Our long discussion with Stargate Executive Producer Robert C. Cooper on Stargate SG-1 finally comes to an end. Season Ten comes into complete focus with this episode, and with it some interesting thoughts about episodes such as “200,” “Unending” and much more.

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Joseph Mallozzi’s “200” Blog Entry 1 ► https://josephmallozzi.com/2011/10/01/october-1-2011-200/
Joseph Mallozzi’s “200” Blog Entry 2 ► https://josephmallozzi.com/2011/10/03/october-3-2011-200-continued/

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TRANSCRIPT
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David Read:
Hello everyone, my name is David Read. Welcome back to Dial the Gate: The Stargate Oral History Project. Robert C. Cooper is joining us for his 11th episode and we are finally finishing out SG-1. We’re gonna talk about “200,” we’re gonna talk about “Unending.” The huge chunk of the reason why I do this show, why I continue to do this show, is to have conversations with key people, particularly this man. I am so proud of the amount of time that we’ve spent together and the content that has resulted from it, the stories that have come out of it. We are nearly done; I may have another episode for him. I hope to have him back for Q&As here and there with you guys if the show continues for a few more years. For the core content, this is almost it and I think you’re going to find a lot of insight. I’m not going to hold him off any longer. Let’s bring in writer, director, executive producer, Robert C. Cooper. Robert C. Cooper, writer, director, executive producer of Stargate. Sir, always a pleasure to have you. Thank you for coming back.

Robert C. Cooper:
Always fun.

David Read:
I have been talking with a number of fans lately and a couple of more esoteric things have been coming up that I realize that we’ve never really discussed and I wanted to start with a fun one. You and I have never talked about where “Indeed” came from. Do you have any notion as to who the real culprit for this madness is?

Robert C. Cooper:
Honestly, no. Oftentimes an actor will deliver a line in a way that has a twist to it that the rest of the actors react to and then that reaction leads to it becoming a thing. We did not write “D’oh.” Rick just threw that in at some point and I think we were like, “Well, hang on, can we even do that?”

David Read:
Is it copyright?

Robert C. Cooper:
I’m sorry, I don’t remember where that came from. Chris’s delivery on a lot of different things would become a meme these days.

David Read:
That meme of him sitting across from Saul Rubinek on camera is everywhere. I think it’s Stargate’s number one meme. The actor obviously enjoyed it, otherwise he probably would have been like, “OK, guys, I don’t like the delivery.” It makes me wonder about certain things with Rick. Where does Rick end and O’Neill begin? In terms of fictional characters, I can’t see a line blurred more than that because at a certain point…he’s there to have a good time and make a good show.

Robert C. Cooper:
Shout out to Richard Dean Anderson who just celebrated his 75th birthday.

David Read:
75.

Robert C. Cooper:
Happy birthday, Rick.

David Read:
It’s just one of those things that the show is remembered for that you didn’t intentionally go in there to create. It’s just something that happens because you have the right talent.

Robert C. Cooper:
It was often, for me anyways, very surprising. He was a hard guy to predict and I think sometimes his tendency to swerve left when you expected him to swerve right was not because he preferred left to right, but because it was gonna keep you on your toes. I think that we talked about the fact that, in my first real close interaction working with him, I had written “Fifth Race” and was very nervous about showing him the script and getting notes from him the first time because he had so much time with the puppet.

David Read:
If he doesn’t buy it, it’s not gonna work.

Robert C. Cooper:
It turned out he loved it, he loved working with the puppet. I didn’t expect that at all. Unpredictable was really the hallmark of Richard Dean Anderson.

David Read:
Tom McBeath and Rick – If I told you this story, stop me. Tom talked about a scene where they were at Senator Kinsey’s house and his wife answers the front door and he says, “Good afternoon, ma’am. I’m Mr. Starsky. This is Hutch.” Tom said, “That wasn’t in the script.” He recalls Rick looking at him saying, “How you gonna react to that, huh?” I think Rick enjoyed Tom’s, i.e. Maybourne’s, blank stares. “How am I supposed to respond to this?”

Robert C. Cooper:
Also, with Rick, sarcasm could be a form of affection. That’s how he expressed affection, if you were worthy of him directing sarcasm at you. Or sometimes it was just sarcasm.

David Read:
Jeez. I have never asked you about something that I’ve heard in other shows that eats up development time. If you don’t mind me going into the nuts and bolts a little bit, episode titles.

Robert C. Cooper:
No.

David Read:
This is something I’ve never discussed with any of you. Did you have parameters in terms of creating episode titles? On Seinfeld, it was one of the things that Larry David always said, “This is why the episode titles are so boring. I don’t want my writers to be spending time coming up with creative episode titles. I want them to be coming up with good story.” What were your rules? Did you have them?

Robert C. Cooper:
I actually don’t remember when or how it came about, but at some point somebody decided that we weren’t actually gonna put the episode titles on the episodes. They appeared in credits; at the beginning of the episode, it would say the title. That was a very sort of old-fashioned TV thing to do, they don’t do that at all anymore. It’s only for the sake of, I think, Wikipedia that we now have episode titles at all.

David Read:
Universe doesn’t have them.

Robert C. Cooper:
No. At some point, we would be sitting there talking about whether the title was good or not and somebody would say, “Well, who cares?” and we go, “Oh yeah. It’s going on the screen.” At the end of the day, no, we did not spend a lot of time and it did not cause the day to get wasted away as we bantered around a title. In fact, in some ways, more often than not, the title went hand in hand with the idea that was originally pitched. If the pitch survived, the title survived. There were only, I think, a few times that we would either, for one reason or another, decide that a title couldn’t or wouldn’t work for some reason and then have to think of a new one. You often would come in with a title attached to the idea.

David Read:
Joseph Mallozzi, I don’t know if I’ve asked you this, he’s on record for “48 Hours.” There was a little bit of an argument because he thought “Teal’c Interrupted” would be appropriate.

Robert C. Cooper:
Yes.

David Read:
Do you remember this? You’re like “No. No, we’re not going with that one.”

Robert C. Cooper:
I can’t attribute this to any one person so I don’t remember whose voice this was. There were occasionally debates about whether the titles were too irreverent and puns on movies started to feel a bit like we weren’t taking things seriously enough. I remember that conversation going on. Segue to “200.”

David Read:
That’s exactly right. Lot of conversations in “200,” thank you for teeing that up, in the writer’s room ended up as banter in that briefing room scene that threads the narrative throughout the show. I wanna ask a question that’s been driving certain sectors of fandom nuts throughout the years. Do you consider “200” to be established continuity with the rest of the season or is it out of continuity? There are little hints, like when Gary Jones goes around the corner in one shot and then he comes through and he’s fully dressed. That’s, “OK, this is probably not actually happening. This is just a fun episode.” Where do you stand on “200” continuity?

Robert C. Cooper:
Wow. I’ve never actually thought about that.

David Read:
I’m glad it surprised you.

Robert C. Cooper:
Obviously, the clips are just fantasy. They’re fictional imagination from the script that Martin wrote, the script within the show. But to me, that happened.

David Read:
The boardroom and the post scene with all of the shooting 10 seasons.

Robert C. Cooper:
To me, Wormhole X-Treme in the Stargate universe actually was made. Martin was a real character in the Stargate lore and him inventing that show and then subsequently trying to make a movie and then ultimately making the show. To me, that actually happened in Stargate. If you were able to drop into the world of the show and ask somebody if they had seen Wormhole X-Treme, they might be aware of it.

David Read:
Party hats, streamers, all the fixings for Colonel Mitchell’s 200th trip through the Stargate?

Robert C. Cooper:
If you could give us credit for making that episode chock-full of references and celebrations of everything we had sort of been through on the show. I know there were certain segments that fans felt maybe were pointing out weaknesses in the series or maybe thumbing our noses at them. I don’t think that’s the right mix of metaphors. The Furlings thing was certainly …

David Read:
Give them what they want. Let them see it in some form. Jack and Sam getting married, “You know, if she doesn’t come up here, they’re gonna think you and I are…”

Robert C. Cooper:
I don’t know if I’ve told this story before, so forgive me, we have done a few of these. When I was being interviewed for the job, for Dirk Gently, little plug for another show I worked on. I had to fly down to L.A. to meet the team of producers. I’d done some initial interviewing and work online and phone calls and stuff with the studio. I had to go and meet the production team, all the exec producers and Max Landis. I walk into a boardroom with a bunch of people in it, including Max and before anyone could say anything, including hello, Max said, “When are we gonna meet the Furlings?” I was like, “Oh, OK.”

David Read:
You’ve struck a chord in the cultural zeitgeist.

Robert C. Cooper:
He’s a science fiction fan and I think he’s definitely, if nothing else, someone who would have done a little homework online about me. He admitted he watched the show and was kind of a fan.

David Read:
That’s great. I remember being with Darren in your office with Brad, we said, “What’s this thing about?” Tere’s concept art laid out of the Furling monitor. You guys were going through something at the time and we said, “So, what are we doing here?” Brad said, “We’re making puppets. We’re going there.” How did that idea come about? Was it even feasible? These things are not cheap. I’ve heard in some cases they’re like $20,000 a puppet.

Robert C. Cooper:
Are you talking about the actual puppets, the marionettes? Not the Furling sequence? The Furling sequence also had the costume. The puppets – we were huge fans of Team America. Not politically correct at all, but also making fun of certain things that needed to be made fun of. It was brilliant. We laughed our heads off at that repeatedly and quoted it all the time. I think it’s on Mallozzi’s blog that we were all talking about the movie in and around that time and Joe brought up that he knew the guys who made those puppets. I think Martin Wood had some connection to it as well; he had done some work with them as well. We did one of those, “Can we do this?”

David Read:
“Should we do this?”

Robert C. Cooper:
And the fact that Daniel is the lead in Team America, the puppet is the guy, the main guy in Team America. It is Daniel, ’cause we just repurposed some of them.

David Read:
Really? You took some of the puppets…so they’re not all original? I did not know that. They just changed the hair.

Robert C. Cooper:
Not even that much.

David Read:
I didn’t even consider that. I thought they were all original.

Robert C. Cooper:
Gary, who is the lead character in Team America, is Daniel Jackson.

David Read:
Were any of the puppets created from scratch?

Robert C. Cooper:
Yeah, other ones were.

David Read:
Some of them were sort of, “He looks like him.”

Robert C. Cooper:
I think Don was such a unique look, I’m pretty sure he was original. I’m pretty sure the Richard Dean Anderson one was original too.

David Read:
Do you know what happened to any of them?

Robert C. Cooper:
I think Rick got one of the Richard Dean Anderson ones. One of the execs from MGM kept the other one.

David Read:
Could this have been Charlie?

Robert C. Cooper:
It was Hank who was around at the time.

David Read:
OK. Very good. That’s amazing. Which sketch is your favorite? Which sketch did you write ’cause everyone took a slice of the pie? Which ones are your favorite?

Robert C. Cooper:
I wrote the Furlings one. I wrote the younger, better-looking, SG-1 one.

David Read:
The teens?

Robert C. Cooper:
Yeah.

David Read:
I love that sequence, Rob. Cory Monteith, may he rest in peace. He did a great job.

Robert C. Cooper:
Exactly. It’s crazy actually, to be honest with you, how many people we miss now who are in the show, including Willie Garson. It makes me sad every time I go back and look at it or think about it. We all gang rode a lot of it, we all participated in quite a few of the scenes together. Those two were the two I think I took away and did the initial work on.

David Read:
How long did it take to settle on the idea for them, the Furlings? Did someone just say, “Here, koalas are cute. Let’s make a big koala.”

Robert C. Cooper:
I remember James Robbins walking in with a drawing of them and I think it was the first one he did. I just laughed my head off and said, “Yeah, that’s pretty good.”

David Read:
That’s terrific. We get to see something. Had they actually existed, I assume that they would be something quite opposite from fur, like tall, spiny, maybe with wings.

Robert C. Cooper:
There were conversations about that. Maybe there was a drawing that kind of ran counter to the name. He probably asked me, “What are you looking for?” That felt like one that should be right on, hitting the nail right on the head.

David Read:
I heard that there was a Gilligan’s Island sketch that was thrown about. Were there any others that you remember that didn’t make the cut?

Robert C. Cooper:
It was written. There was a written version of a Gilligan’s Island sketch, we just didn’t have room for it.

David Read:
I would love to see it someday. I’m just saying.

Robert C. Cooper:
Joe posted some dialogue on his blog. He just sent it to me ’cause I was asking him about it. I can tell you; it’s October 3rd 2011 and October 1st 2011.

David Read:
OK, I’ll post links.

Robert C. Cooper:
He did a two-parter talking about the missing scenes and some of the backstory of stuff.

David Read:
What a resource, absolutely. The wedding scene for Jack and Sam, that’s full of crew members, isn’t it? Is there anything in particular that you remember from that particular beat?

Robert C. Cooper:
Not really. The other things I really was kind of into was the sort of in-between stuff, like the self-referential jokes about the writing of the movie. Those were the kinds of things I was really excited about.

David Read:
I didn’t know anything about hanging a lantern or a couple of the other…

Robert C. Cooper:
That was a Glassner thing. From day one, Glassner would talk about hanging a lantern on things. I’m sure he didn’t make it up, but he was the one who brought it into the Stargate world.

David Read:
I’ve heard it since, for sure, in separate complete circles. It hangs together very well with Wormhole X-Treme! in that way, in that it touches on those things that the show just avoided. Like, “Why not? They speak English” and “Why don’t I fall through the floor when I’m out of phase?”

Robert C. Cooper:
There’s something so fun and also kind of exciting and gratifying to be able to convey the experience that you have making a show sometimes. Either the frustration with notes you get or just the reality of making a science fiction show and some of the crazy stuff you have to justify or find a way to make work. You have these conversations a lot with crew members too, who will look at you and go, “Why are we doing this that way?” It’s like, “Just go with it.”

David Read:
“We have our reasons. We have a master plan.”

Robert C. Cooper:
We have to shoot something.

David Read:
That’s so true. I remember the episode aired. There’s some continuity question here ’cause I’ve had a conversation with Christopher Judge about this so you may be able to clarify. If it stays muddy, that’s fine. The episode aired on a Friday. I think it was on a Monday that GateWorld published SG-1 has been canceled and Atlantis has been renewed. Christopher Judge says that during the 200th episode party, in the same breath as, “Congratulations on ‘200.’ By the way, it’s been a great run.” How long was there between you knowing that the show was canceled and the audience finding out when the 200th episode aired? Did you guys have anything to do with when that was announced?

Robert C. Cooper:
It was all happening at the same time. If anything, Brad and I were trying to mitigate what we understood obviously would be disappointing. You also go, “Wait a minute, we made 200 episodes of television.” That was something to celebrate and nobody expected the show to go 10 years, let alone 11. It was important to us, and Charlie was around then, when we said, “OK, look, we definitely want to have this cast and the show live on,” even though we were gonna continue to do Atlantis. That’s when the movie ideas were born.

David Read:
I, to this day, will see people posting online saying, “It’s so unfair. It is so unfair that SG-1 got canceled and that we didn’t get any more.” It’s like, “Do you hear yourself?” You had 350 episodes of an extraordinary franchise. Who gets that for something that they love as much as you appear to? Recognize how fortunate you are that it went as long as it did. What an incredible gift to have for something that you enjoy.

Robert C. Cooper:
Exactly. It’s the sort of thing where, to me, if you did it slowly enough, you could watch it and then forget what the first season was about and go back and start again.

David Read:
There are a lot of people who do. “I’m done. Now I’m starting over.” That’s funny. “The Shroud,” co-written by Brad.

Robert C. Cooper:
I gotta tell you, I was thinking about that one. I don’t even know why I got a credit on that.

David Read:
Really?

Robert C. Cooper:
Yeah. I think there was some back and forth with another idea that had some crossover. I honestly don’t remember, that’s a question for Brad. That episode was 100% Brad as far as I’m concerned. I look at that one and I go, “What? Wait, why did I get a credit on that? I don’t remember.”

David Read:
The reverse is true too. Martin Gero and I talked about “The Powers That Be” and I’m pretty sure he has sole credit on that. I don’t think he shares it with you, but he said to me there was something that happened, either he was too busy with another script or something had happened to him and he said that even though his name is on that episode, which I think is a great episode, it’s a courtroom-scene episode for the first chunk of it. He says, “That really is Robert Cooper’s episode.”

Robert C. Cooper:
Interesting. The finished versions of scripts went through a number of typewriters in some cases and yes, we were all very busy making two shows, 40 episodes. I don’t remember the specific circumstances around that one, but it could have been around the time Martin was directing an episode or writing and directing an episode of Atlantis.

David Read:
You take care of each other.

Robert C. Cooper:
Exactly.

David Read:
I wanna talk a minute about some visual effects.

Robert C. Cooper:
By the way, that’s something that I really learned from Brad and Jonathan and was very much the case on Stargate as a whole; that as a younger writer, you get rewritten. Not everybody continues to give credit to that original writer. I’s not a question of ego and who gets the credit, it’s a matter of who gets paid and who gets the residuals in the long run. As a showrunner, it’s your job to make sure the script that gets to set is the one that’s best for the show but there are definitely cases of situations in the business where people end up getting that money taken away from them.

David Read:
Wow. The name that’s on the episode, that’s the person who gets the residuals? There’s no “Well, I wrote this, but in the backend…”

Robert C. Cooper:
No.

David Read:
OK. That’s how it is.

Robert C. Cooper:
No. The person whose name is on the script and who’s credited for it gets the pay; the script fee and residuals.

David Read:
For all syndication, for all time.

Robert C. Cooper:
It’s bad form. The person has come in and has done a lot of work that’s gotten them the job. I cannot think of very many situations in which a credit was taken away from the original writer. There were a couple, but in those cases we are talking about a page-one rewrite.

David Read:
I see.

Robert C. Cooper:
There’s a formal process of arbitration that will determine these things as well. With the union, you can submit drafts and there will be an independent jury that will look at those scripts and then assign credit. We never had that happen, as far as I can remember, on the show. In a couple of cases I do think we approached the writers and said, “Here’s the situation. What do you think? What’s gonna happen?” They would have had to approve it or agree to the credit.

David Read:
I can imagine you don’t wanna leave anyone with a horrible taste in their mouth. At the same time, if someone is not working out with a specific script, what are you gonna do? This is a creative process, but on the other hand, this is a business. It’s a business, it must run.

Robert C. Cooper:
It’s not something that doesn’t have a mechanism that is predetermined legally. This is all way too much in the weeds for…

David Read:
I love this, man.

Robert C. Cooper:
I’m sure.

David Read:
This is fantastic.

Robert C. Cooper:
Back in the old days, people used to write freelance scripts so they weren’t necessarily always on staff. We would have people pitch the show an idea and then they would deliver something and we would either use it or not. There were also situations where there’s a step deal; they might get cut off at the outline stage in which case they get a story credit, but someone else writes the script. You’ll see a split credit on the episode and that may be why. They wrote an outline, for whatever reason it wasn’t going in the right direction. We used elements of it in the episode and didn’t wanna take the work that they did and the credit away from them so they get story credit and someone else writes the script. Or they turn in a draft that isn’t quite up to snuff and then someone else rewrites it enough that you end up with a split credit. Nobody’s doing anything under the table or backhanded to anybody. They’re all sort of done with the agreement of the representation, and frankly, the contract that’s been set out. That’s not saying I’m encouraging anybody to go back and try and dissect the credits on Stargate and figure out what happened, because it’s all different. I’m just saying I think we were always incredibly fair and, in many cases, writers kept credit when there was a rewrite that was done.

David Read:
From a novice perspective, when we’re looking at written by so-and-so and so-and-so, versus story by and teleplay by, on the back end, the financial percentages are dialing around.

Robert C. Cooper:
Yeah.

David Read:
OK. Interesting. I remember an instance where there was a director that just wasn’t working and Brad had to come in, on either the weekend or a few extra days, and take over. That person just never returned. You have to, as the showrunner, step in sometimes and put out fires in order to make things work. As the audience member, if you did your job right, you never know. Visual effects, I wanna touch on just for a beat. I’ve had the privilege of meeting a lot of these folks and the work that they did was absolutely extraordinary. What do you do when a visual effect doesn’t necessarily work? I wanna get down to brass tacks with you. The dragon in “The Quest,” for me, was a little anticlimactic. It’s not fair to judge it against Harry Potter and Game of Thrones, which came out later. When you look at that, is part of you like, “This is what we’ve got and so this is what we’re gonna run with?” I’m very curious. Or can you just say, “No, this is not acceptable?”

Robert C. Cooper:
It 100% comes down to money.

David Read:
OK.

Robert C. Cooper:
You’re literally paying for time. You’re on a payphone and you got only a certain number of quarters and at some point, the operator’s gonna cut you off. For those of you who don’t know what a payphone is, I’m sure Google will have somewhere…

David Read:
Show you pictures.

Robert C. Cooper:
In the depths of the archive, be able to explain it. It’s money. You have a budget that you have to adhere to and the way it works is you design the idea as best you can in terms of drawings and in terms of a budget. You have a visual effects supervisor who is great at their job, who looks at that, looks at the number of shots, and then puts an estimated budget per shot of what that’s gonna cost. It has to be shot a certain way in order to achieve that and sometimes the director didn’t shoot it the way they were supposed to and that affects the budget. That changed dramatically over the course of the series; we were on so long. You used to have to do motion control with a track and all this crazy stuff. Then you got down to just putting X’s on something in order to track it and then there was no need for it at all. You would have this change in how things were done. At the end of the day, you got this number and then it got shot and then the rubber hit the road and people took the design and started to try and execute it. That’s when you get into the visual effects house that we hire. They’ve got a human being sitting at a computer and they’re costing whatever, $250 an hour, to push a bunch of buttons. Sometimes they’re good at their job and sometimes they’re not. Sometimes their interpretation of what it is, is good and sometimes it’s not. Sometimes we have overreached in terms of what we’re asking for for the amount of money that’s been allotted. You get something back and you look at it, and the truth of the matter is, the first version is usually not great. It’s usually just for position and animation and it’s not really finished. The leap from the very first version of a visual effect you see to the finished version in the show is often quite dramatic. The final texturing and lighting and stuff makes a huge difference. There’s also a certain amount of trust you put in. I say money, money, money, but money also equals time in television. The faster you need it, the more it’s gonna cost, it comes down to these hours. What happens is you have a delivery schedule, so you have to deliver the show at this point. You have a certain amount of money you have to spend up until that point, but then at that point, you’re kinda done, you have to deliver it. Even if I had the money, even if I had another million dollars to put into this visual effect, boom, the show is being delivered. It’s out the door. It’s gotta go on the air. There were times where we just got to the end of the runway and it’s like, “Oh, plane’s taken off.”

David Read:
“This is what we’ve got.”

Robert C. Cooper:
“This is it.” There were times when I would ask for breakage or go over budget because the thing didn’t work. There were a few, like “Uninvited,” the creature in “Uninvited.”

David Read:
The bear creature.

Robert C. Cooper:
The bear creature, there was nothing about that that I liked. I’m not trying to throw any particular person under the bus.

David Read:
No.

Robert C. Cooper:
That didn’t come out. I don’t think we were technologically really ready for that level of 3D realism in the show, to ask for that level of 3D realism with a creature. Even today, I see a lot of creatures, I’m like, “Ugh, I don’t believe that really exists in that space.” Even with our technology today, 10, 15 years later, it’s still not quite there. We would overreach at times. I think we’ve had this conversation before too, that with Universe, we really made a concerted effort to say from the get-go, “We don’t wanna do that. We don’t wanna do something that we don’t believe we can achieve with an acceptable amount of success.” We held off on aliens for a long time. It was Image Engine that came to us and said “Hey, we have this model that’s essentially a feature film model that’s being used for a movie. We can skin a new alien on that and give you something that we could not have built for you on your budget from the ground up.”

David Read:
Wow, the Prawns from District 9. Those kinds of elements behind the scenes could arrive you at a starting place further down the track than you had.

Robert C. Cooper:
A ton of 3D R&D work on the creation of the creature was used to build that and in fact, it existed. The other thing that existed was they had created an infrastructure within the company of artists, basically people on salary, that, for a gap of time, were not being used. It was costing them money to have them sitting there doing nothing. That’s an exaggeration, but you get the idea. They had a movie coming up that they were gonna be using, so they had a window of time where they could put these very talented people, and an already half-built concept, to work. A lot of times, us, the grinding TV show, got to benefit from some feature R&D that led to a much more successful, realistic-looking visual effect that we could never have afforded to do ourselves from the ground up.

David Read:
Was that the same thing that could be said for the White House from X2? This asset exists over here in this place; we can do these things…

Robert C. Cooper:
That was the set. That was not a visual effect.

David Read:
Correct. “It’s here, we can use this!”

Robert C. Cooper:
It’s a production value. I don’t know how many shows it impacted. There was a massive set built for Blade in the biggest stage we had on the Bridge. We just took that infrastructure and turned it into God knows how many different…It was the village in a bunch of stuff in SG-1 and then became a giant part of Atlantis. We were always repurposing stuff for the sake of money. I think we got a lot of production value out of our willingness to take whatever we could.

David Read:
When something is coming along and one of the artists, be it visual effects, be it some other form, and someone is struggling with it, is it basically anticipated that someone’s going to come to you saying, “This is where we’re at with this right now?” Or is there any level of, this is not the word I want, but bullshit, where it’s like, “Yeah, we’ve got this. We’ve got this” and they present it to you and it’s like, “This? You’ve got this?”

Robert C. Cooper:
You should really have some of the visual effects people on, I don’t know, maybe you have had some.

David Read:
Craig Van Den Biggelaar and a couple others.

Robert C. Cooper:
I hope we were fair. I remember guys would come in and women as well – Michelle Comens was an amazing visual effect supervisor for us. It would be, “OK, look. I know this is not quite what you asked for, it’s not there yet, don’t react. Just look at the position. Just look at where it is in the frame.” They would apologize for it before they even showed it to me. I always knew what stage I was looking at and there were a lot of times where it’s a leap of faith. “This is gonna look better by the time it needs to be approved as a final.”

David Read:
John Gajdecki showed us the Lego animations for “Rising” and they are adorable, they’re absolutely so cute. You gotta start somewhere and then work your way in. “This is the general idea. Are we good on these shots? We’re good? OK, now we’ll proceed.” You don’t wanna spend money down, just throw it down a hole and be like, “We need to tweak this.” There are steps.

Robert C. Cooper:
It was an incredible process. You learn that the people who aren’t as experienced in this, often on the studio and network side, who look at the first cut, who look at the early mixes… How should I put it? In a positive way, I would say it was almost uniform that by the time the show was finished, the estimation of people went up so high that when they first saw a cut, they would be like, “I didn’t realize it was gonna be this good.” They see it with the visual effects finished and the music and the full mix and they’re like, “Oh, now I get it.”

David Read:
Absolutely. I didn’t realize that you guys managed to get a lot more mileage, for instance, not by “Enemy at the Gate,” but certainly at “Rising,” by not rendering the visual effects in full high definition. They were crunched vertically a little bit and then expanded into 16:9 to get a few more shots that you didn’t have before out of the budget. He’s showing me these renders and the renders aren’t 16:9, they’re more squished.

Robert C. Cooper:
Everything is on so much of a different scale nowadays. We have conversations about the kind of processing and the amount of energy that takes to get that kind of processing with AI now; all the technology that we’re watching evolve. It’s no different. It was literally pennies per microsecond of how long it took to render something, how much processing power they had. Some of these shots would take literally days. You would press the button to do the finished version and it would be hours and hours and hours. If it came out the other end and it was like, “Oh, shit, this doesn’t look quite the way we want it.” If your delivery was that Wednesday and it was a Tuesday, you’re stuck with it.

David Read:
The render can crash, too. Craig was saying that they can crash and they have to start over.

Robert C. Cooper:
It’s a cost issue, where you’re sort of saying, “Do I have the money to redo this one shot and make it a little better? Or I can put that into XYZ in the next episode and make that episode good.” It’s not like a movie where you live and die on that one thing…. you’re balancing it all out with the whole show. I’m sure there was a point at which we were like, “Could the dragon be better?” Maybe. But what’s gonna suffer because we went that extra mile with the dragon?

David Read:
Here’s a question: were the SG-1 and the Atlantis funds allocated separately or could one show feed the other if it was going over budget?

Robert C. Cooper:
The only reason Atlantis ever got made was because we had both shows running.

David Read:
For sets, for sure, but I was curious for other things like visual effects, money earmarked for those things.

Robert C. Cooper:
Sure. Models, things like that that were built. Wardrobe was a huge one. It was also having one office, one art department, one writer’s room. All those things created efficiencies. Nobody was being short-changed in terms of not getting paid for the work they were doing but you can only work so many hours in a day. Yes, if we could generate the work for not double, but maybe one and a half the work in the time, it would save tons of money. There was also things like rentals, like stage rentals, and maybe Atlantis would get shot in the stage for a day that SG-1 was paying for on the long run.

David Read:
Martin Gero talked about “Trio.” This was an episode that was designed to be a little bit smaller budget from the outset. It wasn’t specifically to cost money per se, but it was meant to be a smaller story. When it got to the execution, whew, not everything worked as expected. I sit there as an audience member going, “Well, if it doesn’t work, where do you get the money?” I guess you get the money from the next thing and try to dial things around where you can to keep the train on the track that you want.

Robert C. Cooper:
For sure. I think we were successful because we were pretty good at planning ahead and earmarking the right amount of money for the right things. I think I probably often got accused of maybe reserving some of the more special things for my shows that I was writing and directing.

David Read:
You’re the co-creator. Too bad! “Sateda” is so memorable. You and Brad created this thing together, you know the tent pole stuff and you know what you want to see. As an audience member it’s like, “This is great. This works.”

Robert C. Cooper:
For example, “Time,” we built this indoor jungle and that was a big expense. I vaguely remember a number like $300,000, which was not in our normal set budget for an episode. That episode used that set, obviously the most, but then it was used multiple times over the season. We found ways to continue to get mileage out of those expenditures.

David Read:
What about stars? I know that there’s a guest star budget that’s typical for an episode. You can get a number of extras and everything else and there’s a coffer for that. Someone comes along who’s available, I imagine there were instances where they would come to you and say, “My family really loves this show. I’m willing to do it for ‘this’ ’cause I wanna make something for them.” Or were there other instances, “They’re asking for ‘this’ much, but they’re so-and-so. Could we do it?”

Robert C. Cooper:
I think most cases, casting, particularly US casting, which would look at more name guest stars, knew our budget. They would propose people that they knew were gettable for the amount we had. In some cases, we would be like, “Oh, this is special. Who can we get that might require,” what we call in the business, “breakage?” Which is when you’re actually going above what your budget is. Breakage is when you essentially have approval from the studio to spend more than you plan to. There were situations where we went a little higher to get the more namey person. In some cases that sort of situation was going to Rick. Once he had left the show, there were a couple of cases where we wanted to bring him back where the network actually asked to bring him back because he was promotable. With “200,” for example.

David Read:
That was the network’s idea to get him in.

Robert C. Cooper:
No, they were always happy about that. It’s not like we didn’t want him in “200;” we didn’t know how we could make a 200th episode without him. That was a scenario where everybody, the studio and the network, all knew what it was gonna cost. It wasn’t just, “Was Rick available?” It’s, “Were we willing to pay what it would cost to get him back?”

David Read:
“There will be spoilers. Are you kidding? It’ll be in the commercial.” That’s great. I remember David Ogden Stiers, I regret not ever talking to him for his role as Oberoth. I thought he was a great villain. He drove up from Oregon. You guys were perfectly willing to fly him in, he was like, “No, no, I enjoy…” He enjoyed the drive. That’s kind of wild. “Unending” we’ve talked about a little, but we have arrived at the end, phew, of our SG-1 overview. There are specific stories that I know exist that I’ve not…

Robert C. Cooper:
I’ll tell you, that title was one I definitely struggled with.

David Read:
Why?

Robert C. Cooper:
To come up with. That one was not immediately obvious to me and was only later that I figured that one out. Even once I pitched it, I don’t remember getting universal approval of it. I don’t remember what some of the other options were, but that was one that was not initially easy. I didn’t come in with that title when I pitched it.

David Read:
I think it leaves the nugget of the idea that, in some way, even though in some episodes or shows, Amanda’s now over here on the Hammond, Rick is in so-and-so, there’s a team always going through; the adventure never stops.

Robert C. Cooper:
The documentary we were making about the real Stargate program was gonna stop, but the actual real Stargate program was gonna continue.

David Read:
Uh-oh, SWAT, better look out. Over on GateWorld we have the story and I want it here. You kept encountering CCR Have You Ever Seen The Rain? Tell me that story again.

Robert C. Cooper:
I wish I remembered that whole story. I think there were a couple of cases where there were fun coincidences. I would talk about something and then I would get in the car and that song would come on the radio.

David Read:
It’s meant to be.

Robert C. Cooper:
I don’t necessarily believe in that stuff but I also feel like the fact that I’m excited about that coincidence means that that’s the right choice. I like it enough to get excited about that coincidence. I got excited on a number of occasions about a particular song. It was the score that we ended up landing in the Atlantis episode that I wrote.

David Read:
“Vegas?”

Robert C. Cooper:
“Vegas.”

David Read:
That was full of music.

Robert C. Cooper:
That was some breakage that I got some approval for.

David Read:
With CCR – we’d had a couple of pop songs, like at the end of “Fragile Balance” when young Jack goes into school. We’d never had a song like this at this point.

Robert C. Cooper:
On other shows, like on Unspeakable for example, I had a music supervisor who would on every episode, in every situation, pitch me music and say, “Here’s…” We had that on Dirk Gently as well. There would be a dedicated person who would say, besides the score, “here’s music that you could use in the show.” We never did that. I think it was maybe because music has a way of dating things and it also maybe in some ways never felt right in science fiction. Although I personally think one of the things that made Stargate so relatable was that it was taking place in our world and therefore had music in it and should have had music in it. There was some resistance and some intention about making the show feel more timeless, in that music makes it of a particular time.

David Read:
If you could, with the success of CCR — and I wanna talk about that montage momentarily — would you have added a song here or there earlier on in SG-1’s run?

Robert C. Cooper:
Maybe. We did start doing it on SGU; we were having a music supervisor on SGU and bringing that to the mix. I think CCR worked because it was a classic song. It wasn’t a modern song; it was something that was from another time.

David Read:
A lot of these guys would have grown up with that song; Mitchell certainly, and Carter certainly would have.

Robert C. Cooper:
That’s why I felt it was fine. I’ve spoke at length about the contributions…you almost can’t weigh how much Joel and his music meant to the show.

David Read:
Oh, God.

Robert C. Cooper:
There’s also something about a familiar song; it hits you completely differently than the score.

David Read:
We’re watching this show, Have You Ever Seen The Rain represents the beginning and the entrance into a loss of sanity for some of the characters. I remember you and Browder having the discussion about whether or not we should show a scene of Mitchell losing control, ’cause he’s our hero.

Robert C. Cooper:
He did not wanna do the scene where he tears the room apart, which is funny because when you think about these things in retrospect, when I wrote it, I thought, “Oh, he’s gonna love doing this.” I literally expected him to really want to do that scene. He just felt it was a betrayal of his character.

David Read:
He was the guy who could always be counted on to stand firm. He did it with reservations or did you win him over with the idea?

Robert C. Cooper:
Yeah. Obviously I won him over, he did it.

David Read:
I would think there’s certain things like, “Creatively, I disagree with this, but coach, we’re gonna go with this, coach.”

Robert C. Cooper:
I think that, to some extent, was the case. I also think that he understood where I was coming from. It wasn’t a complicated argument. I’m like, “Yes, you are this person, so imagine how far you have to have been pushed to get to the point where you would do this.” That is what I’m hoping the audience will also feel. It’s like, “Oh my God, if he’s doing this, that’s how crazy the situation must be.”

David Read:
They are stuck in amber for years.

Robert C. Cooper:
We had a finite amount of time. When you think about it, there’s a setup and a resolution and whatever. You have about 30 minutes of screen time to tell the story about people being stuck that long. There has to be shortcuts dramatically to give someone the impression that it’s not just being handled in a blase way.

David Read:
No, it certainly wasn’t and I’ll get to that in a moment. I remember watching the scene. Michael and I spoke a little bit about this a couple of months ago. The scene at the foot of the bed with Vala and Daniel, it’s meant to be largely ambiguous. You may disagree with that to a degree, but I remember sitting in the office with you guys after the next season and Darren and I were with you. We were talking about this scene and when I had watched it as a viewer, I’m 18, 19, 20, I was like, “Oh, she’s upset about something.” You and Darren were talking and Darren asked you, “Was it kind of your intent that this was a miscarriage?” I remember sitting there going, “Oh my God, I didn’t even think of that.” Didn’t even occur to me until that moment. It’s when you, in real-time, realize something in a new way that you didn’t before. I’ll never forget that.

Robert C. Cooper:
I didn’t want to unpack everything that goes around that in that moment. You should and could do whole series about what people go through in those situations, but I think it added a layer of texture to the ordeal that these people were experiencing.

David Read:
Were you satisfied with the makeup job when they get older?

Robert C. Cooper:
I would be lying if I said I was. I’m never that satisfied with that stuff.

David Read:
Was there a rush at the end? Do you wish that they had some more R&D time? Tight schedule?

Robert C. Cooper:
It’s the same as the visual effects conversation; there’s a certain amount of money, a certain amount of time. Makeup like that is tough because of the shooting schedule too. It’s not like with The Penguin where they had five or six hours a day to do the makeup and then you only have the person for three hours. We couldn’t do that kind of schedule of one day on a set for a television show when your typical budget includes seven and a half days. If you go to ten days, you’re increasing the cost of most of the budget of the show by half. You just can’t do that. Why did it come out the way it did? It’s hard, that’s a hard thing to do. I remember thinking that the people who did that work did the best they could and I certainly understood what the limitations were gonna be throughout.

David Read:
It’s not just makeup and physical performance; there’s a vocal element too. One of the things that I personally always notice is that people’s voices change as they get older. I thought it was interesting that, specifically Amanda, chose to go in a little bit of a higher register.

Robert C. Cooper:
Everything is time and time equals money, so everything is money. Lighting can make a big difference too. I’m not throwing the DPs under the bus ’cause they also have a certain amount of time. If they could’ve had an extra hour for every setup to light it properly, you wouldn’t have seen it the way you saw it. When you see a successful aging makeup in a feature film and try to compare that to a television show, it’s just not fair. They have a completely different budget, schedule scenario, and they can also fly the best of the best person for that particular discipline in. Years later I did a lot of makeup on Unspeakable as well and I don’t think that hurt the drama. I still feel people could watch the show and get what I wanted them to get out of it.

David Read:
This is a heavy episode. You’re not left with, watching this episode, at least I’m not, and I don’t think you meant it to be, “Oh, joy!” You switch to the exterior of the ship and you see the plasma blast get closer as the time passes, and for me there’s a, “They’re still stuck.” You cut inside and they’re dealing with this trauma of not being able to do anything but pray that Sam comes up with a solution. They’re still in it together, they don’t resent one another. I think that’s one of the core things about the show that stands really true, is that they don’t turn on one another. They find a place to cope with each other and I think that’s beautiful.

Robert C. Cooper:
Thank you. I think that reflected how, when I talk to people, when I meet people who worked on the show, almost universally they’re like, “That was the best experience I ever had, working on the show.” To make a show is incredibly stressful. It’s certainly not brain surgery or soldiering through real war but it is an endeavor that is stressful and takes a lot of commitment. People are often at the end of their rope in terms of their sleep and mental health and all those things. You get a lot of drama and acrimony that comes out of making television and film and a lot of things don’t go well. We managed to work really well together for a very, very long time and I think the vast majority of people who worked on the show had a positive experience. I think that, in some ways, reflects what you’re talking about. Part of the reason people loved the team and loved the show is because, even with their differences and disagreements and differing opinions, they still liked each other a lot. In some cases, loved each other, and found a way to get along and win. I thought that that was going on behind the scenes too, so I’m glad that came across.

David Read:
The final scene was deliberately kept toward the end of the shoot.

Robert C. Cooper:
By the way, making the show felt like an ending. It really felt very much like it had gone on forever. 10 years is a long time.

David Read:
Really? I would suppose creatively at a certain point, some people would be like, “I’m doing well financially for this, but creatively, at a certain point, I would be hitting a wall.”

Robert C. Cooper:
Brad and I have often said, and I think I’ve said it on here, that we did try and end the show in Season Seven. They wouldn’t let us.

David Read:
“I’ll make you an offer you can’t refuse.”

Robert C. Cooper:
No, they’re pulling us back in.

David Read:
Geez, that’s great. You left the gate room scene for the end of shoot and so many people who had almost never been to set in some cases showed up for this one. Was there an open invitation to come in and see it?

Robert C. Cooper:
Yeah.

David Read:
Or did people just stay past midnight I think.

Robert C. Cooper:
By the way, to this day I will not forget how much shit I was getting from John Lenic, who was producing. We were going over, not just over an acceptable amount. We were about to go into something that would have triggered another day of shooting.

David Read:
For this last day?

Robert C. Cooper:
Yeah. For that scene. I was behind. Getting this right was important and obviously it was the last shot of the show so we couldn’t come back and shoot it another time. That would have been really expensive so going late was fine. We were pausing for things like handshakes and goodbyes and celebration sort of stuff. John was just like, “I’m gonna close this down if you don’t get this shot by this time.” He was really tense.

David Read:
That’s his job.

Robert C. Cooper:
All things understood, we gotta get this done. I don’t necessarily think anybody’s gonna hold our feet to the fire now in terms of unions and stuff, 15 years later, 18 years later. I think we went a little over.

David Read:
But it was worth it.

Robert C. Cooper:
I think we went a little past the point where we would have needed to pay a little more.

David Read:
The photos are beautiful. They’re dramatic. Did anyone speak after the final shot? Did you have a speech? Or did any of the cast?

Robert C. Cooper:
I think I said a few things. I think some people said some stuff. It was not very formal. Everyone was exhausted too ’cause we had a really long day.

David Read:
Everyone was gonna go away and come back for “Ark of Truth.” You knew that everyone knew that there was something. You weren’t striking anything.

Robert C. Cooper:
No. Atlantis was continuing.

David Read:
Exactly. There was gonna be some back and forth. At least we were gonna see Beau, possibly every now and then. What a great character, man. “Ark of Truth,” I think Joel’s score was recorded in Seattle, if I’m not mistaken? You guys went down and watched it get performed, and I’m assuming “Continuum?”

Robert C. Cooper:
That was for Atlantis. When we did the Atlantis pilot, we had an orchestra, we went down and saw that live. I remember going. It was the first time I had gone down to L.A. and sat with Joel in his studio in the back. He had a studio in the back of his house then and I remember doing that for “Ark of Truth” too. It’s the most incredible thing ever. Music is kind of like magic to me.

David Read:
You don’t speak music. Would you communicate with him on every episode, or would you do batches together?

Robert C. Cooper:
No, we had something called a music spotting, which is part of the process. Once you had a locked cut, you would do a music spotting and you would literally go through the episode. They would come to the table and have already… They were so good, they would literally watch an episode and tell us what we want.

David Read:
Rick Chaddock and Neal Acree and Joel?

Robert C. Cooper:
Yeah. They would be like, “OK, we’re in here, we’re out here, we’re in here, we’re out here.” They would just have ins and outs and then we would talk about, “This dialogue…” That would be the most we would talk about it. They knew during action sequences they would be in, but there were often debates about whether they were gonna play under dialogue scenes and what those cues would be. Sometimes it’d be, “I don’t like wall-to-wall music. Let’s have this play…,” or, “No, this scene needs a little help. It needs a little something extra to give it the emotion that we’re going for.” We would literally, to the tenth of a second, figure out where his music would start, where it would end, what it would be and then he would go away and do that. By the time we got to the mix, the music would be in and then we would make additions and changes as we go. Rick was always in the mix process.

David Read:
Rick Chaddock?

Robert C. Cooper:
Yeah. Sometimes Joel would be working on the score for another episode while we were mixing one, or the score for two other episodes while we were mixing one, so he’d be busy. I’d say, “Look, this cue is not doing what we need it to do,” or, “We need more here that we didn’t think we did at the time we did the spotting.” Joel was often delivering cues during the mix process.

David Read:
One of the things a lot of people don’t know: two versions for every episode. You got the commercial aired version and not.

Robert C. Cooper:
Yeah, that was not that complicated, but yes, there was a point at which the ins and outs of commercials and how you bridged the cut when there was no commercial was very different. It was like four or five little tweaks that you needed to do per episode.

David Read:
Tracking music from earlier episodes, was it a budget thing, or was it like Joel says, “We can use this here because this fits?”

Robert C. Cooper:
Both. A, Joel’s like, “I don’t need to write new music. I have the music from the library that I can use.” He’d still get paid for it.

David Read:
It’s a theme; it’s an established theme that you can fit into certain characters.

Robert C. Cooper:
He can only do so much. You can only write so much music and so if he can fill something in that, A, adds to it, because there is that sort of familiarity that makes you feel like you’re watching a Stargate and this is a moment that you might even think about that, “This is the hero moment for this character ’cause this is their theme.” There’s no reason why you couldn’t reuse some music. It happens a lot.

David Read:
He was a master. I miss him all the time. You just have to put on a show and you think of him because he’s a huge percentage of that equation. The franchise would look almost completely different emotionally. Absolutely extraordinary man. I rewatched a lot of our discussion before coming back to you and I went and watched the scene from “Space Race” with your wife. God, she’s funny. Was it like, “We’ve got an opening here. Do you want it?” What was the conversation that led to that? She’s so good.

Robert C. Cooper:
I don’t remember the impetus of it. She had done some acting; that was what she wanted to do. She had done some voice work. I think she didn’t really wanna, at the beginning, feel like I had just given her the part, so to speak. Eventually, as the show went on, I was like, “Come on, you gotta be in an episode.”

David Read:
Her banter with Rick is so funny. I forgot how good that moment was. His cousin, Murray, “Yes!” Robert, thank you.

Robert C. Cooper:
You’re welcome.

David Read:
Thank you for being willing to go into a little bit more of the nuts and bolts on things. Some of it’s not as flashy, but it’s like, “Oh, that’s how this comes into be, that’s how this works the way it does.” I love having those conversations with you.

Robert C. Cooper:
Hopefully people get a chance to hear about what we go through on the production side so they understand why the show ends up being what it is.

David Read:
Rob Cooper, writer, director, executive producer of Stargate SG-1, Stargate Atlantis and Stargate Universe. Hope you enjoyed that. There’s always insight when Rob comes in and he is one of the regulars on my show that I get so excited about because he’s so knowledgeable and he’s damn funny. I appreciate y’all tuning in. Before you go, if you like what you’ve seen in this episode and you wanna see more of it, please click Like. It makes a difference with the show and will help us grow our audience. Please also consider sharing this video with a Stargate friend and if you wanna get notified about future episodes, click the Subscribe icon. If you plan to watch live, I recommend giving the Bell icon a click so you’ll be the first to know of any schedule changes, which happen here and there. Bear in mind, clips from this Livestream will be released over the course of the next few weeks. This was not a Livestream; this was a pre-recorded interview on GateWorld.net and the Dial the Gate’s YouTube channels. My tremendous thanks to my moderating team, Antony, Jeremy, Marcia, Sommer, Tracy, Raj, Lockwatcher. Linda “GateGabber” Furey and Antony Rawling, my producers. My webmaster, Frederick Marcoux over at ConceptsWeb. My transcribers, who have been working diligently to archive the show over at DialtheGate.com. If you wanna join them, get in touch with me, there’s a portal there to send me an email. I don’t make the show in a vacuum and we couldn’t have gotten this far without all the help that everyone has given me. My name is David Read for Dial the Gate. I appreciate you tuning in and I’ll see you on the other side.