The Buzz - Highlander Worldwide

Highlander DownUnder
The Official Highlander Fan Club of Australia
The Buzz
The newsletter of Highlander DownUnder
Contents printed on 80% recycled paper
Issue 17
December 2000
ISSN 1441-8894
The Summer Edition
We want to welcome you to Highlander DownUnder and thank you for being
part of our Australian Highlander community
What can you expect from us?
Clubs and Sites
HLDU is managed by people who love Highlander and all that it has come to represent in our lives. Three words
sum up what we stand for - Quality, Reliability and Responsiveness. We are very conscious of being ambassadors
and take our responsibility seriously.
Aeternus Methos
The French fanzine on Highlander
Fanzine on line : http://www.aeternus-methos.com
The Peter Hudson web page
http://www.geocities.com/Hollywood/Picture/6098/index.
html
Roger Bellon web page
http://www.belchant.com
The Stan Kirsch web page
http://www.stankirsch.com
Roberta Brown web site
http://www.westsidefencing.com/stagecombat.html
The Official Highlander Site
http://www.highlander-official.com
For delivery to Australia, New Zealand, Asia & Europe:
Highlander DownUnder, PO Box 198, Brisbane Albert St QLD 4002 Australia
Please make cheques in Australian currency payable to Highlander DownUnder
The Jim Byrnes Fan Club
http:diversions.simplenet.com/jbfc
Adrian Paul web page
www.adrianpaul.net
For delivery to Canada and the USA:
Contact Sonja at [email protected] or PO Box 198, Brisbane Albert St QLD 4002 Australia to discuss payment &
delivery. HLDU accepts US personal checks, PayPal, international drafts.
Anthony De Longis web page
The Anthony De Longis webpage: www.delongis.com
Valentine Pelka Fan Club
http://www.vpfc.org/
VPFC, PO Box 528306, Flushing NY 11352-8306, USA.
VPFC, c/o Carol Looby, 152 Otley Road, Headingley,
Leeds LS16 5JX, United Kingdom.
Membership to HLDU is free. To join go to : http://www.hldu.org
The club email list is a moderated lis t. The club retains the right to approve or reject applications and members.
The Buzz is available free online. http://www.hldu.org
For those who prefer to receive a hardcopy:
Australian members $5 per issue
Members from Norfolk Island, New Zealand, PNG, Asia and the Australian Antarctic Territory $8AUD per issue
Members from USA & Canada $5USD per issue
Members from the UK & Europe £4 per issue
For membership fee and method of payment for members from other countries, send a message to: [email protected].
The Elizabeth Gracen web page
Http://www.elizabethgracen.org
NEWS FLASH FOR OFF-LINE MEMBERS
While the majority of HLDU members are on-line & therefore have email access to the club, members who rely on
The Buzz for club & Highlander news can be left with long gaps between contact. In order to overcome this, we’ve
introduced the HLDU news sheet. This will be a photocopied 2 page A4 interim update designed to help everyone
keep in touch. Its content will be drawn from news and discussion on the HLDU email list. The news sheet will be
distributed by snail mail every 4-6 weeks.
The James Horan web page
http://www.jameshoran.com
Gillian Horvath web page
http://hometown.aol.com/webgill/index.html
If you don’t have access to email and would like to receive the news sheet, just write to Sonja at
PO Box 198, Brisbane Albert St QLD 4002
Paul Johansson web page
http://www.pauljohansson.com/
The Buzz: Issue 18
Front cover art: Photo by Pam Laity © HLDU
Back cover art: HLDU4 montage by Sonja van den Ende. Photos by HLDU members including:
Jody Anderson, Peter Mayze, Jenny Dodd, Nancye Elliott, Kevin Sheehan
Stage data Pg 27: Monica Simms
Lisa Howard Fan Club (official)(online club)
email: [email protected]
http://www.lisahoward.net
Highlander DownUnder
The Official Highlander Fan Club of Australia
PO Box 198, Brisbane Albert Street QLD 4002, Australia
http://www. hldu.org
[email protected]
[email protected]
2
Summer Edition
The
The Buzz
Buzz
The Buzz
Maureen Russell web page
http://pweb.netcom.com/~maureenr/
Marcus Testory Appreciation Society:
http://members.tripod.com/~MTAS/index.html
Peter Wingfield Fan Club
http://www.pwfc.org/
PO Box 1294, Pepperell, MA 01463, USA
Club Merchandise
AT LAST!! Our own
Proceeds from club merchandise will go toward staging HLDU4
Highlander DownUnder Club Shirt!
Welcome
Carmel and Sonja
Hi Everyone
Celtic and Australian symbols combine perfectly to represent the international
flavour of our club. In the colours of Australia (gold ink on a rich green shirt).
Artwork by the incomparable Pagan. L, XL and XXL available
$15.00 AUD or $15.00US (Prices include airmail postage)
Highlander DownUnder Carry Bag!
Death to all turtle -choking, plastic bags!!! Natural calico carry bag. Ideal for
shopping, study books. 33cm wide x 46cm long (13”x18”) with side & bottom
gussets. Shoulder strap. Deep green logo on natural, creamy calico.
$3.00 AUD or $3.00USD (Prices include airmail postage)
Highlander DownUnder 3 Convention Shirts
Another superb design by Pagan and another great con shirt from HLDU.
Delicate and intricate linework (the graphic at left doesn’t do it justice). Back
design as shown. Front design, smaller circle with HLDU3 over pocket area
(no pocket).
Burgundy ink on white or snow marle. Med, Large and XLarge available.
Aust $18 ; NZ: $20Aust ; USA: $15US (Prices include airmail postage)
Methos: What Game Is He Playing?
Methos - the ultimate enigma. Indeed, what game is Methos playing?
Does even he know?
Peter Wingfield discusses Methos and his motivations
with audience members at Highlander DownUnder 2
Well it has certainly been an action packed year for Highlander DownUnder and for Highlander in general. Despite the
Series’ ending some three years ago Highlander fandom is still rich with solid friendships and all the elements of a true
global community. It is only natural that some would pass on to other fandoms however Highlander is the type of show that
attracts an intense loyalty amongst its followers.
There were a number of well attended Conventions throughout the year - Gathering 5 in March, in Denver saw a solid
HLDU contingent in attendance. It was there that we inaugurated the HLDU stall and who will ever forget our hotel room
filled with fans all stitching and cutting and gluing - but mainly laughing and chattering. The stall was a highlight of the Con
and helped raise much needed funds for HLDU. Our own con - HLDU3 followed in April. We were very disappointed when
Peter Wingfield couldn't attend, but true to form, Peter offered to approach Elizabeth Gracen for us. Elizabeth, Valentine,
Anthony and Maureen were a delight at HLDU3. May 2000 saw HLDU at Legacy in Washington where we again made
contact with Peter and Elizabeth and ran another very successful HLDU stall. The by now famous Lady Gray patchwork
quilt was a centrepiece and continues to attract a great deal of interest. Yes - we will be auctioning it one day!
HLDU offered to help Elizabeth Gracen with the development and launch of her Official web site (http://www.
elizabethgracen.org) and this was launched in October, 2000..
During 2000, we took the club into a new direction by putting into practice what we both firmly believe about fandom - that
it is a means to an end, not an end in itself. By this we mean that fandom provides a wonderful opportunity for
inclusiveness - friendships, travel, support, intelligent discussion - and fun. As a result we abolished all club dues and opened
up membership of HLDU. Members need only pay dues if they desire a hard copy of The Buzz. With the support of Jean
McArthur The Buzz is now on line and all copies will eventually be mounted in full zine format on the web. We also
temporarily lost our minds and decided to run HLDU4 twelve months ahead of schedule. This is no mean feat as each
convention costs well over A$50,000 to mount (particularly as the Australian rouble continues to plummet, making every
overseas airfare and appearance fee double the cost). But this is where Highlander fandom comes into its own and we have
been overwhelmed by the generosity of those amongst you who have donated wonderful items to be auctioned, who have
purchased the items or who have simply been there giving us such strong support.
We can’t finish this year without mentioning the appearance of Duncan MacLeod, Methos and Joe on the big screen. HLDU
was in LA in force to support its release in early September and we remain hopeful that it will make it to Aussie screens in
March 2001. In this issue you will read some of those adventures in LA. While in LA, I asked Bill Panzer whether he really
reads The Buzz (which we dutifully send to him, along with our quarterly reports) and he laughed and told me that indeed he
does and that he had read our last one on a flight to Hawaii. So, despite the paucity of issues throughout 2000, we remain
very proud of The Buzz. You can expect to see more regular issues in 2001. Our next issue will be focused on Highlander:
Endgame & will feature interviews and articles.
We continue to derive enormous enjoyment from Highlander, from all of you in HLDU and from the people who brought
Highlander to our screens for so many years. See you all in Brisbane in April for HLDU4.?
1hr 05min Available in PAL and NTSC
$20AUST, $20US, £12.00 (all prices include airmail postage)
Released with permission from Peter Wingfield
Thanks
The continued support we receive from Highlander friends is always a source of inspiration! This issue we have a fantastic
mix of articles, trip reports, reviews and information. We think you’ll enjoy reading then all as much as we did. Highlander
is as rich in discussion as ever and in this issue we owe thanks to some wonderful authors including Meredith, Big John,
Athena and Jean for insightful articles. Our thanks to Roger Bellon for his generous interview. Thanks too to Erilyn and
Nancye for sharing their Highlander adventures, to Karen, Marilyn and Aine for their reviews and to Chris for her fun story.
You may not all know it, but Chris is an accomplished chess player who has competed at high levels. Thanks also to Taselby
and a special vote of gratitude to Karen for her amazing research into where else the actors we’ve come to know on the show
may be found. Karen’s article, Know the Face, will continue in future issues, as will her useful magazine reference. Thanks
also to Paul M who helped buy and ship our new colour printer and to Heather W for letting us load her with last minute
work and delivering in record speed.
Duncan's Journey: One Fan's Perspective
A video exploration of the epic journey that is
Duncan MacLeod of the Clan MacLeod.
Filmed on location in Scotland and Paris.
Highlander images used with permission from Davis Panzer Productions
Now complete with bonus Bloopers!
Available in PAL & NTSC Total running time: 1hr 20min.
$15.00AUD or $15.00US (includes airmail postage)
Sonja and Carmel
Conceived and
presented by
Carmel Macpherson.
But most of all, a huge round of applause goes to Sonia (the other one) Hines for major assistance with editing. What a
fantastic woman! This issue would have been the poorer without her.
Enjoy this issue! :^)
30
Summer Edition
The Buzz
The Buzz
Summer Edition
3
Magazine Watch
Australia's fourth Highlander Convention
Cinescape
May/June 2000
Vol 6 No 3
Vol 6 No 6
Highlander DownUnder is pleased to announce appearances by:
Elizabeth Gracen
James Horan
Join us for yet another a great weekend of Highlander interaction
Panel Discussions, Workshops, Guest Presentations, Autographs,
Displays, Costumes, Competitions, Merchandise and much more.
A con with a leaning toward discussion and participation.
Friday Evening Cocktails
$25 (Aust)
Saturday Evening
Queen of Spades River Cruise
$45 (Aust)
International rates are available, but are not listed here as they are too closely determined by foreign exchange rates.
International attendees requiring assistance with payment methods should contact HLDU.
News
Adrian Paul portrays a modern day vampire in the movie,
A Breed Apart. (Sony Screen Gems in association with
MPCA). This was filmed in Budapest & features Bai Ling
amongst the cast. He has also signed a non exclusive
contract with Lionsgate Films for a feature film plus a
television series of his choosing.
seen in the cinema release. The B side will an unrefined cut
that explores the movie’s evolution.
Peter Wingfield has revived h is role as Tanath in a second
Stargate SG1 episode. He has also done an episode of First
Wave which was written by David Tynan. Watch for Jim
Byrnes in the same series.
Stan Kirsch has done an episode of Family Law
Highlander: Endgame grossed almost 13 Million in the US
in 8 weeks. Hoyts are advertising the Australian release on
22 March 2001. Endgame will be released on an A&B
sided DVD. The DVD version will contain material not
4
Myles Ferguson, who played Kenny, passed away in
September 2000 following a road accident.
Doug Aarniokoski, director of Highlander:Endgame, has
signed a 2-year, first look deal with Dimension Films.
Summer Edition
#102
Movies - Immortal Beloved - HL: Endgame
Sequel Special - little bit on HL: Endgame
Advert for Highlander: An Evening at Joe’s
News - Highlander: A Celtic Opera
Movies.com - Highlander
Faces of the Future - Donnie Yen
TV Preview - Queen of Swords
There Can Only Be 2 - HL: Endgame
Cult Times
#54
The Hunger - 1 ep directed by Russell Mulcahy
(Director of Highlander 1 & 2)
#57
Interview with Lisa Howard
Dreamwatch
#68
Film News - There Can Only Be One
Empire
#130
Film Review - Joan of Arc - starring Richard Ridings
#132
Top 20 Movies ‘in the works’ - No 17 HL: Endgame
#134
Interview with Dougray Scott (S4 TaGD)
Film Review
Oct 1990
Highlander II
Dec 1993
Interview with Mario van Peebles
Flicks
July 2000
Jason Isaacs (S1 Lady and the Tiger)
Impact
#98
Highlander Convention Report - Wolf359: Legacy
HL: Endgame - Interview with Donnie Yen
#100
Soundtracks - Queen’s A Kind of Magic
Advert for Legacy 2000
#101
The Gathering 5 Highlander Convention
All Guest appearances are subject to professional commitments
Registration:
$175 (Aust)
Single Day Rates are available
Friday (PM only)
$ 50 (Aust)
Saturday
$ 90 (Aust)
Sunday
$ 90 (Aust)
[email protected]
The articles listed under the Film Review and Starburst magazines are all old issues. I thought I would include them as Highlander:
Endgame is currently about to be released and these particular articles relate to Highlander movies.
Mercure Hotel, Brisbane, 6—8 April 2001
Peter Wingfield
Karen Scott
The Buzz
Ranger (1998), Nash Bridges (1997), Conan (1998), The
Adventures of Brisco County Jr (1993), Matlock (1987),
MacGyver (1987), The A-Team (1986), The Twilight Zone (1986)
Other HL Episodes: Little Tin God (Lorca) (1996)
Jay Brazeau (Commissioner Comanski)
Movies: Cheaters (2001), Best in Show (2000), Double Jeopardy
(1999), Snow Falling on Cedars (1999), Urban Safari (1996),
Andre (1994), Intersection (1994), Little Women (1994), Cool
Runnings (1993), We’re No Angels (1989), The Melting Pot
(1975)
TV Movies: Trucks (1997), Bye Bye Birdie (1995)
TV Series/Guest Spots: Voyage of the Unicorn (2000), Cold
Squad (1998), The Odyssey (1992), Booker (1989), Seven Days
(1998), Millennium (1999). Poltergeist: The Legacy (1998),
Stargate SG1 (1998), Sliders (1995), The X-Files (1994), Party of
Five (1994), MacGyver (1990)
Other HL Episodes: Freefall (1992)
Alf Humphreys (Janitor)
Movies: Robin of Locksley (1996), Bedroom Eyes (1984), First
Blood (1982), Improper Channels (1981), My Bloody Valentine
(1981)
TV Movies: Life-size (2000), A Child’s Wish (1997), Shadow of
a Doubt (1995), While Justice Sleeps (1994), Don’t Talk to
Strangers (1994)
TV Series/Guest Spots: Family Law (1999), Millennium (1999),
The X-Files (1997), The Sentinel (1996), Sliders (1996), My
Secret Identity (1991), The Twilight Zone (1988)
Other HL Episodes: The Lamb (Frank Brody) (1994)
Mountain Men
Marc Singer (Caleb)
Movies: LAPD: To Protect and to Serve (2001), Lancelot:
Guardian of Time (1997), Beastmaster III: The Eye of Braxus
(1995), Savate (Fighter) (1994), Silk Degrees (1994), Sweet
Justice (1992), Beastmaster 2: through the Portal of Time (1991),
In the Cold of the Night (1989), The Beastmaster (1982)
TV Movies: Paper Dolls (1982), Taming of the Shrew (1976),
Columbo: Double Shock (1973), Cyrano de Bergerac (1972)
TV Series/Guest Spots: The Young and the Restless (1999),
The Buzz
Summer Edition
News - Queen of Swords
News - HL: Endgame
The Legacy Highlander Convention in Washington
#103
OK
#203
AP and CL at charity party with The Duchess of York
New Weekly
19/06/2000
The Dinner Game - Alexandra Vandernoot
Starburst
#152
Previewing Highlander 2 - The Quickening
#153
Interview with Christopher Lambert
Starlog
#279
Interview with Adrian Paul
TV Zone
#124
Andrew Jackson (The Darkness & Raven: Crime and
Punishment)
#125
Cult Television World - snippet on HL: Endgame
Arabian Nights—Dougray Scott (S4 TAGD) and
Hugh Quarshie (Highlander 1)
#126
Cult Television World - snippet on Highlander: A Celtic
Opera
#129
Interview with Peter DeLuise (S1 Family Tree)
TS38
Interview with Peter DeLuise (S1 Family Tree)
Interview with Don S. Davis (S2 Return of Amanda)
Interview with Michael Shanks (S2 The Zone)
Interview with Christina McQuarrie - Costume Designer
X-Pose
#42
Strange Happenings - Highlander: Titles Without End
#48
On the set of HL: Endgame
Stargate SG1 'Crossroads' (Peter Wingfield).
First Wave 'Night Falls' (Paul Johansson).
Dallas (1995), ‘V’ (1984), Roots: The Next Generations (1979),
Honey I Shrunk the Kids: The TV Show (1998), Batman: The
Animated Series (1992), Murder She Wrote (1989), Simon and
Simon (1988), The Twilight Zone (1988), Hawaii Five-O (1974),
Planet of the Apes (1974)
Deadly Medicine
Joe Pantoliano (Dr Wilder)
Movies: Like Cats and Dogs (2001), A Better Way to Die (2000),
Ready to Rumble (2000), Black and White (1999), The Matrix
(1999), US Marshals (1998), The Immortals (1995), Baby’s Day
Out (1994), Calendar Girl (1993), Three of Hearts (1993), The
Fugitive (1993), Used People (1992), Midnight Run (1988),
Empire of the Sun (1987), La Bamba (1987), Running Scared
(1986), The Goonies (1985), Eddie and the Cruisers (1983), Risky
Business (1983)
TV Movies: L.A Law (1986)
TV Series/Guest Spots: Godzilla: The Series (1998), Hercules
(1998), The Outer Limits (1999), NYPD Blue (1995), Tales from
the Crypt (1989), Amazing Stories (1986), Hill Street Blues
(1984), M*A*S*H (1981)
The Sea Witch
Stephen Macht (Alexei Voshin)
Movies: Swallows (1999), Touch Me (1997), Amityville: It’s
About Time (1992), Graveyard Shift (1990), The Monster Squad
(1987), Agatha Christie’s A Caribbean Mystery (1983)
TV Movies: Samson and Delilah (1984), Enola Gay: The Men,
The Mission, The Atomic Bomb (1980), Amelia Earhart (1976)
TV Series/Guest Spots: One Life to Live (1996), Sidney
Sheldon’s Memories of Midnight (1991), Cagney and Lacey
(1985), George Washington (1984), Knots Landing (1982),
American Dream (1981), Sliders (1999), The Practice (1999),
Walker, Texas Ranger (1998), Melrose Place (1997), Babylon 5
(1995), Kung Fu: The Legend Continues (1995), Viper (1994),
Murder She Wrote (1993), Star Trek: Deep Space Nine (1993),
Alfred Hitchcock Presents (1986), Scarecrow and Mrs King
(1985), Hill Street Blues (1985), The Six Million Dollar Man
(1977), Kojak (1976)
Brooklyn Brown (Melinda)
Movies: Once in a Blue Moon (1995)
29
I Know the Face—Must Have Seen It On Highlander
Season One
Vancouver Episodes (1)
The Gathering
Richard Moll (Slan Quince)
Movies: No Place Like Home (2001), Monkey Business (1998),
Me and My Gods (1997), Jingle all the Way (1996), The Secret
Agent Club (1996), The Flintstones (1994), Loaded Weapon 1
(1993), Sword and the Sorcerer (1982), Cataclysm (1980)
TV Movies: Casper Meets Wendy (1998), Bret Maverick (1981),
The Jericho Mile (1979)
TV Series & Guest Spots: Batman: Gotham Knights (1997),
Batman: The Animated Series (1992), Night Court (1984),
Sabrina, The Teenage Witch (1997), Dr Quinn, Medicine Woman
(1997), Married… With Children (1996), Weird Science (1996),
Baywatch (1995), Babylon 5 (1995), Hercules: The Legendary
Journeys (1995), Due South (1994), My Two Dads (1987), The ATeam (1984), The Dukes of Hazzard (1983), Remington Steele
(1983), The Fall Guy (1981), Mork and Mindy (1981), Laverne
and Shirley (1981), Buck Rogers in the 25th Century (1980),
Happy Days (1979), The Facts of Life (1979), Welcome Back
Kotter (1978), The Love Boat (1977).
Wendell Wright (Sgt Powell)
Movies: Jack’s Back (1988), Cloak and Dagger (1984), The
Howling (1980), The Onion Field (1979), All the President’s Men
(1976)
TV Movies: Stingray (1985), Marathon (1980)
TV Series/Guest Spots: Days of our Lives (1985), Love and
Money (1999), The West Wing (1999), Party of Five (1999),
Frasier (1999), Taxi (1982), The Jeffersons (1978), Good Times
(1977)
Other HL Episodes: Road Not Taken (1992), Innocent Man
(1992)
Family Tree
Peter Deluise (Clinch)
Movies: Southern Heart (1999), Between the Sheets (1998),
Attack of the 52' Women (1994), Rescue Me (1993), Free Ride
(1986), Winners Take All (1986), Hot Stuff (1979)
TV Series/Guest Spots: SeaQuest DSV (1995), 21 Jump Street
(1987), Stargate SG1 (1997), The Outer Limits (1998), 3rd Rock
From the Sun (1998), Friends (1996), Booker (1989), The Facts of
Life (1985), The Dom DeLuise Show (1968)
The Road Not Taken
Soon-Teck Oh (Kiem Sun)
Movies: Last Mountain (2000), Mulan (1998), Beverly Hills Ninja
(1997), Death Wish 4: The Crackdown (1987), Steele Justice
(1987), Missing in Action 2: The Beginning (1985), The Final
Countdown (1980), The Man With the Golden Gun (1974)
TV Movies: The President’s Men (2000), Cagney and Lacey:
Together Again (1995), Last Flight Out (1990), The Return of
Charlie Chan (1979), The Reluctant Heroes (1971)
TV series/Guest Spots: Kung Fu: The Legend Continues (1992),
Hawaii Five-O (1968), Seven Days (1998), Stargate SG1 (1997),
Touched by an Angel (1997), Baywatch Nights (1996),Time Trax
(1994), Murder She Wrote (1993), Tour of Duty (1989), Simon
and Simon (1988), MacGyver (1988), The A-Team (1986), T J
Hooker (1986), Hill Street Blues (1985), The Greatest American
Hero (1983), Tales of the Gold Monkey (1982), M*A*S*H
(1982), Magnum P.I. (1981), Logan’s Run (1977), Kung Fu
(1974)
Dusti n Nguyen (Chu Lin)
Movies: Virtuosity (1995), Heaven and Earth (1993), Rapid Fire
(1992), Sunset Strip (1985)
TV Series/Guest Spots: V.I.P (1998), Phantom 2040 (1994),
SeaQuest DSV (1995), 21 Jump Street (1987), Kung Fu: The
Legend Continues (1995), VR5 (1995), Murder She Wrote (1993),
The Commish (1992), The A-Team (1986), Magnum P.I. (1985)
Other HL Episodes: Revenge of the Sword (1993)
Christianne Hirt (Angie)
Movies: Firestorm (1998), The Accused (1988)
TV Movies: Born Too Soon (1993), Rookies (1990), Brotherly
Love (1985), Secrets of a Married Man (1984)
TV Series/Guest Spots: Lonesome Dove: The Series (1992), The
Outer Limits (1995), The Commish (1993), 21 Jump Street
(1991), Neon Rider (1990), MacGyver (1989), The Twilight Zone
(1988), The Beachcombers (1985), Cold Squad (1998)
28
Karen Scott
An Interview With Roger Bellon
[email protected]
Other HL Episodes: Revenge is Sweet (1992)
Innocent Man
Vincent Schiavelli (Leo Atkins)
Movies: American Saint (2000), Man on the Moon (1999),
Tomorrow Never Dies (1997), The Beautician and the Beast
(1997), The People vs Larry Flint (1996), Batman Returns (1992),
Another You (1991), Ghost (1990), Valmont (1989), Time Out
(1988), Better Off Dead (1985), Amadeus (1984), The Adventures
of Buckaroo Banzai Across the 8th Dimension (1984), Night Shift
(1982), Butch and Sundance: The Early Days (1979), The Frisco
Kid (1979), An Unmarried Woman (1978), The Happy Hooker
(1975), One Flew Over the Cuckoos Nest (1975), The Great
Gatsby (1974)
TV Movies: The Whipping Boy (1994), Fairy Tale Theatre:
Pinocchio (1983), Rescue From Gilligan’s Island (1978)
TV Series/Guest S pots: Sabrina: The Teenage Witch (2000),
Dharma and Greg (1999), Buffy the Vampire Slayer (1998), The
X-Files (1995), M.A.N.T.I.S (1995), Batman: The Animated
Series (1993), Eerie, Indiana (1991), Star Trek: The Next
Generation (1988), Matlock (1987), MacGyver (1987), The Fall
Guy (1985), Moonlighting (1985), Night Court (1985), Taxi
(1983), Hart to Hart (1979), Knots Landing (1979), Charlie’s
Angels (1978), WKRP in Cincinnati (1978), Starsky and Hutch
(1977)
John Novack (Sheriff Crowley)
Movies: Legends of the Fall (1994)
TV Movies: Out of Time (2000), Crimes of Passion: Nobody
Lives Forever (1998), The Call of the Wild: Dog of the Yukon
(1997), Doctor Who (1996), Yes Virginia, There is a Santa Clause
(1991), Death of the Incredible Hulk (1990), Trial of the
Incredible Hulk (1989)
TV Series/Guest Spots: Born Free (1998), Santa Barbara (1991),
Crusade (1999), The Outer Limits (1999), First Wave (1998),
Poltergeist: The Legacy (1997), Sliders (1996), Kung Fu: The
Legend Continues (1996), MacGyver (1989), Alfred Hitchcock
Presents (1989), Wiseguy (1989), War of the Worlds (1989),
Twilight Zone (1988)
Other HL Episodes: Haunted ( Kragen) (1996), The
Revolutionary (Mason) (1994)
Amanda Wyss (Randi)
Movies: Bella! Bella! Bella! (2000), Marry Me or Die (1998),
Strategic Command (1997), Black Magic Woman (1991), Desert
Steele (1989), To Die For (aka Dracula: The Love Story) (1989),
Silverado (1985), A Nightmare on Elm Street (1984)
TV Movies: Something in Common (1986), A Killer in the
Family (1983)
TV Series/Guest Spots: Family Law (1999), Profiler (1999), ER
(1998), NYPD Blue (1996), Walker, Texas Ranger (1995),
Murder She Wrote (1995), Quantum Leap (1991), Cheers (1986),
St. Elsewhere (1986), The Powers of Matthew Star (1983)
Other HL Episodes: Bad Day at Building A (1992), Deadly
Medicine (1992), Eyewitness (1992), Band of Brothers (1992)
Free Fall
Joan Jett (Felicia Martins)
Movies: Edgeplay (1999), Boogie Boys (1997), Not Bad for a Girl
(1996), Talking About the Weather (1994), Light of Day (1987)
TV Series/Guest Spots: Walker, Texas Ranger (2000), The
Roseanne Show (2000), Ellen (1997)
Eli Gabay (Devereux)
Movies: Intersection (1994)
TV Movies: Sidney Sheldon’s A Stranger in the Mirror (1993),
Sherlock Holmes Returns (1993), Taming of the Shrew (1988)
TV Series/Guest Spots: Dragon Tales (1999), Cold Squad
(1998), Seven Days (2000), Stargate SG1 (1999), Sliders (1996),
The Commish (1994), Kung Fu: The Legend Continues (1993)
Bad Day At Building A
Andrew Divoff (Bryan Slade)
Movies: Lockdown (2000), Stealth Fighter (1999), Crossfire
(1998), Air Force One (1997), The Random Factor (1995),
Extreme Justice (1993), Toy Soldiers (1991), Another 48 Hours
(1990), The Hunt for Red October (1990)
TV Movies: Tarzan: The Epic Adventures (1996)
TV Series/Guest Spots: Martial Law (1998), Walker, Texas
Summer Edition
The Buzz
Carmel Macpherson
Carmel:
I won’t pretend I have any big long,
detailed questions, because I’m not a journalist, I’m a fan of
the series, and one of the wonderful things for me about
Highlander has been the really almost subliminal levels that
are brought to the show when you first watch it. I
remember being very impressed with the quality, and the
music is very integral to me. You as the composer, I think,
are probably more in tune almost than anybody with
Duncan MacLeod’s emotional journey. So, as well as the
Celtic opera which I adore, I would love to hear how you
see Duncan MacLeod’s emotional journey, and maybe even
by reference to some of the particular episodes or… I can
certainly talk about bits that are my favourites.
Bellon:
Well, that’s going to be hard for me
because you probably know more about the show than I
do. It’s very hard. I can recall certain episodes. When you
score, it’s very distinctive, so I think it was a right match to
hire me for the show because I think I instinctively fitted in
to what was going on. You really don’t have time to
analyse every show. The production schedule was I would
get a show on a Tuesday here from Canada, and on the
Wednesday we would spot the film with Don Paonessa over the phone. I would watch it and we would decide
where the music goes, and what style we would talk about,
which only happened starting in the fourth season. Then I
would have to send a tape of finished music up the next
Tuesday, so I would have to write it and record it. I would
usually spend two days with musicians in the studio.
You couldn’t sit there and think about the character. It
was very instinctual. You’d have to sort of go for it. The
hard part of the show, but also the saving grace for a
composer, is every episode is different, as opposed to
working on some of those big shows that have a palette that
never changes. If you watch those shows, the music is
exactly the same, except for a little cue here and there from
show to show.
In Highlander, the bible was “they’re each little
movies”, so they cannot be the same. One show was tango,
one show was Spanish, one show was Chinese, one show
was a western. They’re flash-backs, so they had to be all
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Summer Edition
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completely different, so it made it so that no themic ideas
would carry from one show to the next. It’s not like you
could have built up a stash of musical stuff and just gone
“This is it”. Every week was started from the bottom up,
you know, and you had to contend with the present and the
past. The past was almost easier because it was Chinese, it
was western, so it was very defined. The present was the
harder one because since it’s today, is it symphonic? Is it
electronic? Is it rock ‘n roll? Is it not? What is it? And that
was almost more of a challenge, writing almost a dramatic
underscore to the “cop” part. It’s a problem-solver cop
show, is what it is. And that was the trickier part and the
part that we would talk more about, because if you’re in a
western, it’s kind of an obvious way - you’re doing a tango
or you’re doing whatever.
I’ve worked on a lot of stuff and this show was very
unique in the way that it was based in three countries as you
know - in France, Canada and here. I was here, and David
Abramowitz was here. The post-production and some of the
shooting was in Canada and the rest of the shooting was in
France. So when it started, I really had complete
independence. I saw Bill Panzer and, at that time, Garry
Goodman, who was the first year’s producer, one time for
the first show, and the next time I actually saw anybody
was maybe three seasons later! We would talk, but there
wasn’t the formality of getting together for every show and
discussing it because the logistics were wrong. So I would
just do what I thought, and I always thought that I was
overwriting music -- I mean, I was putting too much in -but because I wasn’t sure of the sound effects, I was just
writing more than I needed to. I thought that it would come
out when they dubbed the show, when they actually mixed
it. But no, they put it all in.
The odd part about the show was about the third or
fourth season there was a general concept that there was too
much music in the show, which I shared. And to the last
show, it never got cut down. Even though we were always
complaining that there was too much music, it’s the type of
show that needed music, and it always had thirty or thirtyfive minutes. There might have been half a dozen shows on
the 119 that didn’t have a lot, and they would have had
nineteen or twenty minutes, which is still a lot. So it was
kind of a time pressure because you had to deliver, but
there was also lots of music to do, lots of different styles
and it was always very high quality. It was very highly
orchestrated. It always had a lot of live musicians which
most shows nowadays don’t, so you had to actually record
them and mix them.
By the end of the run of the thing, I was just completely
burnt, you know. I mean I loved it, I loved it, it was
fantastic every week having a writing assignment because
most of composing or writing is doing it. It’s really true
what they say about 99% perspiration, 1% inspiration. The
more you write, the better you get. From that point of view
it was fantastic, but at the end it got a little overwhelming
because I had other assignments at the same time that I was
5
doing Highlander. Not always -- most of the show was
really the main focal point of my writing, but there were
other things that came.
But it was great fun and the crew was fantastic. They
didn’t really change anybody for six years. Don Paonessa
is great, Bill Panzer always had wacky but great ideas, and I
loved his operatic ideas. I thought they were always good in
a dramatic show.
It was always great working with Adrian as a director.
Up until Homeland, I had never talked to a director. It is
normal and episodic that you don’t get a call from a director
with their ideas for the show. It really never happens, but
Adrian called me and said “I want to talk about the music
… and I think this … and I have this …”. And so it was
great to talk. He had a real vision about what he wanted.
He didn’t talk to me in musical terms. He talked to me
about it in emotional terms. But it was fantastic, because it
was actually like working on a movie for that one episode.
And then I think I talked with Gerard Hameline who did
a couple, and we talked, and Dennis talked. But apart from
that, you don’t really talk with the directors, and I think
Adrian did a fabulous job directing his stuff. It was very
good, and I think Homeland to this day has been one of the
more popular shows. It had Bonnie Portmore which is that
hit song by Linda
Carmel:
Whose idea was it to use Bonnie?
Bellon:
It was Bill Panzer’s. I’d never heard it,
and at the time somebody from the UCLA archives sent me
the sheet music of just the words and the melody, and so I
just took it from there because I wasn’t aware of the tune at
all. But Bill had quite a few of those sorts of ideas that I
thought were film-made as opposed to TV. I think he
would always have them for a show, but on the schedule
you’d have, you couldn’t always realise the larger ideas
because you didn’t have time, but in certain shows you
were able to get in there and, you know, really attack that.
Because on a film you have a lot more time to try stuff out,
but you really can’t try stuff out on a show like Highlander.
Within a very small framework you can do that.
Carmel:
Well Bill explained it to me in terms of
you put very good people around you and you let them get
on with it.
Bellon:
You know what? I’m going to tell you
that I’ve worked on a lot of shows with strong producers,
and Bill Panzer is a strong producer - meaning he’s there,
you feel his presence - but this is really a show of adults.
They let you do your thing. I mean, I never really had any
interference. We had very few meetings, we talked on the
songs. Basically, once the crew was established, people
just went off and did their thing, and I think that was one of
the key reasons why the show lasted six years, because
people just did their thing. It kept the people together and
the boat just kind of kept moving forward. There were the
same writers, the same composers, the same postproduction. The directors were more or less the same. And
I think if it works, it’s really great.
I don’t know anybody that’s had as much independence
as I did in this show. I mean the people that I know that
write music. The guy that does The X Files is a very good
friend of mine. They are there, every show, making him rewrite, doing this, doing that. I mean the results pay off, but
he knows that every week he’s going to have a slew of
people coming down to his studio, whereas in Highlander
you didn’t have that.
6
Carmel:
And it stands out actually, that thread.
Bellon:
Well it does, because it’s more personal
almost. You know, if it works, you get a more personal
element, and I think that’s why the show will have a cult
status for a long time. It will keep going, whereas these
other shows that are extremely popular now, I think -- not
that they won’t be popular later, but I think a show like
Highlander will outlast them. It will be like The Prisoner.
Do you know The Prisoner?
Carmel:
Yes I do.
Bellon:
I love that show and it’s just, what, thirty
years and it’s still going.
Carmel:
Well I think that’s what quality is all
about at the end of the day, isn’t it? Because I never
expected to fall in love with a TV show, but there were so
many things that came together in it -- the music, the art,
the set designs -- everywhere there was just this quality
aspect to it.
Bellon:
Fantastic. I forget the name of the set
designer in the show who was phenomenal. I used to get
these shows back and I’d look ‘em and go, “How did they
do that?”
Carmel:
In a week!
Bellon:
And it was this particular guy who I think
moved to The Twilight Zone. It wasn’t that it got worse
after him, it was so good, but this particular person, had the
touch, you know. If it was ‘30s New York, or if it was ‘40s
Chicago or London, it looked just so right, fantastic.
Carmel:
Did Bill write Everything a Boy Can Do?
Bellon:
He wrote the lyrics. We wanted to do a
real ‘20s-‘30s piece, and it was modelled on a tune he gave
me, an actual piece from the ‘20s. I don’t remember it. It
wasn’t that it was copied. I said “OK that’s the sound”, and
we redid it, but he actually did the lyrics and I just did the
music to it.
Carmel:
He reminds me of The Great Gatsby.
Bellon:
Oh completely, yes, it’s fantastic. And
the singer I used was a singer that does a lot of Highlander.
He’s almost like a ventriloquist singer. He can do any style,
and the way it was mixed, it was actually mixed like a ‘20s
piece, going through a megaphone and the whole thing. So
I really like that piece. We had the whole sax section there.
That’s another thing a lot of other shows don’t do, source
things. In a lot of other shows, I mean the first run shows, a
few like Xena or all that, those little source pieces are not as
well done. There’s not as much attention to it.
Carmel:
Elizabeth Gracen told us that she had
done the singing of Hey Sister -- I think it’s in Return of
Summer Edition
The Buzz
though Duncan. Duncan is the product of a secure and
loving family environment. His mother was a woman of
immense strength who loved him unconditionally. His
father taught him to lead his clan, to protect the weak and to
provide for those in his care. Duncan's solid hold on life
and on how he fits into it stems from the guidance he was
given by his parents.
Kagan's guides were neither moral nor responsible. The
street taught him to put himself first. Tarsis expands on
that and nurtures him into a full-blown thief and killer.
Maurice's niece, Simone, is the victim of far more direct
and sinister lessons. Where have her childhood lessons
taken her? Motherless, abused by her father and abandoned
by her uncle, she now works as a prostitute and is involved
with a man she fears. She is unable to reach out to Maurice
and is suspicious of Duncan's offered compassion. Like
Kagan, Simo ne carries the scars of her childhood.
Yet while the episode concedes that both carry a burden,
it also says that neither is absolved of their responsibilities.
On the surface it says this through Duncan who judges
them both and carries out sentence. This episode shows
Duncan firmly in judge mode. In 1930 he lays the law
before Tarsis: hurt anyone and I will kill you. It's blunt,
even arrogant and utterly deadly. When that law is broken,
his coldly orchestrated dispatch of Tarsis is chilling. Tarsis
may be holding a sword at the time, but there is no doubt he
has been executed. The fact that Duncan doesn't extend
that judgement to Kagan at that moment makes it all the
more chilling for Kagan survives 1930 not because Duncan
is weakened from a Quickening, but because Duncan has
judged that Kagan should survive, just as he has judged that
Tarsis should not. Tarsis falls to his own stiletto and
cheating tactics and while his life crashes, the world outside
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Summer Edition
ignores his passing and remains absorbed in its own
delusions, which is an irony since Tarsis, as dishonest as he
is, at least wears that dishonesty without deceit.
Kagan, on the other hand, is riddled with it. "I taught
him everything him everything he knows," Tarsis proudly
says of his young charge, but he is mistaken. Even as a
child, Kagan is inclined to cruelty. He is prepared to take on
a larger boy in order to retrieve the knife that boy has stolen
from him, but, more importantly for our story, once he
retrieves that knife, Kagan is so devoid of socialisation that
he continues to inflict pain long after the need for violence
has passed. Kagan is the ultimate liar; he lies even to
himself, but, worse still, knows it. Kagan demands he be
given the benefit of the doubt, but in doing so, he preys on
his childhood and uses it.
"You're going to kill an innocent man!" he cries as
Duncan approaches relentlessly, sword in hand. His plea is
that his crimes lie at Tarsis' feet rather than his own. In part
they do, but only in part. Kagan has had a longer life
without Tarsis than with him and in the end, fittingly, the
man who wasted his opportunities dies in a wasteland.
"Did you find the man?" Maurice asks Duncan,
referring to Simone's murderer, and is told that the man
who did this is dead. Who, though, is responsible for
Simone's death? The easy answer is Kagan, but did Tarsis
play a part? Did Maurice himself? If Maurice had stayed
sober in his years of grief, would Simone have been spared
her damaged childhood? Would she then have kept a light
burning in her soul instead of fading onto the dark and
lifeless world she inhabited? Simone's heart died long
before she did. Was Maurice responsible for that in part?
Certainly the man who crawled into his bottle of brandy is
gone now, metaphorically dead.
Reasonable Doubt is a complex episode. The villains
are victims. The law giver, judge and executioner indulges
in uncharacteristic violence. This is one of the few time that
we see him deliberately inflict pain. Having judged Kagan,
Duncan beats him methodically and even cruelly. When he
comes at Kagan at the end, interestingly, all his sword
moves are parries only. He doesn't strike at Kagan until (in
a mirror of his killing of Tarsis) he returns the killer's
stiletto with mortal blow. Kagan, like his 'father' has been
allowed to go through the motions of a fight before he is
coldly and deliberately executed.
This episode encapsulates Duncan the avenger. More
than that, it showcases far more of Highlander’s depths
than it is often credited with.?
27
Jackson (Pallin Wolf, the rogue Watcher in The Darkness)
plays a mortal baseball player. Michael Siberry (Martin
Hyde, Prodigal Son) is an Immortal come back to haunt
Bert Myers.
Perhaps the most interesting(?).... was the casting of
Valentine Pelka as Andre Korda, a former Immortal mentor
of Amanda. It is not that he did not perform the role well
and convincingly - Valentine does ‘bad’ well. But
Valentine in the Highlander universe is, and always will be,
Kronos.
Another HL:TS actor, revived this time in the same role,
was Jan Triska (Nicolae Breslaw - Interpol agent from The
Valkyrie). Breslaw returned with his insightful and wry
humour, on this occasion seeking personal justice.
The series contains so many of the elements that have,
since its inception, made Highlander memorable. The
Quickenings started off a little stilted in early episodes, but
by the end of the series were up there with some of the best.
Richly costumed flashbacks - a hallmark of Highlander.
Music - which from Highlander 1 through to Endgame has
become so central to the fabric of this universe. In a couple
of episodes Jim Byrnes’ music can be heard playing in the
background. The continuity of writers and directors, some
who were also involved with HL:TS. Dennis Berry is here with his fog juice, blue backgrounds and silhouetted
figures. There are moral dilemmas - not just for Amanda
and Nick. The other characters have well-developed story
lines and their respective pasts give dimension to the series.
Swords still appear from nowhere!
There is elegance and beauty. Where Duncan did katas,
Amanda does a fan dance, of which I would like to have
seen more. The short glimpse of sword moves at the end of
Immunity, between Amanda and a very quirky immortal Stefan - are fluid grace. There could have been more of this
too.
At times the writers seem to be playing with us? In
Passion Play the flashback is to a theatre presenting
Timeless and in the present, Methuselah’s Revenge. I
Reasonable Doubt
Reasonable Doubt is one of Highlander's forgotten
episodes. It rarely generates discussion and appears on very
few favourites lists. Possibly this is due to location; it's
nestled quietly at the end of the Anne Lindsay arc and the
start of the Methos phenomenon. Possibly it's because this
episode tentatively touches on a topic that many find
difficult to deal with. While Highlander often poses
questions of ethics, the show tends not to deal directly with
individual issues. Humanity's impact on the environment,
for example, is touched on only obliquely even though
Immortals would have first hand experience with
environment decline. Reasonable Doubt is somewhat
unusual in that it speaks openly of child abuse.
Like any good Highlander episode, Reasonable Doubt
poses questions rather than offering answers. How far do
the influences of our childhood reach? Where does
innocence begin or end? At what point do we stop being
victims and join the offenders? This episode is about the
impact of childhood and about taking responsibility for
26
missed it the first time through, took a double take on
second viewing - rewound. Coincidence? I don’t think
so.
So ...what is missing? The lack of almost any reference
to Amanda’s friends from her past 6 years was probably the
biggest problem. The closest we get to a mention of Duncan
is Lucy’s: “ ....doing the Tango on top of the Eiffel
Tower”. Jim Byrnes makes a most welcome return in A
Matter of Time reintroducing the Watchers. However,
except for one later episode, they are not mentioned again.
There are scenes of walks along the Quai de La Tournelle
on the Seine - with not so much as a mention of Duncan or
the fact that a good friend of Amanda’s once had a barge
there. Some shots lack originality - scenes taken direct
from HL:TS. Father Liam Riley is in Darius’ church (well
it is on the outside, some of the time, other times it is a
different church). But the inside is not Darius’ church.
Perhaps the interior of St Julien’s was not available to film
crews at the time. And Methos? Well, he was probably in
Kathmandu - but no one thought to mention it.
So, if The Raven had the right Highlander mix, and as a
first series was better overall than others doing the rounds
at the time. If it had (in my opinion) fewer not-so-good
episodes than HL:TS did in its first series. Together with
greater depth of character development for co-stars, and by
the closing episodes showing true potential - what
happened that the series was not renewed?
Perhaps it was just not Highlander enough for some?
Bad programming (or in the case of Australia, no
programming at all). The failure to attract a new audience.
Insufficient ratings, poor reviews - in the media and on the
internet (most I have read in magazines were fair to good).
Poor promotion? A victim of studio polit ics and financing,
or a combination of all of the above?
Whatever the reason, the opportunity to take The Raven
forward and evolve its place in the Highlander universe,
has been lost. All involved in the creation of this universe,
and those of us who never cease to enjoy it, are the losers.?
Review by Sonja van den Ende
[email protected]
overcoming those impacts. It's about the comforting, dark
hiding places offered by denial and the consequences of
accepting them.
"If I'm not a prince," protests Lucas Kagan, "It's because
I wasn't raised by a king." The fact that he says this to
Duncan, who was raised by a father who endowed him with
a strong moral code and sense of responsibility, lend
Kagan's words substance. Unlike Duncan, Kagan was left
to fend for himself as a child. Childhood for him was a back
alley brawl where the strong took from the weak and where
survival involved theft and necessary self-interest. It's little
wonder that he sees the world as an enemy to be overcome
by whatever means he needs. We see him as a child in
1913, ten years before he becomes immortal, already
hardened and angry. When Tarsis enters his life, Kagan
gains material security, but that comes at a high cost.
Kagan also gains a most unkingly father figure.
The influences of our childhood lessons is something
Highlander has touched on previously, most especially
Summer Edition
The Buzz
Amanda. That was a beaut piece too.
Bellon:
I didn’t do that one. I think she did it… I
don’t know how that was done. But yeah, and I think that’s
one of the drawbacks of being so far away, because she was
up there, I was down here, and it’s just easier for them to go
into a studio in Vancouver and do it, or wherever they were
at that time.
Carmel:
Well, congratulations, because it certainly
paid off. And having the CDs then, is superb, because there
are thousands of us that play them continually in our cars.
Bellon:
Oh yes. Well I like them a lot too, and it
was hard doing them and actually when I wanted to initially
do a CD, but there was a lot of resistance to it. I don’t
know why. It had something to do with contractual
obligations between companies -- because I don’t own the
music, you know. But it took to the third season to be able
to get the rights to actually compile the things, and to be
honest with you, between the readers and I, it wasn’t until I
offered to actually pay for everything that they said OK.
(Laughing). I said, “Listen, I just want to get some of my
work out there. Just let me do it. I don’t care. I think there’s
some good stuff and let me put it out”. I think I like the
second one a little better, Season 4 and 5, when it has more
vocal pieces and it’s just lighter.
I think the show got a little lighter starting in the fourth
year, where there’s a little more comedy introduced and
there was a little more opportunity for writing songs. I think
the show got a little less formu lated, which opened it up
better for me. You know, I like Seasons 4 and 5. I think
Season 6 was a bit botched, and I think that has to do with
Adrian not wanting to do the show, and you know, after
Denver, so why bother even trying if there’s not going to be
any more than that? But, you know, I think the show could
have kept going another probably couple of years…if he
wanted to do that.
Carmel:
Yeah. I mean really, the best parts of the
sixth season are just the ten or fifteen minutes of Duncan
MacLeod’s bit in them, and the rest of it could be any sort
of show.
Bellon:
Well, the only e-mails I get about the 6th
season are the montage of the last show, which I’ve actually
never even seen, even though I re-did all the phonic for it.
No, I’ve never actually seen the montage! (Laughing)
Carmel: It’s wonderful actually. In fact, the best bits of
the 6th season actually are a couple of montages. We all
missed you terribly in the sixth season.
Bellon:
Yeah. Well, it was an odd way of
working, because even though I was there, I was not there,
because every show I had some sort of an input, but it was
more from picking stuff out, and as the music editor, it was
sort of an odd way to go about it.
Carmel:
There was a lot of your music in there.
Bellon:
It was all the music in there. It was all the
bits, but it was all cut in instead of being designed for the
thing, and I think it was done to save money, but to be
honest, I don’t know for a fact, but we’ve actually spent
more (laughing) trying to get it done that way! But anyway,
I think probably they knew the show wasn’t going to go, so
why beat a dead horse.
Carmel:
I like what you did with Moonlight
Sonata.
Bellon:
I love that piece, yeah.
Carmel:
When I first heard it, with the guitars
screeching in, I wasn’t sure, but it’s the most wonderful
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Summer Edition
juxtaposition.
Bellon:
Oh it’s cool. It has to do with the imagery,
because it was about the present day rock star, Lord Byron,
and we were looking for a transition point, a time -travel
point, between rock and Lord Byron, so I had mentioned
“Well why don’t we take a classical piece in the public
domain?” I initially wanted to do a piece by Chopin but I
really couldn’t find something that would really work, give
the emotion, because it was more about giving the emotion
than the actual piece, and I thought it was interesting to take a
hit classical piece, which that was, and tie them over. So
when you heard the actual classical piano, you were actually
in present day, and when the guitars came in, it took you
back to Lord Byron to make the connection that this was
Lord Byron in the past, but he’s actually rock ‘n roll now.
Then all of a sudden it got sort of rhythm and blues, and then
it got stranger, because they ended up in a house, and there
were dead people. But it was a fun piece to do.
Carmel:
Yeah, that’s where I think the instinct and
the subliminal stuff works so well, because you also used
Moonlight Sonata in Shadows. With Garrick, and Duncan
couldn’t play. I mean you would get these lovely threads
coming through.
Bellon:
Well, it’s hard too, again. When you work
on a show that is more of a studio show, you have a research
department, so I suppose you can go “Well, give me some
choices for whatever… for some classical pieces”, but when
you’re enthralled with it and you’re writing the score, what I
do, I just grab whatever classical piece that would pop into
my head, and there would be a half a dozen choices, and that
one would probably be the most popular of them. You know,
in Modern Prometheus, I know that’s what I wanted to do,
but in the other show I’m not sure whether it came from me
or if it came from somebody else.
Carmel:
What you said is very similar to Peter
Wingfield. He told me: “The problem is Highlander just
ruins us all. It ruins us for other shows because you just get
such an opportunity to expand in so many ways”. He said a
lot of other things are just boring after that. So what you’re
saying is echoing what the actors themselves say. A lot of the
crew that I’ve spoken with say the same thing.
Bellon:
Yeah, it’s interesting, because as soon as I
finished Highlander, almost the next day I did this Jack Cant
mini-series called The Last Dawn. It was like major six-hour,
huge event (with an Australian director by the way). And I
had to do something like 176 minutes of music in two weeks,
which was just off the charts.
Nobody actually wanted to take the project on, so I took
it. I knew I could do it because I’d come off of all these years
of doing it like that. But, even though it went well, all of a
sudden I found myself dealing with a whole new cast and
crew of producers and directors who were right here every
morning and every night. It went fine and all that, but it was
very strange to go from complete autonomy to somebody
actually listening to every single note that you plucked and
making a critique on it. It was a very hard adjustment. It was
really emotionally draining, just in terms of having people
come to your office all the time. And on that particular show,
I would be writing pieces, the producers would come in the
late afternoon, and they’d critique them, and then they would
come back in the morning to hear the re -write. So you were
like writing around the clock without stopping, because not
only did you have to write the music you had to for that day,
you would have to re-write stuff from the day before. It really
7
brought me back to the reality of how things really are
done.
So the Highlander era was pretty unique. Again, I don’t
know a lot of people who have that freedom. It comes back
to Bill, it comes back to the people who ran the show and it
comes back also to the logistics of how the show was done.
You can’t be that hands on with that kind of a show.
Carmel:
I was interested in your interview with
Maureen Russell, and how difficult Duende was.
Bellon:
Duende is one of my favourite shows
musically. It was very difficult because initially Ken Gord
was in France and I guess they had some real Flamenco
people, and he called me and said “Can you send me a temp
track so they can just dance. Can you send me a beat so we
can just dance to the beat, and we’ll film it, and afterwards
the music will be done”.
Instead of just sending a beat, I hired a Spanish guitar
player and did four or five pieces, but very strict
rhythmically that were tango-ish, you know. They weren’t
actual tangos, they were in the style to it, in that there was a
dance, a real tango dance, so they wouldn’t feel like they
were just dancing to a metronome. But the whole point was
to have it very strict, because you have to come back and
place everything - the feet, everything, have to be replaced,
and if it’s not synchronous, it’s an absolute nightmare. So I
sent it over there and he called me saying “What is this?
This isn’t flamenco. The flamenco people here think this is
outrageous”, you know, yelling at me about how bad what
I’d sent was. But it wasn’t music. I tried to explain to him
it was just a beat. So I said “Well do what you need to do
and, whatever, and I’ll deal with it”. So the show comes
back done with his dancers and the actual real music, and it
was so awful and it was so not flamenco done by real
flamenco people, that it had to be totally scrubbed -- every
note, every foot beat, everything, but the problem was they
were all playing to no beat. So we had to go into the studio.
I had to get musicians and guitar players to match all this
stuff, and there was no point, there was no common
denominator to write to, because I would have to craft a
piece to fit this, but there was no beat to synchronise to. It
was all over the place. But eventually we got through it. I
think I spent almost four or five days in the studio, which
for an episodic show, is like almost a feature, almost
unheard of… not to mention that, but I think it took them, I
don’t know how long to actually cut the tango beat in. So it
was quite a lesson. For where it was in Highlander …
Carmel:
About the fourth last of the fifth season.
Bellon:
Yes, it was almost amateur the way it
was, because you never pre-record without having a
synchronous point. To go on and do it that way was so
almost filmed one-on-one that it was shocking for all of us - music and post-production -- to have to deal with it. It
was really, really tedious.
Carmel:
That probably explains something Adrian
has said, and a lot of the fans said they were very
disappointed in the editing of the actual flamenco because
we knew that Adrian had spent months trying to learn a bit
of it, and when they shot it, you never ever see Adrian
actually doing the flamenco. You see bits of feet.
Bellon:
That’s because the sound and the images
were so off to what it should have been like. There was no
way to actually pull the shot off. I don’t think the intent of
the show was to be done that way. I think they wanted to
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have a more live effect, but the people they hired were so
bad and so non -authentic that everybody here was just in
shock.
Carmel:
You rose to the occasion!
Bellon:
Well you had to. I mean, you really had
to do that, but nonetheless, I think it’s a good show,
because you can’t really look at the flaws in it -- you have
to look at the whole story, and I think it’s colourful and it is
pretty well done.
Carmel:
I was interested to see that you’d done
scoring for a documentary The Doctors without Frontiers.
Bellon:
Yeah, I don’t even remember it but it was
a friend of mine, who’s a pretty famous French editor who
was responsible for this whole documentary. It was a
number of years ago but I remember we got together with
everybody. There was a big screening. It actually was a
promo -tape to get people to give money, and I know this
tape is theoretically still circulating around the world.
Carmel:
Tell me about the opera.
Bellon:
Well I have a colleague who I’ve known
for a long time since I moved here. He’s a composer and
playwright also. We have done stuff in the past. I mean,
he’s had some tunes on Highlander and some songs and
done a few things, and we’d been looking for a long time
for a project to do together, something that was big,,
something we would want to spend some time on.
Basically, after the show ended, I really wasn’t keen on reattacking that world, because I’d just had so many years of
it. But it was really him saying, you know, “This is the
Celtic mythology” in this, and the themes and the
characters are quite interesting.
We wanted to do
something operatic. It’s a world that I knew very well. So
we attacked it from that point, and I really like what we did.
We re-crafted the story to what we wanted to do because
it’s a whole new piece, it really wasn’t based on anything.
We even debated about whether the character of Duncan
should be in there or not, and we thought there should be
some type of reference point for a fan base listening to it
because all the other characters are new. We really debated
about going completely away from that and having it as a
different person entirely. And after really a lot of soulsearching and writing and re-writing, we figured that we
should at least have that one thread tying the whole thing
together. So, it took us about a year to come up with a
libretto in any way that we’d really like, and to start writing
the music. It took probably two or three months to audition
singers, most from the LA opera and theatre in LA, but we
had people from basically all over the country sending us
tapes and resumes.
Carmel:
So how do you put the word out?
Bellon:
You call the directors -- the chorale
directors of operas. We called the people at LA Opera. I
know singers also, so the word started getting out that way.
There’s not too many people casting operas, you know, that
you’re going to pay somebody for, so once the word gets
out it kind of goes.
We ended up using mostly people from LA for
convenience sake, though there were other people that we
had found that were quite good. We found an Italian tenor
initially, but the logistics didn’t work out. He was really
terrific. Luckily we found Steve Emerson who really was
fantastic. He came in almost at the last minute and read
everything and was terrific. Addison Clare who plays the
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Highlander: The Raven
Aine Gliddon
[email protected]
Highlander: The Raven began screening in Australia (on cable) for the first time in November 2000. The following
seeks to review the series without spoiling it too much for those, Australian and others, who have not seen it.
Highlander: The Raven was conceived as the series to
carry the Highlander franchise forward. During the course
of Season 6 of Highlander: The Series (HL:TS) various
women actors were ‘tried’ in episodes in an effort to find
the female Immortal who would lead this new series.
All the time, she was sitting under their very noses!
In Highlander:The Raven, Elizabeth Gracen revived her
role as the immortal thief, Amanda and Paul Johansson
entered the Highlander universe as Nick Wolfe, cop - soon
to be ex-cop. The series also introduced other new and
interesting characters: Lucy (Patricia Gage), Bert Myers
(Hannes Jaenicke) and Father Liam Riley (Robert
Cavanagh).
Twenty-two Episodes were made and aired, starting in
the US September 1998. It was not renewed for a further
season.
Recently I watched The Raven series for the first time.
I’d previously only seen one episode at G4 in Denver in
October 1998 (which I confess, at the time did not overly
impress me.) Then in March 2000 I visited Johanne Briere
in Montreal and I watched the last four episodes - which
left me wanting to see it all!
That first episode I saw in Denver was one that did not
have an Immortal in it. The episode did not feel like the
Highlander I had come to love - it was more like a cop
show with Amanda in the leading role. This was an
unfortunate introduction to a series that, viewed in total, is
very good - even if it does have flaws. And what show does
not?
In March 2000, I first saw Elizabeth in person at G5 and
I was so impressed. Her Q&A’s felt like intimate soirees
with friends. In April, Elizabeth came to HLDU3 and I won
an auction bid to share dinner with her. In August, in LA to
see Endgame - the maddest HL experience of my
existence - we shared dinner with Elizabeth again. Have
these encounters coloured my opinion of The Raven and the
character of Amanda? Absolutely!
Seeing Elizabeth the person - not on a stage at a
convention, still ‘acting’ to a degree, but in casual situations
just being herself - she is not Amanda. Oh, she may have
the odd wicked twinkle in her eye that smacks of that
character’s sense of devilish fun. But she is much more
down to earth, considerate and genuinely interested in the
people she is with. When Elizabeth is Amanda - she is
acting, and doing it well.
The Amanda of ‘The Raven’ is more mature than in HL:
TS. She is less selfish, exhibiting concern for others. She
has developed an appreciation of the cause and effect of her
actions in the grand scheme of things - immortal and
mortal. She has a conscience and is emotionally
independent, in charge of her destiny. This Amanda
verbally ‘spars’ with the man of the series, Nick Wolfe,
rather than looking to him to rescue her. She does this while
retaining her wicked sense of humour - that ‘wrinkled-nose
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snarl’ - and the ability to get herself into just about any
scrape you care to imagine. Only this time around she
usually extricates herself.
Nick Wolfe, Paul Johannsen, is a mortal cop who,
following the death of his police partner and
disillusionment with police justice, quits the force. He finds
himself in an Immortal world, exploring the nature of
Immortality and all the life-altering challenges that entails. I
was not prepared to like this character - but I do, and the
actor. There is chemistry between Nick and Amanda, with
just enough unstated sexual tension to keep us guessing.
From interviews I have read, Paul Johansson comes across
as passionate about protecting the integrity of his character
and the series. His performance throughout puts his words
into action.
The series introduced co-characters, with episodes that
examine their personal history and give depth to their roles
in the series. Lucy is Amanda’s humorous live-in
companion, having been with Amanda for some 30 years.
We discover, later, that Lucy met Amanda via an Immortal
incident. She looks out for Amanda - quick to suggest when
“the going gets tough” that Amanda should pack and leave
town. She gleefully plays devil’s advocate between
Amanda and Nick. Unfortunately when the series moved
from Canada to Paris - Lucy did not go. There were no
explanations why - she just never showed up again.
Not so Bert Myers - one very intriguing character, who
fortunately did make the transition from Toronto to Paris.
Myers runs a ‘detective’ agency - for which Nick works on
and off, after leaving the police. Myers is not entirely
honest, with a somewhat cloudy past. During the series our
knowledge of Myers develops, illustrated in one of the best
non-Immortal episodes. On another occasion Myers’ and
Nick’s shared history involves an Immortal.
Then there is Father Liam Riley, an Immortal priest
(Robert Cavanagh) who previously appeared in HL:TS as
Franklin Waterman, an art dealer, in Reasonable Doubt.
Parallels have been drawn between this character and
Darius. Both took respite from the Game and became
priests though events in their past. But if Liam was indeed
cast as the Darius of The Raven, his is a much younger
incarnation (in Immortal and perspective terms). He is more
contemporary - playing basketball with the locals, wearing
everyday clothes. In the penultimate episode, Liam faces
his past, and its consequences; the choices he made then
and must make again now. The closing scenes are laden
with tension, uncertain outcomes - Highlander at its best!
Robert Cavanagh was not the only person in The Raven
to have previously appeared in HL:TS. Highlander has
something of a track record for recycling actors. In The
Raven we see Philip Akin (Charlie DeSalvo) as Simon
Clark. He is the descendant of slaves who, 275 years
earlier, drowned in a ship wreck that saw the loss of the
papers that gave them their freedom and land. Andrew
25
Visiting Paris
Walking along the Quai de la Tournelle (where
Duncan's barge was moored) and under the bridge (the
tunnel out of Methos) was magical. Being there was both
eerily familiar, and completely different to how it looks on
television. My parents were remarkably tolerant, taking
pictures of me in front of houseboats moored along the
quay, pictures of me on the quay, pictures of me in the
tunnel (their reaction to that request was priceless). So to
reward their patience, I dragged them off to St Juliens le
Pauvre, better known as Darius' church. It's a gorgeous old
church, only a few minutes from Notre Dame. Apparently,
there has been a St Julien's on that site since the sixth
century, and in the quiet little garden out the back (where a
number of scenes took place) there's a tree that's over four
hundred years old, which Duncan rests by in Deliverance.
More photos were taken, but alas, as I peeked inside, a
service was in progress (it's currently a Greek Orthodox
church). I later found out that there are services at noon
every weekday.
We had a tour of Paris booked for after lunch, but I
managed to detour via Shakespeare & Company (also in the
vicinity of Notre Dame). Given our collective attitudes to
book browsing, this one wasn't a hard sell. It was an
interesting tour, and was followed by a boat cruise, where I
got to see the sights I'd seen that morning, from a different
perspective. Plus many more, naturally, though two stand
out in this context. At one point, a boat called "Highlander"
cruised past, and I laughed so hard I almost dropped my
camera as I took a photo of it. The other is another Parisian
mystery I'd love explained, as we couldn't figure out why a
black-on-yellow triangular warning sign featuring a
kangaroo was carefully fixed to the side of a bridge near the
Eiffel Tower. Anyone?
Erilyn Chambers
[email protected]
The Eiffel Tower was our next stop, and the last
Highlander connection for the day. Despite the fact that the
afternoon had become somewhat hazy, the view was still
magnificent, and a careful look at level one as we went past
gave me an increased respect for Adrian Paul, Elizabeth
Gracen and all the film crew responsible for the dancing
scene in Finale.
Here's a tip - take the funicular up to the Sacre Coeur,
and walk down if you want the exercise. Do not follow our
example and do it the other way around. The imposing
white basilica is featured in To Be, though honestly, that's
not why I wanted to visit it. I don't think my parents quite
believed me by this point, as I quite happily pointed out
where Duncan and Fitz sat on the stairs, and where Duncan
must have been to look down and see Tessa.
Among other sights, I saw Saint Severin's, where scenes
from Forgive Us Our Trespasses and Avenging Angel were
filmed. This is just around the corner from St Julien's, my
next stop. This time, I was able to visit the inside, and it is a
must-see if you're in Paris. It was lovely, completely
different in style to the (numerous) other churches I'd seen
on the trip, and I'd recommend it to everyone, non fans
included.
Then, just like that, my time in Paris was up. A city that
I have to visit again (though I did see a little more than I've
elaborated on here), and if you're visiting it, stopping by
Highlander locations is very convenient, no matter how
limited your time.
And if you're in London, the Bronze Age weaponry and
artefacts in the British Museum are not to be missed!?
Erilyn’s pictures of her holiday are at http://www.
iprimus.com.au/merlynne/highlander.html
Queen of Swords
I’m enjoying Queen of Swords a lot! It certainly doesn’t have the depth of Highlander, but it is such a
treat to get a weekly look at Val and a fairly frequent view of Peter. It’s obvious that Tessie Santiago is a
young actress, but I think she’s doing very well with a difficult role. I think we will see her get better as the
show progresses. This role should set her up for a very promising career.
Many of the other actors do an excellent job, also. I love Marta and Senora Hidalgo (Vera). Grisham is a
little jarring because he looks and sounds like a California guy, straight off the beach. He is supposed to be
American, but there isn’t much 19th century about him. But, he does a convincing job as nasty SOB.
The show is beautifully costumed. The settings are lush, and the music is wonderful. You can pick at a lot
of little things that aren’t quite credible, especially that the Queen hasn’t been recognised yet. But, you have
to suspend reality for a lot of shows. I’m very interested to see what they are going to do with the
relationships between the various characters. They have already introduced a little mystery associated with Dr.
Helm (Peter Wingfield). I think Queen of Swords is going to keep me happy for quite a while.?
Marilyn Babcock [email protected]
24
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witch was very interesting because she came in for the
audition, and took the music and was just unbelievable. We
were in love with her. She looked the part -- even though it
wasn’t a part -- she just was the character, and the tenor of
her voice sounded fantastic. But she said to me “You
know, a year ago, I bought both your Highlander CDs and I
sent you a letter saying if you ever needed an opera singer
to give me a call”. And there she was, and there she was
hired. Apparently she knew of Highlander because her
husband is a theatre teacher in a high school, and he and the
students are nuts about Highlander, and so he sort of turned
her onto it.
So we cast the singers, which took a while because
although it was easy to find a lot of good singers, good
theatre singers and good operatic singers, the problem was
the operatic singers. Most of them were fantastically
technical, but their acting wasn’t terrific, and the theatre
singers’ acting was terrific, but not many were really great
singers. So to find that combination of all the people that
would work together was quite difficult. And then getting
the choir that I wanted -- because we had a pretty big choir
on it -- it was actually the choir that mostly John Williams
uses in his scores, so it was a pretty big. think there were
thirty-two or forty or something like that.
The casting was great fun, because at the end of every
day we’d have people come into the room in the basement - it wasn’t even that nice, it was a little room in the
basement of this place. They’d come in and sit on the couch
and we’d give them a piece of music. I’d play the stuff, and
Harlan and I would talk to them about the emotion of it, and
then they’d sing, and we’d listen, and it was fantastic
because the people that were actually picked would walk in
and the first three notes you’d know “That’s it”. You
know, like when Abby came in, she sang one bar and that
was it. We found other singers like the person who plays
the mother. We knew we wanted her, but we weren’t quite
sure who or what she should play -- because we loved her
voice. The singer that we hired for Aurora was actually
Kerin Fleming. She’s from theatre. She was in Les Mis. At
the time she was doing a big theatre piece down town. We
liked the way she presented the character and the sound of
her voice. And the bass singer was actually Ches, and he’s
more from a theatre background also and did fantastic. And
Steve Emerson was technically not Pavarotti standard, but
he’s done a lot of under work for him. If Pavarotti doesn’t
do a commercial, he’ll come in and do it, and his voice is
just fantastic. So finding those characters took a while to
do, and then the production of the whole thing, the
recording of it, took a whole other thing, because you’re
dealing with a very long piece. The opera is seventy-two
minutes long. When the stage version occurs, it will be
actually longer than that. We had to massage it a bit to get
it all on one CD. We didn’t want to have a two CD disc
because it would have been just prohibitive to buy at that
point. But seventy-two minutes of operatic music to cast,
not to mention doing all the music for it, was really a whole
year.
When we actually said we were going to do it it was
mid-April of ’99. Everything had been written by then, so
from mid-April up until February 1, we were working full
guns. It was actual production, recording, the pressing
plant, the art work. It was just completely full. And I’m
really happy I did it. I like it. The themes are good, I liked
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the fact that it is a Highlander opera, because it is unique,
but it is also good for the soul, because when you do a lot of
film work -- TV and film work -- you tend to get really
stuck as a composer in a chair, a slave to an image all the
time. So to me it’s very liberating to have almost turned
down some work for that just to focus on the opera, and do
something completely different.
Carmel:
Are you going to put it on the stage?
Bellon:
Well, that’s the next step. I mean, that’s
really what our dream is.
Carmel:
Now is the CD selling well?
Bellon:
Yeah. Well, they’ve just come out and
so it’s starting, and we’re working on a staging sort of
presentation book in sketch format, because we want to
have certain points of the opera sketched out, not just in
detail, but to be able to give to the people that would be
susceptible to helping us to put it on. The opera is out to
half a dozen companies, but it’s really just recent. It’s only
been since, I’d say, end of January, February, that we
started this whole thing.
We really want to stage it in Las Vegas. We’re
completely not interested in the Met. It’s a piece for us for
the fans. It would be fun to be the first people to stage an
opera in Vegas -- it’s never been done -- because I think it
has that quality to bring to a fan base, or just people who
don’t know they like opera, and when they hear the word
“opera” they cower in the corner (a) because of the
thematic content -- the music -- but also just because of the
incredible staging you can do with the whole thing.
Carmel:
Bonny Eyes is beautiful.
Bellon:
Yes, that is fabulous, and the thing about
the opera is it’s very operatic, very Wagnerian. But then
there are other sides to it which are very accessible which
we purposely wanted to do.
Carmel:
Skeletons Dancing, is a lovely
shift…
Bellon:
Yeah, I like that. I like it in the 21st
century. I think that’s very typical of what that is. So
we’re slowly trying to get the word out about this. As we’re
both composers and not, you know, expert marketeers, it’s
sort of now a slow kind of thing.
Carmel:
You should be paying Diane Shae in
Hawaii. [Laughing]
Bellon:
She’s unbelievable.
Carmel:
Well she has been singing its and your
praises far and wide actually.
Bellon:
That’s fantastic.
Carmel:
Did you run into any trouble at all with
the changing canon?
Bellon:
No. Well, because, we just did it. To be
quite honest, I’ve always thought that things should have
been explained in the series and the films that aren’t -- I
know they’re intentionally not -- but when David
Abramowitz and I used get together for lunch occasionally,
I would say “Does it have to be a cop show? Can’t it be
very interesting other worldly …” He’d say “Well yeah I
have some ideas from that, but really the people want it to
be this type of problem-solving show”. But he had some
great ideas, which I thought were terrific about doing shows
on what happens between the deaths and the rebirths -- that
moment -- very esoteric. I thought “That’s what you want
to do”, but it was never done.
So there were certain aspects of it that I thought “Oh
9
well, it’s my opera, I’ll do what I like with the thing”.
Because I think if you respect the canon, it just stays static
again. You’re turning around in the same circle. I mean it’s
the Highlander but it’s not really the Highlander, so it was
interesting. I think both Harland and I wanted to talk about
problems that were not addressed in the show, that I always
thought would be interesting to address.
Actually, if there’s a second part of it we’d like to attack
which we didn’t have time to do in the seventy-two
minutes, it’s about what happened after mortality. What is
this all about? I think those kinds of sides to the
Highlander and the mythology, to me, were interesting, not
the actual action and the love part. That was fine, but it’s
all this other stuff that’s so nebulous, and nobody every
addresses because once you open that box up, it’s, you
know, you never get out of it.
Carmel:
And just living with the weight of all
those experiences for centuries.
Bellon:
Exactly. What’s the quickest … Is it such
a fantastic thing to know you receive all the energy… What
happens during that quickening? What is it? What happens
during the death? Where does is immortality come from?
Why can’t immortals breed immortals? There’s a whole
bunch of stuff that if you want to do, you do it.
Carmel:
The cloning was very interesting, in terms
of genetic memories… I mean Who is this woman? It was
a lovely song she sings to him of “I’m me”.
Bellon:
Exactly. Well, there’s a couple of aspects
that I think we wanted to find a way to do. I mean, the
whole point of the immortal is he outlives everybody, so he
outlives his loves. So, how many loves do we all have in
our life? One? Two? Well, he outlived her. She dies and
he’s still in love with her, but he has to continue, so there’s
a point in time where he’s in the 21st century, he’s
successful, he’s on his Eiffel Tower, and he’s got the
money and the technology exists -- so he says, you know,
“I’m tired of this. I want my life the way it used to be”.
And what’s interesting, so he has this woman cloned, but
she doesn’t know anything about it, and when they meet,
she flips out, because she’s outraged and then they get back
together again, but it also brings up other interesting
things -- is this exactly the same person that he loved
before? Is he actually in love with this? So there are so
many events to tackle, a lot of little side stories that you
can’t get into seventy-two minutes, you know.
Carmel:
It was a nice echoing back to Prodigal
Son, when Hyde says that nothing like the kill of a seasoned
immortal, but … of course, that was very dramatic the way
he waited and waited until it would be, you know, kill? …
To kill her when he does.
Bellon:
Exactly. Because actually he’s a Visi
Goth. Another thing about Highlander it’s just …acting.
We get into Celtic mythology, and when you get into true
Celtic mythology, the imagery is wonderful. I watched
Excalibur the other day, John Baumann, which was
medieval times, and mythology and just the Celtic vision of
the thing it brings, you know, it’s not watered down at all.
Carmel:
No. That’s what was missing, I think,
particularly in Raven. You know, Highlander hooked us all
in terms of the mythology and so on, but it was all missing.
Bellon:
Well, I never had time, but I never quite
understood why they didn’t get the mythology right, or just
get more into Celtic mythology -- it’s so rich and so
10
unbelievable, but the show sort of takes on its own life, I
guess. And the writing of the show is, I don’t think,
something I’d ever want to be involved with. Poor David, I
think he just got beat up on all the time. So it’s even keep
your sanity through all those years getting the shows out.
Carmel:
You should all form some sort of a
survival society, you know, when you look at what you all
poured out in a week, week-by-week.
Bellon:
Yeah, but I was, I think, probably the
luckiest of all because I didn’t really have to deal with the
powers that be, so to speak. I really dealt with Don, who
was a friend of mine, and he was fantastic. He’s truly
premier. I would call him a true renaissance man. He
creates in all media, it doesn’t matter. He’s a painter, he’s a
writer, he’s a film maker, an editor, he knows music, you
can really talk to him. I think he was such a lynch pin to the
ultimate product in this. I think if he was not there, the
show would have got done, but I think that he fought for a
lot of stuff that maybe other people wouldn’t have fought
for, and I know he got into a lot of battles with Bill, which
is normal -- I mean, that happens on shows -- but I think his
vision really was the lynch pin to keeping the quality of the
show where it was, and just in talking about music, I knew
that I could talk with him and he understood what music is
to film. Like, a lot of people, even though they’re working
in the business, don’t really know what music is supposed
to do. What do you do with it? Where is it? You know…
and he really knows what’s going on, and he was so
integral to the whole thing -- I mean really integral.
Carmel:
I know in talking to a lot of the crew, they
were saying the thing for them, too, they missed Adrian in
The Raven because they said he would watch every daily.
He would sit and get very involved in the whole thing, and
obviously when you’ve got that much energy coming from
so many different people, I mean, obviously it worked,
didn’t it?
Bellon:
It worked, and in all the years I think I
was on two or three sets only. Personally I find it really
boring, but nonetheless, when I would see Adrian work he
was very much into the moment, and I found him to be
really professional and sort of take charge. I would go on a
set in the first year, third year, fourth year, whatever, and
you could see the progression. By the time I was on set of a
western that Gerard Hameline shot, Comes a Horseman? I
don’t remember, but they were doing a flash-back scene to
the west or something, and Adrian was there, and for the
time that they were actually shooting with them sitting
around preparing the shot, I thought it was really terrific.
I think whoever picked him did a great job of casting
him, and he really truly is the character. I think that’s
another one of the reasons why the show’s so good -- that
the lead character is just like whatever her name is in Xena.
Like the show or not, I think she really is that character. I
happen to like the show because it’s so kitschy -- it can’t
but Lucy Lawless is the character. And I think, ultimately
it’s is only about one thing -- transmitting emotion over a
box to people who watch it, and if it doesn’t transmit, it
doesn’t matter how much you’ve spent or who it is, it
doesn’t work.
You know, Adrian transmitted the emotion of the
Highlander, and luckily behind him was this team of people
that could put make -up on the whole thing and present it in
a way that was truly in keeping with that.?
Summer Edition
The Buzz
Knight Moves
Duncan stands before the ancient battlefield, hands behind his back. The pieces are already set up for action.
“Choose,” he says.
“No,” replies Methos, sprawling in front of the Black pieces opposite Duncan. “I’ll be Black.”
Ever bold and aggressive, Duncan opens with his King Pawn, defiantly claiming the vital center on the first
move. Methos considers a bit before re sponding by moving his King Knight Pawn one square. The Rat!
Perhaps Duncan doesn’t know it. He’s no tournament player. But Duncan fires back immediately with his
Queen Pawn, solidifying his hold on the center.
Methos moves his King Bishop craftily into the square so recently vacated by his King Knight Pawn. His aim
at the center more subtle, mysterious and far reaching —but real. He soon positions his major pieces behind a
rock solid defensive wall of Pawns.
“Do your worst —I am Kramnik!” Methos proclaims.
“Look out, Vladimir,” Duncan replies, in his impetuous way hurling attack after attack, battering and
weakening Methos’ impenetrable defences. Eventually something has to give as the unstoppable force continues.
Black loses a Pawn!
Methos counters valiantly, attacking the Queen Bishop file, taking advantage of Duncan’s focussing his
attention on the King side of the board. At last he gains his valuable objective, equalising the position. Methos’
eyes narrow and gleam. Suddenly just as he merrily slams his Rook onto the hard -won seventh-rank square, out
of nowhere a broadsword cleaves the board in two and the pieces go flying! Too late, they feel the buzz!
“The Krejski brothers!” they both shout simultaneously.
Avoiding a barrage of lethal steel, Methos and Duncan scramble to reach their own swords. Soon furious
combat destroys almost everything in the room as the four immortals fight to the death. Leaping and whirling,
Duncan soon finds an opening and finishes off his opponent with a roundhouse precision shot—thump
THUMP! Then Methos also prevails—thump THUMP!! Exhausted and breathing heavily, the two victorious
immortals turn toward each other.
“Draw?” Duncan rasps. Methos cannot respond.
Then Quickening!
And everything else in the room is destroyed.
Chris Hendrickson
[email protected]
(Vladimir Kramnik is the current World Chess Champion.
In October, he beat long time (15 years) champ Gary Kasparov, his mentor.)
The Cutting Edge
John Mosby
The Cutting Edge - Celebrating the Modern Sword
Movie is a collection of, in some cases, extended articles
that have appeared in IMPACT - The Action Movie
Magazine over the last few years. John Mosby decided to
put this collection together when it became apparent that
there was a lot of interest in this genre.Inside this book you
will find features on such movies as; Excalibur, Cut-throat
Island, First Knight, Prince Valiant, Braveheart, Man in
the Iron Mask, Blade and Zorro. There is also an extended
coverage on the three Highlander movies, which includes a
behind-the-scenes section talking with sword masters: Bob
Anderson, Peter Diamond and Anthony De Longis.
In each of these features you will find a brief synopsis
of the storyline and then discussions with the various
actors, writers and directors. Each with their own opinion as
to why they think films with swords are so popular.
There is a very small section on the influence of the
East with regards to the popularity of this genre of film.
This is followed by a very brief description and history of
some of the most popular swords: katana, rapier,
broadsword, epee etc.
The final section of the book goes into the popularity of
television shows like; Xena - Warrior Princess, Hercules,
Sharpe, Hornblower and of course not forgetting
Highlander: The Series and Highlander: The Raven.
If you enjoy swashbuckling adventure mo vies and TV
series, then you will probably like this book. It doesn’t go
too heavily into detail, but gives you enough to keep your
interest. If you want to know more about swords, their
history etc or anything more about the movies and series
mentioned there is a list at the back of the book of some
websites that could be of interest.
So I guess my advice to anyone thinking of getting this
book is - get it if you can. Overall I found it to be an
interesting and enjoyable read, and I would highly
recommend it.?
The Buzz
Summer Edition
Review By Karen Scott
23
movie shoot in Revenge of the Sword. When Duncan
shelters Claudia Jardine on holy ground in Timeless and
chooses an Eastern temple, not a church or a similar refuge
of Western faiths.
hand or not will never be known, but he also mentions the
Ming Dynasty (765AD) in Til Death when remarking on
the large vase Duncan bought to give to Gina and Robert
de Valicourt.
At the end of Judgement Day we learn that Methos has
disappeared. He shows up again lounging on Duncan’s bed
in The Messenger, commenting that yak butter is hell on the
digestion. I love that scene. He makes other remarks that
lead us to know he’s been in Tibet.
The Raven
Amanda also travelled to China in the 1700s. The Raven
episode A Matter of Time shows her being pursued along
the China coast by thugs whom she defeats. Amanda is then
confronted by the immortal, Korda (played by Valentine
Pelka) and taken in for training. She learns an unusual
method of defence - sword tipped fans.
She is also known for using martial arts in her fights
with stronger challengers.
The Novels
The Path begins in the present day with a rally headed
by the Dalai Lama. Then the story returns to 1781 in
Lhasa, Tibet, where we find Duncan once learnt from the
Dalai Lama. He travelled amongst the people and he also
fell in love with a Chinese girl named Xiao-nan Choi.
It was not only Immortals who had life altering events
occur while in Asia. Joe Dawson was a young soldier in
Vietnam (1968) when he lost his legs after being rescued by
an immortal Andrew Cord. He was later approached to
become a Watcher, a choice that he accepted and which led
him into Duncan MacLeod’s sphere. The unusual aspect of
this episode, Brothers In Arms, is that we see the events via
flashback. Not so unusual you think? But Joe isn’t an
immortal.
MacLeod was in Cambodia during 1975 as portrayed in
Blind Faith. Duncan tries to enlist the help of an Immortal
drug-smuggler, named Kage, to evacuate some orphaned
children; Kage refuses and shoots Mac. When he reanimates the children have been killed by the Khmer Rouge
and Kage is gone.
Another aspect of Eastern methods used is in yoga, Tai
Chi or meditation. At the gentle end of the martial arts is
the kata that Duncan performs in Band of Brothers and later
in Turnabout (thanks to hldu gals for this info). It also
features in the opening credits of the series. More notable of
all is when he flees Ahriman, taking refuge in a Buddhist
monastery for a year, learning to find inner peace and how
to conquer this latest foe. We see him meditate or using
yoga several times throughout the series.
Duncan has also shown his prowess in the martial arts,
during his challenges and in his life, for example when he
spars with Charlie in the dojo. Duncan took over the
business and it became a core set for Highlander in the
later series. In Chivalry, Duncan is seen doing a floor
routine when interrupted by Methos.
Methos is another Immortal who has oriental
knowledge, as shown by his sharing the Mencius’ (372289BC) quote ‘death before dishonour’ with Duncan after
their brush with Kristen in Chivalry. Whether it was first
The Music
While Queen had mostly a rock or ballad base, Roger
Bellon who scored the series had more scope to adapt music
to fit the particular episode. Best known for his adaption of
Bonny Portmore, there are a couple of pieces like Samurai
Suite and Asian Light that are taken from the episodes,
which deal with China and Japan.
I have not included India in my Asian influences but
Duncan has had several adventures there as well. I avoided
Vashti and The Wrath of Khali, perhaps another time...
I hope you enjoyed all the information I have
uncovered.?
Methos The Romantic
Meredith Lynne
We see a lot of characterisation of Methos as the Eternal
Strategist—always has a back-up plan, never acts without
thinking. And the more I think about that, the less I believe
it. If pressed, I think I would have to say that Duncan is
more likely to think things through than Methos is. And
while the conclusions Duncan comes to are emotionally
satisfying ones, they’re very bottom-line as well.
I was trying to put my finger on the reason for seeing
them that way, but it’s not any one thing. It’s more the pattern I see in the kinds of things they say. Like, in Through a
Glass Darkly, Methos wonders aloud what it would be like
to forget everything, to start fresh—he says maybe it would
be a blessing. And Mac responds, “Yeah, until somebody
takes your head.” There’s that bottom line again. When
they’re discussing Bonnie Prince Charlie, Mac is caught up
in the difference between what really happened and what
Cochrane imagined, but Methos says, “Surely it’s the legend that really matters...”
Then we’ve got the Methuselah stone, right? Methos is
not only willing to buy into it, he’s willing to impulsively
risk his life for it, in hopes that it’ll save Alexa. Which is
pretty damn romantic in my book—it comes from his heart,
no matter what he wants everybody to think about what a
tough guy he is. Duncan doesn’t believe in the power of the
stone, and isn’t shy about saying so to both Methos and
Amanda—whom he treats as loved ones experiencing a
strange but hopefully temp orary bout of insanity throughout
the episode.
Then there are other things Methos does—like, sticking
around to meet Duncan when he didn’t really have to, in
Methos. Like deciding in the space of two hours to offer
Duncan his head in the same episode. Like cutting his hand
open to convince Christine Salzer that Immortality doesn’t
make you a bad guy—“improvising”. (It doesn’t make you
a bad guy, but it does increase the odds.) Like showing up
in Seacouver for no good reason—I don’t buy for a second
he was worried Kristin would kill Duncan; he just liked the
guy and wanted to drop by. Most particularly in Judgment
Day/One Minute to Midnight, Methos tells Duncan he’s a
pragmatist. But he also says that the choice was either Dun-
I was improvising!
22
Summer Edition
The Buzz
The Buzz
Summer Edition
[email protected]
can or Galati, “And since I don’t give a damn about Jacob
Galati, it wasn’t that difficult to make.” Sure, that makes
perfect sense—but it’s an emotional decision. He cares
about Duncan, so he does what he has to in order to protect
him. It may not be smart, but Methos isn’t really all that
worried about smart at the time. He’s worried about his
friend. Methos’ prime motivator seems to be protecting the
people he cares about, and that is that for him. He doesn’t
seem to do a lot of thinking once that trigger is tripped.
Like in Indiscretions. Methos is all for getting the heck
out of Dodge—right up until Joe tells him who exactly is in
danger. The fact that it’s Joe’s daughter changes everything
for him. And where exactly were those 5000 years of wisdom and experience when Methos went to Duncan’s rescue
in Deliverance? Hello? Dark quickening, evil, angry,
REALLY GOOD WITH SWORD immortal, quite likely to
kill you—Methos was not exactly at one with his survival
instincts in that episode.
Then, in Comes a Horseman it becomes pathetically
obvious that Methos has been spending a lot of time brooding about how Duncan will feel about his dark past—by the
time he says “Why do you think I didn’t tell you? I knew
how you’d react…” it’s pretty obvious that he’s had this
conversation with Duncan in his head in the past and is
more than a little bit nervous about the outcome.
If he’d been thinking, he would’ve read over Duncan’s
chronicle and noticed that Duncan is a pretty damn forgiving guy, all things considered. All you have to do is ask
(and stop killing people) and he’s your friend for life. But
he wasn’t thinking; he was scared, and he was imagining
the worst.
The fact that he’s basically wrong—that he’s been worrying about the wrong thing all along—notwithstanding.
(He should’ve been worried about how Duncan would react
to Methos keeping this from him. I think Duncan was a lot
more pissed off because he heard it from Cassandra than he
was that it actually happened.)
But one of my favourite examples of Methos thinking
11
with his heart is in Valkyrie, when he’s arguing so strenuously that history makes men; men don’t make history. The
times were ripe for a Fuhrer; if it wasn’t Hitler, it would
have been someone else... it’s very Marx & Engels. Take a
look:
On the application of dialectical method to the study of social
life and the history of society:
“If there are no isolated phenomena in the world, if all phenomena are interconnected and interdependent, then it is clear that
every social system and every social movement in history must be
evaluated not from the standpoint of “eternal justice” or some other
preconceived idea, as is not infrequently done by historians, but
from the standpoint of the conditions which gave rise to that system
or that social movement and with which they are connected.
“The slave system would be senseless, stupid and unnatural
under modern conditions. But under the conditions of a disintegrating primitive communal system, the slave system is a quite understandable and natural phenomenon, since it represents an advance
on the primitive communal system...” “Everything depends on the
conditions, time and place.” “It is clear that without such a historical
approach to social phenomena, the existence and development of
the science of history is impossible; for only such an approach
saves the science of history from becoming a jumble of accidents
and an agglomeration of most absurd mistakes.”
Now, on the surface, that’s extremely abstract—and the
theory lends itself to a certain removal from the impact of
the individual upon society, which would seem more mental than emotional.
But what strikes me about the fact that Methos espouses
these ideas again and again is how important—how vital—
it must be for him to believe that, given his own past. I
mean, think about it. How much easier must it be for him to
believe that if it hadn’t been him doing all that nasty stuff it
would have been someone else—than to believe that he
could have stopped the carnage, that he could have made a
real difference? I see this holistic and removed theory of
history as a rationalisation for Methos—something he believes not because he believes it necessarily in his mind, but
rather something because, emotionally, he needs to believe
it. (And I really would love to know if the Comes A Horseman/Revelations 6:8 arc was already written when Valkyrie
was written, because if it was, this conversation was a brilliant bit of foreshadowing and if it wasn’t, it was a brilliantly serendipitous coincidence.)
Looking at that scene in Valkyrie, Duncan is not concerned with whether the weight of history would have produced a Fuhrer with or without Hitler. He’s concerned with
the fact that it was Hitler, and Hitler was dangerous, and
Hitler had to be stopped. Bottom-line again, and he acted
12
again—but not without thinking about it, not without consideration. He decided what he needed to do and then came
up with a plan to bring that result about.
I think Duncan is a lot less likely to believe something
because he wants to, than Methos is. He challenges his own
beliefs. He hates what Kirin (Blind Faith) did, but he’s willing to examine his hatred and Kirin’s present behaviour,
and alter his perception of Kirin. I’m sure he hates what
Methos did in the Bronze Age as well, but again, he looks
past that and accepts Methos for who he is today. On the
other side of it, he loves Brian Cullen like a brother, but he
is able to do what needs to be done based on the man Cullen is now rather than the one he used to be. Same with
Ingrid. And that’s why I see Duncan as more the pragmatist—he thinks things through. He examines them. And then
he does what he believes needs to be done. The bottomline—this is what has to happen, and whatever I have to do
to make that happen, I’ll do. The people in that auditorium
can’t be murdered—therefore, I have to stop Ingrid, who I
care about, even if I have to kill her. Brian Cullen can’t be
allowed to threaten mortals, therefore I have to stop him,
even if I have to kill him. It’s very methodical, and Duncan
thinks about these things. He considers them, and acts according to his best judgment.
None of that is to say that Duncan doesn’t care about
people—he most obviously cares a very great deal about
nearly everybody he knows. He wouldn’t suffer nearly so
much if his sense of what needed to be done didn’t so often
come into conflict with his love for his friends. I think
that’s where some of the “Duncan is a judgmental jerk”
stuff comes from. You can say that he’s judging his friends
and killing them, and who gave him the right—or you can
say that he’s got lousy taste in friends—or you can say that
when he gives his friendship he gives it wholeheartedly,
and that the conflict between his honour (protecting those
who can’t protect themselves) and his emotions frequently
tears him apart. I think it’s a mix of the latter two.
Anyway. All through this I’ve been torn between finis hing this and wandering off to watch Valkyrie again, since
that’s one of my current favourite episodes. Any episode
with philosophical discussion of the nature of history is OK
by me! So, I’m now off to wriggle happily while watching
Duncan and Methos snark at each other. ?
Summer Edition
The Buzz
Oriental Influences in Highlander
Jean McArthur
[email protected]
Highlander shows strong oriental influences, for
instance in the swords used by main characters, in the
movies and the in the series. There are many settings too,
Immortals and mortals from both the movies, and the series
including The Raven as well as one of the novels, which
show the influence of the Orient. Curiosity, as always, led
me to account for those references, though I may have
missed a few.
The Movies
In the first Highlander movie Ramirez shows Connor
his Samurai sword and told him of the history behind it. He
revealed he was once married to a Japanese princess named
Shakiko, and it was her father, Masamune, who had made
the sword for him in 953BC.
Ramirez went on to say that he had been shattered
when Shakiko died and that she was his last wife. At this
point he did try to convince Connor to leave Heather, but
Connor refused. After the fight with Kurgan and Heather’s
death, Connor took up Ramirez’s sword and left behind his
MacLeod claymore when he left Scotland in 1859.
In present day New York, Brenda dates the steel from
Connor’s blade. She cannot believe the inconsistencies of a
sword from 600BC that had been made with modern
techniques.
Highlander 2 is best forgotten in my opinion and has no
oriental influences that I can recall. And I was not going to
suffer through it to see if there were any.
In Highlander 3, we first see Connor living in Africa
with his son. Through flashbacks we see his studies with
Nakano in Japan, learning methods to forge an unbreakable
sword. In this movie Nakano battled Kane who was then
buried in Nakano’s cave in Mount Neri, as Connor made
his escape. Connor later defeated Kane in New York. This
time in Japan remains Connor’s only Asian journey that I
could find.
Although I haven’t seen Highlander Endgame, spoilers
I have read comment on a Japanese immortal that appears
as the resident k’immie.
The Buzz
Summer Edition
Highlander: The Series
Although the series is set in Paris and Seacouver, due to
the nature of Duncan’s past journeys there are many varied
references to the Orient. He has been in the South Pacific,
visited Japan, studied in China and fought in Cambodia.
Around the same time, Joe Dawson learnt of Immortals and
Watchers in Vietnam during that conflict.
Duncan’s first Eastern adventure started in Japan in
1778 via a shipwreck after marooning a fellow immortal by
the name of Terence Kincaid on a deserted is land in the
South Pacific, shown in Reunion. In Japan he was
befriended by the samurai, Hideo Koto. This friendship
cost Hideo his life by Hara Kiri, due to his refusal to take
Duncan’s life, but Duncan was later able to repay the debt
of honour to one of Hideo’s descendants. It was Hideo who
gave Duncan the Japanese katana that he uses. The
presentation of the sword and these particular scenes are
recalled by flashback in the episode, Samurai.
Duncan also made his way through Russia to Outer
Mongolia where he met Mei Ling in 1780. She was initially
his teacher but later became his lover. This relationship is
recalled in flashbacks of the episode They Also Serve when
Duncan learns that Mei Ling has been killed by a cheating
Immortal named Michael Christian.
Another pupil of Mei Ling’s was Kiem Sun who
crossed paths with Duncan more than once, as shown in the
episode, The Road Not Taken. There is a reference to
Duncan meeting Kiem Sun in 1680, then again in 1780 to
check on his progress with the Kwanlo root. We get to see
Duncan via flashbacks in rich traditional oriental garb with
straight loose hair. Then in the present day we see Duncan
as a reluctant enemy of his former friend, who is now using
the root’s power for the wrong reasons. It appears that
Kiem Sun has remained on holy ground whilst he perfected
his drug for the perfect warrior and this introduced yet
another aspect of the Orient, that of religion.
The Buddhist religion features in the series firstly as
Kiem Sun’s refuge, then as Jimmy’s refuge during the
21
Anthony De Longis, Rachel, Ian Cassidy and Carmel
catch up at Topanga Mall
This Madness That Is
Highlander
Nancye Elliott
[email protected]
To understand this story, you must understand something about the
author. I have spent 15 years creating the perfect packing list for
our one week summer holiday by the beach. I became extremely
stressed because I only had 6 months to prepare for a five week
overseas trip. I am, or perhaps was, NOT a person who did things
spontaneously. Absolutely, never. Ever! So, what happened you
ask? Well, one day
~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~
Sunday: In my study in Sydney, chatting on the Internet with
friends. One makes an offer: “Come to LA next weekend to see
Endgame”. Heart stops beating. Amazing just how many things
can go through your mind in fractions of a second. Possibilities,
work, family, (Father’s Day), money, passport, appointments, how
to tell my daughter! "This is madness," I think, "I don’t do this
sort of thing! But yes, definitely yes!". Break news to family:
“I’m going to LA for the weekend.” Truly stunned silence!
Monday: See Boss. "Can I have Friday & Monday off ? I’m going
to LA for the weekend!" More stunned silence, so much so, he
agrees. Tell selected work mates; reactions range from slackjawed, shaking head, stunned silence to "Excellent! Grab life and
live it!"
More Internet chatting after work, detailed instructions on booking
seat, hotel, the lot. Tickets should arrive Friday AM; flight leaves
Friday 2:00 PM. Think to myself, “Oh gods, I don’t believe I’m
doing this…”
Tuesday: Ring to book flight for Friday. No seats, but "Is
Thursday fine?" "Thursday isn’t fine, I won't get the tickets until
Friday!" So spend rest of the day thinking, "I knew it was too
good to be true!" Try to stop crying and pray for the soul of
anybody who crosses me between now and Friday!
Go home, check email. All fixed! New plan: alternative tickets
will be sent overnight mail by another friend and will arrive
tomorrow. “Oh gods, I still don’t believe I’m doing this!" Ring,
book flight for Thursday. Then another email: "Sorry, friend
didn’t send tickets. Can’t send them tomorrow because they won’t
get there in time for Thursday." So, trip's cancelled AGAIN.
Think: “I really, really knew this wasn’t going to work.” Phone
friend to find out what happened, hear that plans are changed
AGAIN! “Oh gods," I sigh, "I'm going to go crazy!” Now, tickets
will be left at the Domestic Terminal. ”Well, this is the most
insane thing I've ever done! And if I get there it will be a miracle!"
But still, going to give it a go…
Wednesday: To the Boss again. "Umm, can I have Thursday off
instead of Monday?" “Yes," he says, then, "You're really going
tomorrow?” “Oh yes!” I say with absolute confidence. Now, only
have to finish the huge job I have at work. Take son along and
20
drive him like slave, call in all favours, make fellow workers toil
during staff meeting, morning tea, lunch and any other second
they have to spare. Finally come home, pack. Oops, better ring
parents. Still more stunned silence!
Thursday: Morning, Sydney. Well, to leave or not to leave. Very
thankful for a calm and supportive daughter to drive me to the
airport. At Domestic Terminal, miracle number one, tickets are
actually there! "Oh gods, maybe I really will do this?" Off to
International Terminal; will find out at 1.00 PM if I have a seat.
Daughter and I try to sit quietly and calmly and wait. Right! 12.55,
back to book-in counter. Miracle number two: YES! I have a seat!
"Oh my god! I’m going! I’m really doing this!"
Morning, Los Angeles. Due to the vagaries of International travel
& the Date Line, arrived 4 hrs before I left. Annie, Jody and Aine
are there to meet me; don’t know who has the biggest smile. Pile
into a rented van and drive around LA International Airport to
pick up Sonja & Kathy. No Sonja or Kathy, so around we go
again, an interesting experience in and of itself. Second time
around, there they are. More hugs, greeting and smiles. Head off
to the Hotel, get lost, but what the heck? The company is excellent
and the scenery unique. Carmel says, “Don’t forget, we have to be
ready by 5 o’clock!” "Okay," I think, "so what have I missed
here?" “We're going to dinner with Elizabeth Gracen.” she blithly
announces. "What?! I’m living in a fairytale!" I think, "Thank
heavens I bought a dress!” Meet Elizabeth and her friend, Ippolita,
in the lobby and we're off. Have most wonderful and entertaining
dinner, then, at Elizabeth’s suggestion, we visit the Observatory.
“I really and truly don’t believe this is happening,” I mutter to
myself; it becomes a continuous thought all weekend.
Friday: THE DAY! Up early, (actually, hardly been to bed!)
Back to LAX, where Carol arrives. Get phone call from Carmel.
“Where are you? How soon can you get here? We're meeting Bill
Panzer in ten minutes!” So, if there was ever a time to get lost in
LA, of course, this was it and we do. Don't make it to meeting, but
see wonderful sights instead. Meet later at designated coffee shop
and hear all the news from Carmel, then go get ready to see THE
MOVIE! In theatre, overcome by the realisation that I'm really
here and this is really happening. We watch, we marvel, we cry,
we sigh. And when it's over, we “discuss"! However, no time to
get carried away, we have to leave for Topanga Mall. Back into
van, long drive during which we don’t get lost. (Hurray!) Arrive
and find fans and balloons and much excitement. Again marvel,
cry, sigh and, in between, eat, drink, discuss, take photos and talk
to increasing number of fans, stars, writers and technical people
also at theatre. Of course, the 11.45 PM session is special, with so
many people, it has to be. What a day.
Saturday: Breakfast, well, brunch maybe. Nine of us descend on
a wonderful diner recommended by Lizzie. Have an amazing time,
even write an article for The Buzz while we sit. (Such
selflessness!) Then off to an amazing dress shop, “It’s a Wrap”,
and Hollywood Boulevard! Eventually back to the hotel. It's time
to leave for the airport. So soon!
But the excitement isn’t over! Oh no! Plane to take off at 10.40
PM, so, of course get lost on freeway again! Arrive at 10.10, race
like the gods are after me to the gate, arrive at 10.20! Book-in,
maybe there is a seat, maybe there isn’t. Well, if not, I can’t leave
until Tuesday! "How many times can I see the movie again
between now and Tuesday?" Not to be, though. There IS a seat.
<sigh>
Sunday: Well, actually Sunday doesn’t exist. I loose it somewhere
in my excitement and exhaustion.
Monday: Land in Sydney 7.20 AM. Arrive at work 9.05 AM. Not
really sure about Monday, spend a lot of time with HUGE smile
on my face and saying “Yes, I really did!”
~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~
Life has never been the same since I started watching this
wonderful show. I can’t even begin to imagine what my next
Highlander-related adventure will be!
Food and Love:
A Tribute to Maurice Lalonde
‘Big John’ Bierly
Sometimes friends pop up when you least expect them
to. Sometimes you find them living on your barge and using
your toothbrush. But a friend is a friend, and that’s what
matters in the end.
The men of Highlander are one of the biggest keys to its
success. When Connor MacLeod makes his stand against
the ultimate evil later this year in Endgame, Christopher
Lambert will be joined by Adrian Paul, Jim Byrnes, and
Peter Wingfield for what has to be the most handsome male
cast in the history of cinema. And on the small screen, fan
favorites Stan Kirsch, Roger Daltrey, and Valentine Pelka
thrilled the ladies with more than just their performances.
But let us not forget some of Highlander’s unsung
heroes: the characters who
don’t get as much attention
but certainly deserve just
as much praise. As Charlie
DeSalvo and Maurice
Lalonde, respectively,
Philip Akin and Michel
Modo earned more than
just a spot in the show’s
opening credits. They
earned rightful places in
the Highlander universe as
friends of Duncan
MacLeod. And for a man
like Duncan who doesn’t
take friendship lightly,
that’s high praise indeed.
Next month we’ll take
a look at Charlie’s impact
on the series. This month,
to go along with Carmel’s
account of her day in Paris with Michel Modo, let us recall
one of Highlander’s most delightful characters: Maurice
Lalonde.
First, a poem:
On the deck of the barge of Duncan MacLeod
lurks a man who would make the finest chef proud.
For he knows all there is about women and food,
he’s got a big heart, and he’s never been rude.
On first glance you might think he’s just an odd drunk.
“He’s no Duncan,” you’ll say, not an obvious hunk.
But look at that smile, at the heart most sincere,
look past the sneaky face lined with a beard.
What you will find is a man who’s your friend,
who’s more than your neighbour, who’s there till the end.
And though his appearance may seem very slight,
he’d be right there with you in the heat of a fight.
He might take your money for a shopping spree,
but watching Amanda? He’ll do that for free.
“Would he?” you ask, well I’ll tell you right now:
Maurice would, our friend, our wonderful pal.
[email protected]
UnholyAlliance, Part One seethed with drama. Horton
was back, Charlie’s life was on the line, and Duncan
MacLeod didn’t know whom to trust. He knew that Xavier
and Horton were perhaps the most deadly combination of
scum and villainy he‘d ever faced. And he couldn’t help but
suspect that Joe had something to do with it all. Yes,
indeed, Unholy Alliance was a fine piece of drama.
And after the spectacular helicopter sequence in Unholy
Alliance Part Two, MacLeod found himself in Paris again,
hot on the trail of his deadliest rivals. The writers,
meanwhile, weren’t about to let us off the hook. They
added sadness to Duncan’s determination when he arrived
at the barge and had to deal with the flood of Tessa
memories that came with it
in a beautiful Dust in the
Wind montage.
But just as we were wiping
the tears from our eyes,
something—or someone—
happened to Duncan
MacLeod, in the form of
Maurice Lalonde.
The Highlander universe
got a late Christmas
present on December 28,
1938, when Maurice
Lalonde was born in
Marseilles. Maurice would
mature (or not mature,
depending on who you
asked) into one of the
finest gourmet chefs in
Paris. But the death of his
wife Marcelle in a 1983
car accident drove Maurice into a bottle that not even his
concern for his niece Simone, whose mother (Marcelle’s
sister) had died in the same car crash, could bring him out
of. When Duncan MacLeod found him on the barge,
Maurice had been in that bottle for the better part of a
decade. And he’d been on Duncan’s barge for, well, who
knows how long!
And though the scene where Maurice tells Duncan of
Xavier’s whereabouts is one of Highlander’s most priceless
moments, it ’s likely that more than one fan became a little
concerned when Michel Modo was in the opening credits
for the next episode. “They’re making that guy a regular
character?” He didn’t seem the most likely ally for Duncan
MacLeod.
Pharoah’s Daughter didn’t help matters much. Maurice
was again portrayed as Duncan’s silly neighbor. At least he
was more charming than Season One’s Inspector LeBrun,
who would say “son-of-a-bitch” for a quarter. But it wasn’t
until Legacy, an episode that more than deserves its spot in
the “Best of Highlander” collection, that we’d see the true
genius of Michel Modo and the precious addition that
Thank you Carmel, Sonja, Aine, Kathy, Annie, Jody, Carol, Sue,
Ippolita, Elizabeth and most especially my internet friend.?
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13
Maurice truly was to the world of Highlander.
And like Maurice’s first episode, Legacy has some
pretty heavy elements in it. Take away all everything about
Rebecca and the stone and it’s basically a story about
Amanda having one last fling with Duncan before going
away to what they both know will probably be her final
fight. One thing the episode has going for it is the
firecracker chemistry between Adrian Paul and Elizabeth
Gracen. The other is the emergence of Michel Modo as one
of Highlander’s most delightful actors. Legacy is truly one
of Maurice’s finest hours.
One of the funniest scenes is when Amanda wakes up,
stretches her bare shoulders in all their lovely glory, and
warns MacLeod that “this is how love starts.” But the reply,
of course, comes not from Duncan but from Maurice. “Is
that what they say? I’m Maurice. We met the other day. But
you were wearing more clothes.”
Listen to this guy! Not only is he cool in the presence of
Amanda, but he’s cool in the presence of Amanda’s bare
shoulders. And if that scene is one of Highlander’s funniest,
the one that follows is one of its most touching. On the deck
of the barge, Maurice
offers Amanda some
advice.
“My first wife,
Marcelle and I, God rest
her soul, used to fight all
the time,” he says. “It’s
my fondest memory.”
“The
fighting?”
Amanda asks.
“No,” he says fondly
and mischievously. “The
making up. The greater
the fight, the greater the
passion. I see some of her
in you.”
That line could be
interpreted as Maurice
hitting on her. But his
sincerity is just as pure
and true as the beautiful
smile on his face, and the
warmth and honesty in his words. “No offence, Amanda,”
he tells her when she asks if he means that she’s in love
with Duncan, “but a blind man could see it.” And it’s a big
revelation for her. She doesn’t know it, but she’s always
known it. And she should believe it. Why? It’s simple:
“There are two things that Maurice knows about: Food.
And love.”
How can you not love this guy? And how can you not
expect him to take Duncan’s mo ney when he offers it to
Maurice for watching Amanda? If Unholy Alliance was any
indication, you’d expect him to pocket the cash in a hurry.
But Maurice declines, and when he tells Duncan that it was
his pleasure, the words are just as honest as those he spoke
to Amanda just moments before: “It was a joy spending the
morning with you.”
Michel’s performance in Legacy is one of the most
delightful performances that any actor ever turned in during
all six of Highlander’s seasons. The episode was the first
grand step for Maurice as a character, and it was the first
that allowed Michel to do what he does so well.
14
And Maurice continues to be there for Duncan in later
episodes. He’s there when Duncan sees Richie for the first
time since Mako’s death in Prodigal Son. Notice that
Maurice immediately shows concern for Richie. His
faithfulness is one of his greatest virtues, a friend of
Duncan MacLeod is a friend of Maurice Lalonde, even
when that friend is a brash Englishman like Hugh Fitzcairn
in Star-Crossed.
Maurice is there at the racetrack to cheer on Richie and
when Richie “dies” in a motorcycle accident, Maurice is
there to comfort Duncan with sincere words of wisdom.
This is yet another of Michel’s beautiful performances, and
it’s wonderful that the writers gave him the spotlight in
Reasonable Doubt. Reasonable Doubt shows Maurice
taking responsibility for his actions, or, as the case turns out
to be, his inaction. He wasn’t there for Simone when she
needed him. But he can be there for her now. Think of it
this way: Maurice has seen his fair share of odd
occurrences taking place on MacLeod’s barge. He’s seen
his fair share of dangerous men who show up looking for
MacLeod ... and never appear again. But when Kagan stabs
him, he doesn’t run to
MacLeod for help. When
Duncan asks Maurice
what happened to his
hand, Maurice lies. At the
end of the episode he
mourns his ro le in
Simone’s death, but
Duncan tells him that it’s
always easier to see what
you should have done
when you’re looking back.
It’s a lesson that Duncan
has learned—and will
learn—the hard way, too
many times. When
Duncan tells Maurice that
Kagan is dead, Maurice
doesn’t question it. His
silence is his thank-you to
Duncan. It’s also a sign of
respect.
And though Maurice’s departure in Finale just happens
to involve accepting money from Duncan, his concern for
Duncan never falters. Maurice admits his curiosity about
Duncan, but doesn’t push the issue. He respects his friend.
And Duncan, a man whose respect can be hard to earn and
even harder to keep, respects Maurice as well.
Writers like David Tynan and Alan Swayze, who
moved Maurice beyond a two-dimensional oddball in their
scripts, deserve high praise for nurturing the character
along. But it’s Michel Modo’s wonderful talent and
delightful performances that made the character such a joy
to watch. And even though his unfortunately brief role in
“The Modern Prometheus” didn’t give us much insight into
Maurice’s current whereabouts, we can be sure that
Maurice still holds Duncan, Amanda, and Richie very near
and dear to his heart. As one of Highlander’s most
enthusiastic fans, I hold Michel and Maurice very near and
dear to mine. Thank you, Michel.?
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was stunned that he was willing to give us any time at all
given what his day would be like. But he was as gracious
as ever and arrived to find us sitting on his big couch with
our show bag of goodies requiring his signature. He looked
tanned and incredibly fit and happy and we had a wonderful
time reminiscing about Bucharest. Naturally I gave him my
considered views on where he had gone wrong on The
Raven (ignoring my darling Scot!) “How much effort
would it have taken, Bill, to have had a little card with
Amanda’s birthday gifts, signed, simply “Duncan”!! yada
yada yada…” He agreed, it is noted for the record. He was
feeling very nervous about Endgame and I promised that I
would ring him with our reactions as soon as we had seen
it.
I then whipped out of Katana space two Endgame
posters which he graciously signed and dated 1st September.
I then extracted a series of promises concerning everything
from the next Highlander series to the eradication of world
poverty. “Yeeeeeeeesssss Carmel…yeeeeeeeeeeeeessss
Carmel…” (indeed, dear reader, I saw a similar
somnambulant, glazed look that I often observe on Sonja
when she is around me!)
We then headed off to see our first showing of
Endgame. The Contessa was waiting dutifully at our hotel,
clearly feeling a bit nervous at having been abandoned into
the care of these peculiar people from another planet…er…
continent. However she is clearly a woman who adopts a
pragmatic approach to life and immediately got into the
spirit of things by putting on a HLDU t-shirt and off we all
headed through the streets of Burbank to see Duncan
MacLeod’s continuing journey on the large screen.
I loved the movie but it was not without its flaws -- the
main one being that its cinema release is too short in length.
There are however some simply stunning scenes -- some
that had us all weeping aloud. But for those of us in the
audience who had travelled with this man for so long there
was much to savour: explanations of why he had
approached certain things in the way that he had; some
further mysteries….some seeming breaches of canon…
great love…great sacrifice…(boo hoo)…and one of the
most stupendously beautiful soundtracks that you will ever
have the pleasure of hearing.
Naturally we became best friends of the ticket sellers
and they were most amused at the number of shows for
which we kept rolling up.
The Contessa was, I think, a little confused by it all, but
was clearly determined to educate herself on what on earth
this fandom, that so involved her dear friend Lizzie, was all
about. So she agreed to accompany us to the Topanga
Promenade AMC Theaters where Rachel Devine and her
team had outdone themselves organising a wonderful
evening for us all. You can see from the pics that everyone
had a ball. Ian Cassidy (Cracker Bob) was there, as was
Anthony De Longis, Gillian Horvath and a terrific Scottish
piper. Rennie exhausted herself by meeting and greeting
everyone from 11 am onwards.
At 11:45 PM a theatre had been booked for a private
showing for we Highlander fans only. That was very
special, to be a part of the great Highlander community
once again as we all sat there laughing and crying and
sighing and being swept away on the incredible music.
There really was something very joyful about six years of
involvement all coming together in that theatre in Los
Angeles as we all watched our heroes larger than life on
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that enormous screen. Duncan MacLeod of the Clan
MacLeod – Methos at his most enigmatic, Joe still unable
to quite understand what the word non-interference actually
means – and Connor at his very very best. Christophe and
Adrian really were superb, with the camaraderie of teacher
and student and real life friendship and rapport, really
sparking something very special.
I enjoyed the film but enjoyed it more and more with
each viewing and this was a common view. I am able to
wipe out the weaker parts and sit, Watcher-like, and
observe the many flashbacks and scenes that flesh out so
much of what we saw in the 119 episodes. I am critical of
many aspects of the plot and some of the acting of others
but it in no way dampened my enjoyment of the film. Lisa
was superb, I thought. Peter Wingfield, despite only having
a short scene, was his usual excellent self. In a few minutes
he managed to imbue his character with what we have come
to expect and been spoiled with: conveying amazing
complexity and layers of ambiguity.
There was so much about the film that I truly loved…
getting to meet Connor’s wonderful Mother – another
amazingly strong MacLeod woman – the flashback scenes
of Connor and Duncan as wild young things…the tragedy
that stayed with Connor all his life and his soul’s longing
for the great love of his life – Heather.
It is about betrayal, love everlasting, revenge, sacrifice –
hope. In short, everything that we have come to love and
expect in our Highlander universe.
The Contessa found it all rather amazing and couldn’t
wait to tell Lizzie about her observations of this strange
parallel universe she had wandered into.
We saw the movie many more times and in between
lunch by the Bay in San Francisco on our way home on the
Monday we even managed to catch it one last time. We
weren’t banking on ever seeing it on the big screen
DownUnder so are pleased that Hoyts have announced that
they will be showing it in late March 2001.
So, dear readers, our LA adventures came to an end.
The last Tim Tam was eaten, the last tear wiped from our
eyes during the final showing, the last fragment of
observations on life, love and the whole darn thing muttered
as we all kissed each other goodbye until the next time we
all decided to once again behave outrageously in our
unending quest to grow old disgracefully…?
19
my fall in Bucharest? Yes he was sure that I had a myriad
of views that needed sharing with him on the future of
Highlander etc etc etc…and given the time commitments of
a Hollywood mogul he could fit me in later that afternoon.
Well – what was I to do? “Er..um….gee I’m sorry
about that Bill but I already have Elizabeth Gracen booked
up for that time slot. Could we make it tomorrow
morning???” He had clearly not figured on the extremely
busy and hectic life of HLDU moguls!!
So the gang started to get ready to hit poster and picture
shops on the Thursday afternoon, while Lizzie and I were
working our butts off…and to check out the quality of the
local cinema. As the big launch at the Topanga Mall wasn’t
going to take place until late Friday night we wanted to
make sure that we had seen Endgame at every possible
session possible before then.
As they all prepared to hit the shops there was a ring at
the door and there was Lizzie all set to work. Now I ask
you…do you know anyone who can arrive in jeans, black
top and her hair freshly washed and pulled back in a lacquer
band held pony tail – minimal make up – and STILL look
like ruddy Miss America?? As she bounced in looking like
she had just dropped in from St Tropez we all sighed and
threw ourselves flat on our backs on the bed to take the
strain off our Tim Tam laden bodies.
The only
accompaniment to our sighs was the odd ping of a shrapnellike jeans' button ricocheting off the hotel wall all around
Lizzie!
Lizzie had her laptop, and she allowed herself to indulge
in the odd bit of chocolate, and got down to work. I, of
course, told her that as a former Miss America she had very
high standards to keep up and that she shouldn’t really go
around looking so scruffy and that I and my team of able
assistants were ready and willing to give her any advice on
beauty and grooming
that might be helpful.
As you can see from the
accompanying picture,
she immediately sought
our advice on how she
should be wearing her
hair and fortunately our
internationally
recognised
high
standards in grooming
came to the fore as we
enlightened Lizzie on
how she should be seen
on the beaches of St Tropez and Cannes and Venus Beach
in the coming months.
After the gang had disappeared for many hours and
Lizzie and I managed to get through all 60 pages of the web
site (yes – it really is Lizzie’s web site. She is totally hands
on and every page bears her creative mark) Lizzie revealed
a surprise! She had arranged for us all to dine at one of her
favorite restaurants in a private room and had also arranged
for us to meet her dear friend and partner in crime, The
Contessa (Ippolito Douglas Scotti de Vigoleno) who was
staying with her for a few months while they both wrote
and produced a cook book.
Here you see pictures of the inaugural meeting of the La
Dolce Vita club.Lizzie and the Contessa had a basket ready
for us when we arrived at the restaurant with our
certificates, as the first ten members of La Dolce Vita –
“Let the flesh inform the mind!” is the Contessa’s motto.
What a wise woman.
We were all set tasks by the Lizzie and the Contessa –
we had to come up with our ten ideal romantic dinner
companions and give reasons for our choices. Many
hilarious hours later we left the restaurant only to have
Lizzie decide that we could not possibly be in LA without
seeing a bird’s eye view of LA from the heights of the
Griffith Observatory. So after all that an exhausted HLDU
contingent fell into bed, most excited about Endgame's
premiere on the morrow.
As Lizzie wasn’t going to be in town for the premiere
she decided to leave the Contessa in my safe keeping!!
Lizzie was leaving for Vancouver on the Friday to meet up
with Jim Byrnes so they could discuss their forthcoming
joint CD and to then meet up with Adrian so they could all
watch Endgame together in Vancouver. Lizzie later wrote
up her reaction for me to post to her Elizabeth Gracen list
on egroups:
‘I was fortunate enough to screen ‘Highlander
Endgame’ with my buddies, Adrian and Jimmy Byrnes. We
had a blast up in Vancouver. It was like old times. The one
truly fabulous thing about working on the show for so many
years was the amazing bonds the cast members formed. I
consider the ‘boys’ of Highlander some of best friends.
Sooooo...you can imagine the fun I had razzing them
both about the film.
Poor Adrian! When it was over we all had a great time
talking about his bum and how big it was on the screen!!!
We got a lot of mileage out of that one!
I thought Adrian was just superb in the film...he is my
James Bond and I was so happy to see his face up there on
the big screen. It was time to see him up there as Duncan,
don’t you think?’...
Lizzie
So Friday dawned…..1st
September, 2000. The day
Endgame was to be released
throughout the US.
I
couldn’t help but think
about my times on the film
set some ten months before,
in Bucharest, and was very
excited that we were all
going to see the culmination
of all that effort.
We had arranged to see
Bill early Friday morning. I
The Contessa
The Monk And The Warrior
Athena
[email protected]
Before I start I want to pay tribute and acknowledge my debt to the posters of alt.tv.highlander whose
discussions have helped me refine, change and occasionally strengthen what you are about to read here.
“Darius was one of the great generals, Grayson was his
second in command. 1500 years ago Darius could have led
his armies across Europe and ruled for a thousand years, but
he turned his armies back. Grayson felt betrayed and never
forgave him. And Darius ever since has tried from holy
ground to be a peacemaker. ...
... Legend has it that Darius killed a holy man at the
gates of Paris. The oldest living immortal at the time. And
suddenly he changed. He turned his back on war.”
This is MacLeod’s introduction to one of the most
popular and influential characters in the Highlander
universe. He tells us that Darius has been two different
people in his life – a general and a peacemaker. Or, as I
have called them, the warrior and the monk. And it is these
two people that make up Darius that I want to explore here.
The easy one is the monk that Darius now is. It is more
difficult to find the warrior and I have had to rely on
looking for hints, speculating a little and reading between
the lines. But I do believe the warrior is there if you look.
So, let’s do the easy bit first and have a look at Darius
the monk.
It is as a monk that we first see Darius. The very first
shot of him is as a cowled figure knelt in prayer or
meditation in the church. He gives a thief a proper funeral
mass, without checking it through with the archbishop first.
We see him taking confessions and offering advice with
compassion and humour. He also accepts the
responsibilities he has taken upon himself and refuses to
break the seal of the confessional and give Le Brun the
information he needs to catch Xavier St Cloud. Later on, in
FTWD, MacLeod seems to cast a little doubt as to whether
Darius actually believes in God, but whether he does or not,
Darius is certainly committed to carrying out his priestly
duties.
Darius is a healer, a herbalist and a brewer. MacLeod
first meets him when he is healing the sick and wounded at
the battle of Waterloo, which is a long way away from his
normal Paris base. In one of my personally favourite
scenes, he inflicts mould-form tea on an unsuspecting
MacLeod. Darius also brews good enough mead to meet
with Fitzcairn’s discriminating approval.
Darius also appears to act as friend and refuge to many
of the Immortals in and around Paris. Aside from
MacLeod, his flock includes Grace, Ursa, Marcus
Constantine and, in earlier times, Xavier St Cloud. I think
the implications are that he knows more Immortals than we
meet or hear about.
Perhaps Darius is most influential as a teacher and
peacemaker – the two roles for him seem to be inextricably
linked. His students all work for peace. We meet three of
them: Victor Paulus, the man Grayson kills (who I think is
called Jean-Pierre–Darius doesn’t say him name clearly and
he doesn’t appear in the credits) and MacLeod. Paulus is
the star pupil, of course. He is a peacemaker, a man with a
mission, who can persuade hard-bitten reporters to listen to
a speech in the rain and reduce them to tears by the end of
it. Poor Jean-Pierre only just makes it past the starting
credits before delivering his immortal line of ‘Urk glurk’
and then expiring. MacLeod denies that he is Darius’
protege, but admits that he has been changed by him; while
MacLeod still fights, he doesn’t get involved in mortal
battles anymore.
So, that is Darius–monk, priest, healer, friend,
peacemaker and teacher. There seems to be no remnant of
the warrior and general he used to be. Or is there?
Well, certainly Darius can still plan and order a
Ippolito Douglas Scotti
de Vigoleno
18
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15
I think of characterization on TV as a mirror. Not that it reflects us, but that there is no real depth to it.
You can't see beneath the surface to what the characters are thinking and feeling, so you have to imagine
and then project it onto them. Fanfiction, indeed any fiction, is like a smooth pond, or a window. You
can see the surface just like on TV, but if you focus past it, you can see the previously hidden depths. That's
where I like to play. There is so much more room in the water for swimming than for waterskiing.
Taselby [email protected] http://www.tenebris.org/mbb/
Grayson tries to neutralise MacLeod first
campaign. He can’t fight Grayson directly so he summons
MacLeod into the fight, knowing the risks the younger
Immortal will be facing. We can never be sure exactly what
the runic telegram he sends MacLeod says, but the
Highlander interprets it in no other way than he will have to
fight Grayson. Tellingly, Grayson anticipates the same
thing. When he arrives in Seacouver, he doesn’t
immediately try to kill Paulus; he tries to neutralise
MacLeod first. He is clearly expecting the Scot to try to
stop his plans. I think this is a glimpse of the general Darius
once was.
It is also apparent that the warrior’s instincts have not
quite left Darius. When Xavier is gassing people and
taunting Darius with it, Darius considers leaving holy
ground to fight him. It is MacLeod who persuades him not
to. And at the end, when faced with mortals who know how
to kill him, Darius does not go quietly; he fights for his life.
Darius and MacLeod play chess a lot, or rather, Darius
beats MacLeod at chess a lot. And Darius does not only
play games of strategy he also plays war-games. At the
start of Saving Grace we see the two friends re-enacting a
battle from the American Civil War. When asked why he
does it, Darius revealing replies, ‘To deny what I was, is to
deny what I am.’ So Darius still seems to be in touch with
his inner general.
That seems harmless enough. But how about Darius the
spymaster?
When Grayson kills Jean-Pierre in front of the church,
he tells Darius he did it because ‘You planted him in my
organisation to spy on me.’ Darius doesn’t deny it. And it
is hard to see how he could. Jean-Pierre was his student and
Grayson did recognise him in his organisation. What other
16
reason could a student of Darius have for being in
Grayson’s organisation other than keeping tabs on him –
spying? And then there are the Watchers. Not only does
Darius know of their existence, he has one of their ancient
Chronicles. In addition, he doesn’t just dream about the
Hunters, he has enough information about them to be able
to direct MacLeod to their leader. The partial zip code in
the back of the Chronicles is for Horton’s bookshop.
However he found that out, it argues for some form of
intelligence gathering on behalf of Darius.
That then, is my perspective on Darius - the monk and
the warrior, the peacemaker and the general. The monk is
obvious and clearly seen; the warrior is a far more shadowy
figure, only half-glimpsed here and there. But it wasn’t
supposed to be that way.
The version of The Hunters we saw was not the episode
as it was first conceived. It was hurriedly re-written when
Werner Stocker became too ill to work.
On alt.tv.highlander one of the writers gave us a glimpse
of what might have been. In the original version, Darius is
not killed until late in the episode. In the scene where the
Hunters attack MacLeod in the courtyard, he is not rescued
by Richie, but by Darius, wielding a staff. As a bonus, we
get to find out that Darius, not used to carrying money,
couldn’t pay for his ticket on the metro and had jumped the
turnstile. I so wish we had got to see that. Not just because I
wish Werner Stocker had lived, but because I would have
liked to have seen Darius, monk and warrior, clearly for
once ?
Summer Edition
The Buzz
HLDU goes to Los Angeles
Carmel Macpherson
You will all recall, no doubt, my Pt 1 of our adventures
in LA, starting with the following two paragraphs: “…Now
that I have a minute to breathe I thought that I should fill
you all in on our antics in LA recently. That post was sent
to the HLDU list in mid October as I recall. I detailed for
you all, dear readers, Annie’s commando-like control of our
nine seater van on the notorious LA Freeways as we roared
from theatre to theatre looking for the very best in audio
visuals to better appreciate Highlander:Endgame. (There is
nothing about the cinemas in LA that any of the nine of us
couldn’t fill you all in on, plus an excellent complex in San
Francisco!) The nine of us were Sonja, Annie, Jody, Carol,
Nancye, Aine, Rachel, Kathy and Sue and I.
You will all recall how a frazzled Aine met up with us
in LA after half a hill in Yosemite had decided that it liked
the ground better than its current vertical position and she
had awoken that morning to a large rock bursting through
her tent!! So she was a little shaken and in sore need of
much Highlander talk to calm her frazzled nerves.
I rang Bill Panzer to let him know that (joy of joys :-))
HLDU was in town!!
And as I recall my last paragraph said: “…Stay tuned
for further instalments as we gradually build towards Sept
1st and the premiere of THAT movie at THAT gathering in
Topanga Mall plus our meeting with Bill.....and our time
with Elizabeth and the Contessa and how HLDU totally
corrupted the Contessa Ippolito Douglas Scotti Vigoleno
when she was left in our safe-keeping by her dearest friend,
Elizabeth …”
Well – it’s time for a further instalment.
Below is a picture of Aine after having thrown out all of
the carrot sticks and celery in the bar fridge and filling it
with real energy food – Tim Tams in every chocolate
flavour you can imagine, plus that old staple of every
Aussie movie theatre – Fantails and Jaffas.
And here, dear reader, I am forced to once again share
with you evidence of my continuing burden. You will
recall the numerous pictures I have shared with you of
Sonja asleep on the stairs at Chronicles, HLDU 1, 2 and
3…various HLDU documentary filming spots in Scotland
and France (well may you all wonder why I had to do so
many takes as revealed in Sonja’s Famous Blooper Reel
wherein I was lambasted and
my talents totally demeaned!)
What Sonja failed to share
with you all and what I have
been up until now too
sensitive to reveal is that
every time I allowed my
sweeping gaze and arm to ….
well…er…..*sweep*…across
Loch Shiel or Glenfinnan or
Castle Tioram or the Quai I
would be confronted with
Sonja punching out the zeds
…
.
The Buzz
Summer Edition
[email protected]
ZZZZzzzzzzZZZZsnortzzzzzz… and I would be forced to
once again have to do the work of ten. Naturally I have
further pictures of Sonja actually asleep but I shall save
them for the collage that Peter and Lizzie will be auctioning
at HLDU4.<wg>
Now where was I? Aaah yes – Los Angeles. Endgame
was actually premiering on Friday 1 September which of
course gave us many hours of anticipation. As mentioned in
Pt 1, I had made Bill Panzer’s afternoon by revealing to him
in a phone call to D-P Productions that I was in town and
would love to catch up with him for a cup of coffee. I had
also arranged for Elizabeth Gracen to drop by our hotel
room on Thursday because, whilst the rest of the group
were able to do nothing but have fun, Lizzie and I had work
to do! After HLDU3 when Lizzie and I had been talking
about a web page for her I had offered my darling
husband’s time and expertise to get Lizzie’s web page up
and running. We had not countered on Lizzie’s creativity
and innovation and this simple little ten page web site soon
grew into a 60 page flash enabled extravaganza. I quickly
volunteered Kath Heytink to be part of the Lizzie Web
Consortium. Lizzie, Paul, Kath and I had all spent some
time at Legacy going through Lizzie’s ideas and we were
now at the stage where Lizzie needed to go through every
single page to make sure that it was what she wanted.
So I had brought a
hard copy of the
Elizabeth Gracen Web
to LA and she and I had
arranged to put in some
solid hours so that we
could launch the web in
October. And it was at
that point that Bill
Panzer returned my
call…yes he would love
to catch up….had I
managed to get out all
the mud and straw from
17