Parenthesis: A broadcast point on Earth (War of the Worlds Press Kit Video, Continued)

Previously on A Mind Occasionally Voyaging…

Special thanks to Orville Joder Jr. for uploading a somewhat cleaner copy of the press kit, albeit with the aspect ratio altered.

After the featurette, we have interviews with the leads. First up, Jared Martin, who the narrator is quick to remind us played Dusty on Dallas. In the time since I started this project, I’ve learned that Jared spent his later years teaching and making art, and that he contributed a lot to the production as a sort of de facto script editor as the production became even more harried in the second season. So it shouldn’t surprise me that he comes off as an introspective sort of actor.

Harrison Blackwood is a wonderful man. He’s an explosive, sexy, dynamic, delightful, intelligent, warm generous, he’s all of these things. He’s like if you went into a kitchen and there was a lot of food around, and you wanted to make up a dish and you wanted to put everything in the kitchen into that dish, it would be called Harrison Blackwood. Fun to play. Hard to get to, but fun to play.

At first, it seems like a bit of braggadocio. But you get to the middle and he starts likening the character to a poorly-planned casserole, and that’s nice. Just a subtle little hint that Harrison is maybe a bit of a Mary Sue. And note the use of the word “sexy”. He says it again later. Twice. An indication that the whole Sex God Harrison thing I’ve snickered at is, yes, deliberate.

I like that he’s not self-aggrandizing too. He talks up Harrison’s intellect, but claims that he’s not a “hunk”, that his character isn’t the physical one, referring to Chaves as, “Another wonderful actor,” who handles the action.

In a separately recorded segment, he gets deep for a bit about the series premise:

It’s kind of a gateway story. It’s kind of the major story of the twentieth century. After we get our problems with nuclear warfare and feeding people and prejudice and hated out of the way and all those things that are holding us down as a species, we’re going to pack our bags and go into space. And this is a story about that, written at the very, glimmering beginning of this century of a man looking down the long barrel of time and wondering what it’s like out there.

He’s very animated when he talks about this, and I really believe him, even if I think he’s setting himself up for disappointment given that it kinda sounds like the show he actually wants to be doing is Star Trek. It’s very cool to see what he thought he was bringing to the character. He wants to be playing a thinking man’s hero, and though he doesn’t reference Clayton Forrester, I sort of imagine that Martin’s image of Harrison Blackwood tracks very close with the sort of dashing intellectual that Gene Barry portrayed in 1953.

What’s also telling is that Martin doesn’t mention Harrison’s less attractive qualities – that he’s a practical joker, that he’s pushy, arrogant, and, y’know, a weirdo. I always found that memorable about Harrison, whereas I mostly overlooked the “dashing leading man” qualities until doing this close rewatch. Given that Harrison’s less attractive, “nerdier” qualities fade away in the second season, when we can guess that Martin had more control over the fine details of his characterization, I think the evidence here is that the “weirdo” aspects weren’t something he was overly enamored of.

Next up is Lynda Mason Green, who… Does not seem fully engaged, if I am being honest. Not disintested; the opposite actually, she seems very intense in places, but the places where she’s intense don’t seem quite right, like she’s excited about something other than what she’s actually doing. She seems a little off. I mean, she isn’t at a loss for words or anything, but she speaks a little slowly and meanders a little and slurs the odd line and keeps rubbing her nose and I am going to be SUPER generous and assume she has a cold and it isn’t any of the other reasons an actor in the ’80s might seem a little out of it and keep rubbing their nose. One really weird aspect of the way she describes her character is that she claims Suzanne is drawn to the project specifically for the chance to work with Harrison. That’s pretty weird given that in the actual show, they start off not liking each other. On the other hand, taken together with Martin’s description of Harrison, it would fit well with the notion that Harrison was originally written as more of a “science celebrity” in the mold of Clayton Forrester (I’d assume that Forrester, in turn, was based on Richard Feynman, though I’m not entirely sure the timeline of Feynman’s public image tracks with that. Like, Feynman didn’t actually start at Caltech until 1952. TBH, it seems more like Richard Feynman is based on Clayton Forrester than the other way around).

Green says that in addition to the status that comes from working with Blackwood, Suzanne is motivated by the intellectual challenge of being the first to study extraterrestrial life. And, of course, her duty to protect the Earth on account of its where her daughter lives. She prioritizes that one, even though it’s probably the least interesting of the three. I mean, yeah, sure, of course the mother is motivated by protecting her daughter, but personally, I find the possibility of Suzanne being a bit mercenary and approaching an alien invasion foremost as an academic exercise to be way more interesting than the Mama Bear angle.

It’s the kind of story that hooks into… It can not die, because it hooks into a very very basic thing in humans. It becomes a fear of the unknown. It deals with the fear of the unknown, fear of evil, fear of darkness, fear of invasion from an unknown. It’s a very fundamental thing to lock into a peculiar kind human fear.

Richard is up next, and the narrator wastes no time pointing out that he recently worked with Schwarzenegger in Predator. True to his character, Chaves is a lot more reserved than the others, even though he’s pretty upbeat. Both he and the narrator make a point of Paul’s role as a weapons expert who can, “Fly anything that can fly, shoot anything that can shoot, drive anything that can drive.” Again, not really something that gets much emphasis in the show, where he mostly drives, y’know, a car, and shoots, y’know, a gun. Later in the interview, he describes himself as the “chaperone”, the one who carries a gun and steps out in front to protect and support the intellectuals, which is a much more spot-on description of how Ironhorse functioned in the bulk of the series.

If you’ve been following, you know by now that it’s only this time through that I really came to appreciate Ironhorse and by extension Chaves as the real break-out character. And so this is probably the interview that I like the best. Especially when Chaves straight-up confirms the character direction I envisioned for him in “Dust to Dust“. He explains that Ironhorse’s Cherokee side is largely under wraps when the series opens because, “The military has a control on him.” But his “mystical” side would come out little-by-little as the series progressed. I’m disappointed that the second season retool would end up cutting that avenue off, but I’m frankly even more disappointed that the first season spends so much time floundering that it only really had one or two moments where it made a concerted effort to lay that groundwork.

There’s a serendipitous bit of contrast when Chaves talks about his own background. While Jared Martin made it clear that Harrison Blackwood was “fun” but a stretch for him to get into, Chaves stresses the similarity between Ironhorse’s background and his own – their similar family and military backgrounds (I did notice that Chaves mentions that he’s from a military family, unlike Ironhorse, whose family didn’t support his decision to join the Army, though Chaves himself doesn’t bring up that difference). He also says that, while he’s frequently played military characters, he really likes being able to play one in a science fiction series. A lot of his work has been playing a military man in a realistic situation, acting out scenes that were very close to his own wartime experience (He mentions the play Tracers, which he coauthored), but playing a military man in a fantastical situation is a lot more fun.

Philip Akin goes last. I notice that the Canadian actors don’t get the benefit of the narrator reminding us what they’ve done recently. Akin’s interview also mentions Gertrude, and he talks up the extent to which his voice-controlled wheelchair is itself sort-of a character. He otherwise doesn’t really say much about his character, sadly. He contradicts himself a little, saying that his character is more laid back and dry, but also is the source of a lot of the show’s humor. I’m guessing that there’s some more here that was edited out, and he’s talking about the transformation we see over the course of the pilot, where in the early scenes, it’s apparent that Norton was intended to be comic relief, with his overblown Jamaican accent and coffee obsession and the bad attempt at making a running gag about bald microbiologists, that we watch progressively tone down just from one end of the show to the other.

His description of the series is a little confused, but it sort of circumnavigates something which the press kit doesn’t otherwise go into very much: the fact that War of the Worlds is as much horror as it is science fiction:

War of the Worlds has endured, I think, because it has been the first. And because of being the first, it has really captured something special. I don’t believe there’s been a show that’s created as much fear and as much interest as the times it’s been played. It was a novel idea and it doesn’t necessarily mean it was the first time this idea came up. But it was novel in the way it was presented, that it was grounded in our everyday reality. And I think that’s what made it so special. With a lot of science fiction, you have to go into the future to get the effect. And if you go into the future, you can distance yourself from the effect. Perhaps that’s what makes horror so interesting and so strong, because it’s everyday things that have a macabre twist.

This press kit was a neat find, and I’m glad I happened upon it. Pretty much any fan who watches this is going to appreciate the (admittedly brief) glimpses of the alien prosthetic and war machine model, and even more, it’s really cool to hear Jared Martin and Richard Chaves give us insights into what they thought they were trying to accomplish with their characters (Philip and Lynda get the short shrift as usual). Check it out if you’re so inclined.