Epilogue
George Strayton, Renaissance Pictures’ Director of Marketing, describes his rise from Hicksville publishing to the heady world of television scriptwriting.
Official Xena Magazine: Issue 01
I’ve always been a fan of fantasy adventure films, from Conan the Barbarian and Dragonslayer to Star Wars. But television never produced a speculative fiction series that I found compelling enough to watch from week to week. (Maybe Swords and Sorcery - but, then again, I was a little kid back then and my memory may be distorted by the ravages of time, among other things.) Then, in 1994, I happened upon a made-for-TV movie called Hercules and the Amazon Women.
I was hooked immediately. Luckily, within a year the telefeature developed into a series so I could get my weekly fix of action wrapped in a thin (and sometimes not-so-thin) layer of camp and innuendo. At the time, I was working as a writer/editor for a small publishing company in the rural hills of Northeast Pennsylvania (literally, there were cows roaming past my office window). Our products centred around licensed properties like Star Wars, Indiana Jones, Men in Black, and so forth. Well, needless to say, I begged the powers that be to make a deal with Universal for Hercules and Xena.
Luckily, an agreement was struck, and I got to come out to Los Angeles for a meeting with the producers. Shortly thereafter, I moved to California to work on the project, and started visiting Renaissance once a week or so. A position suddenly opened there, I applied, got the job and became the new Director of Marketing.
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A year later, executive producer Rob Tapert gave me a chance to write my first episode. My writing partner Tom O’Neill (who had come with me from the same company back east) and I were charged with developing the story for the Hercules season finale, an episode that would include the Four Horsemen of the Apocalypse and would feature the return of lolaus, who had been killed in the season premiere. A daunting task, to be sure. Our first attempt resulted in a “$7 million extravaganza”, to quote one of the producers. With the help of the writing staff, especially Rob Tapert, Roberto Orei and Alex Kurtzman, we were able to develop the story into something producible. We called it Revelations.
Shortly thereafter, Rob Tapert called and said he’d liked the episode and wanted to know if we’d be interested in writing another. We thought he might have made a mistake - surely he had just dialled the wrong number. But to our astonishment, he was serious. So, we started work right away on the season premiere of Hercules. Our first story was a sequel to the season three episode Atlantis. In the end, however, budgetary considerations brought us back to one of our other initial premises, an episode set in Egypt, and hence we wrote City of the Dead.
At the moment (though by the time you're reading this, we’ll have finished), we're writing the 100th episode of Xena, which will air in the US sometime in the first quarter of 2000 (if we’re all still here). I can’t tell you much, but suffice it to say that you don’t want to miss it. It will provide the answer to a question you will all have been wondering about through the first half of the season (vague enough?).
In closing, I'd just like to say that I'm still a huge fan of these series, and I hope you enjoy our stories as much as we enjoy writing them! Cheers!