I'd hoped from the outset that one of the unfilmed scripts from the series would be perfect for the VS project, and this one I felt offered the best possibilities since the other one that almost got filmed "I Have Seen Earth" would have stepped on some of our story ideas dealing with the post-HOG fate of Baltar, and also our long-term plans regarding clues to Earth. "Twilly" (a reworking of the 1950s Alec Guinness movie "Captain's Paradise", as McDonnell and Carlson admitted at the 15 Yahren Con) by contrast is Fleet-bound and could easily fit in. Once I got hold of a copy of the shooting script, it was a simple matter of doing the adaptation, where the basic structure was kept and only some modifications made to fit the rest of the VS, and also to eliminate some of the more fanciful moments of action that weren't overly realistic IMO.
McDonnell mentioned that Jamie Lee Curtis, at the time a Universal contract player, had read for the part of one of the two "wives" in the story, and I kept her in mind when writing the character (Gayla).
In fact one fun thing about the VS for me, is envisioning a probable guest cast for each of these stories, and in my case, I always try to envision actors and actresses who *could* have done these parts in 1979 based on where their careers were at that time and how old they were. Thus, I've envisioned Timothy Dalton as the oily, but debonair Council member Sire Antipas since he was in his late 30s at the time and not too well-known.
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"They hate us with every fiber of their being. We love....freedom, independence, the right to question. To them it is an alien way of living."-The non-myopic wisdom of Commander Adama, "Saga Of A Star World"
"How do you tell a Communist? Well, it's someone who reads Marx and Lenin. And how do you tell an anti-Communist? It's someone who understands Marx and Lenin."-Ronald Reagan
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