Wednesday, November 16, 2005

Ron Moore on Michael Piller:

Once they were in the room, they had passed Michael’s key test: they were a writer and deserved to be treated as such. Michael had no truck with dishonesty in any form. He was utterly incapable of hiding his likes or dislikes in a professional setting regardless of the impact his opinion may have on the neophyte from Cincinnati who had flown in on their own dime for the opportunity to sit in the very heart of science fiction’s Valhalla and offer their ideas for an episode.

“Nope. Sorry. Can’t do it. Next?”

Sometimes they got less than a full sentence out before Michael would strangle their children in their cribs and ask for a sibling. He showed no mercy. If the idea was wrong, if we were doing it already, or if we’d decided not to do it for one of the fifteen thousand reasons we didn’t do things on that show, Michael would stop the unfortunate scribe in their tracks and ask for the next one. It took a while to realize he wasn’t sadistic, he wasn’t dismissive, and he wasn’t caught up in some kind of a power trip. He was that rarest of Hollywood creatures, seldom sighted and less frequently directly encountered:

He was an Honest Man.