To a prior message...yes, I'll be at Comic Con. I'm slated to do the
Westercon/Westercolt presentation on that Saturday at 1:00.

I sometimes think that EVERYBODY knows somebody who's auditioning for B5.
Good look to him. We've found a good prospect, but we're keeping our minds
open. (We found a *very* interesting prospect for Londo the other day.)

This is going to sound awful, and I shouldn't take pleasure in it, but I
*swear* it's true, there were other people in the room, I wouldn't make
something like this up...COULDN'T...I was sitting in on auditions the other
day, hiding behind the camera, didn't want the actors to know that the
writer/producer was hanging around. So this one actor comes in to audition,
saying all these wonderful thigns about the script, and then pulls a sour face
and says, "Yeah, I was auditioning yesterday for that other show. DeepSpace
Whatever. Man, what a piece of sh!t."

I practically fell out of my chair.

Forgive me. I'm a sick man.

(And, of course, there's every possibility that he said EXACTLY the same
thing in reverse. The one thing I'm learning is never to take easy
compliments too seriously. That way lies madness.)

Anyway....

Interesting prosthetics discussion the other day. We're trying to find
different or offbeat things to do with the look of characters, and their
wardrobe...which is *tough*, because so much has been done over time. We've
absolutely ruled out the Forehead approach, but then you've got other problems
to consider. See, that's the one part of an actor's head that's relatively
unused (boy, what a straight line). For instance, you don't want to cover the
eyes or the mouth, since that's where an actor does 90% of his or her work.
So you start looking at other options: cheeks, necks, arms, head-shapes,
coloration, texture, on and on, while trying to avoid the obvious dumbnesses
(no metallic skin coloration, it either doesn't show up well on camera, or
looks like something out of Voyage to the Bottom of the Sea).

There's the question of how MANY alien species you're going to see on
camera, how many of each, what sizes, do you use appliances that take less
time than straight makeup? How many costumes are required? If a race has
several representatives on board, do they all dress exactly the same (more
cost effective), or do they all dress with variations of the same (more
expensive)? Do you mix mechanicals with costumes? How do you deal with the
lighting as it affects makeup and wardrobe? How much color do you want to go
for? How will wardrobe vary depending on location of the set?

The process of asking those questions entailed locking me in a room with
our EFX guys, the director, prosthetics and wardrobe people, and they just
kept hitting me with this stuff for about 2 or 3 hours. (You get kind of
punchdrunk after a while..."What did you have in mind when you described the
(blank)?" "I had in mind *exactly* what the wardrobe guy is going to give us
because I knew intuitively, being able to see into the future, that he would
know *exactly* what I meant, he wouldn't require further explanation, and once


(Sometimes they hit me.)

Fortunately, they all *do* seem very much in tune with what I saw in my
head when I wrote the script, so it went fairly smoothly overall.

May have some interesting licensing news to pass along soon.

Meanwhile, we now begin the process of further organizing our PR with
Warners so we can get the most bang for our buck, and coordinate our efforts.

jms