wickedwords

A quick tidbit about the movie: Ball of Fire was remade seven years later as A Song is Born, with Danny Kaye and Virgina Mayo, and had a huge collection of swing greats in some of the walk-on roles, and Benny Goodman was one of the professors. Otherwise, a lot of the original professors came back to reprise their roles in the second movie, and I think some of the incidental characters did as well. So the movie itself has an interesting history of being remixed...

Boylesque Links:
Center Stage: Boylesque It's the 2nd article on the page.

Simply Steve's myspace page He's one of the Seattle boylesque performers, and there's a video on his site of him stripping to "I'm too Sexy". ::cough:: Rodney's better.

Choosing and casting the story

The real reason I chose this story was for the botanist, Professor Oddly. I loved him and knew that I could give Parrish his role, which meant that I'd also need to find something for Lorne to do. My real hesitation came in that it's a huge freakin' cast to work with, and I swore after Nouvelle Cuisine that I wasn't going to do any more huge cast stories, but, uh, apparently I lied. (Maybe my new rule should be only one big cast story a year or something, I don't know. When I forget the pain of making sure I know where everybody is and that they all have something to do.)

Fortunately, the structure of the movie gave me a lot of help with that, giving me group scenes and bits of business for each of researchers to do. So all I had to do, was map the rest of the universe onto Snow White here, along with six other dwarfs, and then I could call it good.

(Yeah, yeah, yeah. I cut out one of the professor roles, which made no real impact on the rest of the story. I also cut out the housekeeper as I really disliked her character, and gave her plot-related business to Ronon. Besides, then I could have Ronon just casually longing around the place and eating, and he looks great doing that.)

(Atlantis is just one big puppy pile, that's all I'm saying.)

Kolya and Kavanagh had to be the two bad guy henchmen, simply because I'm an old Highlander fan and cannot resist bad guys whose names as spelled with a 'K'. (They were called K'Immies in HL, and for my own amusement, I mentally spelled Cowen with a K, too).

The thing that did have impact was that I was determined to have Teyla in the story and not make her the housekeeper, which meant all of the stuff about it being 'men only' and not knowing about women had to go. At the same time, I wanted to keep their intellectual innocence and wide-eyed wonder, so I needed to keep it academic and isolated and more ivory tower. I could have gone more into the SGC at that point, and have made them all scientists working in a lab, but I really didn't have enough time to invent all of the crap that I would have had to have done to make it all work out, so I needed to keep the damned encyclopedia and all of the stuff that went with it.

It struck me then that I could get around some of my issues if I simply made everyone on the project gay, and have that be what united them, rather than that whole 'being guys' thing. At that point, I just embraced the fact that I was writing an 'it's a gay, gay, gay, gay world' story, and just went with it.

For example, in the first version of the opening scene, I had Elizabeth, who is a legal scholar, paired up with Teyla, but eventually I decided that Sam Carter was better suited for what I needed. Besides, the image of Teyla and Sam together is kinda hot, what with that whole tiny-women-with-guns thing they've got going, and being the only women on first contact teams and...other stuff. waves vaguely Plus I got the bonus have having Sam say the "I study the sun, but I don't visit it!" line, which made it more fun than the same line in the original movie as Sam actually blew up a sun.

Once Teyla was settled, I got to the real heart of the problem: the two main characters mapped equally well onto either Sheppard or McKay, and neither of them was a perfect match. It was a 60% fit, in my opinion, and I waffled for quite awhile about which way to go. Finally, I left it up to my flist and went with the version they suggested: John as the professor, while Rodney was the Burlesque queen.

And wow, didn't that set me up for a whole 'nother source of problems. Not canon problems, as I'll point out, but fanon ones, as we have a lot more fanon around John as stripper/dancer/pretty boy toy and Rodney as Professor McKay than we do the other way round. So even finding my three canon points wasn't going to help, as there is just so much out there going the opposite way. So I just had to accept that I would lose people on characterization, and just go with it, as I didn't have time to really make it all series rock solid.

Thank god for Duet, that's all I have to say, as that's the version of Rodney sashaying around in this story. I combined it with his ability to lie as demonstrated in 'The Storm/The Eye' (yes, Rodney lies, cheats, and manipulates here, fast talking and faster thinking -- and he's believed. So Rodney can't lie? *Pfft* Please.) I then leaned heavily on Rodney's charisma over the movie characters charm -- plus I had the bonus musical background with the whole piano teacher thing, and that both were energetic characters -- and that pretty much gave me my fusion Rodney. I still had a bunch of explaining to do, but I thought I could work it all in.

Fusion John was actually trickier. He couldn't fly, he wasn't in the military, he used a lot of big words...just a whole bunch of stuff didn't fit. I ended up substituting John's 'sense of wonder' for the movie versions 'corny' nature, played up the physical similarities, and ... well, pretty much gave up and leaned on the Julian character from 'First Monday' to fill in some of the cracks. I hoped that I'd be able to include enough explanation in the story that it would work for most people, given that everyone knew that these were movie fusions/remixes going in.

By the time I was done with that, I was pretty happy with my character list:

Character	Played by	Original Actor
Prof. Bertram Potts	John Sheppard (English)	Gary Cooper
Katherine 'Sugarpuss' O'Shea	Rodney McKay	Barbara Stanwyck
Prof. Gurkakoff (Mathematics)	Radek Zelenka (Mathematics)	Oskar Homolka
Prof. Jerome (History)	Lorne (History and Law)	Henry Travers
Prof. Magenbruch (Physiology)	Carson Beckett (Genetics)	S.Z. Sakall
Prof. Robinson (Law)	Sir Not Appearing In This Story	Tully Marshall
Prof. Quintana (Geography)	Sam Carter (Physics)	Leonid Kinskey
Prof. Oddly (Botany)	Parrish	Richard Haydn
Prof. Peagram (Literature)	Teyla (Religion and Women's Studies)	Aubrey Mather
Garbageman	Ford (UPS Driver)	Allen Jenkins
Joe Lilac	Cowen	Dana Andrews
Duke Pastrami	Koyla	Dan Duryea
Asthma Anderson	Kavanagh	Ralph Peters
Miss Bragg	Ronon	Kathleen Howard
Miss Totten	Elizabeth Weir	Mary Field
Larsen (Miss Totten's assistant)	Teal'c	Charles Lane
Justice of the Peace	Wedding Commisioner	Aldrich Bowker
College boy	Caldwell (Bus Driver)	Kenneth Howell
Newsboy	Laura Cadman (Barrista)	Tommy Ryan
Benny the Creep	Halling the Athosian	William A. Lee
Store Clerk	Miko
Groundskeeper	Bates
Wedding witness #1/Horseface	Stackhouse
Wedding witness #2/Pinstripe	Markham

I didn't get Kate Heightmeyer, Dr. Brio, or Sora into the story -- though honestly, Kate was briefly both one of the professors, and Ronon's ex-girlfriend -- but I got most of everyone else, and that made me very happy.

After casting, the thing that killed me was inventing all of the slang. I couldn't go with what was in the movie as it was all 1940s stuff, and I wanted to give the story a more modern feel. I know I fell down on that toward the end, and went with more of the movie slang than my own (well, and Rodney stops speaking in slang) but damn, it was hard. New languages are tough to do. And because I wanted them isolated, I had to take away their electronic devices, which was a real bitch and a half, I tell you. So much of the SG universe is tied in with tech in my mind, and so much of the movie is technology-free, that I kept having to make choices about what the could and could not do with tech. But I couldn't leave Sam completely tech-free -- or Zelenka, actually -- so they both got to have dial-up internet connections in their bedrooms.

I shudder at the thought.

One last thing. I had an idea for what happened after the story finished:

Rodney smacks John upside the head one morning when John is pining after an airplane con trail and tells him to go screw the contacts and get LASIX surgery, and John hems and haws, and, finally, agrees. He spends several weeks freaking out about it, but does have it done. He decides to take some private plane lessons as well, once Rodney hands him the gift certificate good for ten lessons up at Payne field as an anniversary gift.

Turns out that flying is pretty cool after all.