For nearly every season of Stargate on television, Norman John Smith was quietly working away to make sure production never stopped moving on the franchise. We are proud to host the executive producer on our show and to hear stories from making SG-1, Atlantis and Universe on-time and on-budget — as well as the story for how the Continuum Arctic shoot became a reality!

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Timecodes
0:00 – Opening Credits
0:25 – Welcome
0:28 – Guest Introduction
2:02 – What Does N Stand For?
3:00 – Getting Into the Industry
9:11 – John’s Road to Stargate
11:30 – The Best Production Team
13:35 – Sticky-Note Boards
16:41 – Saving Money with Two Shows
19:57 – John’s Hardest Project
22:36 – The Secret Sauce for Creating a Great Show
25:17 – A Family Business
26:15 – Shortened Lifespans
28:39 – Director Sensibilities
29:57 – “Frozen” and Refrigerating the Set
37:48 – Budgeting an Episode
40:28 – John’s Set Presence
42:11 – Stargate Command’s Spiral Staircase
43:44 – Enjoying Being Together
45:12 – Thank You, John!
47:56 – Post-Interview Housekeeping
49:46 – End Credits

***

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TRANSCRIPT
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David Read:
Hello everyone, welcome to Dial the Gate. My name is David Read. N. John Smith, Executive Producer; Stargate: SG-1, Atlantis, and Universe. This guy was responsible for the day-in and day-out [of] production running smoothly for these numerous television shows. I don’t know how he did it. You have to have the patience of Job to be working with all these people and to be able to handle this much stress in terms of bringing a series to life, and being boots on the ground on there for when the sets open in the morning and when they close at night, and making sure that everything is moving the way that it needs to be moving. I cannot wait to share his story with you for this episode. This is a pre-recorded show. The moderators will not be taking questions, but I’m really excited to present to you John Smith, Executive Producer of SG-1, Atlantis, and Universe. Here he is. This is… I’m really excited to be sitting down and talking with you. I’ve been doing this little channel now for over 230 episodes.

N. John Smith:
Wow!

David Read:
And Darren [Sumner] over at GateWorld has been asking me, ‘Have you found a way to contact John?’ I’m like, ‘I’m working on it. I’m really trying.’ And so it’s a real privilege for me to sit down and talk with you. And it means a lot for me to have you on.

N. John Smith:
Our pleasure.

David Read:
My first and most burning question. I’ve never known the answer to this: what does the ‘N’ stand for?

N. John Smith:
Norman.

David Read:
Oh, I thought Nathaniel.

N. John Smith:
Norman was my, during the war, was one of my dad’s best friends on the ship he was on – he was in the Navy – got killed. And my dad named him after me. I’ve never ever used the name, although in business. You know, John Smith is kind of a bit of a common name. So I always signed off as ‘N. John Smith.’ And there’s a director, a Canadian director, who’s ‘John N. Smith.’

David Read:
I’m sure that’s never caused problems at all.

N. John Smith:
No, no. So we shared credits for years. He’s got some of mine, I got some of his, and we talked every once in a while. He’s a little older than I am, but yeah, he’s a really interesting guy. Very, very smart filmmaker.

David Read:
How did you get involved in Stargate, and… tell the story.

N. John Smith:
Well I did a… there’s a local television series called “Beachcombers.” And I quit school quite early and went to work as a beachcomber. So when… my family owns a building in the town I grew up in, a town called Gibsons, and they wanted to rent the building as a location for eight one-half-hour episodes of this television series put on by the Canadian Broadcasting Corporation. So my dad didn’t want anything to do with it. And he said, ‘If you want to look after that and do it, rent them the building and help them out as much as you can.’ So I did. And that series happened to go… well, we owned all… they wanted to rent beach comb boats because… and we had… my dad’s boat was the… became the star of the show. And my boat at that time was a very fast jet boat that I’d built. And it became the nemesis boat belonging to the bad guy on the series.

David Read:
That is so cool!

N. John Smith:
The series was shown in 37 countries in the world and was still the longest-running drama ever shot in Canada. So, I worked on that series, and it was successful; the eight half-hour episodes turned into 19 years.

David Read:
Nineteen!

N. John Smith:
Went on for 19 years, yeah. So, I became a charter member of Stunts Canada because I did all the boat stunts and everything, which was second nature to me, running around in fast boats and stuff. And then partway through the series, in the year 16, a businessman from West Vancouver got the go-ahead to do a remake of the old “Sea Hunt” series.

David Read:
Lloyd Bridges.

N. John Smith:
Right, with Lloyd Bridges. Well, he contacted me and said, “Would you be a production manager for me on this?” and I said, “Well I’ve never done anything like that before,” but obviously an opportunity, so I talked to my kids – I was a single parent, I have four kids – I talked to my kids and they said, “Yeah, dad. Go back to work. It’s all good with us.” So I did that and it was successful. We shot all the underwater scenes down in the Bahamas and put the whole thing together, shot all the above the water scenes in a little place called Victoria out on Vancouver Island. So it was a success. And that was for… I guess that would be 1987. And after that, they wanted me to go down and produce some stuff down in Hollywood, and I couldn’t – I have four kids. But I did take a job on with them down there, and I said, with the caveat that I could come back every weekend to Vancouver or bring my kids down to Los Angeles, which I did. And so that worked out. And then I came back to Canada, and there’s a gentleman by the name of Stephen J. Cannell, who was producing a lot of film in Vancouver. He moved a lot of the stuff out of the California area up to Vancouver and Calgary, and became quite a presence in Vancouver. And they were doing a series called “Unsub.” And the series wasn’t going very well. So I didn’t want to take it on, but they did talk me into taking it on. And I said, “I’ll do it, but I need a bed in my office” because it was a lot of night shooting, and the show was… if they had any more infractions with the Vancouver Council, they were going to cancel the show. So, I managed to fix that a little bit. And so, after that, I ended up working for Cannell for a long time. I forget how many years. But I produced a lot of pilots for them; one down in the States and several, probably eight or nine, up in Canada and did the fifth year of television series called “21 Jump Street.”

David Read:
Peter DeLuise.

N. John Smith:
I did that show with them. Of course, got to know Peter DeLuise. Gave Peter DeLuise two episodes to direct on that, and Peter was a very, very astute filmmaker and a very good director.

David Read:
Love him.

N. John Smith:
He wanted to immigrate to Canada. So, I had a very good immigration lawyer who’s since deceased – a guy by the name of Barry Dong – and Barry immigrated Peter and his family – well he wasn’t married at that time – up to Canada and I gave him a couple episodes of… I forget what I was even producing at the time… and then when Stargate came around we had him on as a writer, producer, director on Stargate SG-1. And he was a fixture, and still is a fixture, living in Canada with raising his kids. And he married a girl actually from Newfoundland, from St. John’s.

David Read:
Ann Marie [Loder].

N. John Smith:
He’s more Canadian than I am now. I run into him every once in a while. We chat on email. Last time I saw him was down in Palm Springs, actually. We were walking going for dinner one night with a couple of friends and ran into him right in on the main drag in Palm Springs, but, yeah Peter’s a wonderful guy and a very good director.

David Read:
[He’s] one of my favorite people, ever. I love his eye – I love what he sees, and I love his whimsy, you know? There’s something to it. It’s like; you can’t take it too seriously though, you know, you have to have some fun with it, and he does.

N. John Smith:
He does. Peter has fun with everything. And I guess that comes from his dad, who we were lucky enough to have on Stargate a couple of times. And both his brothers, Michael and David, are the same wonderful actors and great personalities and just terrific people.

David Read:
What was the road that led you into Stargate SG-1?

N. John Smith:
I was working for MGM on a television series called “Poltergeist.”

David Read:
Shot at Bridge [Studios].

N. John Smith:
Yeah. And I wasn’t getting along real well with the Head of Production in the United States. And I wasn’t getting along with one of the producers on the show real well. [The] first thing for me in life is having fun every day. Get up in the morning; I don’t want to have… so I gave… I resigned and my production manager, I said, “He can do this for you.” And it was not a good experience for most of the crew, and it sure wasn’t for me. But I’d met Jonathan Glassner. John Glassner and I worked together at Cannell Films on a television series with Carl Weathers called “Street Justice.” And John was a junior writer. The Head of Production at that time on the series with a guy by the name of David Levinson. And David had these two junior writers: Jonathan Glassner and Ann Donahue, who was a very famous, you know, went on to be extremely successful as a writer-producer on many, many different television series. And John was, of course, one of the producers with Brad Wright, one of the Executive Producers on Stargate. So when I became available, they found out about it. And so I went over, I didn’t interview with either of those guys, but I did an interview with Michael Greenburg, who was Ric’s [Dean Anderson] partner and a producer. And, you know, he was on “MacGyver” with Richard.

David Read:
Yes, absolutely. And then “Legend.”

N. John Smith:
I’d done some stuff with MacGyver at one time. So we kind of hit it off, and now I’m working on Stargate. I think that was episode… they were just in the middle of shooting episode two.

David Read:
Right.

N. John Smith:
They released the other producer, and I became the producer on the series.

David Read:
So, number two: “The Enemy Within.” So you just hit the ground running.

N. John Smith:
Yes. Well, it was always a busy series, but the production team on Stargate was always… like Brad Wright, who was always the Head of Production, you couldn’t find anybody better and more astute to work with. And my job as a basically – call it a Line Producer – was I’m only as good as the guys I’m working for. I mean, they make my life easy, I can make their life easy.

David Read:
Right.

N. John Smith:
So we collaborated and, you know, fortunately got 10 years out of that production and, you know, we overlapped which I don’t think has ever been done before – we overlapped SG-1 and Atlantis for three years, and we were sharing… at that time, we had 11 sound stages for the two shows, and we overlapped them. And our production office… I put all the boards up so that all the heads of department could see the schedules. And then we’d look and say, “OK, we need to shoot SG-1 on Stage 3 on such-and-such a day,” the Production Coordinator or one of the other department heads would say, “Well, we can’t do that that day because we’re doing this in that stage that day.” So, believe it or not, we collaborated, and with having these boards up, and everybody’s standing around. I mean, I’m talking… these boards took up 20 lineal feet on the wall in the office, and we all stand there and say, “OK, tell me why we can’t shoot for 45, or, like, two days on Stage 3 on such-and-such a date.” Everybody looks at and says, “No, I don’t have a conflict. No, I don’t have a conflict.” “We’re building something in there for the next series of Atlantis, but I think we can have it finished if we start at 3 in the morning; we can have it finished by 8, whatever time you guys went in there.” – We did this for three years; we overlapped them and never had a train wreck. Wonderful.

David Read:
Gosh! I remember being up in that production office, which was above Stargate Command. Literally, it’s right there. And the rows of all of your, exactly like you said, your boards with the sticky notes on each of them. And it’s like; that’s how you do it. That’s how you map this out. This is the only way that you can pull off such a feat.

N. John Smith:
The only way you can do it.

David Read:
40 episodes a year for three years in a row. The only thing that I can compare it to is Star Trek: [The] Next Gen[eration] and DS9 running concurrently, and then DS9 with Voyager. It’s just not done. You know, because it kills people – exhaustion.

N. John Smith:
We actually used the same department heads, the same production designers, and we doubled up on some of their assistants, but the heads of the department were all the same, and you pretty well had to do it that way, so they knew the problems for both the series shooting, and like I say, we had 11 sound stages.

David Read:
Not all of them at Bridge [Studios].

N. John Smith:
Yeah, no, we had the whole Bridge, and then we had Norco Studios. So it was a bit of an undertaking at the time. It didn’t seem too bad, but we were lucky enough… the crew and department heads and everything we had, they’re just amazing guys. And the secret to doing a series like that is to keep the hours regular. We would push calls and everything, but we did a lot of exteriors, interior; we’d build sets because… you know, what kills a crew is going out at like in the summer, you know, it’s not dark till 10 o’clock at night and so you’d start your night scene at like nine o’clock and then work all night. And, you know, you do that for a couple of months running and all of a sudden your crew’s worn out and the work doesn’t get done properly. And, you know, it shows. So we tried to keep a regular schedule. And, you know, the odd time we’d wrap at one in the morning or something on a Friday.

David Read:
Fraturday?

N. John Smith:
We were wrapped by eight o’clock on a Friday night. The actors could go home and the guest stars could go back to Los Angeles. And you know that was a secret to keep… everybody was happy.

David Read:
You go back and you watch that show – there are so few night shots. And that really was, you know, the secret. Unless it’s, like, really necessary for the plot or something, let’s keep everyone on days as much as we can so that they have some semblance of a life outside of work. If you’re asking this much out of this group of people you got to give somewhere.

N. John Smith:
Well, we built the sets in… we did interiors… like the main effects stage. And we had sets in there. And we’d create villages in that stage and light it for night. We’d be shooting at seven o’clock in the morning in there, and it would be a night scene, you know? So that’s what we did. And, obviously, it worked.

David Read:
I can’t imagine how much money you were able to save by overlapping so much of each of those shows for those three years. Season Nine, you guys had a cave set, you had the village that took up the effects stage – and that became dozens of locations. You had a lot of flexibility built into this, where each show could kind of trade off the usage. Instead of paying for two shows, what do you think – you probably got it down to, like, one and a half in some cases?

N. John Smith:
Many times we did, but that was a collaboration. The good thing about that production was we had all the writers in the office.

David Read:
Right.

N. John Smith:
We were all on the same floor, 50 feet apart. So, we could collaborate and say, “What about if we did this, this, and this?” And so the writers would write to that. That was Brad and Robert [C. Cooper] who made sure that all happened. My job… I’m only as good as the ammunition – I can fire it as long as they send it. It was always a collaboration, and it was never a question of not being able to talk to these guys. I could walk down the hall and say, “We just did a board on this. What if we changed this to this and that to that? What do you guys think?” And, you know, if it didn’t hurt the production value, then we’d do it. The writers would write around production problems, and that was the only way we could pull off the two shows at once with the same crew.

David Read:
There’s so much illusion going on. [We] recently had Richard Hudolin on, and he revealed to us that, like, for the upper levels of the bottom of the silo for Stargate Command, it’s not even a solid surface. It’s like a fabric that just looks like concrete. Anything they were going to have to occasionally make contact with – like on the ground level – that’s more of a solid surface. But if you’re not… it just blows my mind. It’s all an illusion. What does it need to photograph like? If someone’s going to make contact with it or fight against it or rub up [against it], then you’d have to consider that into the design of a set. But if you’re just looking at it, if you’re just going to photograph it, it only needs to be just real enough. And to this day, that just blows my mind.

N. John Smith:
It’s called; making chicken salad out of chicken shit.

David Read:
I’m sorry, that’s… that’s it! That’s right. Man! Oh gosh.

David Read:
Yeah. And Richard was a genius at doing that. And his assistant was…

David Read:
Richard Maguire. I mean, they’re just artists. You can’t think two-dimensionally. You have to think in a number of different ways to pull this stuff off.

N. John Smith:
Yep. For sure.

David Read:
Man, oh man. Was Stargate the hardest thing you’ve ever done?

N. John Smith:
No, no. The hardest thing I ever did was a series for Stephen J. Cannell called “Unsub,” which was the first series I did for them. It was 10 years before its time. It was very gritty, mainly shot outside. The Director of Photography was a guy from New York, Francis Kenny – quite a well-known director of photography. The conditions in Vancouver, when you get rain every night… when I took the job on, they were working like 15, 16-hour days. They were over on their permits, closing bridges down and things like that for traffic. So, I went to a meeting with the Head of Production in Vancouver, a guy named Stephen Sassen, who’s quite a well-known producer in the United States. And the Vancouver Film Commission said, “If you guys have one more infringement, we’re going to shut the production down.”

David Read:
[whistles] You don’t do this in a vacuum. You work at the… yeah

N. John Smith:
Yeah. There was a deadline. So, I took the job on. I went out to the set before I took it on, and I knew most of the film people on the set – the two first assistant directors, I’d worked with before – I went over and touched one of them on the shoulder, he was looking the other way, and he jumped. He was so stressed out. So, I talked to him at lunch, and I said, “You know, I’m gonna have to let you go off this.” I’d worked with him on a production [before]. He was a nice guy, out of Alberta, but was not the type of guy you needed to run a set like that. So, I let two of the first assistants go. And I said, “I’ll do it. I’ll take the job on, but I need a bed in my office. And I want to be able to hire and fire anybody on this crew that I want to.” I never did get it on budget, but we finished it. Like I say, it was a few years ahead of its time. It would have been a very successful series, but it was a little too gritty for the timing. I think that was 1989, I believe, something like that. Maybe 1988. I don’t know. That’s a long time ago. I don’t remember things very well anymore.

David Read:
No, it’s OK. The amount of work that has to go into this – you taking on a project like that… what do you think is the secret sauce there? Is it just organization? Advanced organization, plotting everything out on the board? Or does a lot of it really come down to the personalities and the temperaments, and how they interlock together with one another?

N. John Smith:
It’s a little bit of everything like that, for sure, but definitely the personalities crew-wise, I’d worked as a boat operator for so many years. Any movie that came to Vancouver that had a boat in it, I did it. So, I got to know the crews pretty well. A lot of these guys were my good friends, and I’d say to myself, “Boy, if I ever had a production, I knew who I’d want to hire.” And some of the guys who were my better friends than others weren’t as sharp a worker – they had some flaws. So, I did manage to put really good crews together. The first production I did, like I said, was the remake of “Sea Hunt.” I hired a production designer who had never been a production designer before. I gave him his first job as a production designer. A guy by the name of John Willett. John went on to be… he wasn’t the production designer, but he was the art director on “Mississippi Burning” and went on to do some major big productions. And I’m working with him on a production here right now. He’s doing a production design job on a Fox series in Gibsons, where I grew up. As soon as he came up here, he said, “Would you coordinate the water work on this series?” I said, “Sure, I’ll do it for you,” thinking it’s not going to be that big a deal because I’m busy with our other businesses. I ended up working about 25 straight days on it.

David Read:
Oh wow!

N. John Smith:
Yeah, it’s been a lot of fun. It’s just about over now. Amanda Tapping actually is directing the last one-hour episode. So, full circle.

David Read:
She’s good, man. She’s so good at this.

N. John Smith:
One of our first assistant directors on Stargate… actually, she was a location person on Stargate… is a first assistant director on this new series called “Murder in a Small Town.” So yeah, it’s quite interesting. The construction department on this new series – all, not all of them, but quite a few of them – worked on Stargate. Three of the guys worked on Stargate. So, you know, once you get embedded in the industry… You know, my kids – three of my kids – are still in the industry. My daughter’s a controller at North Shore Studios and Mammoth Studios. My second-oldest daughter, she worked at Cannell [Studios]. She was a linguist and decided that she wanted to do something else, so she went to work with Peter Leitch, who was the head of production for North Shore Studios, and she’s still working for him. She’s been working for him for 27 years. Well, Peter just retired last year. My oldest daughter is a coordinator, and my son is a focus puller, so they’re all still involved with film. All four of my kids worked on film at one time.

David Read:
Got to make you proud, man.

N. John Smith:
Yeah. It’s good. They’re all… and I keep in touch with [them]. Actually, they phone me all the time when somebody I knew passes away. Unfortunately, in the film business, your lifespan isn’t as long as it probably could be. Because if you’re good at what you do, there’s a lot of stress.

David Read:
I would think that one of the things you would hire for, primarily, is keeping your cool. You can’t lose your shit. There’s going to be a certain tension level of stress at all times, and you just got to deal with it.

N. John Smith:
I won’t work with people with tempers. If there was something going wrong on a set, I just had to raise my voice just a tiny little bit. But most times, if you’re making a mistake, you know about it a long before somebody else tells you about it.

David Read:
Right.

N. John Smith:
So I treat people like they’re all grown-ups. You don’t have to yell at people to get something done. I resent people that yell and scream in production. It’s not the place to do that. You should be always be cool. I don’t think I ever had a flare-up or an argument with anybody in my career, and I still don’t to this day. You know, I’ve got – not a lot of people working for me now – but we have seven people running our boats and tugs and stuff, and I’ve never, ever raised my voice – we don’t have to.

David Read:
Brad Wright said to me once, “LTS.” And I was like, “What’s LTS?” He said, “Life’s too short.” And it’s a motto to live by.

N. John Smith:
Absolutely.

David Read:
Just have that in the back of your mind. It’s like, is this worth it? If not, then what are you doing?

N. John Smith:
Absolutely.

David Read:
People in production… I know actors on Stargate who weren’t invited back because it was just too complicated. ‘Best of luck to you, truly, thank you, but no.’ You have to plan for the unexpected, and just doing that day in and day out, it’s going to get to you every now and then, even the best of people.

N. John Smith:
Yeah, absolutely. Nobody likes to be yelled at, least of all me. And if somebody yells at me, I just say, “See you later.”

David Read:
Yeah. This is not worth it. Absolutely.

N. John Smith:
No. Life’s too short.

David Read:
Which of the directors… you had some prolific ones, you had: Martin Wood, Peter DeLuise, and Andy Mikita. They really had the most… you had a number of directors who would come in and out, but they were the most prolific. What were each of their sensibilities like? What did you know going in? Did they all run things pretty much the same?

N. John Smith:
They all came from a production background. Martin Wood was from Alberta, same as Andy. They were second ADs [Assistant Director], and I hired Andy first as a second AD. Martin, I think I hired him as a second AD, too, for some project. I don’t remember what. They were smart guys, filmmakers, and I was always looking for smart guys that you could bump up. So they became… Martin was the first one to make Director, and he proved himself as a director many, many times over.

David Read:
“Solitudes” is brilliant. That is an amazing episode, in an ice box!

N. John Smith:
Yeah. We liked to tackle things like that. When Brad [Wright] was authorizing a script, a frozen script, I said, “Well, we can refrigerate a stage.” It hadn’t been done before in Vancouver, but we did. We just brought in a couple of big refrigeration plants in and built the set, and all of a sudden we’re at the North Pole. Today, we wouldn’t have to go to the North Pole to shoot all the stuff that we did shoot at the North Pole because you can do that on a green screen. But it was an experience, and I don’t think anybody has shot a dramatic series further north than Stargate. I’m 99% [sure]… because we took actors up there. Documentaries have been shot in every part of the world, but I don’t think they’ve ever taken four actors up there. It was quite an undertaking. The whole thing happened… Martin and I were signing autographs at a convention in Vancouver. This ex-commander off a submarine came up, put down a picture in front of me with the conning tower of a submarine sticking up through the ice, and said, “Could we talk about this in a while?” I said, “Absolutely.” So we finished what we were doing, got him over, and he said, “Would you and one other person like to go to this camp? We do war games under the ice with the Brits every two years.” I said, “Wow, that sounds like a hell of an opportunity.” So he wanted Martin and me to go. We took it back to Brad and said, “If I can put this together to get there, can we write something around this? We can get up there for a week and shoot a few scenes.” Of course, Brad jumped all over it, and they were in the process of making a couple of little Stargate movies, so that’s what we did. It took two years to put it all together, but we did. We took 18 crew and four actors. Lynn [Smith] came along as the official photographer. She and I met Ric [Dean Anderson]… and we had to fly Alaska Air. So we left Vancouver, flew to Seattle airport, met Ric there, and took him up with us. The rest of the crew had already been up there. To get prepared for this, we took all the department heads down to San Diego to get on a sister ship to the submarine we were going to be using up there – and experienced that so we all knew what we were looking at – and we put it all together, and it went off without a hiccup. The night Lynn and I and Ric landed on the ice, and it was minus 85 Fahrenheit. We had parkers with hoods out to [gestures], you know. Lots of vaseline on your face and get out of the aeroplane. We went up to camp, Ric did, Martin and I sat down and we said, “We can’t shoot outside – it’s too cold.” So, we sat there for a whole day and a half – we couldn’t shoot – and then the temperature went up to minus 55, and we said, “OK…”

David Read:
Yay! We can shoot!

N. John Smith:
“It’s a nice warm day today, let’s go.” So we did. The actors were all amazing. We never heard a complaint. Well, everybody was just happy to be there. I mean – what an experience. They were all gung ho. So, we got everything in the can, on schedule, and came home.

David Read:
Barry Campbell – what a gift. A Stargate fan who showed up at a convention, had an idea, was brave, and said, “I’m the person who can pull this off if you’re interested.” How did two people become a crew?

N. John Smith:
He didn’t at the time. That was put together after. The initial meeting was: can Martin, myself, and Lynn go up on this thing, and [more] of getting back to the office talking to the writers, and then talking back and forth to Barry, I said, “What about if we did this?” So Barry got working on it and said, “Yeah. We can do this.” So we did. It didn’t actually happen that day at the convention.

David Read:
No. No, but the idea started.

N. John Smith:
The idea started. Absolutely. Yeah.

David Read:
I’m sure the military was.. the Air Force has always been very supportive of Stargate productions. This was the Navy, I think, if I’m not mistaken. Is that right?

N. John Smith:
Yes. The military, they considered Stargate as good [for] recruiting.

David Read:
Yeah.

N. John Smith:
There had been something… I never really knew why… the whole thing: I wrote them a check for $32,500US for the whole thing. That included flying all our freight out to the site. The site was about 400 km south of the North Pole. So we flew from Prudhoe Bay – Dead Horse is what they call it. We flew out, we flew all our gear out, flew the crew out. They put all our crew up. They fed us and did everything else for us and the bill was $32,500.

David Read:
Yeah. Barry said they charged you guys costs – they didn’t charge anything extra. That’s amazing!

N. John Smith:
I have no idea what the cost was, but $32,500 doesn’t get you very far.

David Read:
I know! That is just… but for getting all that on film, that is just wild. What an experience!

N. John Smith:
It was really cool. People don’t know, but the whole ice floe moves from east to west at about two knots. We put an X on the ice where we wanted the submarine to come up – and we were in contact with the skipper on the sub – we staged our actors, put the camera up, and had an X on the ice. And he put it up right on the spot. The whole thing was moving, like I say, to the west at two and a half knots. It was pretty cool.

David Read:
And he’s got a current to deal with, and my understanding was it was like the second or third try, and it was the last one, and it hit.

N. John Smith:
Hit it right on the button. And, so we prepared to do a little something special for them as a thank you. So we made a heat coil up, and we had power on the ice, a gen set, and we put a camera down through the… we cut a hole in the ice and put a camera down through the hole and got a picture of that submarine going down. And they’ve never had a picture like that before. That was the first time anybody had ever done that because, of course, when they do it, there’s nobody left on the ice.

David Read:
Right, so you photographed the thing under the water.

N. John Smith:
Yeah.

David Read:
Just sped up the camera.

N. John Smith:
Yeah.

David Read:
That is just… you still have to, I imagine, pinch yourself that you have an experience that most people just never have, you know?

N. John Smith:
No, and we’re in the process of heading to the South Pole too. So we want to go to both. We almost made it a few years ago: we circumnavigated South America, but we haven’t been to Brazil yet. So we’re going to leave Fort Lauderdale and go down the East Coast and finish off in South America.

David Read:
Wow, good for you guys. Absolutely. Can you take me through – the little bit of time that we have left – what a typical SG-1 episode… the process was for getting all that together? My understanding was that you had a budget of between $2 million and $3 million per episode.

N. John Smith:
Yeah

David Read:
Is that correct?

N. John Smith:
High twos.

David Read:
Hi twos. OK. Was every episode pretty much divvied up the same, or did you have flexibility there to move stuff around?

N. John Smith:
Lots of flexibility.

David Read:
OK.

N. John Smith:
They would let us… I mean, the bottom line is… did we shoot 20 or 22 episodes? I think we shot 22, but…

David Read:
22 for the first five seasons – excuse me, seven seasons – and then 20 once SG-1, Atlantis, and Universe.

N. John Smith:
Exactly. And so the idea is to hit our budget times 22. So if we go over on some, we want to be under on some. And, you know, we are playing the U.S. dollar all the time. The fluctuation in the U.S. dollar could make or break us. And we had the dollar down to 65 cents at one time, which was, you know, we… if that happened over the… if we budgeted at the beginning of the year at a 72-cent dollar, and then it went down to 65 cents, we used every penny of it. We didn’t want to not use it.

David Read:
Wow.

N. John Smith:
You know, and MGM was very flexible, of course. I think they trusted Brad Wright and Robert, you know, explicitly. There’s no ifs, ands, or buts. It’s a collaboration. I mean, we’re trying to get the best production value, and they’re trying to get everything done on the money that is allotted. So it was a collaboration, always.

David Read:
Did you ever not feel that every single cent made it on the screen in the right way?

N. John Smith:
Well, that was the whole idea. You’re trying to get 125% production value out of 100%. You’re always trying for that. And that comes from the crew and the directors and the writers. You know, you don’t want to shoot under budget. You want to spend every nickel you possibly can. And there was times where, you know… I don’t think I ever got a phone call about… budget-wise, and I don’t think Brad ever did either, to my knowledge. But, most likely they would phone them up and say, you know, “You guys are a million dollars over right now” or whatever. But a million dollars in a production like Stargate – you can cut corners and pick it up without taking a lot of production value away pretty quickly.

David Read:
How often were you on set? Were you on set…

N. John Smith:
Always.

David Read:
Always? Every day when cameras were rolling?

N. John Smith:
I was there to start the day…

David Read:
OK.

N. John Smith:
…99% of the time. My wife, Lynn – when she was location manager, she’d leave the house at like 3AM or 4AM, and I would leave the house… usually car was 7AM.

David Read:
She was out by 3AM!

N. John Smith:
Oh yeah. Lots of times to park the unit. She always wanted to be there.

David Read:
Wow.

N. John Smith:
To make sure the unit… and then she’d go from there back to the office. But, yeah, I was always… I always prided myself on being on set first thing in the morning. That’s when you’re going to find out any production problems you’ve got – being there – because, you know, it was important to me to share the same hours as the crew because they’re doing it. Why shouldn’t I do it, you know?

David Read:
That’s right. From the top.

N. John Smith:
Yep. And so I did that, and I was usually there – until the last couple of years – I was usually there at wrap, and we had a cabin about four hours away up in the interior, and lots of times we’d leave at like 9, 10 o’clock at night on a Friday night, and we’d drive straight to the cabin. And, if we had a 7 o’clock call Monday morning, I’d leave the cabin at three and drive down, go to set.

David Read:
Wow.

N. John Smith:
But, I always liked to be… that way, you keep in touch with your crew. And if anybody’s got some issues, you’re going to know about it. It was always important.

David Read:
Were you on production for Universe?

N. John Smith:
Oh yeah. Not very often, though. That was my last year.

David Read:
Got it. Season One… you were there for Season Two as well, or just the first season?

N. John Smith:
No. I was finished Season One.

David Read:
Oh. OK.

N. John Smith:
We were building our house.

David Read:
I see! I remember John Lenic taking me into the stage that had Stargate Command. And the only thing that was left there was the spiral staircase. Everything else had been pulled away. I think that was between Season One and Season Two of Universe. I’ve told this story before, but at that moment it was like, “SG-1’s truly gone.” That was when it ended for me – was when I stepped into that space and saw it. But, the amount of work that you guys did – it was just an extraordinary accomplishment that you guys pulled off. You have to take considerable pride in that project.

N. John Smith:
Yeah. Stargate was always… it was a lot of fun. To do one production for 14 years – mind you, you’re talking to a guy that did one production for 16 before that, but not as a producer. So, I was used to longevity, but it was a wonderful time in our lives. Lynn and I met on that series… no we didn’t, actually. We met before that. We were married in 1995, and started Stargate 1996. We met while I was working for Cannell Films. But, yeah… I don’t have too many issues with anything that ever happened in those 14 years. It was always lots of fun.

David Read:
Yeah. It shows in the quality of the work, and in the production, how much everyone enjoyed being together. You don’t have a lot of studios that, you know… they’ll have barbecues on the weekends and bring in bouncy castles for the kids. That was a family, and you guys operated as ‘one.’ It’s quite an achievement for the volume of work that you did.

N. John Smith:
Yeah. We rented the baseball stadium and had a baseball evening there for the families and everything, and all went to the baseball game. We [would] do stuff like that all the time. You know, if you’re working hard like that you’ve got to have fun, and we did.

David Read:
And the charity work that you guys did with Make A Wish and BC Children’s Hospital – that’s really cool, man.

N. John Smith:
Yeah. It was fun doing that. As they say; you’re only as good as the people you work for. I was very lucky to work for the guys at… I can’t honestly ever say that I get up in the morning and say, “Ah! Shit! I gotta go to work.” I can’t honestly ever say I ever did that. And probably if I would have done that I would have left, because if it isn’t fun then… “life’s too short.”

David Read:
That’s right!

N. John Smith:
I’m quoting Brad now.

David Read:
John, this has been a real pleasure. I really thank you for taking the time. It means a lot to me to have you and to see how the pieces of a television show are put together. A lot of you folks may take that for granted, but we take it in like candy. This is cool stuff.

N. John Smith:
Yeah, it is. But again, [it’s a] collaboration. There’s no one person – I don’t care who that person is – there’s no one person that does it. It is a collaboration. I had spent a lot of time interviewing when I was hiring people. I’d spent a lot of time interviewing them to make sure that we had the right person, and it always paid off because I never had to hire and fire too many. I think on Stargate we let three people go over the whole run of the show, and that was through extensively vetting them beforehand. The nice thing about Vancouver is you pretty well know everybody, and if you don’t, you can check with the previous Producer or Production Manager that person worked for and check them out. Vancouver is a great place to make film. I mean, there’s a lot of really, really good producers and production people in Vancouver now – way more so than when I started out. There was hardly anybody.

David Read:
Oh yeah, the city’s grown enormously.

N. John Smith:
Yeah, well, my son says there are like 45 productions going on – not right now, but I mean, when I started, there was one production in Vancouver. There was nobody.

David Read:
Wow.

N. John Smith:
Yeah, so it’s come a long way. And, you know, it’s funny. I see quite a few of those people every once in a while, unfortunately always at funerals or memorial services and stuff. Yeah. It unfortunately takes people quite early in their lives sometimes because of the stress load they’ve been packing their whole careers.

David Read:
But wouldn’t you rather do something that you love for your life rather than getting to the end of it and being like, “Well, I didn’t do really what I wanted to do”? Sounds like a pretty clear answer to me.

N. John Smith:
No, no. If you can’t be happy doing what you’re doing, you shouldn’t be doing it then.

David Read:
That’s right.

N. John Smith:
My kids are all the same. I mean, I’ve said that to them. And like I say, three of them are still in the industry because they have fun with it. I’ve got one daughter that owns a restaurant, and they like that too.

David Read:
I’m sure!

N. John Smith:
You got to have fun every day, or life goes by real quick. You don’t want to look back and say, “Uh-oh, I wasted 25 years of my life doing that?” No, it’s not right.

David Read:
John, thank you.

N. John Smith:
You’re very welcome.

David Read:
I really appreciate it. That was N. John Smith, Executive Producer of Stargate SG-1, Atlantis, and Universe. I was really excited to be able to share some of his stories with you. I met him years ago on production, and just the number of people who are responsible for making this show, this franchise, possible – there are so many people, and he was one of those main cogs in the wheel. It’s just great to get his story on. So I’m really glad that we were able to share that with you guys. Before I let you go, if you enjoy Stargate and you want to see more content like this on YouTube, please click that like button. It makes a difference with YouTube and will continue to help the show grow its audience. Please also consider sharing this video with a Stargate friend. And if you want to get notified about future episodes, click the subscribe icon, and giving the bell icon a click will notify you the moment a new video drops, and you’ll also get my notifications about any last-minute guest changes, and clips from this episode will be released over the next few weeks on both the Dial the Gate and GateWorld.net YouTube channels. I really appreciate my moderating team who helps me pull this off week after week: Sommer, Tracy, Antony, Jeremy, and Marcia – you guys make this show possible. Big thanks to Frederick Marcoux at ConceptsWeb who keeps dialthegate.com up and running. My visual effects [and] my digital effects guys, Brice and Matt EagleSG – you guys are great. I can’t do the show without them. I appreciate you all tuning in, and we’ve got a few good episodes heading your way this year. Thanks so much for your time and [for] spending a little bit of your day with me. It means a lot to have you on board. My name is David Read for Dial the Gate. I’ll see you on the other side.