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DESIGNING TEK WORLD BEHIND THE SCENES OF THE TEKWAR FILMS by Edward Gross
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the Scenes
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Downtime on a movie or television set can often be a creatively debilitating experience, but for William Shatner it served as the impetus for creating his own universe; a universe that has spanned six best-selling novels, comic books, trading cards and four television movies which will in all likelihood lead to a weekly series. It was during the production of 1989's Star Trek V: The Final Frontier, on which he made his feature directorial debut, that Shatner began to create what would become his first work of fiction, TekWar. That novel was an attempt to blend elements from two of his most popular television series, Star Trek and T.J. Hooker, resulting in a unique science-fiction adventure. Shatner does, however, admit that he may have been influenced just a little too much by Star Trek in terms of his creation's futuristic setting. "When I sat down to write the novel," he explains, "I followed my instincts rather than any conscious desire. It was almost as though I didn't believe anything more would come of it than my doodling around with the story. As a result, I wasn't too careful about where I set it. Since I was working on a Star Trek movie at the time, I set it instinctively, almost, in the general time of Star Trek. So the novels are set 200 years from now and the world that I imagined was a world that I probably had absorbed from various contacts, pictures, paintings and covers of magazines and other science fiction that I had read from the multitude of sources that one gets their imagination from. I had a generalized feeling of the world of Tek, but what I was concentrating mostly on was this policeman whose life was torn asunder by the various things that had happened to him." TekWar introduced ex-police officer Jake Cardigan, accused of murdering his partners while under the influence of Tek, a drug-like virtual reality experience that is oftentimes fatal in its addiction. As a result of this supposed crime, Cardigan is placed in cryogenic freeze for a 15 year sentence, but freed after four by the influential Bascom, who wants him to work for the Cosmos Detective Agency. Partnered with Sid Gomez, Cardigan goes up against one Tek Lord after another in each subsequent adventure while simultaneously trying to repair the rifts between he and his wife and son, clearing his name and getting on with his own life. The basic concept of the Tek "drug" came about, Shatner says, "by the fact that I put a television set in a wall in my bedroom and used it -- and use it -- as a means of going to sleep. In the middle of the night when the dark hangs heavy, to light a candle was to open the television set so that the television, in a way, is something I've become accustomed to using both for information, of course, but to sleep as well. It's almost something I try to not do because I do it so often. As a result, I extended that drug effect into a totality of drug, in that the television miniaturized can then become your fantasy and your fantasy becomes real. In that case, it would become difficult to even leave your house, which is what happens to a Tek user in addition to getting their neurons scrambled. That's the lure of Tek, that your fantasy world can be better than your real world." Actor Greg Evigan, who has been cast as Jake Cardigan in the various TekWar films, sees a distinct difference between Tek and virtual reality, beginning with the fact that although both require a headset, Tek utilizes a specific chip that opens up your mind to any possibility. "It actually probes into the points of the brain that control your vision and all your senses -- like nerve centers -- which is different than virtual reality," explains Evigan. "Virtual reality is really a machine. You see a picture and it has an effect on your equilibrium, but Tek completely involves you. It's almost like you did Ecstasy or some drug that really can take you to another place, but you cannot tell any difference between reality and fantasy. You are going to live that reality as long as that Tek-set is running. You've gotta stay in that place where you take it and where you are using it. So, the difference is that one really goes in on the brain and the other is just kind of like a peripheral enjoyment. Like you're watching a movie or something. That's the explanation and if you think about it, we're probably on the road to something like that anyway." Production designer and producer Stephen Roloff adds, "Tek is a great metaphor for a detective. It is illusion versus reality. What's real and what's not and the idea of having a drug which directly allows your brain to experience anything at all that you want to experience. It's a wonderful premise, and it's dangerous territory. The fear that exists regarding virtual reality is that it will become so seductive that people won't want to go out and live real lives anymore because the virtual world is so much more interesting. A good friend of mine, who was a writer on Star Trek for some time, said, 'One of the things that I never understood about the show was the holodeck, because if I had a holodeck, I would park the ship and spend time there.' Just park the ship!" Although Tek was a creation Shatner was satisfied with, he still wanted the opportunity to alter the premise's time frame. That opportunity came in the form of Marvel Comics, which approached him with the idea of using the novels as a springboard for a comic book series. "I then began to think more consciously of what I wanted to do," Shatner admits. "By now I had stuck myself in the extreme futuristic world and when I had gone out to sell TekWar as a potential vehicle, people said, 'It's going to be too expensive,' and it's then that I began to realize that I shouldn't have gone so far in the future. So I had another shot when Marvel Comics came at it. We granted them the rights but with the admonition that it be set 50 years from now, fantasizing again that the comic books could serve as storyboards for a potential movie. Some part of my mind was cunningly aware of that. Then, when the movie people came and said, 'Let's make a film,' I was prepared by that time to say, 'This story takes place 50 years from now, so we can use the architecture of today and just talk about a new building being kind of creaky and old and needing refurbishing.' That's what worked for me. So that's the world of TekWar that slowly evolved from Star Trek into something more meaningful."
Shatner and his company, Lemli, was approached by a variety of studios interested in producing TekWar, but he finally opted for Atlantis Films and together they struck a deal with Universal. "We went together to three or four people who were bidding on it," he says. "We ended up in a strange position of having more than one person who wanted to do the project, which was wonderful. It was the first time that's ever happened to me in a lifetime of striving." The downside, he points out, is that his name is thoroughly attached to the project. "How would it be received?" he asks rhetorically. "If it's a failure, it's awful because my name is right there. In fact they're advertising it as 'William Shatner's "TekWar"'. My God, the responsibility....But we chose Universal to do it and I'm proud of the final product. And I present it to you with no qualifications whatsoever. Here is TekWar. Greg Evigan and Universal and myself and that wonderful crew in Canada present to you a two-hour, wonderful romp."
That romp began when Atlantis co-owner Seaton McClain (sp.) literally walked through a bookstore and saw a copy of TekWar by William Shatner, who, coincidentally enough, was filming an episode of the company's Ray Bradbury Theater. A deal was struck and one of the first people hired was Stephen Roloff, a veteran of Canadian television who had an extensive relationship with Atlantis. Upon being hired, Roloff was told to "dream." "I was just supposed to sit around and think about how we would actually try to create the future for television on a television budget with those restrictions, knowing that we wouldn't be financed like Star Trek, and to put together a pitch book," Roloff relates with a smile. "So, I did that over a period of a few months and put together a pitch document which included a series of images and a kind of written description of our world. That went out and, after a little bit of wheeling and dealing, they struck a deal with Universal." Universal, for its part, had been eyeing Paramount's success with the syndicated Star Trek: The Next Generation and desperately wanted a piece of the marketplace. To this end, the studio elected to produce the Universal Action Pack, a series of two-hour movies which would essentially serve as potential series' pilots. And a highlight, naturally, would be TekWar. "I was at NBC when Paramount originally talked to the network about doing another Star Trek and no one would step up to the plate with a significant offer," explains Universal's Dan Filie, the executive overseeing the Action Pack. "They offered six episodes or 13, but they wouldn't offer the full year commitment. Paramount decided to go it alone. If you have a success in first run, as they've certainly proven, and you control the commercial inventory, they can afford to put a very well produced, very expensive show on the air and still make money. Whereas that same show on a network would be limited to a network license fee and you could lose money. We lost a lot of sleep about it, trying to figure out what we could do." Using Star Trek: The Next Generation as a gauge, Universal gave the green light to TekWar prior to the debut of Paramount's second Star Trek spin-off, Deep Space Nine. "It was just our feeling that in the marketplace, the stations would have a confidence level of putting something on in the science fiction arena," Filie notes. "William Shatner is certainly one of the major figures in science fiction culture. We knew we could get people to watch and we felt we could make a good show. You can't ask for more than that. The frustration is when you make something you really believe in and nobody shows up. But we felt that we would be talking to the same viewers who loved Star Trek." As TekWar moved ahead toward production, William Shatner and those involved made the decision that their future would be decidedly upbeat. "In June of this past year," says Shatner, "we held a symposium with about eight or ten so-called futuristic experts in their fields, who felt they knew what will transpire 50 years from now, which, as I've said, is the setting of TekWar. And there's a duality in everybody's mind -- knowledgeable people's minds -- and that is that there is the possibility of Doomsday around the corner, and that isn't very entertaining. It's a reality, but it's not something people want to see. "It's human nature to be optimistic," continues Shatner, "so everybody at the symposium, including myself, chooses and chose to be optimistic; believing that the problems of today can be solved with courage, wisdom, intelligence and rapidity. And they'll only be replaced by other problems, which in turn need to be solved. But that's the history of mankind. The only question is, can we solve the present-day problems in time so that our children and our children's children can live? We choose to think that they can." Greg Evigan, who television viewers know from such shows as B.J. and the Bear and My Two Dads -- not exactly deep stuff -- is pretty succinct in his feelings regarding the future and how they contrast with the generally optimistic atmosphere of TekWar, though he does believe Jake Cardigan has a dark side. "I like the character," Evigan says, "but I think there is a dark enough side to him so that he is not just a good guy. His values are in the right direction, but he is also in a world that is in a lot of trouble. You know, like society is in trouble. The environment is in trouble. All of those things are happening and it's kind of like what they say about kids now. They see something like 18,000 homicides by the time they are 18 years old. I forget what the number is, but it's bizarre like that. If you're watching homicides -- whether in entertainment or on the news -- you can't help but be influenced and a little bit desensitized to those things that you should be more sensitive to. The kids watch the news and say, 'Oh, look at that guy who's dead.' I remember when I was a kid and if I saw something like that, it would just really send chills down my spine. I think in this context, by the year 2043 there is a certain amount of desensitization that will take place. You can't help it. It's around you. That's the way I think it's going personally. I think that if we are going to clear up an ozone problem -- if we are going to do all those things, I think we're on the track to it. We're on our way. But I really don't think we are going to accomplish it in 50 years. "Bill Shatner and I had a discussion and I think he sees it as a much better world than it is now -- in terms of health and everything else -- and I didn't agree with that. I don't think that in two generations you are really going to clean it all up. So that's why we had to talk about the idea of whether or not we wear sunglasses when we're out in the sun all the time. What's the reality here? And we made the choice, and there are points where we wear them as much as possible. It's not like people have to wear sunglasses, it's just that people know that you better wear them." Evigan found particular irony in the fact that he was happy to leave smog-filled Los Angeles behind him for the fresh air of Toronto, where the films are shot, only to discover ozone problems. "I was walking around announcing, 'Man, it's beautiful here. The air is fresh,'" he laughs. "Then this guy said, 'Yeah, but make sure you don't stay out in the sun.' 'What do you mean?' 'There is a hole -- a complete hole -- in the ozone layer.' So, here we are with that problem. No matter where you go, it's always something. But I think it's an interesting future. It's a lot of fun to be able to try and think of what will exist at that time based on what we know now. It gives you something to get excited about while you're working. The year is 2043 and everything is wide open. Who knows what you can do?"
Stephen Roloff does. |
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Everyone involved with the film series gives credit to Stephen Roloff for giving this future reality its unique look. William Shatner enthuses, "Stephen has captured my vision and enhanced it. He's a real artist in that he has set up certain rules for his/our universe, and when you come against the rules that need to be bent for the exigencies of production, it's very difficult for him to let go of it because he has created something implacable in his mind. And it's wonderful." Roloff, currently a producer on Gene Roddenberry's Earth: Final Conflict, admits that he was obsessed with science fiction throughout his adolescence and has also been very interested in the evolution of our species -- if, as he adds, it can be said we're evolving -- and what's going to happen to our planet in the future. As a result, he welcomed the opportunity to address some of those issues in serving as architect of this future. "Of course," he smiles, "the reality set in once we started production. You can only dream so far. Ultimately what we're producing is entertainment." Roloff feels that projecting things into the future bears greater witness on the movie screen than it does on television, due to the amount of background detail you can provide on the former. "Take a film like Blade Runner, for example," he muses. "If you see it three or four times and you're tired of looking at Dekker, you look at someone in the background and pick up something you never even noticed. You can't afford that on television because of the schedule and the budget level. You can't afford to put as many layers in, and I found that very frustrating. But it was nonetheless a great opportunity. Many of the notions I dreamed met with Bill's enthusiasm and ended up getting incorporated into the show. So I was very excited about that and it was a chance for me to get some very high-end tools that I had never played with before." Roloff admits that he isn't sure that he managed to project everything he feels on the screen, due to the fact that they're dealing with the television medium. "Our stories are ultimately about good guys and bad guys," he says. "It's a detective show, and the villains are inevitably tied into Tek and the distribution of it. Because the show is called TekWar, it means that there is a very defined set of parameters around who they are and how they can be modeled and what their worlds are." For his part, Roloff's personal feeling is that we are in an interesting, albeit dangerous, stage of our development. "A lot of things are coming to a head and a lot of old systems that have served us well -- especially in America --through the '40s, '50s, '60s and '70s are now sputtering to a halt. A lot of the old ways of looking at things are no longer valid. It's really interesting. In order to move forward, a lot of the old attitudes have to shift. There has to be a considerable change in the way we think. We can't face the future just looking backwards and trying to recreate the '40s or '50s. "We have to be able to address a lot of that in the show to some degree. We sort of suggested a world where the nation state doesn't have the same kind of import, and where NATO has a stronger presence. On a global scale we have an occasional reference to environmental decay -- although we have taken a positive note. It is television and one of the first things we all agreed on is that we had to take a positive note of the future as opposed to a pessimistic one." One futuristic design that Roloff has always liked, but one not appropriate for TekWar, was what he refers to as "technovomit."
"Basically," he explains, "technovomit is when you are doing a futuristic film, you just get a whole bunch of electronic components, rip the cases off of them and stick them on everything around you. If you look at everything from Mad Max on, that's basically what it is. That's assuming technology stopped. There was some sort of apocalypse and the progression -- technological progression -- ended completely and we had to make due with the residues of the past. That's the premise that all those films take because they don't see how to get past where we are now. The other reason for that, of course, is financial. It is very expensive to create the future. That means you are going to have to be projected forward." He uses Sylvester Stallone's Demolition Man, which has certain thematic similarities to TekWar, as an example. "They did it thanks to $60 million. In television there is no way you can have that kind of reserve. So, I realized that I had to be very selective about what elements I used to suggest the future and how I would introduce them. One of the early rules that I sort of came upon is that in every image I would endeavor to have a contrast between something very futuristic and some element of the past, because there is a danger in trying to create everything futuristic. If you have an image in which every element is futuristic, it all sort of begins to taste the same and you don't have any relativity any more. I've carried that theme onwards. Like the courtroom in TekJustice. I built a Frank Lloyd Wright courtroom from the '30s and put a very futuristic holographic projector in the middle of it. "That also fit into an urban design philosophy that I've kind of been working with in regards to buildings -- both built and location work. We have done both, but I think what will happen to the Americas in 50 years is we won't see city skylines glistening with entirely new mega skyscraper projects. I think we'll see cities that have largely been recycled; the shells of buildings have been converted into different uses and there has been sort of a very light-weight interactive, adaptable, recyclable architecture that has kind of been plugged in to embellish what's already there to provide new uses.
"Having a theory like that kind of helps on a show like this, because we can then take that philosophy and go into locations and just treat them differently. Use the location as a different environment. For example, we have a prison in the third show, so I thought about the fact that Toronto has a large number of old greenery or soy or sugar silos -- big concrete fortress complexes. So we recently decided that would be a prison, and I built the sets and suggested levels in it. That is just an example, but I am trying to suggest that we had to become very intelligent with the way we recycle existing structures. We can't sit down and just build new structures, especially since it's only 50 years into the future. As I said, I don't think we are about to come into some huge economic boom that will let us completely rebuild our cities from scratch. So, being optimistic, I'm saying we have been very clever in how we used our resources." A particular challenge -- insofar as budgets were concerned -- was the handling of vehicles in the future. Roloff points out that Oliver Stone's recent Wild Palms mini-series adopted the philosophy that all vehicles in the future will look like cars from the '50s. "We didn't feel that was quite appropriate," he says. "Basically, we are trying to avoid the vehicles wherever possible in the city. The cities have gone a little bit in the direction of European cities where there are more and more pedestrian areas and traffic is confined to contained highways that have walls and fixed speed limits. The cars are controlled by magnetic strips, which is similar to the way they are talking in California about dealing with traffic by having magnetic strips and having cars traveling in clusters. You travel more closely together at a fixed speed, which gets rid of driver error and allows you to be more efficient and more convenient with better fuel consumption. I took that one step further and said, okay, we'll put walls around it and we'll have ads overhead. "One of the things that I think will happen in the next 50 years is that advertising will get insidious. The home has traditionally been a place where you could always hit the viewers with your ads with a proliferation of channels. But you don't have to see advertising in the home. You could just watch a movie, ad free. So, I think advertisers will panic and try to find every possible outlet for expression. One idea that we explored is that you're sitting in your car and your car is being controlled by the highway. There is nothing much to do. You don't have to drive or steer. There are basically ads that run all the way across the roadway overhead, which are staggered like flipcards. It's a flipcard of moving images -- because you're moving fast -- that come on. You're sort of a captured hostage. It's like the in-flight movie and it's advertising. This also deals with the fact -- and you don't actually address it in the dialogue -- that there is a crisis coming with regard to the cost of building highways and maintaining them. So this would imply that the highways have been privatized and the sponsors are basically the advertisers." Speaking of highways, Timothy Bond, director of TekLab, feels that shooting street scenes in this future is particularly difficult. "We're 50 years in the future," he emphasizes. "Jake and Sid drive up past what? What's parked there? From a director's point of view that's tough. It's very much like Star Trek in that way. Film directors are so used to saying, 'Put 20 extras on the street here,' but we have to clothe them. What are they going to be wearing?" The answer to that particular question comes from Sherry McMoran, costume designer for the film series. "What was decided at the beginning was that it was going to be a more ethnically diversified world," says McMoran, who handled similar chores on Captain Power. "There would be a heavy ethnic look in a lot of the clothing. The one thing we discovered is that there has to be a unifying thread to it. We tried just going crazy in the first one with different looks and it was overpowering. What works better is to do one element. The problem with the ethnic look we ran in to is that people associate it with hippies, so we had to be really careful. But the reality is that the hippies took their ethnic styles from all over, so it's hard to incorporate that and make it truly ethnic rather than a hippie look." Morgan Gendel, whose extensive writing credits include both Star Trek spin-offs (The Next Generation and Deep Space Nine) has been intimately involved in the development of the TekWar films, and it's his feeling that the approach taken toward the future and technology is similar to George Lucas' in Star Wars. "To me, Star Wars was the first science-fiction film that didn't have a 'gee whiz' outlook on all the technology," offers Gendel. "Lucas used to refer to it as a used future, like they took this stuff for granted and the robots were pretty shop worn. What is neat about TekWar is that it's close enough to where it is today, and we're extrapolating from the present day of talk about Time-Warner and the Fifth Network and the Sixth Network and Interactive, and all of that. That's what we are projecting into, and I think that is very exciting. And Bill and Stephen's take on it is not gee whiz. Some of it is taken for granted, but some of it is insidious and that's a load of fun for a writer." Eugene Clark, cast as Jake Cardigan's partner, Sid Gomez, is enjoying Roloff and Shatner's visualization of the future as well. "Technologically speaking," he says, "I think it's great because we have the opportunity to think of possible technological advances that may exist 50 years from now. It's like when we looked at the moon and dreamed of reaching it, or all the other things that people used to dream about and that have come to pass. Remember Dick Tracy's watch? Well, now we can call somebody up on the telephone and watch them, and there are some watches out now we have dreamed about. Who would have thought? So, to think of the technological advances and how you can communicate how it could be is fascinating. The possibilities are exciting, but we don't want to be a totally technical show where you lose the sense of relationships with people." |
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