Episode Guide Episode Guide
The first episode, Breakaway, filmed for an exceptionally long time (26 days, against an originally planned 12 days). Much later (February 21-26), 4 days of re-shooting were done.
Gerry Anderson told how the original episode was too long, and was re-cut. From the scripts, and later the sound recordings, fans have speculated about a movie-length version of the episode. The facts are uncertain.
There were several versions of the script. The script titled Turning Point ("final shooting script", dated 5 November, 1973) unusually has timings for every scene, which add up to 45 minutes (a little under the 52 minutes of a standard episode).
A new version of the script, titled Breakaway ("final shooting script", dated 22 November 1973) also has timings. There are no major changes to the previous script. This was the script used for filming from 28 November 1973.
The main differences in the shooting scripts to the final episode (i.e. the scenes that were cut and refilmed in February):
From filming records, we know there were no additional scenes added until the February re-shoots (although lines of dialogue would routinely be altered).
The first call sheet was dated 29th November, and allocated 12 days to film the entire episode (most episodes were allocated 10-12 days).
Revised shooting schedules would be published, extending the shoot to 26 days. Lee Katzin was an experienced director, who was used to the fast pace of American television series. He had worked with the Landaus on Mission Impossible. Why did they over-run the schedule so badly?
Breakaway was a pilot episode, so they were willing to invest more effort (including 2 days of rehearsal, not included in the filming schedule). There were some technical problems, including with TV monitors on film, that slowed filming. Katzin was used to American film studios which would run into the evenings or even weekends. British crews would insist on a fixed 9 hour day, with tea-breaks. But none of these explain why the filming was so slow.
The next episode that Katzin filmed also over-ran: Black Sun took 16 days. This was the last episode he directed.
From cast and crew accounts, and directly from the sound recordings, we know Katzin filmed a lot of takes of every scene. Some of the different takes were technical, maybe simply the actors got lines wrong, or lighting or sound were not quite right. Some of this would have been "coverage"- filming a scene from several angles (wide angles, close-ups) so the editor had material to cut the scene.
Katzin had recently been filming feature films, not television. The pace of film production is much slower than television, and directors typically film a lot more coverage than television. Robert E. Wood in To Everything That Might Have Been (2022) p189-194 proposes that the lengthy filming was because Katzin was purposefully making a movie version, perhaps under instruction from Gerry or Sylvia Anderson.
If this was a deliberate plan by the director and producers, it wasn't known to most of the crew or cast, who found the pace remarkably slow.
The slowness of the filming doesn't mean more scenes or plot were filmed, only that the scenes were filmed with more care than a normal television episode. While the director could have made the pacing of scenes slow, he didn't add extra scenes.
The initial "assembly cut" made by the editor is often too long. When creating the fine cut, the editor will routinely cut small scenes and trim others to improve the pace of the episode (or extend it by introducing more reaction shots or run transitional shots longer). During this process, the director will be involved, guiding the editor.
During filming, the scenes are filmed out of sequence, and when put back in story order by the editor, problems may become obvious. The plot or pacing can be impossible to fix in the cutting room. This happened on several episodes in Space: 1999
With lots of footage, and a director keen to showcase the cinematic look of the series, the first cuts of Breakaway were around 20 minutes over-long. Again, this is not unusual, but it seems that after filming, the production crew considered making a "theatrical" version of the episode.
It was not unusual for a pilot episode to be longer than a standard episode, or to publicise the series with limited cinema releases or television movie versions. The script of Breakaway was definitely not intended to be longer than 50 minutes, but with the longer cut they could have reconsidered.
Within a year they would make a cinema version. It was released on 14 January 1975 to Italian cinemas (Spazio 1999, long before the rest of the world saw the series). It was also sold to Greece. ITC would later make movie-length compilations made for television and cinema (Destination Moonbase Alpha and others). It is possible there were similar ideas at the start of 1974.
This is the fragmentary evidence of what happened:
'The New York office assured me that Lee Katzin was "the best pilot director in America",' remembers Gerry. 'The schedule to shoot the first episode was ten days, but it overran and we were soon tens of thousands of pounds over budget. Katzin finished editing his footage and screened the completed 'Breakaway' for Gerry. 'It ran for over two hours,' he remembers, 'and I thought it was awful. He went back to America, and I sent a cutting copy of the episode to Abe Mandell. Abe phoned me in a fit of depression, saying, "Oh my God it's terrible - what are we going to do?" I wrote a lot of new scenes myself, and these were filmed over three days. I'm pretty sure I directed them myself. I then totally recut the episode to 50 minutes, integrating the new footage.'
The intention initially was that Breakaway would be a standard 50 minute episode.
We can conclude that discussions were made around the end of January 1974 about a theatrical version, and by the start of February they decided a regular episode length was required.
Contents copyright Martin Willey