Regeneration by Philip Segal with Gary Russell There Once Was a Young Director of Development at Columbia Pictures Television
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Book Reviews By David Ennis Regeneration By Philip Segal with Gary Russell There once was a young director of development at Columbia Pictures Television. Through the course of his duties, he decided to pursue the rights to make an American version of a British SF program he loved as a child. This resulted in talks with the BBC about producing the next season of Doctor Who as an American co-production. These talks did not proceed very far, and the series disappeared from British television screens later that year. However, they were the beginning of Philip Segal’s seven-year odyssey to bring the Doctor back to television. Regeneration is his story. The end of the story, as we know, is the 1996 FOX telefilm with Paul McGann. Segal and his co-author Gary Russell, who wrote the novelisation of the telefilm, provide the reader with a fairly detailed description of the events that led up to that point. From the meetings with the BBC’s initial representatives, Verity Lambert and her company Cinema Verity, to the development of the project under Steven Spielberg’s Amblin Entertainment, the reader learns who the players were, and what decisions had to be made to please all of them. Since it deals more with the evolution of the project over time, and not just the details of the actual production of the final telefilm, this is not just a standard “making of” book. It provides, for the first time, the entire proposed series bible written by John Leekley. Detailed descriptions of the evolutions of the failed Leekley and Robert DeLaurentis pilot scripts, as well as the Matthew Jacobs telefilm script, follow. On the casting side, the reader is told who Segal’s first choice to play the Doctor was. Learn who read for the roles of the Doctor, the Master, and Grace, and who the contenders really were. Imagine Andrea Parker from The Pretender playing Grace instead of Daphne Ashbrook, for instance. While I thought that more attention could have been focused on the actual filming and post production work, comments from the film’s director, Geoffrey Sax, and actors Sylvester McCoy, Daphne Ashbrook, and Yee Jee Tso fill in many of the gaps. I cannot fault the book on the amount of lavish pre-production artwork. I have only seen more artwork in books about the making of the Star Wars movies. While this book stands well on its own, anyone who has read Jean-Marc Lofficier’s history of post series movie projects, The Nth Doctor, will appreciate it more, and vice versa. The books compliment each other perfectly. Lofficier may quote more from the source materials for the pilots, but Segal provides the context to appreciate them. Regeneration is only being released in the UK, and thus difficult to obtain in the US. Track down the specialty dealers that carry it, however. No fan of the film, or the series, should be without it. 2001 Release Dates for the Eighth Doctor Novels January Father Time Lance Parkin ISBN 0 563 53810 4 February Escape Velocity Colin Brake ISBN 0 563 53824 2 March EarthWorld Jacqueline Rayner ISBN 0 563 53827 9 April Vanishing Point Stephen Cole N/A May Eater of Wasps Trevor Baxendale N/A June The Year of Intelligent Tigers Kate Orman N/A 2001 Release Dates for the Previous Doctor Novels January The Quantum Archangel Craig Hinton ISBN 0 563 53824 4 February Bunker Soldiers Martin Day ISBN 0 563 53819 8 March Rags Mick Lewis N/A April Instruments of Darkness Gary Russell N/A May Asylum Peter Darvill-Evans N/A June Superior Beings Nick Walters N/A .