Space: 1999 - Production of Series One

Production of Series One

As the November 1973 start date approached, George Bellak fell out with Gerry Anderson over creative issues and left the production. Story consultant Christopher Penfold acted as head writer, bringing in American writer Edward di Lorenzo and Irish poet Johnny Byrne as script editors. Penfold reworked Bellak's opening episode into a one-hour draft first re-titled Turning Point, then finalised as Breakaway.

One week before live action filming commenced, Visual Effects Supervisor Brian Johnson and his team began work on the visual effects sequences for the first episode at Bray Studios on 5 November 1973. For the first six weeks, no usable footage resulted until the team discovered a dragging brake had affected film speed. Studio rehearsals commenced at Elstree Studios, Borehamwood on 12 November 1973. During filming of the first episode, it became apparent that the troubled Elstree was under the threat of imminent closure. One weekend, the company secretly relocated sets, props, costumes, etc., to the nearby Pinewood Studios, resulting in a union black-listing of the production.

Scheduled for ten days' filming, Breakaway overran an additional fifteen days. Lee Katzin was a perfectionist and demanded take after take of scenes; even coverage of reaction shots of the background extras required running a whole scene from beginning to end. His two-hour director's cut was assembled and sent to ITC New York for a viewing. Abe Mandell was horrified by the finished product. Anderson re-wrote several key scenes and, after three days of re-shoots, re-edited the pilot into a one-hour episode that appeased the fears of ITC. Katzin was not asked back to the programme after the filming of his second episode Black Sun, which also ran over schedule.

Scheduled for a twelve-month shoot, the twenty-four episodes took fifteen months to complete, with the production experiencing as many hazards as their fictional creations. Britain's mandatory three-day work week and the unplugging of the National Grid during the coal shortages of the early 1970s did not delay filming (as Pinewood had its own generators), but it affected film processing (the lab was an off-site contractor).

Group Three's commitment to its financial partner, Italian broadcasting company RAI, to include Italian actors in the cast also had to be addressed. Originally, two supporting roles were intended for Italian actors; with the casting of Nick Tate and Zienia Merton in those roles, a solution had to be worked out. Four of the later episodes produced (The Troubled Spirit, Space Brain, Dragon's Domain and The Testament of Arkadia) featured Italian guest artists.

The necessity to telex story outlines and scripts to New York for approval caused further production delays. The incessant re-writing this brought about eventually caused Christopher Penfold to resign during the shooting of Space Brain, after completing his writing commitment with the script Dragon's Domain. In a later interview, Johnny Byrne stated that "one episode they (New York) would ask us to speed things up, forcing us to cut out character development; then the next episode, they asked for more character moments, which would slow down the action; then they would complain there weren't enough pretty girls in another." Years later, Byrne and Penfold would agree that the process they worked under made "good scripts less than they had been" and forced them to waste time re-writing "bad scripts to make them acceptable". Byrne remained until the end of production; his last task writing filler scenes for the desperately short The Last Enemy and a re-shoot for the troublesome Space Brain. The scenes re-mounted for The Last Enemy concluded principal photography on 28 February 1975.