Aricles Annex - Xena: Warrior Princess Magazine Articles
Starlog #246
January 1998
pages 34-37
Behind every successful warrior princess, there's a group of writers having far too much fun telling her weekly adventures. Just ask Steven Sears, supervising producer and one of the most prolific writers on Xena: Warrior Princess . Sears, better known to Internet gurus as "Tyldus the Torturer," because of his penchant for releasing only tiny scraps of information to the fans, joined the Xena team early in the first season.
While some writers have had trouble locking into Xena's mixture of action, drama and humor, Sears was lucky enough to find the balance right from the beginning. "Writers often speak of hearing a voice," he explains. 'Yhey have to hear the voice of the characters when they write about them, and quite ofien, you rely on seeing episodes to hear that voice. When I first started, both Lucy Lawless and Renee O'Connor were blank slates, Lucy less so because she had done three episodes of Hercules . So, it was a matter of finding a rhythm and seeing if they fell into it or not, and then adjusting it. I really have to credit Lucy and Renee, because it's very hard for an actor to find the rhythm of the writer. Now we've made adjustments, so we know which areas Renee is strong in and we love to exploit them. She's very good with humor, but she's very strong with silent drama, as we saw in 'The Greater Good.'
"With Lucy, I can't say enough about her. She's such a talented actress. We didn't know what to expect, and the things we threw at her in episodes like 'Warrior...Princess,' where she played two roles, and some of the other emotional rollercoasters we put her through, but we just sit back and say, 'Wow, where does she get these choices?' "
Scripted Dreams
Sears joined the Xena team in the first season, after his "meet and greet" with executive producers Rob Tapert and R.J. Stewart turned into a much longer stay. "I was asking them questions about where the show was going to go, whether we were actually going to see demi-gods. Rob asked what I meant and right on the spot, I made up a story about Morpheus, the god of sleep, and that became 'Dreamworker.' I ended up writing that script, and apparently I did a good job on it, as they asked me if I would come on board."
It seems ironic that Sears has had so much success as a script writer, considering he originally came to LA to be an actor. He wrote his own three-minute scenes for auditions until somebody suggested he put together a complete script. A year later, he landed his first staff position, and quickly forgot about acting.
Over the next decade, Sears sharpened his skills on such diverse shows as Riptide, Hardcastle and McCormick, The A-Team, The Father Dowling Mysteries, Walker: Texas Ranger, Superboy and Swamp Thing .
"When I came on board, the budget on Swamp Thing had been slashed to practically nothing, so what we were left with was our characters and very little action. We still had Dick Durock running around in 40 pounds of foam rubber, but we were doing more thought-provoking shows, mainly because we enjoyed them, but also because we couldn't afford the big action shows. There are a few shows I look back on as being some of my best experiences, and that was one of them."
Having worked on the last 50 episodes of Swamp Thing , Sears was well-suited for the fast-paced production duties on Xena . His script for "Dreamworker" changed very little from the moment it was pitched at that first meeting. " 'Dreamworker' gave me a huge chance to immediately explore the differences between these two characters. The first thing I thought was, 'Xena comes from this bloody background, and here's this little girl Gabrielle who says, "I want to go out and watch you do this." 'I thought, 'Let's slap her in the face with reality, and make that the stake here. Let's make her blood innocence the huge risk that we have to deal with, and make that as sacred as her virginity, maybe even more so.' That immediately defines Gabrielle as a character."
Sears continued to define Gabrielle in his next script, "Hooves and Harlots," in which Xena's glib sidekick learns how to defend herself, courtesy of the Amazons. "Gabrielle, being the pure character she was, would have become boring after a while, so we had to give her the ability to protect herself To me, the defining moment for her was when she's putting on the clothes and the Amazon comes in and says, 'Come,' and Gabrielle says, 'Excuse me, you must be confusing me with a pet.' When I wrote that, I thought, 'Gabrielle is making a statement of who she is right there.' "
A few episodes later, Sears teamed up with Stewart for "Athens City Academy of the Performing Bards." What started out as a dreaded "clip show" turned into one of the season's most offbeat episodes. As Sears recaUs, "R.J. and I were sitting in the House of Blues, trying to figure out what kind of a clip show to do, and I said we had a natural in the sense that Gabrielle is a bard and likes to tell stories. R.J. snapped his fingers and said, 'What if she wants to go to the Academy and tell these stories?'
"We then decided that it would be a competition, so we would hear stories from other people, and we didn't want them to show Xena clips, because that would make them the equal of Gabrielle. With Stallonus, every time he talked, it was a fight scene from some cheesy Hercules movie. We then had to figure out our other characters, so we just went on until we figured what clips would fit each particular character, and then we said, 'What story is Orion going to tell?' because he has to tell the story that wins the competition, and I believe it was Rob who said, 'Spartacus!' It was the perfect piece for Orion, and we acknowledged Kirk Douglas' award-winning role. I think it's one of the most creative clip shows ever done."
Realized Dreams
'The Royal Couple of Thieves" brought Autolycus, the king of thieves (Bruce Campbell), over from Hercules: The Legendary Journeys to team up with an exasperated Xena.
"I wanted to play with the lasciviousness of Autolycus, who was able to control this woman who he knows full well he normally has no control over. Every opportunity he had, he was going to try and stick it to her, because she's under his thumb at this moment, and there's a certain amount of sexual tension that comes out of that. It did get to the point where there was a genuine affection between them, when he confesses to her, 'I am paying you a compliment, you're a diamond in the rough.'He's also alluding to himself because they have a lot in common."
Sears re-teamed with Stewart for "A Fistful of Dinars," a treasure hunt episode that throws Xena and Gabrielle together with a man from Xena's past. "We were talking about Westerns and The Treasure of the Sierra Madre ," says Sears. "It put Xena in a position of using two people; one she wanted to avoid completely, and another person who was totally evil. She had to use them to get to her greater goal and at the same time not let them know it. You throw into the mix an assassin who kills anything that displeases him, and her ex-fiance, somebody who's so seductive and manipulative, who could say to Gabrielle, 'I talked Xena into marrying me.'
"What's interesting is that after that episode aired, one of the big questions was: Was he really trying to manipulate again, or had he truly changed? We wanted him to say something where the audience would sit back and say, 'You know, he's a nice guy,' and in the very next scene, Xena says, 'Did he say that to you? That's exactly what he does,' so the audience would constantly be off-balance."
Sears' final script for the season was the poignant 'The Greater Good," as Gabrielle and Salmoneus (Robert Trebor) deal with Xena's apparent death. Nobody would believe the writers were killing off their leading lady, so the challenge lay in a different direction. "When I put together scripts, I try to be the audience. We weren't going to try to convince the audience that she was dead. The main part was the emotional impact of her death, and Renee hit that note perfectly. I was calling on reactions I had to deaths in my life, and the way I reacted to them was always very quiet at the moment, and then I had to take out my anger. When I saw the dailies, I sat back and said, 'My gosh, Renee absolutely nailed that feeling; I must have written that incredibly well!' I pulled out the script, and I had only written two lines, so she brought all that to the scene, and my hat is off to Renee."
When the producers of Xena returned for a second season, they made the risky decision to deconstruct their main characters, going for much darker episodes with more conflict. 'There were two things we wanted to do. One was to explore more of our characters, because if you don't do that, your show stagnates. The other thing is that Xena and Gabrielle have taken on a life of their own. They're sisters who have just met, and there's a growth process between them."
Sears' lead-off episode for the second season was "Orphan of War." 'That came about because Rob wanted to do a story about Xena's son, and I grabbed it because there was a story I had been wanting to tell, but when I started working on this story, I received a huge amount of flak, mostly from the female members of our group. What I was writing was a story I had read about a woman who was a crack mother and a prostitute and had a child that she gave up for adoption. She got her story straight, redeemed herself, got off crack, got a job, and three years later, wanted her child back.
"Now, that child has only known one childhood, and I sympathize with what the mother went through, but the bottom line is: She can't rob that child of his chilldood. This is a story I had in mind, because you can't tell the child his life up to this point has been a total lie. That's what I wanted to write: Xena as the crack mother."
A new addition to the Xena staff during its second season was story editor Chris Manheim, who had written 'The Prodigal" and "Altared States" as a freelancer. Manheim's first staff assignment was "Remember Nothing ' an unproduced story idea of Sears'. "We were kidding around one day, saying, 'In our fifth season, we'll have to do the blind amnesia show'‹but then I thought, 'How do you do an amnesia show that hasn't been done?' What I came up with was that Xena doesn't forget who she is, the rest of the world forgets her. I wrote out a story, but at that point we didn't want to explore that aspect of Xena's past and how things could have been changed yet, so it got shelved.
"Then, one of our scripts fell out, and we were stuck for a slot, and I said, 'What about "Remember Nothing?" ' I was busy at the time doing other things, and that story was near and dear to me, but Chris is a wonderful writer, so I handed her the script and said, 'I want to see what you can do with it,' and even though I have co-story credit on it, Chris deserves all the credit. She changed it substantially and did a wonderful job; she found levels there that I didn't. I was thrilled."
With "Intimate Stranger," Sears continued to experiment with the show's format, this time switching Xena's body with that of her deadly enemy Callisto (Hudson Leick). "Xena is feeling a lot of guilt about what happened to Callisto, and she's having nightmares about it. Callisto is in her dreams, and so is Ares, telling her that she murdered Callisto. The whole point of it is they're trying to get her to say, 'I'm a murderer,' and the moment she says it, Callisto is able to enter her mind and they switch bodies. Originally, Xena got back into her own body; however, at the end, she now stays in Callisto's body, and the next episode has Hudson as Xena trying to recover her body. That was a solution we came up with after Lucy wasn't available for filming."
Interrupted Dreams
Plans for Xena's second season were disrupted when Lawless was injured. With their heroine incapacitated, scripts had to be changed, shuffled around or put on hold. Ironically, some of the resulting episodes are regarded as among the show's best.
"I can't say I'm glad Lucy was hurt, because it was a horrible injury that I would not wish on anybody, but I'm glad we had a team that could rally around and come up with solutions designed not just to get us through her convalescence, but to capitalize on our strengths.
"Many people asked me when they were going to see the episodes done while Lucy was injured, and I would say, 'Look, after we've aired them, I'll let you know.' It's interesting to see them speculate on which episodes they were, and get them wrong. At least one person speculated that all the footage of Lucy in the litter being carried behind Argus [sic] was done after the accident, and that we had done another episode involving Julius Caesar before and decided to incorporate it."
The episode Sears is alluding to is "Destiny," which he and Stewart wrote based on a story by Tapert (who also directed). "Rob had always been fascinated by two things: One was a true story that came out of Caesar's past, and that was when he was younger and had been kidnapped by pirates. The other thing Rob has wanted to do was chart the different degrees of Xena's turning from being a peasant girl to a warrior; from being good to totally evil. The thing that was so blatantly missing from what we set up was that we set up the peasant girl and when she turned back from evil, but we never said exactly when she became evil. The distinction is there's a difference between being George Patton and Josef Stalin, and there was a moment where that had to have happened.
"Rob came up with this story about Xena becoming tired of being a warrior and trying to find someone to trust. Not only does that person betray her, though, it seems like life, the gods, the fates, betray her, because of her affection for this girl who had been helping her. That person was taken away from her, so it's a story of utter betrayal."
Another episode written around Lawless' lack of mobility was "The Quest," featuring the return of Autolycus, who gets stuck carrying Xena's spirit. "When we came to 'The Quest,' we had Lucy for a couple of shots, but we also had her voice, so the idea of doing an All of Me -type episode sprang up. We all worked out the story and did versions of different acts, and I got the brunt of it thrown onto me, which was fine, because I loved doing the episode. When we finished it, we realized that we made the stakes so big with the ambrosia and introducing this new villain, Valasca, that Melinda Clarke played wonderfully, we thought it would be great to do another episode where Callisto and Xena combined forces to fight Valasca. By then, Lucy could do some movement, and we could cover her with a stunt double."
As Xena's second season drew to a close, Sears came up with "The Price." It's one of his darkest episodes, with Xena reverting to her old ways to stave off an invasion by a band of vicious savages. "The source of it is the movie Zulu," reveals Sears. "It takes place during the British occupation of Zulu land, and having done a lot of reading in that area, I thought it was a fascinating story. Many people who heard the idea said, 'Oh, you're doing Custer's Last Stand,' but that's not what I had in mind. It's an episode where we see a side of Xena that we don't see very often, and that's fear."
His final contribution to the season was "Lost Mariner," featuring Tony (Candyman ) Todd as the seaman. For this story, Sears dug into ancient history and came up with the legend of Cecrops. "Back when Athens had to choose its patron god, Poseidon and Athena wanted to be that patron. There was a contest held, and Cecrops, a citizen of Athens, was chosen as arbitrator. Each god had to give a gift to the city, and Poseidon created a freshwater spring on the Acropolis, which is still there today. Athena, however, created a beautiful olive tree on barren rocky ground, and the Greeks love olives, so Cecrops decided in favor of Athena. The question I asked was, 'What happened to Cecrops after that, and more importantly, what was Poseidon's attitude towards him?' Add a little bit of the Flying Dutchman and you get the idea."
With the third season of Xena: Warrior Princess now airing, Sears beats a hasty retreat, temporarily giving way to Tyldus the Torturer. That means that little information is forthcoming about upcoming episodes, other than even darker storylines, more conflict between Xena and Gabrielle, and appearances by Caesar and other great figures, real and legendary.
"We have our own little myth going here," says Steven Sears, "and we have our rationalizations as to why they're not mentioned in books. Xena was a very strong female character, and most of the myths were written by men. The bottom line is, we're putting our character into the mythologies and we're having fun with her. I have several books on mythology in my offfice, and when I'm stuck on a story, I'l just pull out a book and start reading, and the drama is there. Timelines be damned - anything B.C. is fair game!"
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