The Canadian Tomorrow That Never Was: THE STARLOST (1973)
Our shining Canadian-made science fiction catastrophe!
[this post is a version of an article that came out in Eighteen Bridges Magazine a while back, but it’s a good intro to my deal and the kind of things I plan to discuss here. I hope you enjoy! - R]
The early to mid-1970s was pure cream for science fiction television nerds in Canada like myself. The original Star Trek cycled through seemingly endless after-school syndication loops. British imports Dr. Who and Space 1999 brought Oxbridge accents and questionable fashion choices into living rooms after dinner. And, of course, our own television show. The most anticipated and pedigreed science fiction series of all time. THE STARLOST.
The story of how we made THE STARLOST is largely happenstance.
In 1972, the controversial writer Harlan Ellison -- called “the Norman Mailer of Speculative Fiction” (interpret that as you may) – was determined to make a television show he could be proud of. Ellison pitched his concept for THE STARLOST, an anthology series based around a doomed intergenerational space colony, first to 20th Century Fox, then to the BBC. The show’s structure would be flexible enough to allow the top science fiction writers in the field to tell their freakiest stories through the medium of television. He would commission original stories from a real Murderer’s Row of SF writers: A.E. Van Vogt, Frank Herbert, Joanna Russ, Thomas M. Disch, Alexei Panshin, and Philip K. Dick. He also planned to write scripts for and to story-edit the series. It really was an unbeatable package.
But no broadcaster bit.
Until the Canadian broadcaster CTV made him a deal.
In this way, THE STARLOST found a home in Canada. While Ellison’s dream-team of writers was American, the episodes themselves would now be written by “the best Canadian scenarists to be found,” according to Ellison’s press release. And the series was to be shot at the CFTO-Glen Warren studios in Toronto, one of “the best studios, the best facilities,” with “the best [videotaping] techniques in the world” (according to a 1972 article in the Toronto Star).
The noted science fiction writer Ben Bova was hired as a science consultant. And two young Canadian actors (Gay Rowan and Robin Ward) were cast as supporting leads alongside the main star, the American actor Keir “2001: A Space Odyssey” Dullea.
The stories told in the series were to be unbound by budget considerations because the effects for the series would be masterminded by Douglas Turnbull, the wizard behind the special effects on such films as 2001 (1968), Silent Running (1971) and The Andromeda Strain (1971). His newly-designed MagiCam videotaping system would allow live action to be transposed onto miniature sets, which would make, in the words of Ellison, “whatever you envision spring to life”.
Even today, THE STARLOST sounds like a nerd’s dream.
And it was a Canadian television show, motherfuckers! In 1973!!
So why have you never heard of it?
I didn’t say it was a nerd’s dream come true.
The first sign of trouble came before the show had even started production. Ellison, an infamous hothead [I can say this now without fear of getting sued ... hopefully], was miffed that the show’s funding was tied to its fulfilment of “Canadian content” rules – which meant a largely green Canadian production crew. But he became really livid when he realised that the Canadian writers and producers he was forced to work with were inexperienced both in crafting episodic American television and with science fiction as a genre. “I was not about to spend the rest of my natural life in a motel in Toronto, rewriting other people’s words,” he wrote a few years after the fact.
After several angry exchanges with the show’s Executive and Associate Producers, with charges and counter-charges of fraud, calumny, and deceit blasting back and forth like pew-pew-fire, Ellison just walked out of the airlock. Into the vacuum with him went the promised stable of top science fiction writers and the guiding vision of the show.
“In the hands of the inept, the untalented, the venal and the corrupt,” wrote Ellison, “THE STARLOST became a veritable Mt. Everest of cow flop.”
Adding to all the creator-producer tsuris was the failure of Doug Trumbull’s MagiCam system. It simply did not work. And because the entire production budget was based on the phenomenal savings this videotaping system was supposed to deliver, many corners had to be cut if the series was to make it to the small screen at all. Many, many corners.
The series was shot “static” on videotape against chroma-key backgrounds, giving it the unfortunate appearance of a local T.V. weather report. The lamps were so hot, they melted many of the miniature sets.
Associate Producer Ed Richardson remembers the level of improvisation the production budget required:
The scenes of Keir [Dullea] floating around in space were accomplished by putting Keir in a black chair against a blue screen and moving the chair around with little rods. […] The meteors were little pieces of Styrofoam that we threw past the camera’s lens.
Actor Robin Ward (Garth), who candidly admitted that “as an actor who was doing theatre in Canada, I would have accepted a series called Pharmacists In Space,” relates a similar story of low-tech mishaps:
We were all wired up to fly in space. After the other [actors] took off, it was my turn. Unfortunately, I’m top heavy. I turned over and flew upside down. They wound up leaving that in the [episode].
Ben Bova, the science consultant, grew increasingly bemused as the red lines he drew under scientific impossibilities or gaffes in the scripts were disregarded. He later admitted:
I was paid rather handsomely as a consultant, and praised by everybody … and my advice was totally ignored.
THE STARLOST was on a collision course with disaster. After sixteen episodes, the series was cancelled.
Never one to leave a gloat unrelished, Harlan Ellison wrote what became the show’s epitaph:
The shows were so disgracefully inept, so badly acted, uniformly directed with the plunging breakneck pace of a quadruple amputee crossing a busy intersection, based in confusion and plotted on the level of a McGuffy’s primer, that when the show was cancelled after sixteen weeks, there were viewers who never knew it was missing.
Yes, THE STARLOST is bad. Very, very bad. You can watch for yourself on Youtube, and lots of folks drag it online — and with good reason.
And yet … I think it’s an essentially Canadian story, for better or worse.
Our national character had always been tied to speculation on the future. The first Canadian science fiction novel -- Tisab Ting, or, The Electrical Kiss (1896) – was set in 20th century Montréal and featured an interracial couple. Marshall McLuhan, who coined the term “Spaceship Earth,” was born on the Canadian prairie. After visiting the farm just outside of Edmonton where he grew up, you can make a day of it and head south to visit the giant replica of the U.S.S. Enterprise built as a roadside attraction in Vulcan, Alberta. We have even tried to argue that the ideology of Gene Roddenberry’s franchise has a distinctly maple flavour. In the early 1990s, there was a grass-roots campaign here for Paramount Studios to name one of the Star Trek: TNG spaceships the “U.S.S. Pearson” after Canada's 14th Prime Minister Lester B. Pearson. His development of “noninterference” as a guiding principle for United Nations peace-keeping forces in 1956 clearly foreshadowed the “Prime Directive” of the United Federation of Planets.
Of course, our national reach towards the future often exceeds our grasp. Tisab Ting, or, The Electrical Kiss is a truly dreadful, racist book. The U.S.S. Pearson never left space-dock. And Marshall McLuhan is now best remembered for a walk-on appearance in the movie Annie Hall rather than for any of his ideas about hot and cool culture.
Yes, Canada may be a likeable also-ran in the race to the future in some ways. But I have a bittersweet soft spot for this kind of unfulfilled optimism. While THE STARLOST project is thought of (when at all) as “the worst science fiction series of all time,” it can also be thought of as an apt metaphor about Canada.
When you consider the story-arc of the series, you can see how Harlan Ellison had come up with -- quite by accident -- a concept that resonated uniquely in a Canadian context. According to the show’s bible, the “Earthship Ark,” built in anticipation of an Earthly cataclysm in 2790 AD, was designed to transport 500,000 people in communities housed in discrete biospheres across space to a new planet to populate. But there was a disaster, the piloting crew was killed, and the Ark drifted aimlessly through space for five hundred years. After the accident,
the airlocks connecting the ship's biospheres that housed the last survivors of the dead planet, Earth, were sealed. Cut off from the outside world, many communities simply forgot that they were on a spacecraft. They accepted that their world was fifty miles in diameter and the sky was metal. (This from a fansite).
The series was to follow three young Amish-y protagonists — Garth, Devon, and Rachel — who escape from one of the biospheres. These country bumpkins explore the Ark, discover its looming destruction, and fight to unite the isolated communities to save the ship. Unless control of the ship can be regained, humanity was doomed to die a second time.
I say that this idea has particular national resonance because as a Canadian kid growing up in the 1970s, the conceit made complete sense to me, much more so than the “Wagon Train In Space” conceit that made Star Trek seem so American, and by extension, so alien. As Ellison described the overall concept in the series’ bible,
THE STARLOST is the long story of three young people discovering their world, and their place in it. It is also a study of many different cultures in conflict with each other. One hundred tiny nations of strangers, no two alike, bound outward toward new life or extinction.
This is a story any Canadian nationalist in the 60s and 70s would recognise, with its themes of many solitudes, youthful idealism, multicultural divisions, and the central riddle that Northrop Frye posed as uniquely ours, namely, “Where is here?”.
I think that the significance of THE STARLOST is greater than Ellison’s epitaph may suggest. The series tapped into Canada’s dream of the future – and its anxiety about its place in it. As a little ol’ nerd glued to the television, I felt the show's promise and mourned its spectacular failure. As I watched more SF TV, I became used to seeing the ghosts of Canada’s future on the screen. Kid-me watched an episode of the original Battlestar Galactica series which featured the derelict and destroyed buildings of Montréal’s Expo ’67 that I had visited three years before.
Much later, I caught a brief glimpse of the Toronto City Hall buildings featured in a montage seen through the Iconian Gate in a Star Trek: The Next Generation episode.
These traces that pop up now and again are what the futurist William Gibson called “the architecture of broken dreams,” that reminds us of the “Tomorrow That Never Was”.
And THE STARLOST itself has also had a fascinating afterlife, Ellison’s grave-pissing notwithstanding. There has been a surprising amount of fan love. STARLOST character portraits, redesigns and blueprints of the Ark, a comic book version of the original Ellison pilot episode by IDW, and even a Toronto sketch comedy troupe doing a STARLOST skit in 2010 “that most of the audience didn’t get” (This is so perfectly Canadian, it makes me a little teary).
Most touching for me as a fan is an online campaign set up in 2008 to raise funds to remake the series. In the words of the organizers:
We’ll rescue THE STARLOST from its Canadian made catastrophe, correct the mistakes of the past.
[Narrator: they didn’t].
Because this is the Canadian Tomorrow That Never Was. What the nerd-kids today might call an alternate timeline.
A future where Canadian knowhow, idealism, talent, and drive made television history in 1973.
If you are able to contact me, my email is dgvaldron@yahoo.ca
Greetings. I enjoyed your article on the Starlost. I've had very similar thoughts as to the program being a reflection of Canadian identity. In fact, I'm in process of writing a book - "Starlost and the Quest for Canadian Identity." My basic thesis is that the early 70s were a time of intense national introspection and a lot of this got reflected in the show.
I'm curious, you quoted Ed Richardson. I'm trying to look him up. Any idea how I might track him down.