GREAT
SCOTT: A Conversation With Scott Bakula
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In a business
where jealousy, backbiting and gossip-mongering are endemic, it's impossible to find
anyone who dislikes actor Scott Bakula. Ask any of the Quantum Leap cast or crew
and you hear the same comments: "complete pro," "multi-talented,"
"easy-going," "the glue that holds the whole thing together." Old-pro technicians, a relatively cynical lot, seem in awe of his energy level and marvel that he spends lunch hours organizing softball games or rollerblading around the set. Assistant directors point out how little direction Bakula requires and that he does his own stunts, regularly getting banged up in the process. Bit-part actresses, on call for only a single day, talk of his courtesy and consideration. It seems hard to believe, until to you talk to the guy. How'd you get into the show, how'd you get the part? My agent called me, said there was a new show by Don Bellisario. I didn't know him, he didn't know me at all. One of the casting persons knew me and had asked that I come in. The most remarkable thing about getting the show was that it happened very quickly by Hollywood standards. I got this phone call on a Tuesday. They said they were going to send me the script: they ended up sending me two scenes. I called my agent, said, "Where's the script?" He said, "Well, it's not done." So I got these two scenes [from the pilot] and they were terrific. There's the scene where I see Al when I'm fishing with my kid and he comes by; and the car scene where I'm driving with my wife home from the bar, where we start talking about life and stuff. I read for the role. That night, all of a sudden, the full script was done and I got it. Thursday, I went back and met everybody at the Tower [the "Black Tower," as Universal's high-rise headquarters is known in Hollywood]. I read for it again [in front of the Universal Television executives]. Friday, I went to the network [to meet the NBC executives]. Friday afternoon the deal was negotiated and Friday night it was done. A couple weeks later, we were shooting. It was fast. What attracted you to the show? I loved the writing. It constantly surprised me. What did you bring to the part? I think I gave the show an opportunity to expand beyond what it might have been — because of my theatrical background, because of my athletic background.... It still would've worked with stunt doubles, but I think it's more interesting knowing it's me. They've been able to create kind of a huge background and biography for Sam. You know: He played the piano for a while and couldn't decide if he wanted to be a piano player; he played basketball with his brother. And a lot of that was me. When I was growing up, I did many, many things — to the point where my Dad finally said, "You've got to start picking, you can't play six sports a year. It doesn't work that way." What's the hardest thing you ever had do to on the show? The most physically difficult was the trapeze, because I have motion sickness. So, not only was I swinging back and forth, but I was hanging upside down for hours. I was sick most of that time. I had needles in my ears and acupressure and stuff; I tried everything. You ever consider just having a stunt double do it? Well, we had cameras up in the air. The leap-in was me swinging back and forth, upside down. There was no way you could leap anybody else in. It had to be me. I mean, we had three- or four-page scenes on the trapeze. What's the toughest role you ever played for the show? I think the role in "Shock Theatre" last year was the most challenging role for me. It was the most exhilarating and fulfilling of anything I've done for the show, because it gave me a chance to actually, for a few minutes, become these people, instead of just being Sam inside these people. I actually got to assume their personalities. The pregnancy episode was extremely challenging. Do you research the characters? Did you go talk to pregnant women? Well, I had my wife. Her pregnancy was very vivid to me. Many of the things I did in that episode were direct rip-offs of things that she'd felt and her behavior during her pregnancy. But what I try and do with the show is — and that is a totally different approach than I've ever done before — I try and not know. I try to do as little research as I have to. Obviously, if I have to fly on a trapeze, I have to go train and then I have to unlearn it. Or if I have to box, I have to go train to box and then I have to unlearn it. But, most recently, when I was in the episode with the all-girl singing group, the leap-in was the middle of an opening number. And I said [to them], "You can do whatever you want — practice, rehearse, whatever — but when you're ready to shoot, I'll just come out and do it." So, I didn't have a clue where they were going, what they were going to do, and I just found my way through it. That's the nature of Sam — every week he's improvising — so I try not to know. Is there something inside, a clue to the character of Sam, something the audience doesn't know? Yeah ... but it's not something I'd tell. You want to let Sam have a little mystery. In many ways he's a bit of an open book. His life has been so simple. My biggest thing about Sam is that I think emotionally he's pretty young. Anytime you go through school in the manner he did — you graduate high school at 16, you graduate college at 18 and MIT by 21 — you have no time to live. It's like young athletes and young actors; they don't have a life. They're too busy working. Emotionally, Sam has got a lot to learn about life. That's what I think has been fun for him, in terms of the series, that he's been exposed to things he never would've been exposed to. He might've heard about them or read about them, but this is a guy who's been locked in a cave in New Mexico and only comes out for meals basically, because he's a scientist and he's totally locked into what he's doing. So it's been great to watch Sam grow. Can you articulate how he's grown, other than what you've just said? I think he's much more accepting of different aspects of the world than he was in the beginning. I think he's much less shockable. I think he's quicker now to adapt. I certainly think he's much quicker in his guises; it's much easier now to fall into something. He's a much better undercover leaper than he was in the beginning. The trick for me as an actor is to maintain enough of the quandary and enough of the humor of a lot of his leaps. I don't want it to get easy for Sam. I think his relationship with Al has changed a lot. There're a lot of holes in their history, which will someday be answered, I hope. The two of them have become much better friends. Their early relationship was revolving around almost a codependency. Sam depended on Al at an early point in his life, and then Al went downhill and was in trouble and Sam pulled him out, and Al came to depend a little bit on him. Now, they've become almost equal through this leaping. Do you have a favorite period to leap into? We've gone from '52 until the present and all the way up to '99. I really like a lot of stories from the fifties and the early sixties. I find that stylistically the most interesting, visually the most interesting. I think that most of the stories could be told in any decade. I'm hoping that the stories are universal enough and timeless enough, [so] that they could also play in Russia, play in England, in Australia. That seems to be happening. What do you think it is about the show that appeals to people-the science fiction, the nostalgia, the retro aspects, the issues you deal with? I think it's all those things. The show offers so much and at the same time, I feel, is unpretentious about it. How many episodes have you directed? Just two. What's the most unexpected thing about directing? I just really liked working with the actors, more than I thought I would. I think I had fear about that, about being able to communicate. I really enjoyed the one-on-one connection. I'm an actor who tends to be very polite in the workplace. I don't interfere with the director and his relationship with the other actors. So when I was directing, it was just great to get right to the other actors, in a sense, without a director in the way. It eliminated one person from the chain. Do you write as well? Yes, but not formally. Not as yet. What's been your input on the character? Very early on I had input in that I wanted Sam to be a little more serious than they did. I wanted him to be a little straighter. There was a sense in the beginning that Sam wasn't funny enough. As I tried to explain to them at the time — successfully; fortunately they listened to me, because the alternative, really, would've been probably just to replace me — I didn't want to do, like, Bill Murray's Sam Beckett, which would've been a totally different guy. My feeling was, I like to believe these things. I like to believe that time travel is possible, I like to believe in holograms and all that stuff. I feel like scientifically it's possible, we just haven't done it yet, but someday it'll happen. To hook an audience, and get them to suspend [disbelief] and come with us, I had to be totally serious and honest about what we were doing. Every scene that I looked at, whether there were comedic elements to it or not, I wanted to present in that fashion. Sometimes you can betray an audience, by coming out of nowhere to tell a joke or something, and they're expecting you to behave one way and you don't. Now, a lot of times you want to do that, you want to surprise them. You know, Dean has so many wonderful comedic bits to do, I didn't feel it was necessary for me to be scoring with jokes and double-takes and things like that. I do a lot of funny things on the show, but it isn't exactly what they were looking for in the beginning. What do you think the chemistry is between you and Dean? You never know what's going to happen in something like this. I read with Dean when he came in to the network and we hit it off from the beginning. Who knew that when we would get to do this, we'd feel psychologically the same about a lot of things? So, we're connected on how we want the show to be, what we want the show to be. There's no infighting over that. He has no ego about his work or my work. It's almost like having a brother-situation, only without the fights. We just don't fight. Beyond the work, we enjoy each other's company, we enjoy each other's families and kids. Did you ever think the show would last this long? No. I'm surprised every day that we come to work that somebody hasn't said, What's the show doing on the air? Now, the fans "get it," but it seems to me the network never "got it" and Hollywood, the business, doesn't "get it" either. How do you mean? As I hear it, the network didn't got the concept at the beginning, and to this day, it they could figure out a way to get the viewers to tune into something else, you'd be gone. But you're like Star Trek used to be: You have those loyal viewers, and they can't ignore that. We definitely have been, from day one, a hard sell. You couldn't capsulize the show. It's been extremely difficult to talk about. The very first time we went to the [network] affiliates and [entertainment] press meetings [to introduce new shows], and [the show's creator] Don [Bellisario] would say, "This is what the show is about," people were just dumbfounded. You know, they couldn't believe this was going on the air; they couldn't imagine what it was going to be about; they couldn't figure out what Dean Stockwell was doing there. Here's a guy with an Academy Award nomination, and he's playing some hologram! Nobody could figure it out. All we knew is that Brandon [Tartikoff, former head of NBC] loved the show from the beginning and championed it. They've always been confused about how to market it; it's always kind of found its own way, really. The fans found it. Actually, the media is what saved us in the beginning, because the press was so good on the show. Fortunately for us, NBC was looking for quality stuff and they were willing to stay with the show for a while. And in that little interim of time, the fans glommed onto it quick. We developed this following-a small, but sturdy audience that followed us around the schedule — while they were investigating what to do. Small, sturdy, but a very demographically desirable audience. We're in the top-five demographic shows on television. Demographically, we're just huge. The numbers issue has changed so much since we started four years ago, in terms of what's acceptable and what's not acceptable, and the demographic thing has become such a huge part of it all. We fit very well demographically; numbers-wise, I'm sure we don't perform as well as they would like us to, but I know that the advertisers love us, and I know that the affiliates love us, because we're leading in to their eleven o'clock news and the right people are watching. And, like it or not, that's a huge part of what television is. The advertisers love you until you do a gay-themed episode, until you do an animal-rights episode, until you have a black-and-white romance, until you're a priest. Then they get worried about offending potential customers. Does that cut down on what you can do, or do you do it in their face? Well, none of it is ever intended to be in anybody's face anyway. But Don isn't deaf to those issues and he's not deaf to the fact that we need to present a lot of different viewpoints and a lot of different areas of life. If we just did, you know, Sam leaps into a 35-year-old white male with these seven problems .... Well, you've got to go into all walks of life, all kinds of situations. Some of them have been difficult for our advertisers. What's encouraging and discouraging at the same time is that there's a group of advertisers who routinely pull out of a show — forget about the particular script — if they hear it's about A, B, C or D. They're just gone. They don't want anything to do with it at all. And, hey, that's their prerogative. Let's move away from these business questions. Is there any concept you want to do that you haven't done yet? I'd still love to find a way to do a baby. Financially, it just presents a lot of problems. Giant sets? Giant furniture and all that? Yeah, and that becomes a problem, but I'd love to be able to do something along that line. Issue-wise, there are lots of issue shows. See, it's a good thing that I'm not producing the show, because that's where I would tend [to go]. I'd love us to do a show about the homeless — and it's an easy thing to do; we just haven't found the right show, and Don wants to do it. I'd like to do a show about child abuse. I'd like to do a show about AIDS. And there are several environmental-type shows that we need to do. My contention is that our audience isn't going to grow much more, but they're going to stay [with us] as long as we're there. So I feel like we have the opportunity-they're so loyal-to almost do anything, and they'll go along. But you have to be careful, you can't abuse an audience. If we stay true to what the show is all about, we can get into some of these other issues. You know, we can go to the future.... We can see my death, we can go see Dean's death. There are lots of things that we can get to. Any bloopers, practical jokes on the set? Yeah, probably the biggest thing that happened on the set in my memory, we shot a show in which I was in the garbage scow of a big boat. The shooting took a long time, three days, and the last day I was in it and in it and in it, and, you know, you're just sitting around with garbage on you and you smell for hours. I thought I was done and they said, "No, no, no. We've got one more shot." And I'm standing there at the end of the day and ten people, including my executive producers, were there with pies — instigated by Dean, of course — so I got pie'd and they left me hanging out in the garbage for two hours, so they could get the shot. How do you keep your energy-level up? You seem to be the spark. A lot of it is you just get into the habit of it, in terms of what is demanded of your body. I'm very careful about what I eat during the day. I feel like you have a certain responsibility, and in this case it's not so much a responsibility as it is I'm lucky to be in a position where I can motivate sometimes and play and keep the set light. I'm determined that all of our guest stars have as good a time as they possibly can, I certainly have been, and certainly will be again, a guest on somebody else's show. It's a very tough thing to do. And when you only have two regulars, it's essential for the show that the guests come in and really feel like they're really the stars of the show. It's critical that they feel comfortable so that we don' t waste a day-and-a-half. In television, that day-and-a-half you never get back. I hear you rollerblade in the shooting breaks. I try to. How did you pick that up? Actually my daughter is skating a lot, and I skate with her a lot. She's eight. And the guys [on the crew] were looking for something to give me on my birthday, and the [cast and crew] softball team gave me a whole rollerblade set. So, we all started playing roller hockey. In three-and-a-half years of shooting, you say there've only been two days when you didn't have to come for one of these 12- or 14-hour shooting days. How do you cope with that pace? Two years ago, it was four in the morning and I was going into a lake up in the Hollywood Hills. I had to go into the water and it was forty-five degrees out. The rest of the night involved running through the woods in wet clothes with no shirt on. I remember turning to somebody and saying, "You know, it's a good thing that I like being here, it's a good thing that I'm with people that I like being with." Because if you weren't, it would be just miserable. These guys [on the crew], they get me going, too; they lift me up when I'm having problems. They know me pretty well by now. And that's invaluable. |
