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OMG BABBY and it’s a babby |
Mr. Brown,
Needless to say, we were shocked and surprised by your manuscript. (It should also go without saying, at this point, that we have not elected to air it.) Please allow me to provide you with some advice in order to earn your writing a little more welcome.
-Show, don’t tell. Your characters talk about their motivations. Why is that? If a person is about to steal, they generally don’t say, “I am about to steal something.” It’s just not realistic. I understand that Battlestar Galactica is set in the future, and there are differences, but the rules of interpersonal interaction still apply. Rather than writing for characters with complex motivations, you simply have them speak their motivations—who does that?
-Some things you and I are used to don’t carry over like that. For instance, it’s a little hard to believe the scene where Valeri walks into a McDonalds and orders a Coke. BSG is not set on Earth and does not have Earth’s corporations. Also, McDonalds uses only Pepsi products.
Sincerely,
Ronald D. Moore
P.S. I also regret to inform you that I will only be able to return a portion of your manuscript, as my reader shat on each of the first six pages.
Battlestar Galactica 2004: Justice is Not Straightforward when You Are In Space!
SCENE THREE
Commander Adama: Gayta, I have lots of painstaking, tedious work that needs to be done. Do it.
Gayta: Sire, this will take me thirty days to finish. Continue? Y/N.
Commander Adama: Yes.
Gayta: Very well sire. I shall continue to interface between plot and characters, sire.
Commander Adama: Is that candor? Are you saying it like it is?
Gayta: Yes, sire, i was
Commander Adama: When characters dont’ lie, it’s boring. From now on I want deceit out of you, Gayta, deceit! Your honesty is troblesome, and I will not have it on my ship.
Gayta: Of course not, sire.
Commander Adama: Gayta…
Gayta: Oh! Right… I mean… yes, you will.
Commander Adama: Much better.
(Gayta exits)
(Enter Kernel Tie)
Tie: Sire we have detected forty base/stars in a neyboring sector.
Commander Adama: Send in the Blackbird.
Tie: Yes, sir. Good thing that, as time progreses and our ship gets more and more beat/up, we can continue to tackel larger and larger Sylon targets. A single base/star would have wiped us out in the first season, but now we are as GODS!
(Tie laughs and drinks heavily.)
Tie: Maybe I can drink so much that I will be able to see again
Commander Adama: But you are only blind in one eye.
Tie: Yes, well, I have been lying to you.
SCENE FOUR
Laura Roslin: Excuse me while I suttly increase the sexual tension between my/self and all the males in the room.
Captain Adama: But your like forty/five.
Roslin: That is why it is tense and not an orgie
Captain Adama: I see.
Roslin: With age comes wisdum. Now, genteelmen, I have called you here to discuss the ethicel ram if cayshuns of shooting one in five civiliens.
Captain Adama: Why are we doing that again?
Roslin: So the Sylons dont kill them
Captain Adama: I am noticing a trend in this writing.
Roslin: This writing is in fact, all about noticing trends, Captain
Captain Adama: Oh, well, I guess i must be getting older. and wiser.
Roslin: So, I want to shoot thousands of people. …Comments?
Captain Adama: Oh, in my role as stick-up-the-ass convictions guy, I am against that.
Roslin: Then pick four friends to live, and youl be the one to dye.
Captain Adama: It is a worthie cause, and I will be come the snobbier for it.
Roslin: Thats’ nice. What about you, Doctor Baltar?
Baltar: I am… against it.
Roslin: But yesterday you said you were for it.
Baltar: Aha! You forget that I am ambigluesly neither good nor evil.
Number Six: Eeevil! Your evil.
Baltar: Shut the flak up, you Sylon in my head—er, Mrs. President. Shut the flak up, Mrs. President.
Laura Roslin: Oh, well, I was going to suspect something fishy but in light of you speaking to me rather than a Sylon in your head, I will go on unassumingly. What about you, Kernel?
Kernel Tie: I don’t like you.
Roslin: One, that was’nt what I asked, and two you don’t like anybody.
Tie: And guess what? You’re an ANYBODY.
Roslin: Captain Adama, be sure not to pick Tie as one of the four to live.
Captain Adama: Yes, Madam President.
SCENE FIVE
(They are inside some vipers.)
Captain Adama: I just shotted one!
Starbuck: I shotted EIGHT.
Captain Adama (Quietly): Oh, I guess she is a better pilot than me.
Starbuck: What was that?
Captain Adama: Oh nothing, you cannot hear me stage whisper because when we are in space, sound is oddly muffled.
Starbuck: I thought it was silent.??
Captain Adama: No you forget, the inter/stellular medium, you see you may be a better pillot but I am SAMARTER!!!
Starbuck: Shut up, i shotted another one
Captain Adama: no YOU Shut up bitch i shat in your bunk and then masturbatid into it
Racetrakc: Hey guys im listening to my radio
Captain Adama: Yeah whatever later I used your helmet
