Editing HIGHLANDER THE SERIES: AN EVENING AT JOE'S

By: Abbie Bernstein
Date: Tuesday, September 25, 2001

Anybody who's been to a bookstore knows that the science fiction and fantasy shelves aren't hurting for a lack of media tie-ins. STAR TREK and STAR WARS have their own sections, while relatively new whippersnappers like THE X-FILES and BUFFY THE VAMPIRE SLAYER make their presence felt.

Still, it's safe to say there's probably never been a fiction anthology quite like HIGHLANDER THE SERIES: AN EVENING AT JOE'S, which takes its title from the bar owned by character Joe Dawson (Jim Byrnes), where 400-year-old Immortal Duncan MacLeod (Adrian Paul) and his friends hang out when they're not engaged in mortal combat with swords. Every single one of JOE's fourteen contributors actually worked on the HIGHLANDER series. Cast regulars Byrnes, Stan Kirsch and Peter Wingfield, guest actors Anthony de Longis, Peter Hudson and Valentine Pelka, series staffers Gillian Horvath, Donna Lettow and Laura Brennan, producer Ken Gord, sword master F. Braun McAsh, director Dennis Berry, composer Roger Bellon and even assistant prop master Don Anderson all had something imaginative to say about events in the HIGHLANDER universe.

Horvath, who spent four of the show's six years on its creative staff and more recently co-wrote the story for the feature film HIGHLANDER: ENDGAME while editing the book, explains how EVENING AT JOE'S came into existence.

"The inspiration for the book [came] from the very first STAR TREK tie-in books. STAR TREK: THE NEW VOYAGES were basically compilations of fanfic, before [fanfic] was widely known or widely spread. The first book had introductions to every story written by the [STAR TREK] cast. The second book had one story written by a cast member."

"Nichelle Nichols," Horvath continues, "had written a story called 'Surprise,' which was wonderfully entertaining. It's no surprise to anyone that Uhura was the main character of this story. Because she didn't get to be the main character on the show, this was something different. She had a lightness of way with not just her own character, but all the characters, to give them a little bit of humor. That story really made you think [that] actors think about what their characters are thinking. Actors imagine dialogue in their heads why wouldn't they be able to write it down? Directors have to examine every character's motivation why wouldn't they be able to write a story with those characters in it? Not every driver or makeup person spends their time thinking, 'Ooh, what would the characters do next?' but a lot of them do. On HIGHLANDER, it was more than most, because I think everyone on the show thought about it, even if they weren't aspiring to write a script about the premise of Immortality."

It's not clear even to Horvath precisely when the idea for the anthology first took shape.

"I'm trying to remember when it first went from sort of a funny notion to, 'Hey, let's call the publishers and see if they'd like to do it,' " she confesses. "But I do know that I sent those initial invitations [to prospective contributors] from my office at BAYWATCH [where Horvath spent a season as story editor], so that would have been summer and fall of '97. We offered it first to Warner Aspect [publishers of the official HIGHLANDER: THE SERIES novels] and they weren't interested. They said, 'Well, you're asking people who aren't writers to write stories, so we have no idea what the quality will be like.' Which is true it was a risk. So we went to Ginjer Buchanan at Berkeley she's a friend from the days when she was publishing the QUANTUM LEAP novels and asked her if she'd be interested. She definitely was, so then it was just a matter of getting permission from Bill Panzer [who, with Peter Davis, has produced all the various incarnations of HIGHLANDER]."

Panzer gave the project his blessings, though Horvath notes with a laugh, "He says in the forward [of JOE'S] something he never told me personally, which is that when he gave his permission, he never thought I'd pull the project off. He was pretty surprised when it all came together."

Given the Herculean nature of the endeavor, Panzer's initial skepticism is understandable.

"It took two years of chasing people around to get stories," Horvath relates. "I would have loved to have the recurring cast participate, but I wasn't chasing them more vigorously than I was chasing the directors and the production designer. We're very happy to have Jim and Peter and Stan in the book, but I also wanted to have Dennis Berry and Roger Bellon. I invited all of the principal cast, I invited some guest stars that I happened to have addresses for, and I invited every department head production designer or editor and also some people who weren't department heads who I happened to have addresses and phone numbers for. It really came down to who did I have contact information for, because the book wasn't started until the show had [ended], so I couldn't just issue an invitation to the whole crew by sending a flyer to the set."

Initially, Horvath recalls that there was some confusion amongst her potential writers as to exactly what they were being asked to contribute.

"Maybe this was my fault in phrasing the invitation to the participants many people at first thought they were being asked to tell anecdotes similar to the interviews that are in the BEST OF HIGHLANDER or THE WATCHER'S GUIDE [official collections of interviews by Maureen Russell], that they were being asked to write down a story about working on HIGHLANDER, as opposed to actual fiction."

Once the basics were understood, Horvath says, "I tried to give people as much leeway as possible if people wanted to write [in-character] journals or monologue musings, the sort of things that actors would normally do for themselves as a tool for performance, as opposed to a more standard novella, that would be fine."

"One of the underlying principles of the book," Horvath explains, "was no editing, other than copy-editing proofreading for grammar, that kind of thing. The [official] HIGHLANDER novels were edited like the TV show was. The [novel] writers [followed] the rules of HIGHLANDER as dictated from above there are things you can and cannot do, things the characters will and will not say, ways that the [Immortal] magic does and does not work, and [in the novels] we would not let them contradict that or even hint at exploring things we didn't want them to explore."

"For this [JOE'S]," Horvath continues, "if someone wanted to write a weird story, it was going to be printed that way. If somebody had a date in their story that doesn't mesh with the stuff that was on the screen or if someone has a theory about the way Immortality or the Quickening works or the history of the characters, which is actually contradicted onscreen oh, well. Because to me, what's interesting about the stories is, it tells you what these people had in their imaginations. And to tell one of these authors, 'Oh, no, that's not the way it works, that's not how we would do it' to me, that takes the fun out of it. So these [stories] may not match up with each other and they may not agree with what's sometimes called 'canon' [facts that are substantiated in the episodes]. The stories are all very different from each other and that's my favorite thing, really, that there's no two alike. I think it's fun to see the different ways people's minds work."

Relatively few stories actually "star" series hero MacLeod.

"I actually think it's a natural outrising of the fact that the premise of the book is, let's do things we could never do on the show," Horvath observes. "On the show, most of what you would ever want to do with Duncan MacLeod had a chance to be done. There are over 100 episodes telling various stories of times in Duncan MacLeod's life. This is related, I think, to the reason why [HIGHLANDER creative consultant] David Abramowitz chose not to participate in the book. For him, if he had an idea for a HIGHLANDER story, it was made," she laughs. "He didn't have a lot of untold stories in his brain that he wished could get out there. It's more likely that the props guy has a story that he wished had been an episode than the person in charge of deciding what the episodes would be [would have concepts not explored on air]."

The ability to tell types of stories that make good fiction but aren't necessarily the stuff of HIGHLANDER episodes, Horvath feels, are one of the reasons that many of the stories focus on supporting characters. She cites as example the character who turns up most frequently in the JOE'S entries: "Because the show wasn't about Methos, if you had any interesting ideas for a Methos story, there was [unlikely to be an] outlet for it, whereas if you had an interesting idea for a Duncan story, with any luck, it could be made into an episode."

TO BE CONTINUED