StarGate a sci-fi success story

By Dan Hilborn
Published May 6, 2006


On the very first day of filming the science fiction television series Stargate SG-1, executive producer Brad Wright very nearly thought about packing up his equipment and just going home.

"It was such a terrible failure," recalls the Toronto-born writer. "We were shooting in the mountains and it was bloody cold and raining. (Actor and star) Christopher Judge had just shaved his head, and he was soaked to the bone. He was shivering so much, his lips were quivering and we couldn't even use the footage."

And, to top it all off, when the production crew got back to their base at Bridge Studios in Burnaby, they found a giant scratch had mysteriously appeared on nearly a third of the day's product.

"Day 1 was a practice day," Wright said with the relative comfort of 10 years of hindsight. "All I could think about was going home and saying that we'd be lucky if we made it through the first episode."

Those days of frustration are definitely light years away. Today, Stargate SG-1 is poised to become the single most successful science fiction series ever produced in North America.

With an estimated 10 million viewers per week in 120 countries around the world, the series has spawned board games, comic books and even theme-park rides.

But the greatest part of all has been watching the growth of the Canadian television industry, said Wright.

He had originally moved to the West Coast from Toronto to work on such shows as Neon Rider and Black Stallion (both of which were also filmed in Burnaby, at the former MacPherson junior high school once attended by famed Hollywood actor Michael J. Fox.)

While Stargate SG-1 and its three-year-old spinoff series Stargate: Atlantis both feature American-born lead actors such as Beau Bridges and Richard Dean Anderson and are owned by U.S.-based MGM and Sony Pictures Television, the vast majority of the 200 people who work on each episode are Canadian.

"It took a long time in my career trying to convince the Americans that there were some of us (Canadians) who knew what we were doing," Wright said during a tour of the sprawling Stargate soundstages. "When I started working with American production companies, our shooting crews were Canadian, but the above-the-line people - writers, directors, actors, producers, set designers and department heads of the creative teams - had come up from L.A.

"The challenge for me was not only to prove that I knew what I was doing, but that I could bring aboard a ton of above-the-line people who were all Canadians and also knew what they were doing.

"That used to be a challenge. But now, it's just the way it is."

Another big difference between Stargate and other Canadian-made television shows is that Wright made a conscious decision to create the series without relying on the usual source of funding - loans from the government agency, Telefilm Canada.

But Stargate does have a connection to the U.S. government that might surprise some viewers.

The spaceships, computer graphics and virtually all of the set designs for the two series were created with the assistance and approval of the North American Aerospace Command, the secretive military base better known as NORAD, hidden in the U.S. Rocky Mountains.

"All our scripts are signed off by the U.S. air force, right down to the designs on the uniforms to the logos on the equipment," Wright said during a tour of the Bridge Studios.

With help like that, it's not surprising that Stargate SG-1 has outlived each of the five different Star Trek series.

And sometime this summer, when episode No. 202 airs, it will even surpass the venerated X-Files as the longest-running drama series created for cable television.

According to the Vancouver Sun, each episode of the two Stargate series costs about $2 million to produce, meaning the show has generated an estimated $500 million US infusion into the Lower Mainland economy over the past decade.

Its success is undoubtedly based on the elaborate fantasy universe first created for the 1994 Kurt Russell movie that spawned the series, and then elaborated upon by Wright and his writing partners for the TV series.

While the show is aimed primarily at an American audience, it is also meant to be universal in its appeal, and it does contain many 'hidden' references to Canada.

Some of the most obvious nods to Hollywood North revolve around the character Jonas Quinn, who hails from the fictional country of Kelowna on the planet Langara.

"Unfortunately, we're kind of treated like Americans in Canada and like Canadians in America," Wright said.

But one thing is certain. After 10 years on the air, Stargate SG- 1 has already achieved more than its creators could have possibly imagined on the first cold and wet day in the B.C. mountains.