written by Paul Robert Coyle
The Chakram Newsletter: Issue 25
SD: They needed a clip show?
Paul: Yes.
SD: What story ideas and other elements were you given?
Paul: I was given the story. That’s the way they were working the sixth season. Although I had plenty of stories I would have loved to have pitched, they weren’t interested in hearing them at that time. I don’t know that anyone was given a chance to pitch stories that last season. Rob Tapert and R.J. Stewart pretty much had the season mapped out in advance, so they knew what they needed. And they had writers, like myself, who were on the list of people they would call when they needed something done that the in-house staff couldn’t do.
They called me in twice prior to “Clones” to do something that, for various reasons, fell apart. I was traveling a lot that year and I wasn't always available. I was perfectly willing to stay in town if they needed me, but they never knew much in advance when that might happen.
I remember they called me in one time to give me a story. I got in the room and, as Rob and R.J. started to bat the story back and forth among themselves and tell it to me, it pretty much fell apart! (laughs)
I honestly don't remember what it was about. It wasn’t a clip show. It would have been a full episode. But what I was hearing wasn't striking me as particularly interesting or maybe it was something I thought they’d done before. As I raised a few points, they both realized I was right and that there wasn’t a story there. And they said, “Sorry for wasting your time and we’ll call you again later.” (laughs)
SD (laughs): That's show biz!
Paul: Another time, when they were doing the Norse trilogy, they wanted me to do part three of it. But I’d already done a Norse two-parter on Hercules. Brunhilda and the Valkyries were originally in that show, but they were cut. Now they were doing them on Xena. Anyway, they ended up doing the trilogy in house.
Finally, months later, I got the call to come in. First of all, it was a new writing staff. R.J. and Rob - over the speaker phone from New Zealand - were there. And then there were other people in the room I didn’t know. It wasn’t the old gang, it wasn’t Steve and Chris!
SD: That was a little sad, wasn’t it?
Paul: Yeah, it wasn’t old home week. But I was excited to be back doing the show and working with R.J. Doing the clip show was easy and hard at the same time. The only reason a clip show is done is to save money. They needed to do a four-day shoot to get back on budget and schedule.
They were in the middle of the season and, because the sixth season hadn’t started airing yet, I was out of the loop of what they were doing that I hadn’t seen.
They laid out the story - a comedy - pretty much as you saw it in the end. It was about a group of fans who resurrect Xena and Gabrielle from strands of their hair. I don’t think Alti was the villain initially. I think at first it was just going to be a generic mad scientist character. But it pretty quickly became Alti.
SD: Maybe they needed to see if Claire Stansfield was free to play Alti?
Paul: I’m sure they needed to arrange things with her schedule. Or maybe they hadn’t thought of her right off the bat.
SD: What are the challenges of doing a story for a clip show instead of a full episode?
Paul: The restrictions in doing a clip show are difficult. Although I was paid for a full script, usually about 40 pages, they only wanted 24 pages for this episode.
SD: That’s got to be tough. You normally get 40 minutes in which to tell the story. Now you’ve got only about 20 minutes.
Paul: And, there was still a lot of story to tell. Everyone was throwing in ideas! (laughs) “Oh, have them do this.” “Have them do that.” The ideas just flow from R.J. and I was furiously taking notes and adding my own ideas. I was already thinking, “How can I possibly fit all this in?” Xena in the modern world was what they wanted me to do and I thought that was a great idea! It would have made a great feature movie! (laughs)
SD: And you had to put it in a clip show! (laughs)
Paul: I get to do Xena and Gabrielle, loose in modern-day Los Angeles, in the 21st century. I thought that was awesome. And then they tell me I get to shoot one day outside! Six pages only can be shot outdoors. The other three days had to be on the lab set. Which I think was the Cleopatra 2525 lab set redressed.
The other advantage to having me do it was that I could choose the clips because I knew the show. The writer of a clip episode doesn’t necessarily have to do that, but I think Bernie Joyce, in post production, was grateful I was able to do it. I only needed their input on what they had done so far for the sixth season. I wanted to cover the entire series, but I also wanted to avoid any clips that had been used in previous clip shows. I spent a lot of time choosing them.
I wrote it in June 2000, it shot in September of that year and didn’t air until April 2001. There was a very long lag time. I thought, when I was writing it, it was intended to be the last Xena clip show, but they ended up doing “Soul Possession” when they needed to catch up again with the budget and schedule.
I probably got a little carried away in the first draft. They were in the modern world and I had Xena fighting a motorcycle gang and turning them into her new army. She was walking around in this costume and they start ragging on her. She kicks butt. The motorcycle leader would have been played by Matthew Chamber-lain who played Darphus in the Hercules episode “The Gauntlet,” Xena's original right-hand man. I wanted to bring the whole thing full circle. I thought that would have been fun. And then taking down a helicopter, going up against a SWAT team and Xena and Gabrielle heisting an armored truck!
SD (laughing): What were you thinking?
Paul: I was thinking, “Rob's gonna love this stuff!” (laughs) If he saw it on the page, he’d want to commit to it. He could borrow a day’s shooting from another episode down the line. (laughs) He did get excited about it.
SD (laughs): You probably drove him crazy with all these things he knew he couldn’t do.
Paul (laughs): I’m sure I did. I got over ambitious with it. But I thought it was too good an opportunity to pass up - having Xena out there in our world.
SD: That was the fans' biggest complaint. They said, “Oh boy! Xena and Gabrielle in the modern world! Why the heck is this a clip show!!” (laughs)
Paul: Right. Well, I wrote all that stuff and, ultimately, it came down to Rob saying, “We have to go back to four days, three indoors and only one outside.” And everything I dreamed of showing had to be cut.
SD: I bet you had fun writing it.
Paul: I did. I was disappointed, but I knew where he was coming from.
SD: So having Xena fans play a part in the story was one of the elements they wanted to use?
Paul: Yes, they even had half the casting in mind. They already knew Alison Wall was going to play the Gabby fan. They wanted Polly Baigent - one of Lucy’s body doubles - to be the chop-socky fan. They wanted to give her a shot at a speaking part. Originally, Ted Raimi was going to play the male fan. In fact, I think the original story had two male fans - one would be a Joxer fan and the other would be an action fan. But that was too many characters, so we combined those two.
SD: Ian Hughes wound up playing the male fan.
Paul: He was terrific. He had previously been Loki in my Hercules' Norse two-parter. I liked him a lot.
SD: You’ve been to conventions. You know how to write fans.
Paul (laughs): I have, I have. I patterned this whole episode after the two modern-day clip shows we did on Hercules - “Yes, Virginia, There Is A Hercules” and “For Those Of You Just Joining Us.” Neither of which I wrote, but I was involved in them. I was in those episodes as a character played by Michael Hurst.
I knew how to write that type of over-the-top comedy. I told them I would write “Clones” in that style. We, the writing staff, were merciless on ourselves in the Hercules episodes. We made total fools of ourselves on camera. So I figured now it was the fans’ turn. (laughs)
SD: In fact, one fan wrote, in an online review of the episode, “Boy, they didn’t do half the job on us they did on themselves.” (laughs)
Paul: Originally, I was going to make more of a direct link with the Hercules episodes by having Michael Hurst show up playing me again. (laughs) The idea is that my character is out of work after the cancellation of Hercules and I hooked up with the fans. Again, that was an extra character that wasn’t necessary and I think Michael may have already shot the episode where he played the reporter.
SD: Right, “You Are There.”
Paul: So, for all those reasons, we couldn't do it.
SD (laughs): That’s a funny idea, have the writer show up in his own episode.
Paul: I think R.J. was rolling his eyes think-ing how self-indulgent can a freelancer be. (laughs) But I tried to get away with anything I could on that show and half the time I did. (laughs)
SD: Hey, they did it on Hercules! (laughs)
Paul (laughs): Yes, they did.
SD: They had a choice. They could have cloned a good Xena or a bad Xena. How come they chose the evil one?
Paul: Xena was to be awakened as a blank clone and needs to be programmed by the clips which needed to be organic to the story. And then the idea was that the villain - in this case, Alti - slips in the evil Xena scenes to deliberately bring bad Xena into the world.
If they'd brought back the good Xena, we wouldn't have had the big fight in the auto wrecking yard at the end. (laughs)
SD: Gabrielle, the bard, when she’s watching scenes of the series, makes a comment about the writing on the show.
“What about this writing, Xena? I mean, it’s not exactly Euripides. They have taken liberties with my scrolls.”
Paul: That Euripides bit was an R.J. line. (laughs) I did at least three script drafts and R.J. did the final polish. Actually, he cut the page length down even more. I don’t know what draft you read?
SD: The shooting script.
Paul: Okay, that would have been R.J.’s overlay of my draft. To my surprise, when I saw the final show that aired, they put a lot of my scenes that had previously been cut, back in. The voiceover scene, for instance, when the camera is panning the fans and we're hearing their thoughts, that's from an earlier draft I wrote. R.J. cut it for time. There was a lot of interaction between the fans that I had written and he had to cut for time. Somehow, much of that found its way back because, as they were shooting, they realized the pace was pretty fast and they needed to reinstate pages. I was happy they were able to do that.
SD: Seems to me cloning was in the news when I saw this episode.
Paul: You’re right, when it aired, there was something about cloning going on. I thought, “Boy, it seems like we’re plucking this out of today’s headlines.” And yet we’d written it months before.
SD: It was a coincidence, but, then again, there are a limited number of ways to bring characters into the future. On Hercules, they used that time travel tunnel.
Paul: The Vortex, from “Armageddon Now,” which was mine.
SD: Okay, here are some cloning questions for you. (laughs) Clones wouldn’t have memories of their own.
Paul: Correct. Alti’s power to bring people’s memories back to haunt them was established previously. I originally had a scene showing that in the script. She tries to pull that on the cloned Xena and it doesn’t work because it’s not the real Xena and she doesn’t have those legitimate memories. Xena only has the memories of the clips Alti has shown her from the TV show. But that scene was cut from the final draft. I did try to cover that.
SD: How were they able to comment on the kiss from “Return Of The Valkyrie” and Gabrielle saying that they’d taken liberties with her scrolls if they don't have any memories? Here they were getting original memories and they’re clones.
Paul: They're re-awakening. Not having been aware of the content of the Valkyrie episodes, I didn't write that line. You’d have to ask R.J. (laughs)
SD: Okay, I'll do that. (laughs) You did cover the fact that normally clones would be babies with the line about, “Maturation acceleration worked beyond my wildest dreams.”
Paul (laughs): Exactly. We couldn't deal with them as babies. I needed them grown up, so I threw in the line about some kind of accelerant.
SD: It was a bit like reality TV having the fans be part of the story.
Paul: I didn't want to offend anyone, of course. There was always a fine line in depicting the fans. In shooting it, they actually took the top completely off. (laughs) They went further than I'd envisioned.
I remember when we had a staff meeting to discuss my first draft, none of the new writers in the room were familiar with the two modern-day Herc episodes. So they weren’t aware of the particular style of humor I was shooting for. And they all thought the fans came off as mean-spirited creeps. So I backed off and tried to smooth out the edges, so to speak.
SD: The fans brought up the fact that Alti hated Gabrielle and wouldn’t have wanted her back. So why did she clone her?
Paul: Obviously the glib answer, and probably the most honest, is that Renee is the co-star of the show, and the episode wouldn't be the same without her! But seriously, I asked that same question when I first heard the premise. It's something I tried to address in the first draft outline, dated 6/26/00, from which I’ll quote: “Alti addresses Xena, laying out her plan - a plan in which Gabby is included - it's the reason Alti/Alexis revived them both, not just Xena.
ALTI: ‘Yours is a shared karma. The yin and the yang. Consider her my gift to you. Besides, I dig threesomes.’”
All this got lost in the next revisions. Speculating further, I suppose the ultimate test of whether Alti’s plan worked, whether “Evil Xena” was truly reawakened, would be for her to kill Gabrielle. So Alti was probably setting her up for that.
SD: There were many discussions about the Tomb of the Scrolls where the hairs were found that were used to clone Xena and Gabrielle.
Paul: I believe it was meant to be the same tomb that we saw in the second season episode, “The Xena Scrolls.” The tomb of Ares. That was part of the original pitch.
SD: And along with the two pieces of hair, Alti received the yin-yang chakram. But the chakram we saw in “The Xena Scrolls” was the original one, not the yin-yang version. The last time we saw the yin-yang chakram, Gabrielle had it and was setting off for Egypt. So how did the yin-yang chakram get in the Tomb?
Paul: We didn’t say the chakram came from the Tomb, only the hairs. Alti had her minions out looking for Xena artifacts and they found the chakram. They were at the Tomb to pick up the hairs, so why not look around to see if they could find any more Xena souvenirs to bring back to Alti.
SD: And Egypt's just across the water from Macedonia. So who’s to say Gabrielle didn’t wander back over to Greece during her travels. Or that Alti’s minions took a side trip to Egypt. That works. (laughs) However, I guess we're gonna have to Ignore the fact that Xena was cremated at the end of the series, so where did her strand of hair come from. They didn’t know they were going to do that when “Clones” was written.
Did you take a trip to New Zealand to watch this episode being filmed?
Paul: The one regret I had was that I didn’t go over during the shooting of this show. I decided, for a four-day shoot, it didn’t seem worth it to go that far. It was my last chance, unfortunately, and I wish I had. Cause the footage of the fight in the auto-wrecking yard looked great! That battle was incredible. All the little details put into it were fully realized and a lot more. The stunt people were always inventive in coming up with new ways to have Xena fight. And they had never had a fight in a modern-day setting before. They had lots to work with - blowtorches, cars, cranes. I drive a TransAm, therefore I had to put one of those in the show. Although mine is black. I should have specified the color. (laughs)
SD: Well, it matched Gabrielle’s outfit. (laughs) Someone asked why Alti drives a TransAm and now we know.
Paul (laughs): Because the writer does.
SD: Were the newsclips real?
Paul: Some of them were. Some were from the bank shootout in North Hollywood which took place one day while I was at the Xena offices. I didn’t want to get overly serious. For instance, had this taken place a year or two later, I certainly would not have referenced 9/11. You can’t bring too much reality into a show like this.
Related to this, I didn't get to use Michael Hurst as me, but the actress, Elizabeth Hawthorne, who played the on-camera newswoman also played that role in the Herc modern-day episodes. In Cleopatra 2525, she was the voice of the character we never see who’s in Hel’s head.
SD: Is there anything I missed?
Paul: I always got a kick out of writing the disclaimers for my episodes. I attached one to the script when I turned it in, but they didn't use it. They felt it was too self-referential. The one they used was, “No Xena fans were harmed in the making of this motion picture.” Mine was, “The Renaissance tradition of money-saving and incredibly self-referential clip shows was maintained in the production of this motion picture.”