>You also have to remember how extremely callous and insensitive JMS
>was to Andrea Thompson near the end of season 2

And, may I ask, where were you at the time? Were you at the stage? Were you
privy to conversations? On what do you base this?

She wanted more screen time, at what would have been at the expense of the
overall arc of the story. I couldn't comply. She chose to leave. There has
never been any dispute about any of this as far as I've ever seen.

So I suggest you either retract that statement, or back it up, because I don't
much like it when I get libeled by someone who doesn't have the first clue what
he's talking about, stating things as though they were fact.

jms

(jmsatb5@aol.com)
(all message content (c) 2002 by synthetic worlds, ltd.,
permission to reprint specifically denied to SFX Magazine
and don't send me story ideas)

>When she went to JMS to ask for, although an unreasonable
>(though not grossly so) request, an understandable and fair request,
>she got a (nasally voiced) "NO!" from JMS.

And who, exactly, are you to determine, years after the fact, what was an
"unreasonable" or resaonable request? Or whether it was grossly unreasonable?
Again, were you in the room? Yes or no, were you in the room? Then how do you
know what was asked?

And how do you know a "NO!" was said by me, "nasally voiced?"

You are utterly ignorant of the situation and the conversations. You weren't
there. And you choose to characterize my actions with your own voice and
prejudices (see above) in order to make it sound snotty.

As for example:

>Considering how caustic
>JMS's words on this matter were (i.e.Whenever she was on, she expected
>it to be the Andrea Thompson Show,"(1) ), I'm inclined to take
>Andrea's side on this matter.

You then link to the actual quote, which you deliberately paraphrase to make
something else. Since you had the quote in hand, you could easily have just
cut-and-pasted it rather than rewriting it to fit your thesis. What I said --
from the article you cite -- was:

"Finally, it was never Warner Bros. who hired her or pushed her
on me. WB didn't care one way or another. I was the one who hired her,
with Doug Netter. If I hadn't felt she was right for the role, I
wouldn't have hired her. But I was also under no constraint to make
the show into the Andrea Thompson Show. Andreas and Peter have often appeared
as many times in a season as Andrea, and didn't even *have* a guarantee for the
first two seasons. (Now they do.)
We did what we could to accommodate her without destroying the
story arc. I regret that she has taken out her frustrations in this
way. Either one is a team player, part of an ensemble, or one is not.
We are very proud of the fact that the cast members as they stand now are all
ensemble, team players."

Where, please, is the "caustic" in this? Where is me saying "Whenever she was
on, she expected it to be the Andrea Thompson show?" Nowhere.

It's the oldest trick in the book, and the lowest, also the meanest, to take
someone's words and paraphrase them to your own benefit, and characterize them
with loaded terms to make the other person look bad.

Frankly, this kind of tactic is beneath contempt.

Grow up.

jms

(jmsatb5@aol.com)
(all message content (c) 2002 by synthetic worlds, ltd.,
permission to reprint specifically denied to SFX Magazine
and don't send me story ideas)

>But none of us were there, except JMS and the cast and crew of B5. And even
>their statements should be taken with a grain of salt. Everyone has a
>different
>perspective, and no one has perfect and unbiased memory.

I don't necessarily disagree with this, there is a certain amount of that in
any kind of human discourse, but there are also other elements to factor into
this.

Here, for me, is the biggest one. If you go to jmsnews.com, you will find
16,694 messages that I posted to the net between November 1991 and five seconds
ago. All of this was done in real-time, without having to fall back on
memories of events five or ten years down the road. So the information there
was as current as the event itself.

Lots of other recollections have been found to be flawed. Claudia's statement,
for instance, that she was fired, where I had insisted she'd quit, only to have
her say, in later interviews, that yeah, she did indeed quit. (After having
left me to bear the brunt of that allegation for a very long time.)

But in 11 years and 16,694 messags (of which this will become 16,695), not one
of them has ever been shown to have strayed from the truth after the fact.
They have uniformly passed the test of time.

If I have one benefit, it's that I come from a journalist's background, and I'm
very good at reporting what happens, without much in the way of elaboration.

Personally, I think that counts for a lot.

jms

(jmsatb5@aol.com)
(all message content (c) 2002 by synthetic worlds, ltd.,
permission to reprint specifically denied to SFX Magazine
and don't send me story ideas)

>All those in favour of JMS say "aye"

Then I vote nay.

And I'm not being facetious.

This shouldn't be about taking sides with one person over another. The day
people start agreeing with stuff just because it's me, is the day the
conversation is over, because it's no longer a conversation at all.

I'm in favor of reasoned discourse, of asking impertinent questions in search
of pertinent information, but doing so fairly, without resorting to straw-man
arguments, pettifogging, paraphrasing, dead-catting or "are you now or have you
ever been" high school debate tactics.

It's not about winning or losing an argument or taking sides.

jms

(jmsatb5@aol.com)
(all message content (c) 2002 by synthetic worlds, ltd.,
permission to reprint specifically denied to SFX Magazine
and don't send me story ideas)

>That you have had an average of 4+ posts per day over 11 years that can
>be searched and critiqued is absolutely incredible.

Also frightening and deeply disturbing.

>How the heck did you find time to
>post that much?

I use the net as a break from writing. When I hit a point where I need to
think about the next scene, rather than leave the desk and go watch TV, which
will kill an hour or more, I go online, which keeps me at the keyboard. I
noodle a bit, during which my brain works out the story problem, and zing, I'm
back into the writing again.

I may be one of the few who uses writing as a break from writing....

See "deeply disturbed" above...
jms

(jmsatb5@aol.com)
(all message content (c) 2002 by synthetic worlds, ltd.,
permission to reprint specifically denied to SFX Magazine
and don't send me story ideas)

Correct, the cameo was a) at the end of the show precisely so that it
*woudln't* break my suspension of disbelief, because by then it was done, and
b) it was meant as a surprise. If I'd said "Yeah, I'm gonna do it but just
once," then everybody'd be waiting for it, and if they hadn't seen it by SiL,
they'd know it was there.

jms

(jmsatb5@aol.com)
(all message content (c) 2002 by synthetic worlds, ltd.,
permission to reprint specifically denied to SFX Magazine
and don't send me story ideas)

>With a) in mind, and given that you ended up getting another season
>after SiL was in the can... *did* you feel your suspension of disbelief
>was broken? If so, how did you work around it?

By making sure the episode was never finished (final editing) until after we'd
finished shooting S5. I let it sit in the Avid, unfinished, until I was ready.
That also prevented WB or anyone else from getting it and having the cut hit
the streets in an unauthorized way, which I felt could happen if the cut was
just laying around for a year. By keeping it all in the system, in pieces, it
(and I) was safe.

jms

(jmsatb5@aol.com)
(all message content (c) 2002 by synthetic worlds, ltd.,
permission to reprint specifically denied to SFX Magazine
and don't send me story ideas)