanted to get his shot at production design. So, he went and did Andromeda, and then he did something else. And after he had done that, he realized that production design wasn’t his forte as much. And he and I hooked up again on …

Bridget McGuire:
Battlestar?

Richard Hudolin:
… I forget what, but I think Battlestar.

Douglas McLean:
We worked on a couple of other things with him.

Bridget McGuire:
You guys did Dead Like Me.

Richard Hudolin:
Reaper. After I left Stargate, we did a lot of pilots. We did Prophet, which is where we designed and built that huge backdrop.

Bridget McGuire:
Prophet was before …

Richard Hudolin:
Was that before?

Bridget McGuire:
… Stargate, yeah.

Richard Hudolin:
OK, that’s been a long time ago.

Douglas McLean:
We did about four pilots.

Richard Hudolin:
The lithium is wearing off.

Bridget McGuire:
It wasn’t really very long between you leaving Stargate and you being on Battlestar. It was only about, I think, 18 months.

Douglas McLean:
No, no, no.

Douglas McLean:
Because we did about four or five pilots.

Bridget McGuire:
You did four or five pilots in 18 months.

Douglas McLean:
Did we, though?

Bridget McGuire:
Yeah.

Douglas McLean:
OK, maybe it just felt like 18 months.

Richard Hudolin:
But pay attention, we worked a lot.

Douglas McLean:
Dead Like Me, Reaper, one that has… I can no longer remember.

Bridget McGuire:
I saw the pilot for Battlestar, and …

Richard Hudolin:
That was another series.

Bridget McGuire:
… I don’t think we’d started Atlantis yet.

Douglas McLean:
Ken did some of those with us, and then we went on to Battlestar, and he came on that. Did I never work with you on Stargate?

Bridget McGuire:
Yeah. For the first five years.

Douglas McLean:
No. After. With you as production designer on Stargate.

Richard Hudolin:
Makes me wonder what they were doing …

Bridget McGuire:
Yeah, You did.

Richard Hudolin:
… without me out on the road.

Douglas McLean:
‘Cause I only remember doing two little things on Universe.

Bridget McGuire:
No.

Douglas McLean:
I never worked on Atlantis.

Bridget McGuire:
No. No, you didn’t work on Atlantis. We didn’t start Atlantis for– I did two years of Stargate, which was just doing Stargate, which, in hindsight, was just so lovely. Just doing one show at a time was nice. And then we dug in, started doing the Atlantis.

Douglas McLean:
At the same time.

Bridget McGuire:
And doing the two of them at the same time. So, doing, Joe pointed out, or somebody pointed out, over 40 episodes in a season. That was a little dense. It was intricate.

Richard Hudolin:
No, that was great. I saw some of the sets and designs that Bridget had done, and they were terrific.

Bridget McGuire:
We did a lot of stuff.

Richard Hudolin:
You know what makes you feel good? It’s when your kid does well. Honestly, it feels like that. Not that she’s my child, but– She has her own talents and skills and all the rest, and then both of them, it’s– I’ve been very lucky. Guys like Ken Rabehl, Bridget, Doug, come on. How can I lose, for Christ’s sake? I’d have to be an idiot to blow this deal. And we all, from pretty much day one, understood each other. I don’t know if you know what it’s like when you can talk to somebody and they get what you’re saying, they get the undercurrent, they get the backstory, they get it all in a couple of words. You don’t have to sit there and beat it to death and explain this and explain that and why, blah, blah, blah. Both of these people would come to me sometimes and say, “I have a better idea.” “What?” I mean… “How could you? How dare you?”

Bridget McGuire:
Never, ever.

Douglas McLean:
We thought it would be better.

Richard Hudolin:
They were right.

Bridget McGuire:
“Here’s your idea, reinterpreted.” There you go.

Richard Hudolin:
They were right. It was difficult to swallow, but…

Douglas McLean:
I think it was a good time to be doing that kind of television, because we got to build a lot of really big stuff. We filled stages. Thom Wells would always be coming, “OK, I’ll be there in 20 minutes, and I’ll need another stage.”

Richard Hudolin:
And more money.

Douglas McLean:
And more money.

Bridget McGuire:
And we filled them.

Douglas McLean:
We filled them. They were always–

Bridget McGuire:
Three at Norco, the effects stage, and then two stages, five and six. So how many is that? I don’t know.

Richard Hudolin:
We were up to seven at one point.

Douglas McLean:
And then sometimes we’d have the baby stage.

Richard Hudolin:
Plus locations.

Bridget McGuire:
Plus locations. And we were filling those up. And we would fill them up.

Richard Hudolin:
Blow them away.

Bridget McGuire:
And then we’d tear it out, and we would fill it up again, and that was really– I’ve lost them now, but I had this Excel spreadsheet for all the stages, locations for the two different shows, all divided up into different colors so we could track when spaces were gonna be being used, when they’d be available, and when we could start turning them over again. And I remember going into Brad and Jon, and I was like, “I got the script,” or “I’ve gone through the script.” And I think it was three or four episodes in the future, “We were gonna be in trouble. We’re not gonna have anywhere to build.” And they looked at me, and I had this, it looked like a crazy quilt. And they’re like, “OK, we’ll change the order of the episodes then. Would that fix it?” And I’m like, “Yes, it will.” But that’s the only way you can do that sort of stuff is to be looking that far in advance.

Richard Hudolin:
But that speaks to the ability that she would spot it and that they would actually change it. They don’t dig their heels in and say, “What do you know? We’re gonna do it anyway,” and beat the hell out of everybody, including all the crews. They would understand and say, “We got a great group of people, we’re gonna keep ’em happy, we’re gonna get it done the way it should be done, and we will switch the order.”

Douglas McLean:
They were great. Producers were great too, ’cause you would go down and be talking in the office with them, going, “Two episodes from now, three episodes from now, what’s it gonna be? Where you wanna go?”

Richard Hudolin:
At the beginning of every season, I would start a week earlier, and I would go to the offices of Stargate, and Brad and the writers were all there, Brad, Jonathan, the writers, were in that office, and they were working out the storyline for the whole season. I said, “Look, I don’t need the details. I need the big bounces. I need to know, is this another planet? Is it a subsidiary of whatever? Just the big beats. Give me those.” And it would take a week to go through all of this, maybe spilling into the next, because the keys obviously would start first, ’cause they would set up props and set dec, and Thommy was construction and paint and all the rest. And in that week, I would say, OK, I could divide the work up and say who’s gonna be working on what. So, when these guys showed up, they didn’t sit around drinking coffee for the first week. Now we’re gonna have a meeting, and here’s what I’m thinking, we’re gonna try this and that and that and that, and if this works with these guys, we would move on from there, because everybody had a direction. ‘Cause when that bell rang, we were off and we were running.

Bridget McGuire:
There was no downtime. I think considering the scale of the show, we kept our pace pretty good. But that was only because you gave us direction and then we were all able to follow it. It was everybody working together as a team, and everybody working in the same direction and having really strong departments that you could really rely on to do their part of the job and not have to micromanage them or be checking back and making sure that things were being addressed. You did do all that, but you’d find out, yes, everything’s fine, it’s progressing, everything’s in good shape.

Richard Hudolin:
The Davidsons were set dec, and they were terrific together, the two brothers. And then Dan Sissons did the first season, and Dan was an amazing props guy, who I had worked with many times prior on various shows and with Bridgit as well. We had a pretty tight crew. We weren’t training too many people. We were all well integrated in knowing this is the A-team that’s going into the show. Again, I keep going back to Brad and Jonathan. At any time, I could walk into that office with Bridgit or with Doug or by myself or whatever it took, and say, “Here’s what we’re seeing and here’s what’s working and here’s what’s not working. How do we accomplish what you wanna get? It’s not what I wanna get. You guys sold it to MGM, so we’re gonna follow your lead. I’m not here to lead the dance; I’m here to follow you.” And we would always come out knowing where we were going. We never came outta there saying, “Oh, geez, now what?” It was like that.

Douglas McLean:
And it was good all the way down the ladder because we’d produce stuff, it would go off to construction and they’d just do it. You’d go into the shop every once in a while and they’ll be like, “That’s good.” Or they’d come and go, “We’re changing this. Here’s why.” And you go, “OK. That makes total sense.”

Bridget McGuire:
Thom’s team, they were just– I think Thom developed that system of trusses, and hanging, so essentially all these massive sets were built off of a scaffold system of trusses. The first thing that would go up would be the trusses, and that’s what supported all the walls. then all the walls, the flats, would hang, which allowed all those flats to be wild. The trusses were reusable, so that reduced the cost, and just made things go up really quickly and come down. They were absolutely brilliant. Such a good group of guys, really good.

Richard Hudolin:
He came to me when we were doing the set in the new stage and building the Stargate set where the star goes here and the walls– And Thommy comes to me and says, “Richard, can we build a cotton above 14 feet? and I said, “Yeah, why not? If we’re gonna fly a wall, we’re gonna fly a wall where the camera is. I don’t care what’s 14 feet in the air.” He saved us a hell of a lot of money and time. And effort with that one comment. But he knew he could come to me and ask me if I got rocks in my head or whatever. Like Thom says, their offices and shop were not on the lot. And we transported it in for the most part, except when we were building on a stage. And Thommy would always say, “It’ll take,” even though it took him 20 minutes, “I’ll be there in 10 minutes and I’m gonna need more time and I’m gonna need more money and more space.” And that was his line. But he always delivered. Always.

Bridget McGuire:
The stuff that we were building, it wasn’t coming off the shelf.

Richard Hudolin:
No, no. Gary York was on this team.

Douglas McLean:
Gary York.

Bridget McGuire:
Yes.

Douglas McLean:
He’s awesome.

Richard Hudolin:
You used him on–

Bridget McGuire:
On Sanctuary.

Richard Hudolin:
Sanctuary. Yes. Great guy.

Bridget McGuire:
He was a great guy. We did miracles on that show because there we had no space, time or money.

Richard Hudolin:
I remember.

Bridget McGuire:
And yet we still pulled it off.

Richard Hudolin:
I remember him. The first time I met Gary York, I was here working on Bird on a Wire, a movie with John Badham, and Philip Harrison was the designer, and I remember we were gonna blow up a gas station in Chinatown.

Bridget McGuire:
As you do.

Richard Hudolin:
And there’s this guy– It was a one-story gas station, we were putting a fake second floor on it. And Gary York, he was this little fella, long hair, which immediately ingratiated to my black little heart. He’s up there and I’m looking and I’m saying, “Could we have that railing a little bit lower so he can see where the window is?” And I could put somebody there. And he goes, “Sir, you can have anything you want,” with a big smile.

Bridget McGuire:
That was Gary.

Richard Hudolin:
That was Gary. You could have anything you want. That was great.

Douglas McLean:
He was great with geometry because we would constantly have discussions. I would do my projection of geometry …

Richard Hudolin:
He’s the mathematician in the group.

Douglas McLean:
… of something. And go, “Here’s the way these two arches are gonna intersect.” It made no sense at all when you thought of it in your brain. No, two arches coming in like this are gonna intersect with a line that does that. And I’d go, “Gary, it’s gonna be a straight line that drops to the floor. It can’t be this.” “I’ve built it in the computer. It’s gonna do that.” And he’d go running off, he would lay it out full size, come back out, “OK, it’s a straight line that cuts to the floor.” Or you’d give him a really complicated piece of geometry and go, “I have no idea how to break this down for you.” And he said, “Just give me the final thing.” And he would just start laying it out on the floor. And go, “This and this and this.” You’d come in, there’d be this huge drawing, and it was just a template, he’d just build to it. Pieces go up and you go, “Yeah, that’s what I thought it would be.” “Good.” It was.

Richard Hudolin:
The only time I ever saw anybody laying something out like that was when I was assistant at Pinewood after a show. And the construction people would build balustrades and railings full scale. And have them on the wall so that you could put a person there, you’d know exactly where their head was gonna be or where the cautioner had to be or whatever. And these guys would lay out that kind of structure. Full scale. Unbelievable. I’d never seen anything like it. I’m a little hick from Canada. And this guy, Gary York, could do that. And I walked in one day through the shop, and there he is and he’s got the entire floor. And I thought, most people could look at it and say, “You’re wasting space.” This guy is spending the smart money and thinking about how to do that.

Douglas McLean:
Because they’ve gotta do it eight times or ten times.

Richard Hudolin:
Of course, every time. And she got to work with this guy even closer.

Bridget McGuire:
He was great.

Richard Hudolin:
He was something else.

Bridget McGuire:
But I think you just mentioned you were drawing things up on the computer. I mean, this is back in 19–

Douglas McLean:
The Stone Age.

Richard Hudolin:
To get that they had to use a chisel.

Bridget McGuire:
Nobody was producing working drawings on the computer. I think even when you started …

Douglas McLean:
I did very little where I would finish the drawing on the computer.

Bridget McGuire:
… you would build them, you would model it.

Douglas McLean:
I would model it and then I would do rough elevations, clean slices through it that weren’t very precise. Blow them up on the Xerox machine. Because you only had an 8 x 10 printer.

Bridget McGuire:
Yes, Xerox was our friend.

Douglas McLean:
Then take them down and then throw a sheet of vellum on them and then draw. Because you couldn’t get any real …

Bridget McGuire:
The programs weren’t–

Douglas McLean:
… textures or anything.

Bridget McGuire:
The programs weren’t available.

Douglas McLean:
It only finally hit even after we’d left Battlestar, was when I finally got to do what I wanted to do.

Richard Hudolin:
That’ll extend into what Battlestar story, what she’s interested in. I know he’s interested in that but I’ll put– Anyway, going back to the beginning, when he showed up and finally called me, I discovered that I’d known him from Montreal and Toronto and Calgary. Pretty talented drawing, but unbelievable. Bridget as well, unbelievable drawings: freehand, drafting, whatever, beautiful. You look at this stuff and you just want to cry. It’s fantastic. It’s art. In any event, this guy is onto a computer. He took to that… And Doug, you have a math background as well?

Douglas McLean:
Yeah.

Richard Hudolin:
Which explains the Gary York thing. So, I discover he is into computers at this time, and I talked about the green screen. And Bridget mentioned the green screen, and everybody’s, “Ooh.”

Bridget McGuire:
Ooh, the green screen.

Richard Hudolin:
So now, we got the green screen and the computer guy. Boy.

Douglas McLean:
Woo.

Richard Hudolin:
Are we smoking hot or what? Huh?

Douglas McLean:
Shiny, shiny.

Richard Hudolin:
Son of a bitch. We got her rolling now, boys.

Bridget McGuire:
I had to write– We wanted a computer for the art department. And I had to write in a letter to Ron French why a computer in the art department could be useful. I guess he fell for it and we bought an Apple. And that was when the only reason we got the Apple was because my sister was in graphic design and she said, “Anything else, go with,” whatever the other computers were. And she says, “But if you’re doing graphics, you’re gonna wanna get an Apple.”

Richard Hudolin:
I think you could buy Apple shares at $10 a share.

Bridget McGuire:
We didn’t.

Douglas McLean:
We should’ve done that.

Richard Hudolin:
So anyway, Doug continued to develop the computer skills, and ultimately– If I skim over and go on to the Battlestar thing, he was off on some other show, and he’d been taking computer– I’m a computer dummy. I look at it. The first computer I ever had, I borrowed from Mary and I put it on my desk at the office, Stargate office. And I said, “I gotta learn this thing. I hate it, but I’m gonna. I have to learn it.” And I started it. I hit the on button and up comes, “Fixed disk failure.” And his office was just outside of mine. And I said, “Hey, Doug. What does fixed disk failure mean?” On the computer.

Douglas McLean:
This is why you had to buy Mary a new computer.

Richard Hudolin:
I had to buy her a new computer.

Bridget McGuire:
Because you broke it.

Richard Hudolin:
I just turned the goddamn thing on. I didn’t touch it.

Bridget McGuire:
No, you weren’t allowed to go near the computers.

Richard Hudolin:
And people would see me coming and hide their computers.

Douglas McLean:
You’d have an energy field around you.

Bridget McGuire:
“No touching the computers. You stand over there, and no touching the props. You just look at them. They’re just for looking at.”

Douglas McLean:
“This is it. Let me show you.”

Richard Hudolin:
‘Cause it would break. Jesus. Back to Doug. I think Ken was gone at this point.

Bridget McGuire:
Going on to another show.

Richard Hudolin:
Yeah, the big show.

Bridget McGuire:
You’re talking about on Arrow.

Richard Hudolin:
I go to visit Doug at his computer school. And it’s like taking a sea captain and showing him how to run a row boat. Why? He knows everything. So I go and I see what he’s doing. And I said, “Wow.” ‘Cause he’s doing illustrations at this point. He wasn’t doing illustrations before. He was doing working drawings and that kind of stuff. But I see that he’s doing illustrations, and I’m looking for an illustrator. Was it Arrow?

Douglas McLean:
It was on Arrow. It was the last season of Arrow.

Richard Hudolin:
Then I says to myself, “I found my illustrator.”

Bridget McGuire:
You must’ve been… Because you were involved in the second Bunker, I think. You did. Because you did the illustrations.

Douglas McLean:
That’s right.

Bridget McGuire:
You modeled that for us.

Richard Hudolin:
He wasn’t really interested in it, but I convinced him. I said, “You’re gonna be the illustrator.” Because Bridget had introduced me to another cat, very talented man. And it’s going off-topic a bit, but Rodrigo.

Douglas McLean:
Rodrigo.

Richard Hudolin:
Rodrigo Segovia.

Bridget McGuire:
He’s fantastic.

Richard Hudolin:
Incredible talent. Again, I keep coming back to the same thing. I find these people or somehow we bump into each other that are incredibly talented. Rodrigo, a designer, incredibly nice human being. I pair him with Bridget and Doug. I’m golden again. I really am. It’s unbelievable. ‘Cause Rodrigo will come up with an idea. And again, this whole everybody sees everybody else’s work. And what are you doing? And you look at that and say, “Try this.” Or they’ve come to me and said, “That’s wrong.” But usually, they’re in line with me, so whatever I’m doing is wrong, but they–

Douglas McLean:
You were saying that I wasn’t interested in being an illustrator, which is kinda right, because, to me, illustrators are Ken Rabehl. They’re people who can take a pencil, a brush, a magic marker. Bang, it’s done. I build entire things in the computer, texture them, light them, and produce renderings. And then we’ll work on that a bit in post stuff, but it’s still–

Richard Hudolin:
Amazing.

Douglas McLean:
To me, it was a whole different process. So, I never thought of it as illustrating. Because not only can I illustrate it, we can just hand this to the special effects department if you want. Because that’s where I ultimately thought I would be heading was into complete visualization. And the industry has gone there. They now have the volume stages and that. And the industry went there and I didn’t. Because Ken, again–

Bridget McGuire:
He had a different process.

Douglas McLean:
Such an amazing talent for just– He’d just see stuff in his head, and it would be on paper.

Richard Hudolin:
But in later years with us, he was working on a computer.

Douglas McLean:
He was starting to, because everyone had to.

Bridget McGuire:
He did. His work always started by hand. And then he would take that into the computer, do Photoshop work with it. Everything he did started as a pencil sketch or a pencil perspective. He had this system of working out perspectives. It would take up half of the art department with his lines and stuff like that. He was really obsessive about his art. My frustration as the art director was to get it off his desk and hand it off to the person …

Douglas McLean:
All of us.

Bridget McGuire:
… who needed it. And he was like, “No, I’m not… I’m just…” And you look, and he’s shading the stars and you’re like, “OK. That’s enough shading on the stars. I think we can hand this off to the visual effects people now.” And he’s like, “Not done yet. Just not done.”

Richard Hudolin:
Bridget, I remember I had a flight booked to fly to LA to make a presentation to the executives at the studio. Could have been a presentation for Battlestar, I’m not sure. There’s Ken finishing off one of our concept drawings. And tick-tock, the limo’s gonna pick me up, Ken. If I’m not on that flight, I’m gonna kill somebody in this— I’m gonna kill you. And he kept at it and at it. And I said, “Ken, I’m gonna rip that goddamn thing right off of your table. I want it now.” The limo was outside, motor’s running. And he’s still trying… “You don’t understand, Ken.”

Douglas McLean:
The amazing thing is, though, he could also do the most amazing sketches about this big, in seconds. Literally, he would be– I remember him going on a bus or it could have been a limo to the airport with a director and a script. And they would be storyboarding a sequence. And on the script page, he would draw these little squares about this big and they would talk. Director would say, “I’m gonna do this kind of shot over here. We’re gonna push you to do this.” Ken would scribble and do this, and then he would come back to the art department …

Richard Hudolin:
And storyboard it.

Douglas McLean:
… and then he would storyboard it. But his little sketches were the best. It was sort of like, “Ken, blow ’em up. Print them eight by ten.”

Bridget McGuire:
You’re good.

Douglas McLean:
“Send them out. You don’t need to do any more.” He would then work them because he was–

Bridget McGuire:
He really did. I talked towards the end of his life there. We talked about it. When I say he was obsessive, it really was, he had to do– He would picture what he wanted. The picture would be in his head.

Douglas McLean:
He wanted this–

Bridget McGuire:
And he had to keep working on it until what he had in his head was what he saw on the page. And if they didn’t match up, he wasn’t happy. He wasn’t happy to let it go.

Douglas McLean:
The people that he modeled himself after, and I think he even went to LA and …

Richard Hudolin:
We met Sidney.

Douglas McLean:
… trained under him.

Richard Hudolin:
Another great illustrator for you guys.

Bridget McGuire:
Sidney and Ralph McQuarrie, who did a lot of the …

Richard Hudolin:
Star Wars.

Douglas McLean:
… Star Wars stuff. And you could see it. That’s what Ken was looking for, because he went down there, talked to the guys, saw their work. He went, “Ah, that’s what I wanna do.” So, that’s what he wanted.

Bridget McGuire:
And that’s what he did.

Douglas McLean:
And that’s what he did. Because when you’ve got a finished sketch, Ken, pencil sketches were really nice. His finished paintings, when he got to paint, which wasn’t often enough, were stunning. And then, to me, his tiny little thumbnails. I would kill to be able to do that. Wow, you’ve got the whole thing there.

Richard Hudolin:
I ruined his hands, I think. Because I asked him to do original paintings. It was for …

Bridget McGuire:
For the Afghanistan–

Richard Hudolin:
… an Afghan series of paintings or whatever. Ever after that, he always had to wear a support on his hands.

Bridget McGuire:
That was the beginning of the ALS.

Richard Hudolin:
Was that the beginning of the ALS?

Bridget McGuire:
Yeah. Those were the first symptoms. And he put it off to his shoulders or strain or whatever. He developed ALS, and it affected his shoulders first.

Douglas McLean:
Ultimately, all of us age.

Bridget McGuire:
Those were probably his last paintings that he ever did.

Richard Hudolin:
They were, yes.

Bridget McGuire:
They were. Hopefully they’re around somewhere.

Richard Hudolin:
Gary York had ALS too.

Bridget McGuire:
He did.

Douglas McLean:
Oh really? I didn’t know that.

Richard Hudolin:
How are you feeling?

Bridget McGuire:
Lucky to be here.

Richard Hudolin:
It’s a black humor.

Douglas McLean:
I haven’t hit any of those yet.

David Read:
Speaking about dark humor, what about the fire?

Richard Hudolin:
The fire. That day.

Douglas McLean:
That was funny.

David Read:
We should keep on going. Now it’s just incendiary.

Bridget McGuire:
Now, the fire is incendiary.

Richard Hudolin:
Is that what you guys call a segue?

Douglas McLean:
Yeah.

David Read:
Yes.

Bridget McGuire:
Our recollections might be different. I think it was a Thanksgiving long weekend.

Douglas McLean:
It was definitely a long weekend. I think it was the American one, wasn’t it? Or was it…

Bridget McGuire:
Could be. Could have been.

Douglas McLean:
Because a lot of people were away. A lot of people had vacations.

David Read:
You had just shot “Solitudes.”

Bridget McGuire:
We had just shot “Solitudes.”

David Read:
Frozen the set with Martin Wood.

Bridget McGuire:
That was in stage six, and I don’t think we’ve used that much Styrofoam on anything more than–

Douglas McLean:
I don’t think it’s legal anymore.

Bridget McGuire:
It was …

Richard Hudolin:
Wall to wall.

Bridget McGuire:
… wall to wall, and probably half of the volume of the stage was Styrofoam, with the one, the elephant door at the end, and then two little crew doors, and that’s it for getting in and out of the stage. I think Thom, we were done shooting it and it was sort of, “We might as well get rid of it now. Clear out the stage. We don’t know what we’re doing in there next, but it’s not gonna be a glacier.” So, this isn’t something that we can …

Richard Hudolin:
They have to strike it.

Bridget McGuire:
… flip into something else. So we’ll strike it, and I think they did it Thursday, the day before the long weekend that we did that.

Richard Hudolin:
I remember that picker that came in there ’cause they had the big arm and then a sharpened point kind of thing, and he would literally be picking up, throw 40, 50 feet in the air and a whole wall would come down. It was amazing to watch.

Bridget McGuire:
It was crazy.

Richard Hudolin:
I was very impressed with that. And then because it was a real full-sized crane, they would run over this. And crush it. I was like, “Wow.” People always say, “You should enjoy watching your work going up.” It was more fun watching it come down.

Bridget McGuire:
It’s very satisfying. Very satisfying.

Douglas McLean:
But if that had not been done …

Bridget McGuire:
If that had not been done—

Douglas McLean:
… the stage would have gone. Because I remember, in Toronto when I was working in a theater. Toronto Arts Productions had a set they were building. A lot of Styrofoam, a lot of it on the ground, a lot of panels set like this up against the wall. It was all being glued together with contact cement. Somebody put the ash somewhere.

Richard Hudolin:
But what caused the fire?

Douglas McLean:
And the whole thing whumpf.

Richard Hudolin:
The set was gone.

Douglas McLean:
The set was gone, fortunately.

Richard Hudolin:
And I remember that I would leave at the end of the day and I’d generally walk through the sets, the stages, ’cause everybody’s gone. It gives me a chance to look and see where we are or refresh my own little reminder and stuff like that. And I remember, there was a guy who went fishing with somebody and he drowned that weekend.

David Read:
Whoa.

Richard Hudolin:
And he was a carpenter, and he was in the stage wandering around, and I saw him and the stage was empty and you know how you go through the trap, the sound trap? You go through that and there was a light.

Bridget McGuire:
Like a stumble light.

Richard Hudolin:
A stumble light.

Bridget McGuire:
A house light.

Richard Hudolin:
Above that door. And it wasn’t touching– It wasn’t where it should have been.

Bridget McGuire:
I think they were doing some kind of repairs on the– But they were those super hot halogens.

Richard Hudolin:
What caused the fire was, it was Gyprock, which doesn’t burn. You use that as a firewall when you’re building things. But there were wooden studs in between. That’s what started it on fire. So, the fire was within the walls and the ceiling and everything else. It didn’t get through to the main set, the main stage, which was the Stargate set.

Bridget McGuire:
By that much.

Richard Hudolin:
But there was smoke …

Bridget McGuire:
Flame.

Richard Hudolin:
… and shit everywhere.

Bridget McGuire:
Layer.

Richard Hudolin:
There were people in there with the things that dissipate smell. And they were toothbrushes and cleaning and cleaning forever.

Bridget McGuire:
That stage always smelled of wood smoke. Five, eight years later, you could still that little barbecue smell. It was an unpleasant remnant.

Richard Hudolin:
So, I finished my little walkthrough and then that weekend, Mary was shooting in Charleston, was it North Carolina or South Carolina? Charleston, I think it’s South Carolina.

Bridget McGuire:
South Carolina.

Richard Hudolin:
I was gonna go visit her ’cause I was chasing her at the time. I chased her all over the goddamn planet. In any event, there I am on some beautiful beach in Charleston, which is a lovely city by the way, a lovely city. Staying in this stilt house and it was fantastic. Shrimp boats out there. My phone rings, and it’s Andy Mikita. “Richard, Richard.” “Hey, Andy. How you doing?” He says, “We’ve had a fire. You’ve gotta get over here right away.” I’m going, “Andy, I’m in South Carolina, man.” And he was explaining what happened and I said, “No.” It was one of those, “No, can’t be. Impossible.”

Bridget McGuire:
It took them, I forget …

Richard Hudolin:
Who would believe it?

Bridget McGuire:
… how long to put it out because it was a smoldering fire. They opened up the wall and went in and they thought that they had it, but it had crept over there. It was a smoldering fire so it traveled all through this huge wall between the studios. Eventually they just said, “Well, this has all gotta come down,” and they ended up knocking the whole wall down. So, now what used to be five and six was, there’s our standing set. Now we’re looking into stage six and this huge wall that used to be there and it was the space between the studio wall and the standing set was …

Richard Hudolin:
That long.

Bridget McGuire:
… that much. So, there was that much and, I’m assuming, half-inch drywall, probably three-quarters for soundproofing. And that’s how close the fire came to our standing set.

Richard Hudolin:
Taking out the Stargate.

Bridget McGuire:
It would have gone up because sets are built of 1x6s …

Richard Hudolin:
I told you that there was …

Bridget McGuire:
… and cotton.

Richard Hudolin:
… cotton above 14 feet.

Bridget McGuire:
Yeah.

Richard Hudolin:
What do you think cotton burns like?

Bridget McGuire:
I think that was right at first season because it was soliloquies that Martin had been shooting. That was one of his first directing debuts. I don’t know if it was his debut, but it was …

Richard Hudolin:
I’m not sure.

Bridget McGuire:
… pretty close.

Richard Hudolin:
Close to it.

Bridget McGuire:
Because he was the first AD.

Douglas McLean:
First AD.

Bridget McGuire:
We were lucky.

Richard Hudolin:
We were very lucky.

Douglas McLean:
I know, it could’ve been a total disaster.

Richard Hudolin:
I had a lovely weekend.

Bridget McGuire:
I did too. I didn’t hear about it until I turned up that morning to open. No, I must’ve heard because I would’ve been there to open set. And I guess maybe we weren’t shooting in the standing set. We must’ve been shooting something else.

Richard Hudolin:
It was a mess. But, we …

Douglas McLean:
I’m sure they weren’t …

Richard Hudolin:
… worked around.

Douglas McLean:
… shooting for a while in that standing set because-

Richard Hudolin:
No. No.

Douglas McLean:
It was pretty–

Bridget McGuire:
I don’t remember it being shut down in there though.

Douglas McLean:
I think for a couple of days it was.

Bridget McGuire:
Maybe a couple of days.

Douglas McLean:
They threw things.

Bridget McGuire:
They readjusted the schedule or something like that. That was fun.

Douglas McLean:
Indeed.

David Read:
Can you tell us about building the Atlantis Gate based on the design of the SG-1 Gate?

Douglas McLean:
I can’t. Can you?

Bridget McGuire:
I can.

Richard Hudolin:
It’s up to you, Doug. What do you think?

Bridget McGuire:
So, they wanted it to be different, because they wanted it distinctly different than the SG Gate. By that time, computers had developed to the point where computers and lighting– It must’ve been lit with LEDs. So, LEDs were the new thing, and there was a steep learning curve for them. I’m still learning. And so, the lighting guys got at it, and we worked with the pattern for the different constellations using LEDs for the constellations. And they basically had to program in all the different addresses. And they also wanted the Gate to fold down, because we wanted to use the main …

David Read:
Gate room?

Bridget McGuire:
… Atlantis, the Gate room as a sort of a flexible space, so we could drop the Gate, change the back wall, slide it back and forth, and then turn it into a different part of the Atlantis facility. So, the whole Gate had to be able to be flopped down, stood up, and the programmed with all the lighting. It worked. I thought it worked well. It was pretty.

David Read:
Beautiful. It was made for ever.

Bridget McGuire:
It was cast. It was cast pretty similar to what the SG Gate was. By that time, the model shop that grew out of– It started as a tent in the back of the effects stage.

Richard Hudolin:
Inside.

Bridget McGuire:
On the pilot, when we were building the snake helmets and everything, and those were all sculpted and then cast. That was a nightmare.

Richard Hudolin:
Did Sal go over for it? Cast the gate?

Bridget McGuire:
That was Thom and those guys.

Richard Hudolin:
Thom?

Bridget McGuire:
Yeah.

Richard Hudolin:
Corrado was in there at that time? Michael? No, Michael was in the props department. On Stargate.

Bridget McGuire:
Michael was in props.

Richard Hudolin:
Casting and all that stuff.

Bridget McGuire:
He might’ve been there. There was a big crew.

Richard Hudolin:
Sal D’Aquila was the head of that department when we did the pilot. For Stargate.

Bridget McGuire:
And then Gord Bellamy took over.

Richard Hudolin:
Gord. Yes.

Bridget McGuire:
They continued. They started in the tent with no temperature control trying to cast, and it was–

Richard Hudolin:
It was terrible.

Bridget McGuire:
It was terrible. No proper ventilation. And then when construction moved to Norco, they sort of gave them an area, and that’s when they started, first of all, with proper ventilation and space and different areas for different tasks, because they had Paco doing–who was an electronic engineer–doing, again, the whole programming, robotics really. Thank goodness he came to us, otherwise he would’ve been, I don’t know, building bombs somewhere or something? But really, super, super smart guys, with a real depth of talents and skills. I think Michael Corrado was there doing upholstery in the model shop or something like– No, he was casting. You’re right.

Richard Hudolin:
He was casting.

Bridget McGuire:
He was casting too.

Richard Hudolin:
He was on the bench.

Bridget McGuire:
And that model shop grew and grew and grew until it pretty much took up the same real estate as the construction shop. And they were building everything. We’d go, we’d rent the spacesuits from LA. We’d bring them out here, and it would be a huge deal. They’d come with the technicians and it really limited what we could do. And they were bulky and awkward, and the face plates would fog up and they didn’t have internal lighting to light the actors. So, then Paco and the guys said, “OK. We can do this or we can do something better.” And they built the helmets so that they were mic’d so that you could hear the director. Because the ones that originally we had, the actors couldn’t hear the director, and that was a problem. And then they built in integrated lighting because now we had LEDs. Before that, we had those MRs that were like a little Easy-Bake Oven. They were so hot. So the LED were cool enough that you could integrate them into the helmets.

Richard Hudolin:
Why’d he have to be sweating in there?

Bridget McGuire:
Because honestly, there was one where we had some sort of glass or plexi box that RDA had to be in. And we built it and we had these MRs built into it and it looked really pretty. And then we had to put all these holes in the top because it really turned it into an oven. And we couldn’t–

Douglas McLean:
Please do not bake the lead actor.

Bridget McGuire:
That made a huge difference. So, the model department, as all these things were coming out, they were on them. I don’t know what the expression is. The first time I saw 3D printing was in the art department. And it was sort of, how could this work? How could you print in 3D? And they’re like, “Well, there. Here’s how it’s done.” And it was the very, very first 3D printers. And Gord was buying them right off the bat. And CNC, which was–

Richard Hudolin:
Unheard of.

Bridget McGuire:
On the original Gate, they CNC’d the pieces. But that was, again, for them, leading edge of technology. And it was being done for a feature. I don’t know, we started using CNC almost right away. And then Boyd started basically CNC-ing all the intricate powder work and stuff like that. And you think about all the hieroglyphs and all the texture that you see in all of those sets. All of that was built by the construction department with the model shop. And it was–

Richard Hudolin:
As we evolved from the first start-up, from the pilot, what we wound up with was a complete art department, a construction shop, metal shop, paint shop, fabrication, paint. There were more. We had a Pinewood, basically.

Bridget McGuire:
It only got bigger.

Richard Hudolin:
It got bigger. ‘Cause they were all special. And they all had something to do with making this thing, whatever that thing was, even better. I looked at the box that David sent me. You should look at this because it’s totally CNC, that box over there. That’s totally CNC. I went, “Wow.” And from where that is, from when we started.

Douglas McLean:
I remember ’cause we used to have Boyd in the art department before Godfrey was there.

Richard Hudolin:
He was the sign guy …

Douglas McLean:
The sign guy.

Richard Hudolin:
… who normally would be in the construction department in some dusty old corner. And we said, “No, we want him in the art department.”

Douglas McLean:
We want him in a closet, in a room.

Bridget McGuire:
We kept him in the closet. There was a door.

Douglas McLean:
So, he was there, and it would start with cutting vinyl signage. And then it became, “Could we decorate this box with some vinyl decoration?” Go to that.

Richard Hudolin:
With dimension.

Douglas McLean:
Then it moved to dimension because we discovered sandblast mask.

Bridget McGuire:
Sandblast mask.

Douglas McLean:
And sandblast mask is sort of a rubbery substance about eighth of an inch thick. And Boyd would cut out really intricate patterns in that, and that would get put on there. So now suddenly you had a flat surface, but you had the dimension with hieroglyphs, …

Richard Hudolin:
You had relief.

Douglas McLean:
… and you could paint it and rub it and it would get antique. Then you’d start going, “Let’s do two layers of the sandblast separately so we get two different layers of detail.” And then, CNC would be occasionally done, but it usually sent out. Boyd would prepare the files. Did he eventually move over to the model shop? ‘Cause they started CNC-ing in the model shop.

Bridget McGuire:
No, he stayed with us.

Douglas McLean:
‘Cause by the time Universe was there, Boyd was CNC-ing permanently over in the model shop. And they would do with the CNC, you’d be cutting in, instead of eighth inch or sixteenth inch, you’d cut through quarter and half inch mid-height. So you’d have a floor with a cutout pattern. Sometimes they would be CNC-ing things that I looked at him and gone, “You could just cut four strips of wood. Slap them together there and it’d be faster.”

Bridget McGuire:
Just because you can doesn’t mean you should.

Douglas McLean:
See, it was a time when things were changing, and through Stargate, and through Battlestar. Battlestar, for Richard and I, we were still on Stargate, but that was when we changed from storyboarding by pencil. Then it would be by pencil, scan it into the computer to produce PDFs so they could be printed and sent out. Then it became scan it into the computer, do some quick Photoshop work instead of marker work on it, send it out for distribution. Scan it, do complete paint overs in the computer, or eventually start doing the roughs in the computer, and then eventually even the original illustration would be done starting there and go all the way through.

Richard Hudolin:
I can tell you what they were really doing on Battlestar. I went out on a survey one day, by myself. Now very unusual, because usually you bring …

Bridget McGuire:
I was not there.

Richard Hudolin:
… your right hand with you. You weren’t there but I point to you as the art director. You usually bring your right hand with you, because any time you’re by yourself, you’re gonna get worked over or something.

Bridget McGuire:
You’re not allowed out by yourself.

Richard Hudolin:
And usually then they won’t be able to let me out. Anyway, I’m by myself to survey this area, and it’s basically a gully and there’s a lot of greenery and some body has to be put in it and they’re gonna find them and– There’s just me going out with my camera and my notes and whatever. By the time I get back, Mary’s coming to visit me that afternoon, and she starts laughing hysterically. And I’m saying, “What are you laughing at?” And she hands me this record cover, back then when they had albums. And it said, “Richard Sings,” on this album cover. And there’s the photo of me in that location, sort of crouched down and looking, because I was standing in for the person that had to be there. I don’t know how they got a hold of the photo that fast, but they …

Bridget McGuire:
Holy moly.

Richard Hudolin:
… had created a full album cover with “Richard Sings” of me, and she was just– And the whole office knew about it. They wanted to see my reaction.

Douglas McLean:
Occasionally you used the computer for fun.

Richard Hudolin:
That’s what they were really doing when I went out by myself. And you should have heard her howling. It’s unbelievable. And it took her a second. “What? Richard Sings?”

Douglas McLean:
That’s another thing that was great about that department, the whole show, was people still had fun. I remember once, I think I’d gone to Las Vegas for a Photoshop convention, so I was away for about four days. I came back, and on my desk, there was a pinned-up T-shirt with the letters D-Y-K-M in the style of …

Richard Hudolin:
Donna Karan.

Douglas McLean:
… DKNY, Donna Karan New York, only it’s DYKM. And I’m like, “What the hell is this?” And Thom and the guys in the shop had printed it up, and next to it, or pinned on it, is this thing. It says, “Doug, you’re killing me.” Because I’d done something or other, or sent them off some detail that was–

Bridget McGuire:
You had made an angled wall with a detail and …

Douglas McLean:
Made a set and then gone off.

Bridget McGuire:
… some decorations.

Douglas McLean:
And he came back and went, “Killing me.” There was stuff like that all the time. Fun people to work with. ‘Cause everybody was really good at what they did.

Bridget McGuire:
That was part of the–

Douglas McLean:
Yeah, thanks.

Bridget McGuire:
“We can’t do this,” and we’re like, “Yeah, we can, unfortunately.”

Richard Hudolin:
No, it’s true. It’s absolutely true. The one thing I hate about the film business and the television business is the early morning calls. I’m a night person. I’ve told you this. Come 10:00, I’m just starting to go. Come 7:00 in the morning, you just don’t. It got to the point, Bridget wouldn’t let anybody come in. I would show up at the office a little, 9:30, maybe 10:00 sometimes, and she’d say, “You don’t go into his office. You give him 15 minutes.” And then you can go. If you’ve got anything to ask him, you go to her first. And heaven forbid the poor person that went in to see me as soon as my car door closed. I hated going to the office, but I always did it, and when I got there, I was fine. I never heard anybody complain about the hard work or– I know it was hard work and I know they would be putting their extra hours in. And I would always say to them, “You gotta go do something, you go do it.” If your work is done, I don’t care what you do. If it takes you an hour, go. Go stand by a river and watch it. Whatever, because that’s gonna make you a better person.

Bridget McGuire:
And we all worked together as a team. I always said, “It doesn’t matter how big the project is, if everybody is working in the same direction together and you can rely on the whole team, you can do anything.” I’ve worked on way smaller shows where you think you’re on the right track. You go in there early, you start to get everything, everybody sorted so everybody knows what they’re doing and what the task is. And then by 6:30, it’s all changed. And you have to start again, come back in early the next morning, reorganize all the information, get it out there, and then hope it stays. And there was very little of that on Stargate. If anything, if there was a big shift like that, I think the biggest problem we had, or one of the challenges we had, was when Amanda got pregnant. And then she didn’t have her baby at the right time. And they had it all worked out so that she’d have her baby here, and then they’d do this episode and that episode. But it didn’t work out that way, and that was, “Oh, things aren’t going to plan.” The whole production had to be very efficient. You knew what your task was. You knew how to get there because you had all your team, and you moved forward. There was no sitting around.

Richard Hudolin:
The cast was very respectful of the art department as well. And construction and painting, and that’s everybody from RDA to– I remember Don Davis.

Bridget McGuire:
He used to come and hang out.

Richard Hudolin:
He would come up to the art department. As soon as there was a break, he’d come wander around and say, “What are you doing? Oh, look at that, that’s really cool. Why’d you do that?” He loved the art department.

Bridget McGuire:
He was an artist. He was an artist himself. He did beautiful prints.

Richard Hudolin:
And they would all appreciate all of the work that everyone had done.

Bridget McGuire:
Our art department was part of the production office. The writers were down there, we were down there, and we had these screens they put up when we first moved in there where we would put all the art, all the work that was being done up on these screens so that anybody at any time could come in and see what was being done. And they could look at it, they could respond to it, and they could see the process. And we were all there, either with our drawing or our computers, but we were all there. And we had lots of people coming into the art department. It was a pretty social place. We had props and–

Richard Hudolin:
Props, set dec.

Bridget McGuire:
We had props, set dec, art department, Boyd all in the end of—

Richard Hudolin:
In one area. From where the kitchen wall ends to about here.

Bridget McGuire:
It was cozy, but we made it.

Richard Hudolin:
But you could walk down 150 feet or 100 feet or whatever and you’d be in …

Bridget McGuire:
Be at the stage.

Richard Hudolin:
… back lots. And you would have passed through the production office. Everybody got to see everybody. And it wasn’t far. If you had a problem, you could just …

Bridget McGuire:
Or an idea.

Richard Hudolin:
… down that hall. Or an idea.

Douglas McLean:
And because it was open, you got to see what everyone else was doing. Because we’d be working on different shows. If I was doing a big set on a show, Ivana would be working another set down the road. You’d look over and, “Oh, that’s nice, isn’t it?” And you’d get competitive. The work gets better and better and better.

Bridget McGuire:
You’re right. Everybody fed off of each other.

Richard Hudolin:
It’s all very open. I had mentioned the other day talking with David that some people like to hide their– Not in our department. It’s wide open, man. You wanna come by… I’d ask janitor, cleaning people, whoever, “What do you think of this?” And they’d tell me. “Well, this is very cool. What does it do?” “Who cares what it does? Do you like it?”

Bridget McGuire:
Blows up galaxies.

Richard Hudolin:
It blows up galaxies.

Douglas McLean:
My only real battle ever on Stargate was how much of the shared table with Ivana did I get, because she had her drafting table here, I had mine over there going that way.

Bridget McGuire:
I think I had it actually over–

Douglas McLean:
I had a table here, she had a table over there, and between us we had a nice long table that was four feet wide or whatever. It’s like, “Common table and we’ll share it.”

Bridget McGuire:
I know.

Douglas McLean:
We did and then you’d put a drawing down and shift it over a little. It was common too, because the phone was on it.

Bridget McGuire:
She did that to me once. Girl.

Richard Hudolin:
But she was on all the time.

Douglas McLean:
The only phone. It was like, “Why don’t you just put it on Ivana’s side because she’s on the phone?”

Richard Hudolin:
All the time.

Douglas McLean:
“It’s not me.”

Bridget McGuire:
That’s not an exaggeration.

Douglas McLean:
I’m learning to say hello in Czech so I can make friends.

Bridget McGuire:
I think I’m fluent in Czech.

Douglas McLean:
We were quite respectful of each other’s work.

Richard Hudolin:
They fought all the time.

Douglas McLean:
You’d push over and then—

Richard Hudolin:
She would fight with–

Douglas McLean:
I’d come back and stuff would be pushed back over onto my side. I’d put another big drawing down so it went over that one.

Richard Hudolin:
Then when she got tired of annoying him, she’d start with Ken. It was great. I used to actually bring gasoline and a fire extinguisher …

Bridget McGuire:
Her and Ken.

Richard Hudolin:
… because they would argue all the time.

Bridget McGuire:
They’d get into the [inaudible]. They would–

Richard Hudolin:
I’d walk by and I’d start talking to them and I’d throw some controversial subject down and I’d walk away. And watch them kawoosh.

Bridget McGuire:
There I am right in the middle. There’s Ken, there’s Ivana. I’m listening to them. I’m like, “Oh my gosh.”

Richard Hudolin:
I’d walk out 20 minutes later, they’re still going at it. Then he’s gotta sit next to her as she’s talking to her friends in Czech, complaining about Ken. It was great.

Bridget McGuire:
That was great.

Douglas McLean:
Wasn’t complaining about me, I know. I don’t speak enough.

Richard Hudolin:
Poor Bridget, sitting there shaking her head going…

Bridget McGuire:
Right in the middle of it all.

Douglas McLean:
It was a great department. It really was.

Bridget McGuire:
It was.

Douglas McLean:
It was talented, talented people.

Bridget McGuire:
And then you put the Davidsons in there with …

Richard Hudolin:
Mark.

Bridget McGuire:
… with Dan Sissons. They used to prank each other and they would go back and forth, and back and forth, and back and forth. And then, started noticing this smell in the art department. It was vile. I’m like, “OK.” I’m like–

Richard Hudolin:
Was this about the dogs?

Bridget McGuire:
No. This was… I’m like, “OK. I get it, you guys, this is funny, but whoever has hidden cheese …

Douglas McLean:
Should go and find it.

Bridget McGuire:
… in somebody’s area, you gotta get rid of it now because we all have to work in here and it’s getting really, really, really bad.” And they’re both like, “No, it wasn’t–”

Douglas McLean:
“It wasn’t us.”

Bridget McGuire:
The smell would go away and then it would come back. And we even had them go and check for rats under the– It was vile. It went on through the summer too. It was gross. And then finally one day, I walk in and there’s one of these office plants that’s now out on the stairwell. I’m like, “Oh, what’s this?” And they’re like, “Well, I guess somebody had emptied a latte into this plant.” And it was fermenting and turning into the worst sort of cheese. And every time it was watered, the smell would come back. But I was sure it was—

Douglas McLean:
It wasn’t Dan.

Bridget McGuire:
I was sure it was Hal.

Richard Hudolin:
I’ll tell you what about Dan and his partner in crime at that time, and I can’t remember–

Bridget McGuire:
I don’t know. Was it Terry?

Richard Hudolin:
It wasn’t Terry.

Bridget McGuire:
No, the guy with the Boxster.

Richard Hudolin:
It was the guy that bought the Boxster. So, I mentioned that the art department’s over here, offices of the editors and writers and such are over here, production office is here in the middle, and there’s a stairwell, elevator in here somewhere, in the middle. Now you have to understand that there were a lot of dogs involved. In the art department. Occasionally, Bridget would bring her dog. One dog, well trained.

Bridget McGuire:
Not that…

Richard Hudolin:
Well behaved. More than the people. Her dog. The other dogs, they’re just all over the place. They’re running around and they’re pissing here and this and that, and finally Andy Mikita, who was the guy that called me in South Carolina, the PM at the time. One of the writers’ dogs took a dump under his chair in his office, and Andy hit the roof. “What the hell? Jesus…” So all of a sudden, there was this big thing about dogs. Now, people would still bring their dogs, but they were watching them like hawks. So, Dan Sissons and his partner in crime had this brilliant idea. You have to go to the common area to get your coffee and muffin or whatever. And all of a sudden, there’s all this big kerfuffle in the production office all day, and it goes on for two days and I said, “What’s going on?” And he says, “Some dog is peeing everywhere. There’s a puddle here, there’s a puddle there, there’s a puddle there, and they have to clean it up.” I’m going, “I don’t have a dog, so it’s… But it’s annoying, seeing as how well you’re looking after all of your dogs.” What I found out later was it was Dan Sissons and his partner in crime. He would take those boxes of apple juice.

Bridget McGuire:
Juice boxes.

Richard Hudolin:
Walk by, squirt a little here, squirt a little there. And then grab their coffee and quietly go away. To create hell. It was hilarious and …

Bridget McGuire:
It was great.

Richard Hudolin:
… the office would be in a furor…

Bridget McGuire:
I don’t know if anybody else knows that story.

Richard Hudolin:
Maybe. There’s always editing.

Bridget McGuire:
It was Brad’s dog. It was a puppy at the time who was getting blamed for it.

Douglas McLean:
Great secrets of Hollywood right there.

Richard Hudolin:
Brad… Brad who?

Bridget McGuire:
That’s great.

Richard Hudolin:
And there’s another one that Dan had got with his partner in crime. We’re in the boardroom.

Bridget McGuire:
This is awesome. This is awesome.

Richard Hudolin:
And there’s a special effects guy who they didn’t get along with.

Bridget McGuire:
Is it Wray?

Richard Hudolin:
No, it wasn’t Wray. No, they loved Wray. It was another guy. So it’s a long boardroom table and there’s Dan and the special effects guy, they’re on that side and I’m on this side and Bridget beside me and Mark, and the effects guy is trying to explain something to everyone at this production meeting. His phone goes off. And there’s nobody there. He hangs it up. As soon as he puts it down, it rings again. This must have happened a dozen times. And he’s getting more and more flustered because he can’t say anything because his phone keeps going off. It was rumbling, I think, or buzzing, driving this guy crazy, and I don’t know if he finally said, “Forget about it. We’ll do this later.” But he couldn’t get it out, and it drove him nuts. It was a joy watching this happen. And again, it was Dan who put him on speed dial, and he was sitting next to him. As soon as the guy picked his phone up, Dan would hang up. As soon as the guy clicked off, Dan would ring again. All under the table. And he’s sitting right beside him, driving this guy crazy. ‘Cause he could. But first-rate props guys I had. first rate. Fun aside, it was fun. The end result was always top drawer. Never had a problem, never had a, “Can’t be done,” or none of that nonsense. It could always be done, one way or another.

David Read:
Bridgit, we’ve heard a lot about the writers would always write, “Will they come to a village?” Always, without exception. You guys, Season Nine, had a masterful way to solve that.

Bridget McGuire:
We built the village. That was a great build. It started at the end of the season before that. At the end of the season, we built at the end of the effects stage. We built a tavern, and we put up a big cyc, built a wall, and did a little thing in there, and they were like, “Oh, that worked. That worked out really well, looked quite good.” And we were all nice and cozy in the stage. By that time, we weren’t even shooting up in GVRD anymore, because it was shut down for some reason. They were building something, some tunnel or something. That had been our go-to place, going all over the lower mainland building these villages, and we built some really nice ones. And we built a lot of tent villages, but we’d lost the sand dunes in Richmond. We’d lost the GVRD. We were going further and further and further afield, and it rains a lot here. That was Season Eight?

David Read:
Season Nine, it was the village.

Bridget McGuire:
Season Nine. Brad and the guys, and Rob and everyone came to me, and they said, “Could you build a village in the effects stage?” And I’m like, “Yes, I can.” And it was the priory. That was beautiful. That was a beautiful set. That was also the one where we did …

David Read:
The burn.

Bridget McGuire:
… the burn, which Gary York was involved with. You guys weren’t around for this. But we were gonna burn a witch, and the burning platform, whatever you wanna call it, was like a labyrinth of the flame. So, the flame would travel through this oval, towards the witch who was in the center, and that was done practically. I have a photo of …

Richard Hudolin:
Oh, God.

Bridget McGuire:
… Scott from special effects doing the test burn. And I like to call it Scott taking the heat. And it worked. It worked beautiful. Barb Wilson, who you know, she was a math major as well, who also went into theater. Go figure. She worked out all the math for it, because it had to slope in all the directions, and then it had to be an oval, and it had to be a gradual ramp. So, it was a ramp. It was complex. And your conversations with Gary continued with her and Barb. And she had worked out the math, and then she presented it, and he’s like, “I’m not sure about this.” And they went through it, and she convinced him that her math was correct, and it worked. It worked beautifully. And then the rest of the set was, I think we had inherited the Blade set by this time.

David Read:
That was at the top.

Bridget McGuire:
So, that was on one half of the effects stage, and then we had the village on the other half of the effects stage. The set was 150 feet by, again, however wide that set was, or stage was.

Richard Hudolin:
165.

Bridget McGuire:
However high it was.

Richard Hudolin:
50-ish.

Bridget McGuire:
And it filled up the whole space, the big cyc. I think I did three changeovers to it, and that was the idea, was that we would build the space, and then we would be able to switch it over to be somewhere else. And I think they continued using it for a number of years after I was gone. I wasn’t around at the end. Part of the reason I had to get out of there was I was looking at all the stuff that we had done and thinking, “I don’t wanna be around here for the strike.” The Blade set alone, it was like, “How are they even gonna take this down?” ‘Cause that was a three-level metal structure.

David Read:
Steel.

Bridget McGuire:
Steel. We had watched it going up. That was right outside my office window. And I had watched them building it, and then when it was done, it was like, “Wow, this is kind of great.” And then when they were done with the movie, we inherited it, and got to have our way with it.

Richard Hudolin:
We did.

Douglas McLean:
The best way to dispose of sets is to go, “Say, would you guys like this set? You just have to take over the space.”

Bridget McGuire:
I think the strike on that was a bit of a deal. But the village, that was all drawn, designed and built. We had prep at the beginning of the season, weeks of prep. Weeks. I forget exactly how many, but that was a massive build, and it might’ve been ready for Episode One.

David Read:
So, the cave was in Episode One.

Bridget McGuire:
The cave.

David Read:
The Avalon cave, which lasted into Episode Two.

Bridget McGuire:
It was Episode Two?

David Read:
Episode Two.

Bridget McGuire:
That’s pretty good. Good on us. That was a full everybody drawing. I remember I sketched out basically the two elevations, showed them to Rob and Brad, and said, “Kind of like this.” It was literally me hand drawing with pencil crayons. And they said, “Yeah, sure, great, let’s do it.” And we divvied it up. At that point I had Rodrigo and Peter, and I think I had a couple people brought in for the beginning of the season, just to get us going, drew it up, gave it to Thom and Gary and all those guys. And if there were any details that were missing, it was like, “I’m right there. I’ll come down, and we’ll figure something out.” Because a set that large you can’t draw every detail in three weeks. So, my sort of way of dealing with things was always to get drawings to construction as soon as possible.

Richard Hudolin:
Get the decor all set.

Bridget McGuire:
The sooner they were looking at things and working out the big picture, the big approach to the set, the big strokes, that’s the only chance you have. And then the smaller details, they’ll come. They’ll get sorted out, and that was Gary’s set. Well, no, they were all working on it. But if there was a blank area or something looked weird, I’d get a phone call and I’d come down and I’d say, “That does look weird. Let’s not do that, and let’s do something else.” But not very much.

Richard Hudolin:
It’s part of the joy of being close.

Bridget McGuire:
Walking through that set as it was being put together five times a day, looking at paint treatments as they were being developed and sort of going, “Yep, that, there,” and just keeping everybody moving, keeping the whole job moving forward, making decisions. And then also that allows the other departments like lighting and grips and everything to have their time in there ’cause if lighting and grips don’t have their time, things don’t look good. Anyhow, that was fun. It was a fun set piece. Missed it. You were doing other things. By that time you were doing Battlestar.

Douglas McLean:
We were building villages elsewhere.

David Read:
I would like to know if any of you have questions for the other two from those days, a question that you would like to ask.

Douglas McLean:
What the hell were you thinking? Wow.

David Read:
Take a second and think about it.

Richard Hudolin:
Questions that I would ask of them?

David Read:
That you would ask them, or vice versa.

Richard Hudolin:
Why they didn’t listen to me more. No, we shared a lot of stories and we’ve got a lot of history, always have had, and I’ve always been very open with them and they’ve always been very open with me if they were going through some sort of thing in their life. We all worked it out together, and I had young kids and I remember calling Bridget when I was in a jam and she’d be driving up to Maple Ridge and saying, “Bridget, can you pick up a Sailor Moon doll, whatever the hell that is, ’cause Amy’s gonna have a meltdown.

Bridget McGuire:
The Sailor Moon crisis.

Richard Hudolin:
Amy’s gonna have a meltdown if she doesn’t get this thing.

Bridget McGuire:
She needs this one doll.

Richard Hudolin:
She needs this doll.

Bridget McGuire:
And it’s in Coquitlam. And I’m driving right by there.

Richard Hudolin:
Stuff like that.

Bridget McGuire:
What was your favorite set, Richard?

Richard Hudolin:
My favorite set?

Bridget McGuire:
Of the Stargate sets.

Douglas McLean:
Think carefully.

Bridget McGuire:
Of the Stargate sets.

Richard Hudolin:
The Stargate sets.

Bridget McGuire:
Which was your favorite?

Richard Hudolin:
The first one.

Bridget McGuire:
The standing set?

Richard Hudolin:
Yeah, the standing set. All of the first one. There was more involved with just the standing sets. It was a whole deal, that whole beginning of Stargate. We had the pyramid thing and we had all kinds of stuff going on.

Bridget McGuire:
You established the cargo ship. I’m sure you guys are familiar with it. So, we’re asked to build this thing. And you come up with the concepts for it and then we’re gonna do this, we wanna do a fancy door. It makes sense that this will be a visual-effect door, because it’s gonna be shot for two episodes and then that’s it. Then it’s gone. Never to be seen again. Gone, like sets do. Then another six years later, the cargo ship is still sitting in stage two. It’s had to be rebuilt because the whole front screen came out and it would have to be screwed back in. And there was nothing for the screws to stick into anymore. So all that had to be rebuilt. And people would come up to me and say, “Why could this door not have been practical?” Because it’s a visual effect every time somebody walks in and out of it. And it was only gonna happen twice. Twice it was gonna happen, and then it would be gone. So instead they ended up doing a visual effect for eight years. I think it was still around.

Richard Hudolin:
When you hire a person to design a show, I say to them, and I think I said it to John Smith one time, really pissed him off. I said, “Am I designing for your budget and resale value, or am I designing for the show?” Man, he was pissed. He called me into his office after the meeting. “Don’t you ever do that to me again.” “John, I’m just trying to point out that we have this set that we’re building. It’s supposed to look like it’s in the Arctic.” And I wanted to put those big checkered designs on it like they do in the Arctic. So helicopters and stuff could see them. And I know that he wanted to resell it or use it as–

Bridget McGuire:
Is that the one with the frozen… No. Anyways.

Richard Hudolin:
No. I know he wanted to use it as a granary or something later. And I was saying, “No, John. I’m doing it for the show. You’re doing it for resale value.” Boy, he was pissed. Man, it was really good when I got him that pissed. I said, “I still got it, man.”

Douglas McLean:
I think I can name a favorite set. Out of five years.

Richard Hudolin:
Your set.

Douglas McLean:
It was one of mine, but that’s not why it’s my favorite. It was the ziggurat. Inside of the ziggurat.

Bridget McGuire:
The red… Was that the red-sand set?

Douglas McLean:
We did get a lot of sand in, I remember that.

Bridget McGuire:
Was that with the toxic sand?

Douglas McLean:
No.

Bridget McGuire:
No.

David Read:
Inside the Goa’uld ship. You were inside of it.

Douglas McLean:
There was a ziggurat.

Bridget McGuire:
I know.

Douglas McLean:
Inside of the ziggurat there was a sarcophagus. And it was a rebuild of the set, ’cause we did a lot of sets that we repurposed. I think it started as the Hell set. It had actually been something before that. Anyways, with the ziggurat, you get a script and it says, “We are inside a ziggurat.”

Richard Hudolin:
You had another alien life form.

Douglas McLean:
I don’t think ziggurats have insides. I think they’re just steps that keep going up, and then you put a little thing on the top of it. I say this at some point, “We’re inside a ziggurat.” “OK, we’re inside a ziggurat. What’s the in–” “Oh, the inside’s gonna be the same thing stepped above us.” OK, we take the basic set that we had, ’cause there were long hallways and there was a big room. And I think at one point there had been a sloped ceiling in this room. So, I took all that stuff out. Actually, no, I put the sloped ceiling in in that one. And then stepped in all of the walls with more layers of foam so that instead of a hallway it was a hallway that was shaped like that.

Bridget McGuire:
Wow. Is that where you got the T-shirt?

Douglas McLean:
Might have been. Could have been where that happened. But the most interesting thing was there was another room that had been a bedroom or something, Hell’s bedroom. And then there was a door off of that. And that was another, “We want a door that opens,” like doors we had in scenes. So, this time we built it, though, and it split this way and went up. All covered in cliffs of some kind. And then on the two walls of the big room were these long things of carving.

Bridget McGuire:
Was that on …

Douglas McLean:
Things with carvings.

Bridget McGuire:
… the Hell set or was that on the ziggurat?

Richard Hudolin:
No, that’s the one he wasn’t gonna like.

Douglas McLean:
We’ll get to that part of the story. And inside was also basically a reproduction of the …

Bridget McGuire:
Yeah, that was the other set.

Douglas McLean:
… the stele from Hammurabi or something. The set was there and they were working on it for, it felt like weeks. But every day I’d go in, it’d go a little further. And then the sculptures were going up, the bas-reliefs. And they were, “Here’s a good reference, give it to the guys in the model shop. Bye.” And you’d come back and they’d be carving away in foam, and come back another day and the other one would be carved. And all the textured foam was going up. I’m a guy who likes to build sets that will burn. If that one caught fire, it would’ve gone up, too. But we’d already had a fire, so we probably put a good layer of plaster on. Lots of texture, really rich texture. And as it’s being built, every day I go in, it gets quieter and quieter, because one, there’s tons of sound-dampening material around it. And it’s getting really quiet. And then we’ve gotten past 20 guys in there hammering up foam. We’re down to two guys carving and another guy’s off somewhere else putting details on this. And as I said, the room’s getting quieter and quieter every day you go into them. And then set dec comes in with two tons, maybe, of sand. And covers the floors. It was exquisite to go into. Because it was dark. There were just the stage lights above it. Every time I went in there I felt like I was going into a tomb.

Bridget McGuire:
I feel that too.

Douglas McLean:
Everyone who went in had started, [whispering] “I think we should have a little bit more of this over there.” “What?” “I think we should have a bit more of what you’ve got over here over on that side.” “OK.” The sand went in. Eventually we had to take about half the sand out, or maybe three quarters, because they–

Bridget McGuire:
Are you sure that wasn’t the toxic sand?

Richard Hudolin:
A different set.

Douglas McLean:
‘Cause the sand was about this deep. Again, you walked in and you were in some foreign land.

Richard Hudolin:
You were in a location.

Douglas McLean:
It was quiet. The doors closed behind you and the only way you knew you weren’t in here was to look up and go, “This is grid. This light’s up there, OK.” Walking through it, showing them the set as it was being built, when it was finished, you felt so great. It felt so real. So, we do the tech survey.

Bridget McGuire:
[inaudible] production meeting.

Douglas McLean:
I was not in the production meeting, fortunately. So, Richard can take over the story for you.

Richard Hudolin:
No, you guys, I wanna hear you tell it.

Bridget McGuire:
No, it’s your story, Richard.

Richard Hudolin:
No, I already told this. Sorry, you tell it. He already told it two days ago.

Douglas McLean:
As we’re doing the survey, I’m hearing bits and pieces because the director of photography is going, “Wow, this is really great. This is awesome. This’ll be great. We’ll light it with a couple of flashlights and we’ll go through here and it’ll feel like it’s really this abandoned place.” So, we could have just put up some canvas flats. This thing was so detailed. Everyone who was working on it just did great work. Guys who were carving were in an old tomb, carving. They felt like that. It looked like that. I go, “We’re not gonna see anything, guys.” So, Richard goes into the production meeting, and there were words exchanged when the idea came up in the production meeting that we’re just gonna light this with a couple of torches going along. We’ve got a quarter of a million dollars worth of scenery here.

Richard Hudolin:
I stood up in that meeting.

Douglas McLean:
A shitload of really beautiful carvings on the wall. You could’ve flown to Egypt and found this. And we’re not gonna see it.

Richard Hudolin:
And you’re not gonna light it?

Douglas McLean:
I know mentally where it came from. “We’re underground. There’s no light except what we bring in with us.” You’ve watched movies, right? There’s always God light coming from somewhere. A pitch-black room, you light a match. Suddenly …

Bridget McGuire:
It just lights up.

Douglas McLean:
… you can see the walls 60 feet away from you. We didn’t just shoot it with a match, guys. Eventually they did light it. It did look beautiful, but to me it was the feeling. That was one of the most satisfying …

Richard Hudolin:
It was.

Douglas McLean:
… sets that I’d ever worked on. That you just walked into it every day and you went, “Holy shit. This feels awesome.” I had it once again on Battlestar with another set. And again it was because it was self-contained. And you walked in and you’re like, “Holy shit, I’m in a ship.” This is steel. This is all real. And actors feel it when they walk in. Now you would probably put most of that on a Hollywood screen. You’d build a bit of stuff around them, some sand on the floor so when they’re walking they’re interacting. But this… Now, thankfully, at least volume screens still give that to the actor. They get to see the picture. But for a while, you went into green screen. For a while I worked on Once Upon a Time. Doing virtual sets for that. So you’d walk in and it’s like, “Nice door. You should see the room that goes with it, though.” And I knew what went with it, the designer knew. The director got it too, because it was fed through the camera system. But the actor is still like, “Nice door.”

Richard Hudolin:
See, that’s the important part he’s talking about. ‘Cause we designed the set to be absolutely brilliant and beautiful, and the actor filmed it. That’s what came through. And that’s the business we’re in.

Douglas McLean:
Great actors, yes, they go onto a volume stage now, and they do it. You’re given a green screen and some guy with a ball going like this, “OK, the dragon’s head is right here. He’s fearsome, by the way. He’s got a real ball. He’s really real.” And they do it, and they can put the performance in, and you spend the time with the lighting and it’s gotten better and better. And I love all that virtual stuff, really looks good. But we were so lucky. Several times in my life, actually the third time in my life, we worked on it again. It was not our design. It was Ken Adam in Calgary.

Richard Hudolin:
Oh, the tunnels?

Douglas McLean:
With the tunnels.

Richard Hudolin:
“Goddamn art department.” Who said that?

Douglas McLean:
That was John Frankenheimer.

Richard Hudolin:
“Goddamn art department.” John Frankenheimer.

Douglas McLean:
We were building a …

Richard Hudolin:
He’s a very tall man.

Douglas McLean:
… set of underground caves that a neo-Nazi group was hiding in. We built them casting real rock in …

Richard Hudolin:
Brought the studies up from LA.

Douglas McLean:
… in plaster. We’d talk with the production designer about, “We can do foam stuff, or we can do …”

Richard Hudolin:
Ken Adam is the production designer.

Douglas McLean:
“… crinkled paper and then a bit of foam.” He’s like, “No, I don’t think so. No, I don’t…” “But it’ll be easier if we…” “No, I don’t think so.”

Richard Hudolin:
“We’re gonna cast it.”

Douglas McLean:
“They’re gonna cast it in plaster.” Some guys tried to cast it, so we found some real caves, so guys cast it in plaster.

Richard Hudolin:
No, he and I– This is in Alberta. He and I, in a small four-by-four, because the road is on the edge of– Here’s a mountain, here’s the road, that’s a drop-off. There’s no line on the road. It’s where the Alberta government stored critical documents. They dug all these tunnels into a mountainside. A long way. Hundreds and hundreds of feet. And it had keys off of it all. Our locations guy found out about this and said, “If you want real, that kind of tunnel, go up there, take some photographs, bring it back. Let’s see if that’s what Ken wants.” So, we go up there. Jesus Christ, that road was– There’s no place to turn around, and I’m driving. And I’m this far from this wall, because it’s that narrow. And if you go over, you ain’t coming back. And anyway, we get in there. Now I gotta turn this car around. I was very, very slowly getting down that mountainside because now I’m on the cliff side. On the driver’s side. How close can I get, Doug? Tuck that mirror in, man.

Douglas McLean:
See, I was lucky. I didn’t have to go in that car.

Richard Hudolin:
And that’s where we set the crew up to get the squeezes to do the casting from that mountainside. Interior of that mountainside. But, no, your story. Go on.

Douglas McLean:
They cast thousands of sheets of plaster with straw and horse hair and whatever in it. Built a framework. And then we had …

Richard Hudolin:
It was low.

Douglas McLean:
… people carving, essentially carving… Because they did what, maybe six or eight…

Richard Hudolin:
Casts.

Douglas McLean:&
… casts. These are the masters. And you don’t want repetition. So, we had a sculptor, a guy named Bryn Finer who came in and carved the panels into individual chunks and then was going, “OK, this will fit here, and then we’ll build some rock in here.” And when you finish the thing, it had a damp mustiness to it because the plaster was still drying. And Ken had taken John Frankenheimer through as they were building, and we built it like you would with tunneling. We had big beams and a cross beam, and then this stuff was all on the outside. It was all braced from behind with two-bys and whatever. And they went through and Ken was like, “Do you want this to be just a little higher?” ‘Cause if you dig in a cave, you dig it minimum height. And Frankenheimer goes, “No, no, I want the guys to be going, when they reach a beam, they have to duck underneath.”

Richard Hudolin:
John Frankenheimer’s also what? 6 foot 2, 6 foot 3.

Douglas McLean:
You could always– If you could stand, you could stand up in the rock part, but when you reach the beam, you duck, and you instinctually do it. But in rehearsal, when they started to go in to shoot, you hear people walking along. Bang. “Aah.” I think he said about four or five times on it. ‘Cause they were all over the place. And it was a fabulous set because if you wanna wild it, it’s like, “Yeah, what can we wild?”

Richard Hudolin:
Anything.

Douglas McLean:
This was Frank. You can wild anything you want, but you can’t put it back immediately. You can go and shoot in another part of the cave, we’ll put it back up. But you can have– You want a small hole wild here, we’ll wild it for this one shot. You wanna take out 18 feet of the cave, we’ll wild it. And it was a guy with a Sawzall just going through, cutting all the things on the back. Pulling it out, they’d do the shots. There were machine gun fights going on in it. Where do you wanna put the squibs? You could have …

Richard Hudolin:
Anywhere.

Douglas McLean:
…them anywhere. Had a little bit of fun with that because they didn’t want to plan too much. They wanted to feel what they were gonna do the next day.

Richard Hudolin:
We shot on that paper for weeks.

Douglas McLean:
They were gonna shoot for two weeks. I think they were there for a month and a bit. So, at night after they’d finished shooting, they’d go through, “What are we gonna do tomorrow morning? I’m gonna come over here, we’re gonna do this.” Bring in the effects guys. “OK, squib this area, squib that area, squib that.” They’d be drilling holes all night, packing it up, little bit of finishing. Come in the next day, shoot that. End of that day, same thing. So, it took a long time but it was again one of those sets, totally enclosed, you walked in it, you could have been in that cave that you were in. But it was smaller than that cave in the mountains ’cause it was so dark.

Richard Hudolin:
Did we do the false perspective in that cave? I think we did one area.

Douglas McLean:
We did one tunnel where I go…

Richard Hudolin:
It was only from here to that wall and we miniaturized, false perspective, miniaturized everything. I think that we had some small people in there as well, didn’t we?

Douglas McLean:
No. I don’t think we had any in that one.

Richard Hudolin:
No people. Maybe in another one. But we just miniaturized it. You’d look at it and you’d swear to God it was 100 feet long.

Douglas McLean:
Those kind of sets remain within–

Richard Hudolin:
I still remember Frankenheimer, “Goddamn art department!” He blamed us personally and he asked for it.

Douglas McLean:
So those was the kind of thing that we did, Stargate, Battlestar, that movie. There was great stuff that was being done, and it was a lot of fun.

David Read:
I’d like to wrap this up by asking, you guys look back over your careers with Stargate in the mix with all that, how rare was it that the quality of the work from the people who all came together at just the right time with just the right people to hire just the right people who were needed was it good as it was? What I’m really asking is how high does Stargate go up in terms of the work that you put out and the work that the people around you put out, compared to all the other things that you did in your careers?

Bridget McGuire:
that’s like asking us to pick our favorite child. That’s really hard.

Douglas McLean:
I’ve never worked with a crew that didn’t say they were the A crew in town. Because there’s a whole lot of really, really talented people out there. And would Stargate have been the same show if the three of us had not been doing it? No, it would have been a different show. And it might have been as good, might have been better. I always think art departments, and basically whole movie crews, are like a band. It’s like you can play guitar, you’re great on drums, you’re a great bass player, there’s five other great bass players. But when you pull those people together, it’s suddenly like, “Oh, that’s that band!”

Bridget McGuire:
I think the thing that made Stargate really exceptional was that we were all in the same space together. The writers were right there, everybody– It was face to face to face. And we got that a little bit on Sanctuary as well because it was a small show and we were all poured into one little space and had to make that work. And then after that, because of the logistics of the world, things started getting split up and on Arrow we were separated from the rest of the production. We were separate from most of the stages and so it felt more disjointed. And then when COVID happened, the few connections that we still had sort of fractured.

Richard Hudolin:
That’s another thing that entered into it though. ‘Cause we had all done movies prior to Stargate and we had all done big movies and I had mentioned the other day, the great people that I had worked with like the Sir Ken Adams and the Harry Langes and the Terry Marshes, and the great directors like the Richard Lesters and the Frankenheimers and those great cats. Each of these people, your standard, your personal standard is up here, OK? People used to ask me, “Well, Richard, how does it feel to do a television show after having come off of Bird on a Wire or some major movie role we spent a bazillion dollars doing?” I said, “To me, there is no difference. It’s the same camera, you got lights, you’re telling a story. Why should that make a difference to me as the designer or the art director or whatever on that show? And these people bring that level, so it’s fine about, we all get together and a whole lot of other contributing factors. But the personal level of perfection and necessity that we work to, this includes all of us, including the Thoms and everybody else. Because they all have that very high level. That’s what we bring to it, and that’s what everybody brings to it. And that’s what these two bring to it, and that’s what I bring to it, hopefully. And you have to maintain that level, and it’s hard sometimes because you got the accountants trying to bring you down or you got the schedule, the ADs trying to do whatever. And everybody’s got their own little thing. Except we have that standard, and I remember when I first started in this business, I’m sitting in dailies. And I looked at the dailies, and I said to somebody, “What we did yesterday’s gonna be there forever.” I can’t go back and change it. It’s on film, so why don’t I get it right the first time? And that’s what we do. That’s why. Hope that I’m speaking well.

Douglas McLean:
I think it’s dead right.

Richard Hudolin:
That’s what you have to do. That’s what they pay you to do. It comes from your heart. It doesn’t come from a pocketbook. I’ve done low budget, high budget, medium budget. I’ve done shows where I was the props guy, the set decorator, the painter, so has Bridget. So has he. We all know what it takes to be there in the middle of the night with a rubber cement spray can making cobwebs in the set. And nobody else is around and you’re saying, “Is this right? Is it–” And you make a decision, and you live by it. I can’t tell you, either one of you guys, how many times I said that to Bridget and to Doug. “If I’m not available, you go in there. You make the call. I’ll stand by you.” And they know that I will, and I know that they will. They may disagree with me privately, but they’re not gonna let you know that. We’ll have that conversation privately.

Bridget McGuire:
Hardly ever.

Richard Hudolin:
And hardly ever. Literally, hardly ever. I can count a couple of times and that’s it. Maybe 18, 20, 25.

Bridget McGuire:
30. 35.

Richard Hudolin:
I think it’s the personal standard and ethic to your chosen professional career that you bring to these things, and that stands the test of time. To me there’s no difference between a movie, a television screen, a podcast, a video. Doesn’t matter. It’s capturing an image, and we are in that business.

Douglas McLean:
Well said.

David Read:
Bridget, Doug. Richard. Thank you.

Douglas McLean:
It was fun.

Richard Hudolin:
Nice meeting you all.

Bridget McGuire:
Thank you.

Douglas McLean:
Lots of fun.