>Midnight Nation soars above just about everything that I have ever read
>or seen... B5 included.
>
>It is a triumph of words and art; an utterly flawless story.

Thank you. It's a story that I'm inestimably proud of; I still can't get
through the last issue without falling apart, for some reason it just hits me
hard. It's a very personal story for me, and there's a lot of me in the
characters and what they're working through.

>You wrote (or said) a couple of years ago that you will not reach your
>prime for at least "10 years." Reading that, then, it was hard to
>imagine that you could ever top B5. I was thinking in terms of the
>majesty of the B5 story... Even with all it's flaws what could top it?
>And in short order you gave us Midnight Nation.

It came out far better than I could've hoped, and it's definitely my favorite
prose work to date. To compare it with B5, I dunno, that's kind of in a
separate category from everything else. It's the old comparins apples and
woodchucks thing.

BTW, two asides (and I'm putting this here because I generally am not posting
as much while my hand goes through therapy, I'm trying to do only the typing I
absolutely *have* to do)....

On the DVDs, last I heard they'll be out around mid-November, with the whole
first season at about a hundred bucks. I did the commentaries on Signs and
Portents and Chrysalis, and an on-camera intro and interview. They've also
done new interviews with Rick Biggs, Claudia, John Iacovelli, John Copeland,
Stephen Furst, Jerry Doyle and others. So it should be a pretty big deal
overall, much better than the movie dvd.

Item two, just for the humor of it...when we finished B5, all the sets were
demolished, no bits and pieces of it remain...with one exception, and it's a
doozy. The last remaining set piece from not only the B5 series, but from the
set of Babylon 4. An absolute rarity. I mention this because I just saw it
come up on ebay (I'd handed it off as a souvenir some time ago). I especially
liked the final line, where it said that the seller could not be held
responsible for temporal abnormalities that make the buyer's house disapper
mysteriously....

Funny stuff.

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)

>Fantastic! I will be buying that B5 boxed-set once it comes out. Nice to
>know
>that there will be commentaries from the cast, too.
>

One error. Apparently Claudia had agreed to do the interview, then canceled at
the last minute.

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)

>Now *wait* a minute. That means that we're getting the episodes, *and*
>extras, for about the same per-time price as the movie disc.
>
>Anyone else here feeling gypped?

The movies were limited in number, these are going to be printed in much larger
amounts, the more you do, the more you can bring down the price.

>Wait a second. Parts of B5 showed up on Crusade, though--and all of *those*
>sets were put into storage. So did they have to rebuild the sets for
>Crusade? (Especially since the "Value Judgements" script had a set that was
>supposed to be a redress of one of the B5 corridors...) And are those still
>around?

No. Most of the B5 sets were scrapped after we finished production, in large
measure because they'd just gotten trashed over 5 years of shooting, and
because WB didn't want to pay to store tens of thousands of cubic feet of sets
for a show that was done. (This is par for the course on all series, btw.)

We saved a small number of the B5 sets for Crusade (part of the zocalo, some
conference rooms, a couple of quarters and a hallway, that's about it) since we
were going to be going back and forth to B5. But when Crusade went down, those
sets were also elimated, as were the sets for Rangers.

This may seem like a bigger deal than it is; TV sets are not like feature film
sets, they are made from lesser grade lumber, and they're not finished to the
same degree because TV is more forgiving visually. You can get away with
things that will appear on a small set that you could never get away with on a
big screen.

If someone said "Okay, do a new season of (fill in the name of the show)," the
costs of building new sets would be probably about the same as if we'd stored
all those tens of thousands of feet of old set for X number of years, and which
would also have endured more wear and tear through the fold-and-hold process.
Why pay all that money to get old sets when you can pay the same amount and get
new ones?

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)

>This just *has* to be a gag.

I don't make jokes about things like this.

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)

>She cancelled at the last minute for her appearance at the final AgamemCon,
>too. I hope this isn't becoming a pattern for Claudia.

Agamemcon, I believe, was June 8th. The cancellation was yesterday, Wednesday,
June 26th. Just in the interests of accuracy.

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)