4/2/23
Newsletter #294
The Crack of Dawn
Xena: Warrior Princess ran from 1995 to 2001. At first they hired mostly American directors, mainly because there weren’t very many New Zealand (Kiwi) directors. I had started as a 2nd unit director (on Hercules), and was then moved up to main unit director. They kept that system in place, and as New Zealanders proved their abilities on 2nd unit, they too were moved up to main unit. This wasn’t done to help the Kiwis, although it did, it was because the Kiwi directors were four times cheaper than American DGA directors. By the third season Xena was being directed mostly by Kiwi directors. Yet I remained. By the sixth season I was the only American still working.
I earned my longevity in two ways: I made the funniest episodes, and I could take problem scripts and fashion them into functional episodes. Most episodes of Xena were “serious,” and I didn’t do many of those. I have known the executive producer, Rob Tapert, since college, and he knows me well enough to understand that I had difficulty taking Xena seriously. All of the Kiwi directors took it seriously, but none of them could get a laugh to save their lives. So, every fourth or fifth episode it was a comedy, and that’s where I came in. Since the comedy scripts were the hardest to write – coming up with jokes is much harder than coming up with action scenes – Rob gave me an extremely unusual freedom on a TV show. He said, “You know my sense of humor. If you come up with a gag and you think I’ll think it’s funny, put it in, and if I don’t like it, I’ll cut it out.” So I just put in gags, silly lines, and songs, and they never cut anything out.
For instance, the comedy sidekick on the show was Joxer (Ted Raimi). I decided that Joxer ought to have a theme song. My inspirations were the old Hercules cartoon – “Hercules, master of song and story/Hercules, master of fame and glory/With the strength of ten/Ordinary men/He’s the mighty Hercules” – and Woody Allen’s Bananas (1971), where the rebels’ theme song is, “Rebels are we/Born to be free/Just like the fish in the sea.” I pitched it to Ted. He said, “Uh-huh?” So I said, “It goes something like this: Joxer the Mighty/Roams through the countryside/Never needs a place to hide/Cause he’s he’s Joxer/Joxer the Mighty.” That’s what I had, but I needed more, so I said, “Ted, come up with some more verses.”
The scene arrived where Joxer is tied to a post and Gabrielle is escaping, and I said, “Ted, sing the Joxer song. Whatever you’ve got, give it to me.” Ted being Ted had written six more verses. He sang them with bravado, and I shot them all. And it was so silly that we used it all over a montage. Then the composer, Joe LoDuca, got inspired and at the end of the episode he added a big, rousing male chorus, and four more verses, and it’s pretty funny.
Every season a Xena soundtrack record came out. That season the record included the Joxer the Mighty Theme. The writing credit goes to Joseph LoDuca and Theodore Raimi. At some point over the years I asked Ted, “Why didn’t I get credit on that song? I thought it up.” Ted looked straight at me, dead serious, and said, “No, I wrote that song.” I said, “Ted, remember when I pitched it to you with Woody Allen’s “Rebels are we/Born to be free/Just like the fish in the sea”? And I watched as that knucklehead remembered and said in amazement, “Oh, that’s right, you did come up with it. I remember now.” Joe of course had accepted Ted’s version when he submitted the credits. The bottom line is that I don’t give a shit. It was a good gag that worked out really well for that episode.
But fate works in its own wonderfully mysterious, ironic way. The song became connected to the character and was reprised a couple more times during the run of the show, including the second-to-last episode of the series that I directed in 2001. Over the course of the next 20 years Ted attended many conventions all over the world, and upon seeing him some Xena geek will inevitably sing the Joxer the Mighty Theme, and ask Ted to join in, which he will not do. He hates the song, and after a million times won’t sing it anymore. Ha ha.
Six seasons with each season consisting of 24 one-hour episodes is a lot. 144 episodes (something like that). By the end, when the show was recycling plots from the first two seasons, and in our case, crew members were defecting to Lord of the Rings. Lord of the Rings got the greenlight just as Hercules got cancelled. The Hercules crew became the Lord of the Rings crew. Perhaps that’s why Lord of the Rings looks like Hercules to me.
And it’s happened. I just pulled the shade and it’s the crack of dawn.
Tomorrow I will report from Barcelona, Spain.