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See also User:Ngarenn, Bradley Thompson's user page on Battlestar Wiki.
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- Contributors may ask Mr. Thompson (or other cast and crew that take time out of their busy schedules to visit "Battlestar Wiki") a question about the show and its production. Please submit questions ONLY on the special Battlestar Wiki:Official Communiques article. Please keep your question succinct, brief, and remember not to get too carried away--it's a TV show.
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| Role: | Writer / Producer | |||
| BSG Universe: | Re-imagined Series | |||
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| Date of Death: | Missing required parameter 1=month! ,
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Bradley Thompson is a TV writer and producer who, before working on BSG, was best known for his work on Star Trek: Deep Space Nine. He is a supervising producer for the Re-imagined Series as of the fourth season.
In a recent interview, [1] Thompson recalled that his early impressions of Battlestar Galactica (the original series) were far from favorable: "I met (my writing partner) David Weddle in an acting class and we discovered we were both at USC School of Cinema. It was the same acting class that Richard Hatch frequented. Richard was doing the original Battlestar Galactica at that time, and everybody in class was in awe—he was a WORKING ACTOR! And all the class ladies would go to parties and watch him when the show came on. Of course, while they were adoring him, they were ignoring me, so I didn't like the show very much. But they would have ignored me anyway, so I guess I wasn't giving the show a fair shake."
Five years later, Thompson was designing fiber-optic manufacturing equipment in what he calls "a sweatshop in Van Nuys" and he asked Weddle if he could turn his play "Memoirs of an Awkward Lover" into a screenplay. Weddle agreed, and the two ended up collaborating on the project together instead. (Nobody bought the adaptation. It's still for sale.)
After Star Trek: Deep Space Nine Executive Producer Ira Steven Behr read Weddle's book about filmmaker Sam Peckinpah, Weddle secured an invitation to pitch for the show and Thompson & Weddle collaborated on pitch ideas for the series.
Their first credited story on the series, was the fourth season episode "Rules of Engagement". The teleplay was written by Ronald D. Moore. Their first credited teleplay for Deep Space Nine was the fifth season episode, "The Assignment."
After their second teleplay for DS9, "Business As Usual," Thompson & Weddle joined the show's writing staff for seasons six and seven, writing two episodes from the final tightly-plotted nine-episode arc of the series.
In 2002, Thompson and Weddle were invited to a screening of the new Battlestar Galactica miniseries. "We expected it to be like so many other remakes of failed series—but hey, Ron (Moore) wrote it, it'll be worth a look," Thompson recalls. "Oh, boy, was it! It blew me away. We told him so. And found ourselves invited to lunch—we thought, to talk about old times—but soon we were talking excitedly about where he was taking the series and where the character relationships could go."
Calling BSG his "dream project" and "the best job I ever had" because of both the concept of carrier pilots in space and the opportunity to work with "amazingly talented writers," Thompson also credited the actors with contributing important insights into their characters that sometimes reshapes main storylines. "Actor input is an important part—if it's good and doesn't conflict with some other uberstory, we gleefully steal it, bend it and use it," he said.
Thompson and Weddle initially served as story editors on the first season. They became co-producers as of the second season. They were given more responsibility as producers for the third season. They became supervising producers for the fourth season.
While initially slated to write a BSG television movie with Thompson, the two had to subsequently withdraw from this assignment due to being hired as writers and supervising producers for CSI: Crime Scene Investigation, the popular, long-running CBS series.[2]
Writer credits for "Battlestar Galactica"[edit]
- Season 1:
- Season 2:
- Battlestar Galactica: The Resistance - A series of webisodes bridging the gap between Seasons 2 and 3
- Season 3:
- Season 4:
See also: Episodes written by Bradley Thompson
External Links[edit]
- Bradley Thompson article at Memory Alpha, the Star Trek wiki.
References[edit]
- ↑ Interview with Bradley Thompson
- ↑ Hinman, Michael (4 July 2008). SyFy Portal: Writing Duo Finds 'CSI' After 'Battlestar' (backup available on Archive.org) (in ). Retrieved on 6 July 2008.