High Stakes

The stakes had never been higher for Gerry Anderson and Lew Grade.  Space: 1999 was a massive gamble, a huge production on a scale never attempted before with no guarantee of a sale to the biggest market of them all.  An American network sale was absolutely vital if the series was to have a future.  ITC had a track record of selling to the American networks but they weren't infallible: in recent years neither Department S nor Thunderbirds had been taken up in the US.  Hugley successful worldwide, both were curtailed because they failed to get a foothold in the US.

For the project to succeed the series had to get off to a strong start with its opening episode, which started filming under American director Lee H. Katzin on December 3rd 1973.  There had already been production delays when the entire production was forced to decamp clandestinely from the closure-threatened Elstree Studios to Pinewood.

A highly experienced director of filmed television, Katzin should have been well used to the time constraints that came with the medium.  Unaccountably he caused the shoot to go wildly over its ten day schedule by filming far too much material, causing chaos with the show's budget and filming schedule until the episode finally wrapped on January 11th.  Worse news was to come when the miles of footage were edited together - instead of producing a 50 minute TV episode, the first cut of the pilot show lasted over two hours.  Even worse, according to Gerry Anderson the film was slow and dull; a view shared by Abe Mandell of ITC New York when he saw it for himself.

Disaster on the Launchpad

At this stage the entire future of the series was on the line.  Space: 1999 was set up with the intention of producing a series with similar production values to 2001: A Space Odyssey, but to television production schedules and a (very large) budget.  If the opening episode was going to take over double the scheduled time and still not produce a useable result, how was a full series of 24 episodes going to be made on anything resembling the show's budget and screening dates?  Gerry Anderson was Lew Grade's most trusted producer, but Abe Mandell had Grade's ear and his continued support for the project was vital.  At this early stage it was still possible for the series to be cancelled, with perhaps a TV special salvaged from the shoot which could be released to cinemas in Europe and South America.

Remarkably, Anderson was able to supervise the re-editing of Breakaway down to the required length, he personally wrote and directed twenty linking scenes to tie the by-now disjointed story together.  These were filmed in a three day shoot between the filming of Black Sun (Lee Katzin's second and final Space: 1999 episode) and Ring Around the Moon.

The result was a triumph - fifty minutes of televsion which looked better than most feature films and provided Abe Mandell with the best possible tool to attempt to sell the series to the American market.

The patchwork nature of the script, Christopher Penfold's rewrite of George Bellak's The Void Ahead having undergone further additions by Anderson, were as nothing.  Breakaway was always going to have size and scale, but now it all flowed perfectly and worked as a piece of drama.

If ever Gerry Anderson proved his worth as a practical, nuts and bolts filmmaker it was here.  The immediate future of Space: 1999 was assured.  The business of completing the pilot to his satisfaction and to ITC New York went on alongside the vital tasks of assembling a team of directors to helm the individual episodes and having the musical score written and performed.  The latter would have seemed relatively straightforward, but even here there were unexpected difficulties. 

Where Hendrix Meets Wagner

Barry Gray's status as Gerry Anderson's composer of science fiction scores was beyond question, his ability to create a huge sound from a relatively small orchestra giving the shows a big screen feel way beyond their budgets.  Here he would have the chance to create a score for a project where the images would be every bit as large scale as his music.  Not that the size of his orchestra was a factor, with the Space: 1999 theme and a later recording session for the episode Another Time, Another Place utilising the talents of a fifty-two piece ensemble.  Other recording sessions used fewer musicians - just 32 produced the soundtrack to Breakaway and Matter of Life and Death (recorded in reverse order on March 14th and 15th, 1974).  Barry Gray's final recording session, for The Full Circle, took place some months later on December 3rd.  These were to be his final compositions for Gerry Anderson.

Gray's Space: 1999 theme was recorded almost a year earlier, on December 11th 1973, and is arguably his masterpiece.  A real sense of awe and majesty is brought to each episode, the opening fanfare announcing to the world 'watch this, it's important'.  The composer undercut any tendency towards pomposity (a comparision with Stu Phillips' theme to the original Battlestar Galactica is instructive) by mixing this with the pop sensibility he had regularly displayed in Anderson series from Four Feather Falls to Joe 90 and UFO.  The result was both grandiose and thrillingly catchy, as if Jimi Hendrix was jamming along to Wagner. 

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