riter/producer David Kemper may have begun his career working on the earliest cable stations and ushering for the comedy Soap, but the long and winding road through television-land has led him once again to science fiction, this time as the executive producer of Farscape. Now in his
13th science-fiction television series, Kemper has found that working on SCI FI's top original series has surprised him and given him insight he hopes to use in the future. The Farscape third season finale will air Friday, April 26, at 9 p.m. ET/PT, with season four set to begin June 7 at 10 p.m. ET/PT.
Kemper paid his way through college by writing commercials and went on to write game shows for the Goodson-Todman Company, before moving to CBS. He spent 10 years working for the network, moving up to the position of program executive. But Kemper had other plans in mind that would give him a chance
to work "on the outside."
His work "outside" would squarely land him in genre television. Kemper has written for Star Trek: The Next Generation, Star Trek: Voyager, The Pretender, Equalizer, Stargate SG-1 and The Outer Limits. He's also served in varying writer/producer capacities on SeaQuest DSV, American Gothic, Pacific Blue, Poltergeist: The Legacy and Tour of Duty.
While Kemper isn't about to reveal any big secrets about what's coming up on
the Saturn-Award-winning Farscape, he did have plenty to say about
working on the series, the Aussies and magic.
Up to this point, the crew of Moya has been pushed and twisted and pulled in every direction. You're just so nasty to them.
Kemper: I'm not nasty to them. Just so you know, and you can quote me, all we do is get the little radio signals and we chronicle what actually happens. So we don't have anything to do with what actually happens. We just report it.
What was the biggest challenge for you putting together the final four episodes of season three?
Kemper: Everybody always asks that, and it's real simple. The first thing is, when you get to the end of a year like this, there was no challenge to the story in a way, because we knew it had to end this way. It just had to be. So in that sense, some people always think, "My God, it must be so difficult to think of these things." Hey, not really, because the end of the year is easier than the beginning of the year. All these events have happened and all you have to do is pay them off. It could easily have been a six-parter. But we made it a four-parter and we had to get rid of stuff and add stuff and subtract stuff. And it gets hard to make those choices.
When you finish the four episodes you'll be saying, of course. Of course. It had to be that way. There are other ways, but we like to think the season had to end this way. We're the producers. We're the actors and directors. We're clinical. We go, "Oh, it works. Its works, it works, it works." It's
exactly what you'd want it to be at the end. We did our job, we should get our pay.
What other challenges do you have doing Farscape?
Kemper: The other hard part, just the hardest part that nobody cares about, is that everyone keeps saying, "Why isn't the show on sooner?" or "How come you don't do a feature?" This is the hardest show I've ever even sniffed around. It's enormously difficult to make this show, and it takes us six to nine months from the concept of an episode, when somebody pitches an episode and says 'I want to do an episode about [this or that],' 'til it hits the air. That's an enormous amount of time to keep your focus. So the hard part is at the end of the year you just don't want to do it. You don't want to work
that hard. You don't want to. You just want to go home. You're tired. Everybody's literally working on fumes, and you're just trying to make it to tomorrow. Well, we are [pushing] though, because we know we have to make something great. But it's like, "Oh, just let me go home." So everybody, Ben [Browder] and
Claudia (Black) and the directors and editors are all dead tired. So every year when these last four come up, it's up to everybody to suck it up.
Part of the way we make it is the stories usually are so compelling. We've done it for three years in a row and I'm really proud of the writers, of which I'm one. We create a template that's got enough cool stuff that it energizes people. 'Cause they read it and they go, "Wow! I can't wait to see this."
Then, all of a sudden, people pick up and we find that it's like a guy running a race, and you get to the end and you just don't think you're going to make it. Then you see the finish line, and when you see the finish line, somehow your brain kicks in and your body [finishes the race]. You know Farscape is pretty earthy and it has all sorts of disgusting noises and things that happen. So here's another analogy which is much more Farscape. It's like when you're in the car and you have to pee really bad. And you're okay. And then you start to get closer to home and you have to pee worse and worse and worse. And then, of course, you find a way [laughs]. You know when you're going up your own street, it's never worse than that. Most of us just don't give into the urge. Most of us get home. I've always gotten home. I'll just say that [laughs].
You're doing some things with Farscape that nobody has ever done before.
Kemper: We don't know that. We keep hearing that. But when we're doing it, we think we're doing exactly the same thing. Our model is to do exactly what everyone's done before, but do it in a different way. That's the secret. One of our writer's has a really big B.S.-meter. I'm the boring
meter. I don't like to sit still. I don't like to stare at one thing for too long. I like to keep moving. I like to keep going. Rock O'Bannon is like that. And this came from him. He said originally when he created the show, he said let's just keep it going, keep it going, keep it moving, tell a story. And that's what we try and do all the way through. So, we just don't want to bore ourselves.
What's surprises you most about the series so far?
Kemper: You know something, I've been answering a lot of questions in the last year. That's probably the most fun question someone's asked me because I don't have a ready answer for you.
The most surprising thing to me about Farscape is probably what I've learned. What I mean is, nothing much surprises me anymore. I'm relatively older in the world of TV producer people, and so when I learn something new I'm surprised by it, because I just thought I knew it. Now I've got a new thing presented to me, and what that is is I have been on shows where you are in a tightly controlled environment and everything is micromanaged from top to bottom. And some of them work and some of them don't. And I have been on shows where somebody does not have a strong hand or the politics of the situation present two competing factions, the producers or you have a star that's fighting the executive producer. You're tugging the show in two different directions. Some of those shows, miraculously, because of the concept and the actors, the stuff works. And some of them have not.
With this show, I got lucky in finding what I call a hybrid, which is kind of an American/Australian hybrid. It's the first time that anyone has ever asked me the question, so it's the first time I've had to put this in words, but I know this is what it is. We have all these writers and the Aussie way of
writing is different than the American way. We've trained the Aussie writers to write American as a different way of telling a story, structurally. A different way of putting edge into a story. As producers, Rockne and I realized early we couldn't control this production. We couldn't be at every meeting. We could not be in every place we had to be. We couldn't talk to everyone we had to talk to. We had to give control, to spread it down to the generals and the majors and the lieutenants and the colonels. [They] had to have their own autonomy to a degree. It all comes centrally and we have big
meetings and we talk about it. Like Terry Ryan, our award-winning costume designer, basically designs the costumes. He'll bring us sketches and says, "This is what I want to do." And with rare exceptions we make minor changes. It's one of out of 66 episodes where we'll say, "Oh, that costume doesn't work." He knows what he's doing. He gets Farscape. The same thing happens in props and makeup [and throughout the production]. We tweak it, but the people generate their own ideas and they work kind of as independent cells. That's very Australian.
What I've learned and what surprises me is that you can do a show [the way Farscape is done]. The scripts are hugely, tightly micromanaged. Any writer who's worked on the show will tell you that. No script goes out unless it's perfect, or as close as we can do 'til they rip it from us. We redo every
line and we toss out a period and [ask] should there be a semicolon here. We really deal with the scripts. And then we release the scripts to the community of the show, and we allow the show, in a way, to create. Everyone is creative on this show.
And so I'm eager someday, I'm not eager to end my job, but I'm really eager to go to the next show I go to and see if I can't recreate this. And then I'll discover, as I'm partially suspecting, there is a bit of magic here. All great shows have magic. Seinfeld had magic. It just came together.
The writers were right, the directors were right, the actors were right, the crew was right, and you don't get to recreate it again. You get a thousand failed shows before you get magic again. Before you get Frasier or LA Law or Cheers. I don't know, but I'd like to try this template again where we control the scripts, which is the blueprint for the show, and then we allow people to improvise on the construction of the blueprint. Kind of like, as long as the building has six rooms we've designed and a bathroom here and a kitchen here, people get to decorate the bathroom any color they want and put any fixtures in the kitchen they want in any arrangement. We simply say, here's the kitchen. We don't tell them the refrigerator is on the left and the stove is one the right. We let them do it. So the people who are experts at kitchens do a much better job when they don't have the stupid architect trying to say, "This is where I want the stove." And the kitchen guy's going, "The stove doesn't belong there, dude." And I'm desperate to see if it's just this show, or if I've discovered some secret way to making better television [laughs].
I don't know, but what's surprised me the most is that you can back off and not have a disaster when you have good people. And I'm sure I'm not the first person to discover this. It's just the first time I've ever been on a show that's worked this well. So there are other people out there, Steven Bochco and David Kelley, who'll look at you and go, "Dude, where you been? That's how we make our shows." And that's great. But I've never had the pleasure of working with them. So now I'm working on my own show, not mine like I created it or anything like that, but my own show without having someone over me. Without having Bochco to tell me or David Burke, who is my mentor, tell me do this, do that. So I have to make some creative decisions. And one of my key creative decisions that I'm simply most proud of is that I basically said to the people, "You're on your own. Thrill us. Do you best
work and we won't change it. We'll accept your genius like you accept our writing." And I can leave the show. I could have left the show, I think, after the first year, as long as my successor carried that through and the show would still be Farscape. Because the show is now a collection of a lot of people's creative intent. It's very diffused creativity now, which is excellent, and that's why the show excels on every level. So maybe the short answer is, I'm surprised by how stunningly fabulous the Australian film industry is. These people are really, really good, and that's what makes Farscape. I mean, I know that.
Do you miss working in Hollywood?
Kemper: Not for 13 seconds. Not even a millisecond do I miss it. Farscape can't go forever. I don't hope it goes forever, because I can't do it forever. I don't want to let anyone else do it. Ben and me and the gang, we could not do it together for more than six or seven years. I'll be
back [in Hollywood] soon enough, you know what I mean? No knock against them, it's just there's a different kind of sense here, there's more openness. There's a craziness that's evident here that is nowhere else.
Back to the top.
