The Production Guide
Script To Screen: Guardian Of Piri
by Martin Willey

Script To Screen

• Storyline
• Script: Hook
• Script: Conference
• Script: Landau
• Call sheet: Eagle
• Call sheet: Conference
• Call sheet: Guardian

---

As usual, Martin Landau doodled over the card cover of his copy of the script. He was also very unhappy with it, and annotated it with comments.

The inside cover has further comments

On the blue title page changing Barker's name to Davis from 6th May, Landau filled the page with notes. This is possibly a draft of a memo to be sent to the producers and writers. He picks out scene 94, the conference scene detailed earlier. This no doubt led to the yellow page changes on 16th May.

No fix!!! we aren't puppets. I'm fed up

The scripts should serve us - we shouldn't have to serve them
the dialogue is unactable-

We make it work - illogical as it is bad at best we come off bad-

good scenes play easily

Example:
Koenig is an ass in Scene 94
in continuing to lay down all the exposition (for story sake) when
he can plainly see, early on, what's going on - Is he an idiot -

Every scene has bumps

No matter what one does it is bound to be a crappy scene - & I'm a handy actor - I spend hours on a scene to make it passable

I've never had this much trouble in trying to make things plausible in my life - there is no way! it serves no one

Let's get some writers in here who write dialog in a progressive way to fill out the stories

We have none - It's impossible!

The yellow page changes for scene 94 are the result of Landau's complaints. The longer bits of exposition ("There is some kind of civilisation down there") are removed, while Koenig's dialogue is shorter and more forceful ("Cabbages!"). Helena and the others are more light hearted than the dialogue implies; in the original scene Koenig is trying to persuade Helena with rational arguments, but now he quickly realises they have been changed by the Guardian. Other scenes were changed throughout the episode, leaving the script full of different coloured pages- the original 64 white pages from 29 April were reduced first by 27 blue pages from 6 May, and after filming started on 7 May, two new pink pages on 9 May, three yellow pages on 16 May and three green pages on 22 May.