Men In Ink
They've transformed Hercules into a pig, turned lolaus, Autolycus and Salmoneus into pantomime dames, and even ridiculed the behind-the-scenes workings of Renaissance Pictures! So Zeus only knows what famed Hercules writing duo Alex Kurtzman and Roberto Orci will come up with as part of Xena's staff. By Jon Miller.
Official Xena Magazine: Issue 04
As two of Hercules' most prolific and acclaimed writers, Alex Kurtzman and Roberto Orci were responsible for several of the series' finest hours. Now, they've moved on to Xena, and are already excited about the spin they're bringing to the show. “This season we're going to see beyond the traditional pantheon of Greek gods,” reveals Kurtzman. “Our world will open up, and Xena and Gabrielle will confront a higher power above the Greek gods. And their relationship will be tested in the face of it. They'll definitely grow in different ways.
“Xena will be a mother this year, which is going to be a real driving force in our show. She'll be the first pregnant superhero, and that's an exciting opportunity that probably no-one will ever get again. Xena dealing with motherhood is going to be the biggest thing about the entire season.”
So how much of a change has it been switching from Hercules to its spin-off?
“There’s certainly more pressure on us this year,” says Kurtzman. “Xena and Hercules balanced each other out very well, but without Hercules, everyone’s eyes are a little more focused on Xena.
“I think the biggest change for us as writers is that the subtext between Hercules and lolaus was very different to that between Xena and Gabrielle. Writing Hercules was really one of the greatest joys of our lives and we had such a good time on it, but you can get more emotional in Xena. The two leads are allowed to say things to each other that Hercules and lolaus as men probably wouldn't. That’s a great opportunity and we really enjoy that.
“We enjoy writing pure emotion over restrained emotion, and with the exception of the Dahak arc, Hercules didn’t tend to have that much raw emotion.”
In the Young Hercules episode X, Y and Z, the pair got the chance to write for the son of Zeus as a teenager, and they found that this provided an interesting new angle on the character.
“The thing about young Hercules is that he can make mistakes,” explains Kurtzman. “He hasn't matured into the adult that Kevin Sorbo plays. That’s a fun opportunity, as one of the difficult things about writing for Hercules (and also one of the joys) was that he was basically Superman. He is pretty perfect and he doesn’t make a lot of mistakes, and that’s why the older Herc was such fun to write because it tested us as writers.
“But writing Young Hercules is interesting because he’s cocky, he’s still figuring out where he fits into the world and how to use his power correctly. He can make mistakes, and when Hercules can make mistakes it means that the dramatic situations are more interesting.”
Returning to their work with the adult Hercules, Kurtzman and Orci are especially proud of the pivotal fifth season opener, Faith. “It’s not only a deconstruction of Hercules’ and lolaus’ characters as individuals,” says Orci, “but also of the relationship that the audience has been watching for four years.
Faith also set in motion a slight change of direction for Hercules, kicking off a story arc that spanned most of the season. “What we found on both shows,” explains Kurtzman, “is that stories with a large degree of continuity are more interesting to write and more interesting for the audience to watch. If you can engage people in a long-term emotional arc then you can really get into the specific detail of it. If each episode is part of a greater whole, then that’s really fun. We're certainly continuing that trend with the new season of Xena.
“I also think it’s much harder to write stand-alone episodes and have the audience truly engaged because you have a much longer story path to tell your story. Great drama is about the detail, and if your story is only an hour long, it’s harder to get those details across.
“I feel very proud of the Hercules-Iolaus-Dahak arc, but I think it went on two episodes too long. You have to make sure that you are gauging the correct amount of time that you want to spread a story along. Some people will say, ‘Okay, I want an ending for this, I want a resolution - I’m not getting it, so I’m going to tune out.’”
Having introduced Atlantis into the Hercules universe during season three, Kurtzman and Orci were allowed to put a spin on the epic of Gilgamesh with Faith.
“It’s fun to play with the myths,” says Kurtzman. “It's fun to spin them in a new way. I think one of the things that we’ve always felt is that because people know a lot of the Greek myths, you don’t want to tell the same story that everyone already knows... The fun in a situation like that is to say, ‘Okay, let’s play with the audience’s expectations but let’s reverse them by applying a direction to the myths in a way that the audience can’t necessarily predict.
“I think that thinking up the storyline to tell was the fun about Gilgamesh and Atlantis. The myth we’re dealing with is open wide and the audience is going to be asking, ‘What am I going to see that I don’t know about?’ The audience knows where the story’s going, but they don’t know how it’s going to get there.”
As well as establishing the fabled lost city in Hercules’ world, Atlantis provided one of the first opportunities to take the son of Zeus away from the confines of ancient Greece. It also depicted a society where flying and microwave technology had developed before their time, thanks to the magic of crystal waves.
“Atlantis was actually the first time that we ever really opened up the Hercules world,” explains Orel, “In a world without technology, you’re suddenly confronted with a situation that verges on sci-fi.”
Introducing new attractions for viewers seems to be a constant element of Kurtzman and Orel’s work. The two writers were responsible for creating several popular recurring characters, including Nebula, Morrigan and the Widow Twanky.
“It goes back to Hercules being like Superman,” says Kurtzman. “As wonderful as that is to write, it can also be limiting. With Nebula, we realised that while Hercules and lolaus have such a wonderful dynamic, they rarely argued, and when they did argue lolaus would listen to Hercules no matter what in the end. We designed Nebula to be somebody who wouldn't listen to Hercules. That way, we could put him in more difficult and interesting, dynamic situations where he would have somebody he couldn't fully control. I think she was definitely successful and we certainly had a great time writing for Gina Torres.
“Morrigan was designed to be Herc’s love interest from the beginning. Hercules always seemed to fall for the same kind of woman in a way and we wanted to change that. Morrigan was designed as someone he could turn around and then somebody he could fall in love with. Obviously there are echoes there to Xena, but I think that Morrigan and Xena are very different characters.
“Widow Twanky was something we wanted to try because we’d never seen anything like that on television, and we’d certainly never seen anything like that on an extremely heterosexual action show. I think it was just an interesting thing to throw in there. The reason that I think it works is because Hercules plays it completely straight. He doesn’t bat an eyelid at the sight of Michael Hurst in a dress!
“Actually, we have to really credit Michael for that. He was just making us look really good in that one. He’s an incredibly well-trained theatre actor who knows a ton about British pantomime and all of that. So even though we have to have our names on the screen, we’re actually taking credit for his genius!”
Eclecticism seems to be the order of the day for these two writers, and episodes like ...And Fancy Free and Men in Pink betray their love of old movies. “I think we’ve found our true voice on Hercules by imitation first,” admits Kurtzman. “We both came out of a real heavy film background; we love films, particularly old films.
“The first time we thought that [approach] truly worked was in applying Strictly Ballroom to ...And Fancy Free. When we saw how successful that formula was we thought, ‘Well, okay, what other old films can we do that to?' You can call it rip-off or you can call it homage!”
During the fourth season of Hercules, Kevin Sorbo became ill and for several months, so Kurtzman and Orel were confronted with the problem of having to write episodes of the show which didn't focus on its leading man.
“It was certainly a hard period,” recalls Kurtzman. “But it was a convergence of good liming because what happened was that we were both new to the show, and at that point we were very hungry to prove ourselves. Anything that could have been seen as an impediment, we just saw as a challenge.
“It was terrible not to have Kevin around and it was a miserable and exhausting time. And it was very difficult to plan episodes when we didn’t know if we were going to have Hercules around. But it was also a fun time and we learned a ton. It was really a crash course in how to write quickly and I think we got more out of that six or seven month period than we could have ever have gotten going to school for four or five years.”
Despite the obstacles, the period inspired some of the series' most original and highly- regarded episodes. These include the notorious Porkules, in which Hercules is turned into a pig.
“That was a mixed show for us,” admits Kurtzman. “We liked lots of it, while at the same time I don’t think we feel that it was an entirely successful show. We had a good time with it and it turned out well, but it’s just such a strange thing to see Hercules as a pig.
“One really great thing, however, was that in the absence of Kevin, all the other actors really rose to the challenge because they knew they had to take over for a little while.”
Soon after Porkules came one of the most original pieces of television ever. Billed as a backstage tour of Hercules’ production company, Renaissance Pictures, Yes, Virginia, There is a Hercules was a legendary journey unlike any other.
“Yes, Virginia was truly an experiment,” says Kurtzman. “We decided that the only way to make it successful was to go all the way with it. If you went half way, it wasn’t going to work.
“In some ways we were still testing the waters of how far we could go with the show. I think in the second episode, For Those of You Just Joining Us..., we got to go a little bit further than we did in the first one, but I will say that I had a great time writing it.
“While the portrayals of the staff are extremely exaggerated, if you spent a day at the Renaissance office and watched all those people, you’d probably see a degree of truth in all those characters!” he laughs. “I guess the funny part about the fact that [our screen counterparts] slept in the closet at the studio was that we spent most of our time at the studio during that time when Kevin was sick. That too was an exaggerated version of what we were going through at the time. We weren’t sleeping there, but to all intents and purposes we were!”
Unsurprisingly, Kurtzman and Orci had to think carefully about writing themselves into the episode. “If you put yourselves in there, then people will tell you that you're really ego-centric,” muses Kurtzman. “And if not, they’ll say, 'How can you make fun of anyone else and not turn the gun in on yourselves?’ I think the best way to do it is just to make sure that you’re always laughing at yourself.
“We often wondered whether the viewers would get it, and I think people did think it was terribly self-indulgent,” he notes. “But the bottom line is that people are talking about it, and that’s all that matters."
One of the most striking things about Kurtzman/Orci scripts is the sheer level of variety between extremely humorous tales and episodes which deal with dramatic and serious subject matter.
“We tend to write both kinds of episode because they're both interesting for different reasons,” explains Kurtzman. “I think that the emotional episodes are always more satisfying on some level because we have to dig into ourselves to write them, and that's a very cathartic process for both of us. However, there are some days when all you want to do is laugh, and that's when it’s really fun to write episodes like Men in Pink. So it’s different for different reasons.
“It’s very satisfying to write both, but my personal preference is always in writing drama. Although I think if you only write drama, then the drama can gel a little stale as well. We like to break it up into equal parts comedy, equal parts drama.
“I think too much drama, particularly in a show like Xena, is a mistake because people need to be able to tune in and feel a variety of different emotions. You can probably feel the most extreme emotions while watching drama, but you can’t feel them consistently if you're only watching heavy-heavy shows, as things start to get slightly desensitised and you need a break. That’s when the comedies come in, and we find the key is to get a good balance between the two.”
Alex Kurtzman and Robert Orci feel that one of the greatest pleasures of working on Xena is the process of collaborating with each other on a story.
“Every day is a joy,” declares Kurtzman, “and I mean that truthfully. We write every line together. We enjoy writing most when we’re doing it together because we know that if we’re making each other laugh we’re probably succeeding. When you have faith that your partner will (metaphorically) take a bullet for you and you trust them, then you can do anything. We have that kind of trust and that’s what makes this partnership so fun.”