Between The Lines
A lot of polishing and checking goes on before a television script is ready to be filmed, and a missed reference or an incorrect piece of family history can spell disaster for a finished episode. Former Xena script co-ordinator Maggie Hickerson reveals to Paul Simpson just how much work goes into perfecting a script...
Official Xena Magazine: Issue 12
Working in television isn't all glamour and photo opportunities with Kevin Sorbo or Lucy Lawless. On a comedy show, you might find yourself in the office at 2am, typing up a set of jokes that a group of writers found hilarious 12 hours earlier. On a show that is filmed on the other side of the world, you can just as easily be snarled up in Los Angeles traffic trying to get important new script pages to the 50 different offices that needed it five minutes ago.
British-born Maggie Hickerson was the script co-ordinator for the first four seasons of Xena: Warrior Princess, and is used to both sides of the television business. Having worked in the industry for some years, she was attracted by an advertisement in LA’s Hollywood Reporter. “When they were looking to start up Xena they advertised for a writer's assistant,” she recalls, “but they didn’t say what it was for. They just said, ‘Spin-off of hit show’. So I applied, and the fact that I had been a writer’s assistant before put me in good stead. When I was interviewed, they offered me the script co-ordinator's position, which is the next step up.”
The words ’script co-ordinator’ could actually be divided into two elements to describe Hickerson’s role: she was partly responsible for the scripts, and partly responsible for co-ordination. The trips through Los Angeles traffic came under the latter: “The reason for a script co-ordinator on a show like Xena or Hercules, especially with them shooting in New Zealand, is everybody is so spread out,” she explains. “You have at least four different factions that have to be kept in the loop at different times. There were the executive producers and everyone at Renaissance Pictures who everything had to go through; there were the people at Universal Studios; there were the Xena writers who were in a separate little office in Studio City; and then there were the people in New Zealand.
“The Hercules writers were in the same building as the Renaissance producers, but there was no room for the Xena writers there, which is why we were in a separate office a few miles away in Studio City. If we had changes for a script and it was only two pages but they had to go to 50 people, it was a lot quicker to run off 50 copies and jump in my car and distribute them than to call a messenger service that would take up to two hours to come and get them. New Zealand would already have them through the modem and would have distributed them, and it wouldn't even have got to Universal!”
Hickerson's job also required her to keep on the progress of the script and co-ordinate various departments responsible for developing and approving them. “There were three staff writers, of whom one was the executive producer,” she explains. “They would start off with a story idea, and then throw these out at a meeting, and then decide along with the executive producers which ones I would carry on with and which ones they would scrap. Each writer would then work on their script, developing it and typing it into their own comptuter until they figured the script was ready. There'd be a first, second, third and then final draft. Each time there would be meetings after the draft was distributed and they would discuss what needed to be changed, cut out or made bigger or better.
“Once they got it as good as they could, they would give me the printed copy and I would go through it and check it for spelling, continuity timelines, making sure the names of the characters were correct,” she continues. “If Xena had a bro whose name appeared in one script, and then a bro in another script, and they got the name wrong, it was my job to catch that. I started a character list, almost like a bible of who Xena's family was, who Gabrielle’s family was - along with the important people in their lives. If any new writer was hired to do a script, I could see what Xena's brother’s name was, what her mother’s name was, which town she came from, how old she was... all those kinds of things.”
This ‘bible’ covered every episode of Xena as it went along, although the character herself had appeared on parent show Hercules. “We used those episodes as a referral,” Hickerson explains, “but didn’t need to refer to them too much. They didn’t establish that much. In the first two episodes she was evil and then she became good, and her history was only really relevant after she was good. I don’t think they gave her too much of a back story when she was a bad person because it wasn’t establised that it was going to be continued.
“So the main part of my job was proofreading for spelling, continuity, timelines and family history,” Hickerson expands. “That was interesting, because everybody has a different take on the family and the history of the character. So it was fun to see how it all pieced together, especially tying it in with events we have come to know as history. I liked the way they put her into different things that we regard as gospel, like the killing of Caesar, which has her there trying to stop it and being a former lover of his. I found that fascinating. There’s so much that you come to believe was true, but none of us were there. It all got changed through time. The fact that we put that in the story made sense.”
Hickerson was particularly interested in Xena’s visits to Ancient Britannia. “I was reading it as an English person,” she says, “trying to make it as true as possible to what I knew of the story of Boadicea. When Xena was travelling there and she got in the boat and was in England overnight, I said that meant she had to have got the boat in Gaul [France]. She couldn’t have got the boat in Greece and got there overnight.”
Discussion of the ‘English arc’ reminds Hickerson of one of the mistakes that made it through to the final televised episode The Deliverer. “I remember reading one of the final drafts where they had put in a scene in which Gabrielle was kidnapped by Caesar and somebody spying on Caesar’s camp noticed Gabrielle’s staff and realised she was there,” she remembers. “I said, ‘Wait a minute, we haven't established throughout the story that she has her staff with her. Right at the beginning of the story, they left Xena’s horse behind and boarded the boat for England. We never established that Gabrielle had her staff.'
“The script had already gone to New Zealand when I spotted that, so we did some amendment pages to establish that Gabrielle had it with her when she got on the boat so that she would have it with her in every scene. New Zealand got the changes, but the director never shot her with the staff, so when it got to that scene in the camp she had it with her, but we had never seen her with it earlier. Even though I’d caught it, it was never obvious to New Zealand why the correction was there, so the scene never got shot in such a way as to establish it. It wasn’t a major plot point that would destroy the story, but the eagle-eyed fans who watch the show religiously spotted it, and there was a lot of interaction on the internet about it.”
Correcting another error which came up would have meant a major rewrite of a script, so it wasn’t actioned. “There was a ‘reveal’ at the end of an episode that the temple they were in which collapsed was actually Stonehenge,” Hickerson recalls. “All the way through the script they had been on the top of a high hill looking at Caesar’s army on top of another high hill. I said, ‘Wait a minute, Stonehenge is on Salisbury Plain. By definition, a plain is not a group of hills!’ But you had to have known the geography, so it was left as it was in the script - it wasn’t as important as the reveal at the end that it was Stonehenge.”
Geography was important, however, when it came to Xena’s own stamping ground. “We had a huge map of Greece on our wall,” Hickerson explains, “and quite often some of the outside writers would have her heading East from Athens to the Peloponnese, but she would be heading Southwest. I would pick up on little things like that. In the Helen of Troy episode [Beware Greeks Bearing Gifts], we had to make sure the armies were heading from the right direction. The map did have the ancient Greek names on it, so the writers could always use those, and people wouldn’t know where that town was anyway!”
Another key element of both Xena and Hercules is the battles between the gods, and another chart helped the writers ensure that they didn’t mess up any of the very complicated family relationships there. “I was familiar with a lot of mythology, but not as much as they had in the scripts,” Hickerson admits. “We also had a huge chart of the genealogy of the mythical characters from Zeus down: how many sons he had, how many brothers, who married whom, how they were inter-related... So when people picked up the show and got on the internet saying that this god didn't have three sisters or two brothers, we’d check our chart and it was right there.
“People only know the more famous gods and myths and don't know the ins and outs of their families, so it was quite easy to take it off this huge chart and make up stories about the gods. Some of my favourite episodes were those where Xena met Ulysses and joined in his quest to go home, fought Neptune and the Fates. Those kinds of episodes make Greek mythology more accessible to viewers. People think they can’t be bothered with all that stuff, but to see it in a television show makes it more interesting.”
With continuity one of Hickerson's chief responsibilities, it was also down to her to ensure that Xena’s horse maintained its sex. “That was a funny little thing that got missed right at the beginning,” she remembers. “In the first few episodes, the horse was a he, then it was a she, and then it went back to being a he! So we called it by its name, Argo. But Argo is a she!”
When Hercules came to an end, its executive producers moved over to work on Xena, a transition made smoother by the fact that there had always been a lot of contact between the staff of both shows. “Everything would be compared all the time because there were so many crossover characters,” Hickerson notes. “We always worked pretty close together with the bibles and the character lists.”
Unfortunately, however, the arrival of the Hercules staff meant that Hickerson left Xena, four years after she joined Renaissance. As someone who had loved mythology since she was a teenager travelling around Greece, she still misses the show, but she has no regrets.
“I was just thrilled to get on the show when I did, right from the get go, to see it evolve in four years, and to see how the fans picked up on it right away and made it the huge hit that it is now.”