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Jonathan Frakes - Executive Producer and Director on Roswell
On the move
How do you feel about the move to UPN?
I think it’s a blessing for the show in that on UPN we’re essentially a very big fish, and when we’re partnered with Buffy it makes an argument for [our night] being perhaps the strongest night on UPN.
While we were on the WB we were certainly not the number one show. I think we have a wonderful position in the schedule and a wonderful position in terms of publicity and marketing and I think it’s a good move on all fronts.
Do you think the change of network is going to alter the show?
I suspect that UPN wants to make sure that we hold onto their demographic of wrestling fans, but I don’t think that’s a problem with our show anyway.
Our strong teen-girl demographic attracts a lot of the boys as well, so I suspect that they’ll let us continue to create the show with a style that has already gotten us into the third season anyway.
Romance, not rubber-headed aliens
What was your initial contact with the concept of Roswell?
A few years ago Metzer’s book, Roswell High, which was [part of] a series of teen novels, was brought to the attention of my partner, Lisa Owen. For some reason I am associated with all things alien, the official spokesperson for the paranormal, [so it was passed to me].
This show appealed because it was not rubber headed aliens, it was, in fact, quite attractive intelligent teenagers who just happened to be aliens.
So, the premise of the show, that there were in fact aliens from Roswell who had infiltrated the public, I thought was very intriguing and very sellable. We attached Jason Katims, which has been a real blessing on all fronts, and the show was sold.
It has a very complicated genealogy. Twentieth Century Fox, for whom Jason was a contract writer, produced the show. It was then bought by Warner Brothers, the station that originally aired it, it is being shot as we speak on the Paramount lot and is now airing on the UPN. And the Â鶹ԼÅÄ. It’s a very well travelled, successful alien chronology.
What do you actually do?
Could you explain what your role is as an executive producer?
Good question. What does an Executive Producer do?
In my case I was able to put together the team that now runs the show. I’m not a writer. I was attached to direct the pilot but at the same time I was also finishing Insurrection, the last Star Trek movie. I wasn’t able to do both, so it worked out that David Nutter, who has great success with pilots, did our pilot and the show was sold.
As an executive producer who’s not a writer, my responsibilities are obviously to hire the best people for the jobs and to contribute notes to the scripts and then to the cuts as the shows come in.
What I’m most proud of besides the casting and the good fortune of getting Katims is the addition of Ron Moore, who was a lead writer on Star Trek. He wrote First Contact, which was my first movie directing effort, and ran Deep Space Nine, and is a master of story telling and mythology.
[That] was something that we needed to address with our aliens, the mythology of where they came from, and where they’re going and what they are looking for. Ron Moore’s been able to come in and give us some wonderful big arcs to that end.
From tome to TV
What did you feel needed changing from the original books?
One of the original concepts of the show limited it to a high school setting which was not a great idea in that the dew was off the rose of having yet another High School show.
That's why the title was changed from Roswell High to Roswell. As the actors and the kids get older we didn’t want to pretend that they were still sixteen when they’re not. It became clear that the themes that were working for the audience were not ones that could be talked about easily by the locker or in the dressing room at the gym or in the cafeteria of a High School.
They were in fact philosophical and ethical and moral issues that needed to go outside the [scenario]. Not that High School kids couldn’t handle these concepts, but the locales needed to be more private, more secretive, more surreptitious and the High School element was not as important as it was in the novel.
Outside of that, the concept of the show has been to explore our aliens’ background. The novel originally was sort of a love letter from one of the human girls who fell in love with an alien. That arc has been explored and continues to be explored [by the show], but now we’re going to find out where they came from.
Ironies of a SF career
How interested are you generally in science fiction?
Ironically, I had virtually no interest in science fiction. It was not on my bedside table for reading, it was not something that I was a follower of. I didn’t know anything about the original Star Trek outside of the fact that it was a cultural phenomenon.
I like contemporary American literature and I like biographies and I like jazz and I like baseball and I like writers who write about the human condition and sci-fi is just something that I happened into. Don’t get me wrong, I’m very thankful for all the aliens I’ve met and loved.
It’s ironic that because of my connection with Star Trek my role [seems to be] official spokesperson for all things paranormal, [so] these projects come my way. As a result that’s what I have found myself doing.
I just finished another movie here at paramount called Clockstoppers which is about time travel and has a science fiction bent so I’m determined, or they are, whoever they are, to keep me close to other planets.
Roswell, the movie?
Given your film experience, would you like to see Roswell crossing to the big screen?
That’s a very good question. Given the success of the X-Files movie, I wouldn’t be at all surprised, if we continue to do well.
If the interest is there and a studio wants to put the money behind it, this could be a very, very powerful film because we could do things that we can’t do on television. It would certainly have more edge.
Letters, and beings, from the beyond
Does your profile mean you get a lot of people sending you theories and so forth?
I get an inordinate amount of, diplomatically, let’s say odd, mail and scripts and treatments and story ideas and theories and theorems. I’m fortunate to have a very trusted assistant who filters through most of them for me.
What’s your own personal view of what happened out in Roswell?
I’ve always thought that we, as human beings, would be naive and arrogant to pretend that we’re the only life form in the galaxy. That’s my story and I’m sticking to it.
Crossover potential
Now that Roswell’s on the UP, will there be any crossovers with other shows on the network?
Funny you should mention that.
I’m about to direct an episode of Roswell in which Max, our favourite lead alien, ends up in Los Angeles, and is picked up by a talent agent. Who sends him an audition for Star Trek: Enterprise, the fourth instalment in the new Star Trek television on-going family. Ironically, directed by Jonathan Frakes.
So crossover and synergy are going to be at the forefront of our new home at UPN. Enterprise is on UPN, Roswell is on UPN and we all work for Viacom at Paramount studios. So should this go smoothly there will be a direct crossover.
Being Jonathan Frakes
You’ve now played a cameo as yourself. What was that like?
It’s funny, the line is very thin when you play yourself.
It’s not unlike doing a convention, which I have some experience with, obviously, from speaking at Star Trek conventions. This episode was [set] at a UFO convention, oddly enough.
I have a pretty good handle on who Jonathan Frakes is but it seems to be an ongoing process to learn how to play him accurately.
Alien conventions
Have you been to any fan events for Roswell?
The people that I worked for on the Star Trek conventions have asked me to try to get our stars from Roswell to commit to doing some conventions.
I’m hoping to cross that bridge next week when I come back to the show as a director. I think the fan base is huge and I think it’s an interesting experience, not unlike Galaxy Quest, to go out and do a convention. As actors they owe it to themselves [to do it].
Prime directives
Has the Star Trek philosophy of Gene Roddenberry changed the way you look at the world?
I think that Gene Roddenberry’s vision of the future was so positive and uplifting that it can’t help but have influence. It’s certainly [affected] my outlook on the future and it’s what made Star Trek successful and what made it attractive to be on.
It makes me proud now as the father of two kids to say "This is the show that your dad was doing for all those years" and watch it. I can have them watch it with pride because the ethics and the morals of the show, which were Roddenberry’s strongest suite, are things that we should be so lucky as to embrace.
With what’s going on in the Middle East, and in Northern Ireland, parts of the world have gone to [an appalling place]. If the prime directives were followed a little more accurately here on earth, I mean it sounds somewhat Pollyanna, but I think people would certainly get along better.
Number one trombone
I understand you played trombone on a hit album?
Well, it’s a hit album from many years ago.
I played briefly on the Fish album Hoist and the story goes that Hoist was being produced by my next door neighbour John Fox, who’s a dear friend, and I guess he said "The guy from Star Trek lives next door".
I had this sort of beat-up cow mail-box that the Hoist band members were attracted to and they wrote a song, small as it is, called Riker’s Mail-Box which I play some very loud trombone on.
Spinning Max and Liz?
If you had the chance to do a Roswell spin-off, what would it be?
That’s a wonderful question.
You don’t want to hurt anyone’s feelings, but you certainly could take any of our three lead couples and take them to another town and follow their journey.
If Max and Liz are in fact a couple, there’s a human in that relationship, Michael and Maria are a couple, there’s a human and an alien in that relationship, and Isabel is about to be engaged. So any of the three aliens teamed with a human partner I think is an intriguing possibility.