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This in from the SciFi Wire - looks like they've started the casting, and they've selected their lead actor:
Paula Malcomson (Deadwood) has been cast as the female lead in Caprica, SCI FI Channel's prequel to Battlestar Galactica, while Eddie McClintock and Joanne Kelly will headline SCI FI's two-hour pilot for Warehouse 13, a comedic SF drama to be directed by Jace Alexander.
Malcomson will play Amanda, a surgeon who works as a double agent, in Caprica, which is set 50 years before the events in Battlestar. Caprica follows the evolution of the Cylon race and the fight between two families.
Warehouse centers on two FBI agents, Myka (Kelly) and Peter (McClintock), who work at the government's Warehouse 13, which houses supernatural objects. They are assigned to retrieve missing objects and investigate reports of new ones.
TV Squad has posted up some casting information for Caprica:
Exclusive: Caprica casting info revealed
Posted Apr 3rd 2008 10:15PM by Keith McDuffee
Now that we got the confirmed greenlight for the Battlestar Galactica spin-off series, Caprica, of course we can expect to see more details of the series trickle in. Just today, for example, sources have provided us with casting information for the series. Cool stuff!
Anyone familiar with the details of the show knows that Caprica will center around two families, the Graystones and the Adamas, and the goings on leading up to the Cylons as we see them on the show now. Now we can get a sense of what the characters on the show will look like and perhaps make our own wishlist of who we'd like to see in the roles. I warn you that there are what to some will consider SPOILERS ahead.
(I put my own comments in bold below)
[DANIEL GRAYSTONE] In his early 40s, a spectacularly wealthy computer engineer / designer, Daniel is married to Amanda and the father of Zoe -- but his extensive business interests leave him little time for his child, whom he still sees as a little girl in pink shoes. Busy trying to design an intelligent robot, Daniel is devastated when Zoe is killed in a suicide bombing, and has no idea that his daughter had a complex, very secret life. After learning that his own wizardry with computer technology was exceeded by his own child, who found a way to upload her personality into an online avatar, Daniel realizes that with a little stolen technology, and with a little intellectual elbow grease, he can create a robotic version of his dead daughter -- and in doing so, he creates the first Cylon...SERIES REGULAR - SUBMIT ALL ETHNICITIES.
As I never followed the original BSG series, I wonder if what Graystone creates is meant to have any resemblance to a human other than being a biped. I can't imagine he'd make his late Zoe look like a Centurion.
[JOSEPH ADAMS] In his 40s, he is a Tauron, an off-worlder who has emigrated to Caprica; his hair is already starting to go iron-grey and his entire demeanor is that of someone who's already put on more miles than most men his age. There's a gravitas to Joseph, an intelligence, and a strong sense of someone you wouldn't want as your enemy. He has risen above the traditional Caprican prejudice against Taurons, and has become a powerful, influential defense attorney, with powerful ties to the Tauron crime underworld. His wife and daughter are killed in the same blast that takes out Zoe, and he bonds with the much-wealthier Daniel in a common grief. A man who has done a few crooked things in his life (largely in order to use his position to protect his fellow Taurons), Joseph reluctantly agrees to assist Daniel in his grief-fueled efforts to create robotic versions of both their children -- but after stealing vital technology from a Tauron computer developer, Joseph is ethically appalled by the robot version of his dead Tamara, and repents his actions. Left with a 9 year old son to care for, Joseph reaches out to young William, revealing to him that his last name is really Adama...SERIES REGULAR - SUBMIT ALL ETHNICITIES. HOWEVER, PREFER LATINO.
At first I thought the "Adams" was a typo, but it seems this was an alias Joseph used at some point. It's no wonder why the Cylons have such an interest in Bill Adama, seeing as his own father was quite instrumental in assisting with their creation.
[AMANDA GRAYSTONE] In her late 30s, Daniel's wife, she is a successful surgeon with a volatile streak to her, who has married well and dearly loves her daughter. Devastated after the death of her daughter Zoe, Amanda turns for consolation, not to her husband but to an ex-lover, Tomas Vergis, a Tauron who is one of her husband's competitors. Furious with herself for having cheated on her husband, Amanda in fact is something of a double agent, plucking information about Vergis' intellectual property from his blabbing mouth and taking it home to Daniel to use as he sees fit...SERIES REGULAR - SUBMIT ALL ETHNICITIES.
You'll note that Tomas Vergis isn't a casting choice here. Either he's already cast or he's an extremely minor role.
[SISTER CLARICE WILLOW] In her mid 30s to 50s, dressed in the traditional clerical robes of an Athenian High Priestess, Sister Clarice is the headmistress of the Athena Academy, a private religious school, where Zoe, Lacy and Ben are all enrolled. A gracious, eloquent, thoughtful woman who grew up in a slum and has seen it all, she's elegant and sophisticated -- and utterly duplicitous. In fact, she is a closet monotheist, and has taken the best and brightest of her students and shared her own (illegal, closeted) beliefs with them -- only to see her efforts literally explode in her students' faces...SERIES REGULAR - SUBMIT ALL ETHNICITIES.
This sounds like a role that's going to require quite a lot of depth. Very interesting with the whole "closeted monotheist" thing, as it shows such beliefs didn't just come from the sentient minds of Cylons alone.
[ZOE GRAYSTONE / ZOE-A / ZOE-R] 16 going on 40 (18 TO PLAY 16), with severe hair and makeup, Zoe is the daughter of Daniel and Amanda Graystone, and she's a girl with many secrets. A computer genius like her father, she has found a way to enliven a holographic avatar of herself, by uploading all her memories and DNA into the hologram, thus creating her online twin, Zoe-A. A closet monotheist in the polytheistic culture of Caprica, and obliged to perform her religion in private, she tries to leave the planet with her boyfriend, Ben, only to be killed when Ben suicide-bombs them both into oblivion. But Zoe-A is left behind, a baffled, grieving digital duplicate of the real, flesh and blood Zoe. With the collaboration of Daniel and Joseph, Zoe-A is downloaded into a robotic brain, thus becoming the first Cylon: Zoe-R...SERIES REGULAR - SUBMIT ALL ETHNICITIES.
Now this is an awesome twist. I wonder what happened to Zoe-B through Zoe-Q.
[WILLIAM ADAMS] 9 years old, Latino, Joseph's sole surviving child, William is inward and withdrawn in the best of times, and grows more taciturn after the death of his mother and sister. Barely aware of his father, whose work kept him away from the family, William is a stoical Tauron who keeps his deepest thoughts to himself and rarely smiles. Promised a closer relationship by Joseph, he is taken aside, taught the basics of his Tauron heritage, and told that his Tauron name is William Adama...7 / 13 SERIES REGULAR -TO PLAY EDWARD JAMES OLMOS AT 9 YEARS OLD.
Big shoes to fill for a 9 year old.
[BEN STARK / BEN-A] 16 years old (18 TO PLAY 16), with close-cropped hair, Ben has an intensity to him, a sense of a kid who's gone someplace far away and may not be coming back. Zoe's boyfriend, he is a fanatical monotheist; he introduced her and Lacy to his cult, and induced them both to flee Caprica with him. But Ben is a little crazy, and he's fleeing Caprica in a different way than he promised: by blowing up their train with a suicide bomb. He later is revealed to have his own uploaded avatar, an on-line twin named Ben-A, whom only Sister Clarice can contact...7 / 13 SERIES REGULAR - SUBMIT ALL ETHNICITIES.
Well, there you have it. I also got a look at the sides (portions of scripts for auditioners to read), but I'd be killed for showing any of that. To be honest, no notable actors come to mind to play these roles, but I'm clearly not thinking too thoroughly about it. I'd love to hear any thoughts you have other than "they should all be relative unknowns" (even though I pretty much agree with that statement, since it will keep the show's cost down.)
I just came across these two articles:
Exclusive! Caprica Pilot Preview
Frak yeah! Not only is Battlestar Galactica back this Friday, but I've just wrangled up some juicy scoop about the Caprica spinoff.
In case you haven't heard, Sci Fi has ordered a pilot called Caprica from BSG creator Ronald D. Moore. It goes back in time to before the creation of the Cylons for a look at life in the Colonies before, well, everything blew up.
Caprica is the story of two families, the Graystones and the Adams (better known to us now as the Adamas), and we'll be meeting the man who fathered and grandfathered the goodness that is Bill and Lee Adama (Edward James Olmos and Jamie Bamber). Interestingly, when I interviewed Ronald D. Moore last year, Caprica's plotlines were not directly tied to the characters we know from the current series. I asked RDM if there might be any Thrace-Adama-Agathon-Roslin ancestors in Caprica, and he told me, "Right now, there are no ancestors of anybody in the pilot." Well, looks like that changed in the intervening time, and thank goodness!
Full Article
I'm not sure what I think about this - I don't know why a lot of sci-fi fans like connecting things together to an insane level, but eh.
The Biz: Sci Fi Goes To Elle And Back To Promote Battlestar Finale
March 31, 2008
IF you're surfing the Web later this week during a specific prime-time hour, the screen could go completely dark, except for a single command: go immediately to your TV and turn on Battlestar Galactica.
Sci Fi Channel, fully understanding its fanboy base, is tapping further into the online world with some unprecedented stunts to promote the launch of the fourth and final season of the Emmy- and Peabody Award-winning show.
The blackouts will happen on sci-fi enthusiast sites like Ugo and 1Up as the opening episode launches on April 4. That follows a mid-day live stream that's intended to whet the appetites of the faithful.
The network, part of the NBC Universal family, also is reaching further into the mainstream than it has in prior years, buying TV time during the NCAA playoffs, magazine spreads in non-genre publications such as Elle, Vanity Fair and the New Yorker, and using celebrities like Brad Paisley and David Letterman to rally newbies to the critical darling's much buzzed-about last 20 episodes.
Full Article
This in from the SciFi Wire:
David Eick and Ronald D. Moore, executive producers of SCI FI Channel's original series Battlestar Galactica, told SCI FI Wire that their upcoming prequel Caprica will be a markedly different series.
Eick compared it to the feature film American Beauty, while Moore referenced the TV soap opera Dallas.
"Caprica is a story that Ron Moore and I concocted with [co-executive producer] Remi Aubuchon, and we're casting as we speak," Moore said in an interview at SCI FI Channel's upfront presentation to advertisers in New York on March 18. "I'm very excited about that. If Battlestar Galactica is Black Hawk Down, I would say that Caprica is American Beauty. Caprica is all about the inner lives of the people on a planet and how their personal relationships as well as their professional relationships inform what will become the creation of the Cylons."
Moore, a former Star Trek writer and producer, said that Caprica is not a show along the lines of any Trek spinoff series. "It's a different animal altogether," he said in a separate interview. "Unlike those shows, which are all riffs on the same notion of what Star Trek was, Caprica is really a completely different kind of genre. We're trying to do something different."
Instead of Galactica's action-adventure space-based war show, Caprica will tell a story that takes place before any of the wars happened. "This is really more of a sci-fi Dallas," Moore said. "It's a political story, a family story. It's about the creation of the Cylons, and it's about a company. It's planet-based. It's very character-oriented, very serialized and very much about the characters. It's a whole different genre, and that's what makes it exciting."
Production will begin this spring on a two-hour backdoor pilot. Moore said he will be "very involved" with the pilot, but stressed that it's too soon to say whether he'd remain on board if SCI FI Channel gave the green light for a weekly Caprica show.
"If it goes to series, it kind of depends when that happens and what I'm doing," he said. "We'll just wait and see."
SCI FI Channel has given a green light for production to begin on Caprica, a two-hour backdoor pilot and Battlestar Galactica prequel from executive producers Ronald D. Moore and David Eick. Production is slated to begin in Vancouver, Canada, this spring.
Set 50 years before the events of Battlestar Galactica, Caprica follows two rival families--the Greystones and the Adamas --as they grow, compete and thrive in the vibrant world of the 12 Colonies. Enmeshed in the burgeoning technology of artificial intelligence and robotics that will eventually lead to the creation of the Cylons, the two houses go toe-to-toe.
"I'm thrilled with the chance to expand on the Galactica world and get deeper into the origins of the story we've been telling," Moore said in a statement. "It's also great to have a chance at doing a completely different kind of science fiction series, one that's even more character-oriented and doesn't rely on pyrotechnics to carry the story."
In his own statement, Eick said: "While Caprica will have its own personality, it will carry on Battlestar's commitment to pushing the boundaries of the genre, and we're thrilled that SCI FI has seen fit to giving us another opportunity to tell character-driven stories in challenging ways."
The fourth season of Battlestar Galactica kicks off on March 28 at 10 p.m. ET/PT with two back-to-back half-hour specials, with the first new episode premiering the following week, April 4, at 10 p.m.
Happy New Year everyone! And we have good news to come with that: TV Squad and SyFy Portal are both reporting that Galactica will be renewed for a 4th season!
From the SyFy Portal:
January 02 2007) - Moving a show to Sunday nights might at first glance appear to be an act of desperation, but SciFi Channel is expected to officially give the greenlight to a fourth season of "Battlestar Galactica," possibly even before the show makes its Sunday night debut on Jan. 21.
Looks like the folks at the SciFi channel have high hopes for the upcoming Sunday night timeslot with the Dresden Files. Hopefully, it'll work out better than the friday nights. Along with this good news, there's some not so good news: It's looking like the spinoff series 'Caprica', might not be coming as soon as hoped:
The "Battlestar Galactica" prequel spinoff "Caprica," however, may not be getting the same good news.
"Anyone expecting to see 'Caprica' before 2008 is fooling themselves," a SciFi Channel source told SyFy Portal. "There is still quite a bit to be worked out."
We'll keep you updated when we hear more.
Source.
The SciFi channel webpage has posted up an interview with Galactica producer Ron Moore:
Executive producer Ronald D. Moore offers a sneak peek at the third season of Battlestar Galactica—and beyond
By Melissa Perenson
Battlestar Galactica returns this week with the start of its red-hot third season. Set about four months after the show's doozy of a second-season cliffhanger, year three's opener focuses on the Colonials and their life under the thumb of the Cylons on New Caprica. In our first installment of interviews with Galactica cast and crew, executive producer Ronald D. Moore plays it close to the vest, giving us some juicy morsels about the upcoming season, the forthcoming prequel and the show's creative process.
What are you trying to do with the upcoming season?
Moore: Well, a lot of it was informed by where we ended the second season, which we ended with them down on a planet with the Cylons a year later in our narrative, with the Cylon occupation beginning on New Caprica. Now, the remaining [Colonial] ships are out there someplace, trying to figure out a way to get back and rescue the people down on New Caprica. The show is going to deal with suicide bombing, it's going to deal with issues of security and freedom, and it's going to deal with issues of collaboration in a time of war and freedom of speech.
We're going to be going through some pretty tough stuff this season. We're going to lose some people along the way, and there are some beloved characters that are not going to make it all the way through the season. But we're also going to get some victories that we've never gotten before, and we're going to get an insight into the Cylon society by doing a long-running story inside a Cylon base ship for the first time: We'll get a firsthand look at how they operate and what they're all about. I think it's a really interesting season.
The series was created five years ago, in the aftermath of 9/11. It's been interesting to see how the show is paralleling the events and issues in the real world, only in the context of the struggle between the Colonials and the Cylons.
It's been fun to sort of move back and forth on the perspective and to take issues and themes that are happening around us today and then do them differently. I really like the fact that there are some times when you're not quite sure who you should be rooting for in the show. And I think that's a really interesting accomplishment if you can take a viewer to a place where suddenly they're not sure who the good guys and who the bad guys are. I think that's a really provocative place.
Tell us about the Web-only episodes that appeared online at SCIFI.com, leading up to the start of this season.
Moore: [The network] came to us about webisodes almost a year ago. And at first it took a while to work out some of the logistics involved, budgets, legal questions. We still haven't cracked all the questions involved, but we moved forward with doing them [anyway]. We decided we'd do 10 webisodes, each of them two to three minutes in length, because that was what's [considered] the ideal download length for people. We wanted them to be one story that would lead up to and help launch the season-three premiere. So I essentially took it to the writer's room and threw it to them and said, "OK. Come up with a bunch of ideas." And they did. They churned out a couple of pages of ideas and concepts that we could do for webisodes. We culled through them and decided on the resistance movement, the one that we're doing now. It seemed like the best for a variety of reasons, and it set nicely backstory to some events that are going to take place in the television show. If you're a fan, it's like "Here's added background and texture about why certain things happen." But if you don't see them, you don't lose anything. You could still watch the series without having to see the webisodes.
Battlestar has been on quite a roll lately, from rave critical reviews to awards. Earlier this year the series nabbed a George F. Peabody award—something that few series ever achieve, let alone series categorized as science fiction.
Moore: That was an enormously gratifying and very surprising award to get. It's not something that's usually even on your radar, because it's just so outside the norm to get that. There's no nomination: They just tell you you've won, and so it was very surprising. I remember we went to the ceremony in New York, sitting in this big ballroom at the Waldorf Astoria, and they were showing clips of all the winners. You're there with people that are doing documentaries about AIDS in Africa, and Katrina and all kinds of really weighty issues—and [then they showed] Battlestar Galactica.
What can you tell us about the status of Caprica, the prequel to Battlestar?
Moore: It's in script right now. We're doing some rewrites for the network, and we're waiting to see whether they're going to give it a green light or not.
How will Caprica differ from Battlestar?
Moore: Caprica is set 50 years before Battlestar Galactica. It's the story of the creation of the Cylons. And it's a very different format than Galactica. It's not a war show; it's not even a space show or an action-adventure show. It's a family drama and a political drama about corporations and politics. It's almost [more] like a sci-fi soap than it is an action-adventure series. And again, we're trying to do something different within the genre and give a different flavor to the material than Battlestar Galactica does. [The story] centers around two families, one of whom owns an enormous corporation, à la Microsoft, and it builds the first Cylons; then the other family is Adama's father, who's a lawyer at the time and starts to become an opponent of what they're trying to do.
Doing a prequel concurrent with the original series is unheard of. What made you decide to go this route?
Moore: David [Eick] and I have been kicking around ideas for a spinoff for a while. We talked about all the different possibilities. Do another Battlestar, do the first Cylon war, etc. We started talking about a prequel as a concept, as something that we were interested in, but we hadn't really worked out a storyline. We'd had a couple of preliminary talks with the studio and the network about it. And then separately, Remi Aubuchon came in to the studio to pitch a series of his own that had a lot of similar themes and a lot of similar ideas to what we were considering for Galactica. So the studio called us and said, "Why don't the three of you get in a room and see if there's something there?" So we sat down, and we all got along really well, and the idea started to really come together.
How many episodes are you writing this season?
Moore: This season I wrote the first two hours myself, and then I rewrote a handful of the next few. I think my next credited episode probably won't be until possibly one of the finale episodes. Although at this point I might not even do that. I might just take a hand in rewriting.
Do you have a particular five-year plan in mind for Battlestar?
Moore: It's still pretty organic. I still take it in 10-episode chunks. We've mapped out clearly the end of the third season, and we know how we're ending this season. I haven't started the conversation yet about the first 10 episodes of the fourth season, but I have a general idea of where we're going to start.
At the beginning of each year, I always feel like "Oh man, this may be the last one, because I don't know if I can fill up 20 episodes." But somehow by the end of a season you always end up with more stories than you could ever get around to doing. It's a judgment call. Right now I feel like maybe we have just another couple of years in the show. But you ask me again next year and I might give you the exact same answer. So it's really hard to say. When I was at Star Trek, I had two different experiences. On Next Generation, I think the writing staff universally felt like we went one year too long. The seventh season was not our best season, and we probably should have ended at six, because we all felt that that was one of our best seasons. At Deep Space Nine, we all felt like the show was going out at a high point, like it still had more life left in it and we could have gone for another year or two, because we still had plenty of stories to tell. And that's the point when you do want to get off the stage, when you're at the top of your game and you have more to give, but you leave [the audience] wanting more.
How does the writing staff approach writing the stories we see on screen?
Moore: I like to stroke out the first about 10 episodes in a generalized arc, and I'll discuss that with the writing staff. And then they'll start generating ideas, story suggestions and pitches, and there might be some specific story ideas I've got, too. We'll put them [all] up on a big board in the writer's room, and we start culling through that to decide "OK, here are the first three or four episodes; now let's break them." I'll have a preliminary discussion with the writing staff about what the episode is and what we want to try to do here, and then I'll set them free. They go off and they sit in a room for hours on end and hash out a storyline and start to break the show and put it up on a big board. And then when they're ready, they'll call me in and they'll run me through the break. And usually I'll change it and talk, and we'll go through some points, and we'll rework it a few times, and maybe they'll go and break it one more time, and I'll come back and review it again. I'll sign off on it at some point, and the writer of that specific episode will now generate a story outline that is then sent up to the network and the studio for comments.
Once the script is written, how much do you rely on storyboarding the scenes, early in the game?
Moore: It depends on the requirements of the particular show. For action sequences—and depending on the director—we like to have a storyboard artist engaged. Our visual-effects department usually delivers some kind of storyboard, and oftentimes now they've gotten to the point where it's actually an animatic. It's like a video storyboard that they'll use to show you movements—how the fighters will move and what Galactica is doing. It's pretty sophisticated in terms of visual-effect storyboards. The other storyboards [we do] really depend on the director. Some directors need it, some directors want it, and other directors hate it. And sometimes we'll force them to do it if we feel like it's a particularly complicated sequence; other directors, they don't storyboard at all. Each episode is a little different.
Do you continue to enjoy working on science fiction?
Moore: I do enjoy it. There are times I feel like "Gosh, I need to do something with people without space suits." But I keep finding things that are fascinating to do, and the canvas is just much broader. You can play a much bigger game of "what if?" in science fiction than in contemporary drama. And I find that challenging, so I continue to do it. But I'm also reworking a pilot for FX at the moment that has nothing to do with science fiction. And I have other movies and things on my desk that I continue to try to do.
