No one understands this better than Ed Gross and Mark Altman, two TV journalists, fans, and creators who now have two TV oral history books under their belts: Slayers & Vampires and The Fifty-Year Mission. Den of Geek was lucky enough to talk to Gross and Altman last month at New York Comic Con. Here’s what they shared about the process. “I thought it was a fantastic format to tell these stories, particularly because, with Star Trek, there’s so much disagreement about certain things,” continued Altman. “This way you can give everyone a chance to say their perspectives … You get their perspective, rather than us saying, ‘This is the way it happened.’ Because nobody really knows.”
Collecting stories…
Of course, gathering the many stories needed for an oral history and crafting them into a cohesive narrative takes an immense amount of work, time, and access. How do Gross and Altman even decide who they want to talk to from the vast number of people involved in the production of a TV show? It helps that both Altman and Gross have built up connections over the course of their decades-long careers as both TV reporters and, in Altman’s case, an executive producer within the TV industry. “We really tell the story in a way I don’t think anyone [else] could,” said Altman of The Fifty-Year Mission. “The access that we had, and again, the fact that even in The Original Series, when Ed started as a journalist at Starlog, he talked to so many people who are gone now, who are just passed away. And we were able to go back to those original … And then I was on the set of Next Generation…”
Melding the past and the present…
As you may have already gathered, not all of the interviews in Gross and Altman’s books are from the period when they were writing the books. Many of them come from interviews conducted during the airing of the shows, when either Gross or Altman interviewed the cast and creators for a contemporary article. (Altman affectionately calls Gross’ basement the TARDIS because it is filled with microcassettes and tapes from old interviews.) This is how Joss Whedon’s voice comes into the Slayers & Vampires book. He “respectfully declined” to be interviewed for the book, said Gross, adding for context that the book was being written around the same time Whedon was being courted to take over direction on Justice League. However, Gross has hours worth of interviews with Whedon, who Gross first started talking to in the 90s when he was working for Cinescape magazine and Whedon was a little-known screenwriter working on the Alienfranchise. “They announced that Alien: Resurrection was being written by this guy named Joss Whedon,” recounted Gross. “I had never the name ‘Joss,’ let alone Joss Whedon. But I figured, ‘All right. How many ‘Joss Whedons’ can there be in the phone book?’” Gross found Whedon’s number publicly listed, gave him a call, and introduced himself. The two spent 90 minutes to two hours talking about Alien, Whedon’s background, Whedon’s script-doctoring, and Whedon’s unmade Suspension script. Gross and Whedon’s conversations continued through the announcement of the Buffy TV show and beyond. Gross and Altman pulled on Gross’ 20 hours worth of interviews with Whedon over the years. “We were able to delve into that material,” said Altman, “so Joss is a huge voice in the book, even though technically, he didn’t give a new interview for the book.” “With the Star Trek book,” said Altman, “there were Paramount people that we had interviewed that we didn’t re-interview, either because they were dead or because when we interviewed them, they didn’t work on Star Trek again, so there’s no reason to go back to them because we [had already] interviewed them.”
Crafting a cohesive narrative…
So you’ve compiled all of your interviews for your oral history, now what? How do you craft all of those different anecdotes into a cohesive story? “Somewhere in that half a million words, these quotes have to come together and tell [a story],” explained Gross. It’s not hard to see why, after finished two tomes of Star Trek‘s oral history, it took Gross a bit of time to convince Altman to begin the process all over again with the Buffy/Angel retrospective. “We had a lot less time to write it than we did the Star Trek book,” recounts Altman. “Fortunately, Ed had covered Buffy for many years, and had a lot of material—a lot of it that he’d never used. Then, we scrambled to talk to as many people as we could, and we’re amazed that the book came out so well.” “We were insistent that, if we’re going to do Buffy, we’re going to do Angel,” said Gross, “and give it the same kind of in-depth exploration. Angel had never really gotten that kind of treatment.” “We call it the Deep Space Nine of the Buffy franchise,” said Altman, putting it in Star Trek terms. “It’s show that, arguably, is better than the show that spawned it, but has a small but passionate following. [Similar to] the way Next Generation totally overshadowed Deep Space, Buffy totally overshadows Angel, but there’s stuff which is better.” “In season four [of Angel], there was an executive producer hired named David Simkins,” said Gross. “David was only briefly involved, and he did not have a good experience, and got let go. So, for me, it was exciting. David turned me down, and kept turning me down, and turning me down, turning me down. And I wrote him back and I said, ‘David, I know you don’t want to be interviewed, but I’ve got everybody else talking about you and your involvement with the show. Isn’t it due diligence that I get you in there?” Gross and Altman had a similar experience when writing The Fifty-Year Missionwhen it came to interviewing Kate Mulgrew, who had a notoriously bad relationship with co-star Jeri Ryan. The Voyager section is one of Altman’s favorite parts of the Fifty-Year Mission story, he said, and it was one that Gross took the lead on. “He’s like fucking Barbara Walters,” said Altman of his writing partner’s interviewing ability and his knack for getting people to open up about difficult subjects. Gross and Altman said they had a lot of respect for the way Mulgrew owned up to mistakes she had made in the past, and used the example to talk about their own philosophy when writing these oral histories. Gross and Altman also singled out the interviews they conducted with James Marsters and Charisma Carpenter as two of their favorites from the Slayers & Vampires experience. “Those guys were so illuminating in so many ways,” said Gross. “They spent the time [to talk to us], and it was like, as you would talk to them, it was just like, ‘Oh, my God.’” “Just today we were doing the signing here,” said Altman. “This girl comes up. She’d just read the book, and she said, ‘I really related to Charisma, because she talks about her problem with anxiety,’ and she said, ‘I have the same problem, and it made me feel better about myself having read that Charisma has these problems.’” Another standout interview for Altman and Gross when writing The Fifty-Year Mission came in Gross’ conversations with Jonathan Frakes, which came about when Frakes was directing an episode of The Librarians. Gross wanted to properly interview Frakes for The Fifty-Year Mission, and he convinced Frakes to call him during his half-hour drive to work every morning that week. “And we did it for the whole week. Then, Friday, we finished and he said, ‘You know, Ed, I’m going to miss these calls.’ Then, on Monday, he called me just to say hi.” “He was writing for Starlog, and I was writing for Cinefantastique [in the 90s],” said Altman of the origin of his friendship with Gross. “Which was sort of like the Hatfields and the McCoys … We started talking. We hit it off, and we became friendly.” Twenty years later, they would be working on The Fifty-Year Mission and Slayers & Vampires together. Gross and Altman obviously had a lot of fun writing The Fifty-Year Mission and Slayers & Vampires, but the oral histories also represent an immense amount of work in the form of arranging and conducting interviews, drawing upon decades of their own interview material, and organizing it all into coherent narratives—they’re also a huge boon to the field of television history. “I’m really so proud of those books,” said Altman, “because our goal was to write the greatest book about Star Trek [alongside The Making of Star Trek by Stephen Whitfield, the book that inspired Gross and Altman]. Because it was important to us. And I feel like we did.”
