“The End of an Era:
Xena’s Final Wrap”

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       I received the invitation for the big, final wrap party for “Xena: Warrior Princess” being thrown down in New Zealand.  I won’t be going -- it’s a long, expensive flight for a party -- but it was nice of them to think of me and send an invitation.  This isn’t just the wrap on “Xena,” though, it’s a final wrap for all of Renaissance Pictures’ (known as Pacific Renaissance Pictures in New Zealand) shows that have been shot there since 1993.  That would include: “Xena: Warrior Princess,” “Hercules: The Legendary Journeys,” “Young Hercules,” “Jack of All Trades” and “Cleopatra 2525.”  315 hours of television programming, from what I’ve been told.
       Included with the invitation is a complete list of every episode of “Xena.”  I am proud to be one of two directors -- along with Garth Maxwell -- to make it through all six seasons.
       I began work down in New Zealand in 1993 when Pacific Renaissance Pictures first opened their doors for business to make five TV movies about Hercules.  I was on the same flight down as Kevin Sorbo going down for his first time.  These five TV movies were part of a thing called “The

Josh on set of the Action Pack TV-movie, "Hercules in the Maze of the Minotaur" June 1994

Action Pack,” which I thought was a clever idea.  Universal TV made four or five episodes of a number of different possible series.  There was “Hercules: The Legendary Journeys,” and William Shatner’s “Tek Wars” and “Midnight Run,” and “Smokey,” (as in “the Bandit”), and a martial arts thing.  Anyway, out of “The Action Pack” emerged not only “Hercules,” but from that they spun-off “Xena,” which still has an “Action Pack” credit on the end.  And then they never did it again.  Two hit series out of the experiment seems like a success to me, but what do I know?
       However, when we first got down there, it was strictly to make those five TV movies.  I began as the 2nd unit director on the very first film, “Hercules and the Amazon Women,” and I also 2nd unit directed the third film, “Hercules in the Underworld” (“Hercules in His Underwear,” as we so cleverly called it).  I was then main unit director on the fifth film, “Hercules in the Maze of the Minotaur.”  After I wrapped “Minotaur” in June, 1994, I got the job back as 2nd unit director and I

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"Hercules in the Maze of the Minotaur" crew shot. Front row (LtoR): Kevin Sorbo, Hercules; Eric Gruendemann, producer; Chloe Smith, co-producer; Josh Becker, director.

stayed on to the bitter end, cleaning up bits and pieces for all five films.
       For some odd reason Kevin Sorbo was still under contract and Rob Tapert, being the slave-driver that he is, made Kevin come out and work on 2nd unit the day before he left New Zealand.  Kevin bitched a little when he showed up on the set, like why wasn’t I using a double as 2nd unit generally did?  I told him it wasn’t my problem, I was going to shoot whichever Hercules they gave me.  Kevin was perfectly cool and we shot the stuff we had to.  As he and I were walking away, I said that Rob Tapert had mentioned to me the night before that he thought Herc would get picked up, for 13 episodes, anyway.
       Kevin laughed disdainfully and waved his hand, “Man, I’ve heard that shit before.  I’ve already been in five or six pilots and they all say that.  Believe me, I’ve made other plans” and he walked away.  Cut to him returning to New Zealand in a few weeks and staying for the next five years.
       When I just started, one of my first jobs was to shoot the front title sequence of the show.  However, nothing had been written or storyboarded or even vaguely conceived, so I just kept going out and getting random shots of Kevin running in different locations, at various film speeds, and swinging his sword and stuff.  This got silly and redundant, so I suggested that Hercules be arm wrestling a huge guy, slam his arm down, crush the table and flip the guy, which still seems pretty cool to me.  The casting people went out and found the biggest man they could in New Zealand, named Alistair, who was over 500 pounds.  I think he actually said he was 40 stone, which, at 14 pounds a stone, puts him closer to 600 pounds.  He was big.  And a very nice guy, too.  They put him in his costume, he took one step and split the pants in half.
       As I was walking out the door of the office to go shoot this arm wrestling sequence, someone ran up and got me because Rob Tapert was on the phone and wanted to speak to me.  Rob said that he suddenly hated the idea of arm wrestling, and I should instead make it a real fight sequence.  I said, “But Rob, this guy can’t fight.  He’s huge.”
       “No, no, a huge guy is good.  Herc should kick the crap out of him.”
       “It should be a stunt man,” I said.
       “Naw!  A stunt man looks like a stunt man.  This guy’s huge, right?”
       “Right.”
       “Good.  Make a good sequence out of it.”
       And I hesitantly agreed.
       Cut to the 2nd unit crew on this grassy hill somewhere outside Auckland with Kevin Sorbo, Alistair, the 600-pound man, and I attempting to shoot a believable fight scene.  Alistair’s arm honestly had to weigh 75 pounds.  He was about as uncoordinated as it’s possible for human being to be previous to becoming incapacitated.  If you were casting for the exact opposite of a stunt man, Alistair was perfect for the part.  If he ended up on the ground, God forbid, it took four people struggling as hard as they could to get him back on his feet.
       So I had Kevin and Alistair throwing fake punches at each other, none of them looking very convincing, and within three or four punches Alistair was huffing and puffing, wheezing, verging on coronary arrest and out of control.  I called cut and explained to Alistair, again, that all he need to do was sell one punch at a time.  There could be as much reset time as he need between punches.
       I called, “Action,” Alistair pulled his fist way back, launched an enormous punch which threw him off balance and he mistakenly punched Kevin Sorbo in the mouth and decked him.  I ran over to find Kevin flat on his back in the grass with blood coming out of his nose and mouth.  I saw my career flash before my eyes.  Ice was quickly applied to Kevin’s face.  Moments later the assistant director’s phone rang, and naturally Kevin was needed immediately back on main unit.  He was quickly hustled into a car and driven away.
       Apparently, when Kevin arrived back on main unit his face was so swollen and bruised and that they couldn’t shoot with him anymore that day.  Had this been my hair-brained idea I suppose I would have been fired, but luckily it wasn’t.  Kevin was also very good about saying he didn’t think it was my fault.
       Strangely, when we first started, I, the 2nd unit director, was on a 6-day week, being Monday through Saturday, but the 2nd unit crew was only on a 5-day week, starting on Tuesday.  So, one Monday I ended up shooting tight inserts of amazon babes putting knives into boot scabbards and oiling their skin, all supposedly by firelight, with myself as the entire crew.  I was in a corner of the stage as main unit was shooting in the same place, which is a very odd set-up, let me tell you.  So I’m doing everything, putting up the background, setting up and aiming the lights, controlling the propane fire bar, as well as operating this enormous 35mm Arriflex camera with a big zoom lens.  I had three very attractive young girls, all models, dressed as amazons in strips of leather, and I was actually getting some usable shots -- several of which were in fact used -- when someone from the office came and got me saying the co-producer, Liz Friedman, was on the phone from the USA.
       Liz said, somewhat hesitantly, “Rob would like you to get these amazon girls to have . . . orgasms.”
       “Excuse me?”
       “Orgasms.”
       “Liz, these aren’t actresses, these are models.  Young models.”
       “Rob wants orgasms.”
       I threw my hands in the air, as Liz obviously already had, and said, “OK.  Orgasms it is.”
       The look on the faces of these three pretty Kiwi girls when I came back and told them what was now being desired of them was priceless.  I may as well have been asking them to fly.  It was quickly apparent that the prettiest, blondest one of the bunch had never even heard of orgasms, let alone had one.  Somewhere in a vault lies a piece of film with this poor, befuddled, very cute young girl suddenly smiling widely, as though a cute puppy has come into view, then looking forlornly directly into the lens.  The next girl energetically slammed her wrists together, then jumped up with her arms raised over her head like a cheerleader and I thought for a second she was going to do the splits, but she refrained just short of it.  Oddly, none of these shots were ever used.

Josh directing Anthony Quinn

       I think I may have shot the two most used shots in all of Hercules and Xena.  One was a tight close-up of a yellow flower, that tilts up to reveal a whole field of yellow flowers; and the other was this gorgeous sunset that was occurring behind us as we were setting up the camera to shoot Anthony Quinn in “Minotaur,” so I had the camera turn around and get it.  Both of these shots have been used many times in numerous episodes of all the shows that Pacific Renaissance made.
       Also, way back there at the very beginning in the first film, “Amazon Women,” the lead amazon babe was portrayed by the soon-to-be “Touched by an Angel” Roma Downey, and the second-lead amazon babe was Lucy Lawless.  It shows what a terrific actress Roma is that she got and easily handled that part, given she’s a tiny person, or, as she would say with her beautiful Irish brogue, a wee little person.  I was going through a very serious Van Morrison phase at that time, which has never really stopped, and she and I would exchange lines from his songs.
       As I’ve said before, and will now say again, I set eyes on Lucy and kind of swooned.  2nd unit was on a very light schedule those first few days of shooting and I did very little else except follow Lucy around and vainly attempt to be witty by saying over and over like Ricky Ricardo, “Lucy, you got some ‘splainin’ to do.”  After two unrelenting days of this, Lucy finally said to me, “Your doing an imitation from Lucille Ball’s TV show?”
       I nodded, smiling, “Yes.”
       “We never got that down here” and she walked away.
       Still, undeterred, I continued dogging her heels until a day or two later she brought her husband at the time, Garth Lawless, to the set.  This may well have simply been to have Garth out to the set, but it cooled my heels a bit, anyway.
        That she ended up marrying my buddy Rob is pretty amusing, I think.  They have an incredibly cute, fat baby now, too, named Julius.
       Julius won’t even remember “Xena,” even though that was where he was conceived, born, and raised for his first two years.  Luckily, he’s a really good baby that doesn’t cry very much, because he’s spent an enormous amount of his first few years on a film set.
       When the three episodes of Hercules that contained Xena spawned the order for the first season of the show, there were no

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The inscription reads, "Joshua, To my favorite director of all time!  With great love & fondest regards, Lucy Lawless, your friendly neighborhood warrior princess.  P.S.  You taught me everything I know.  I just wish I could smile more.  11/95."  Lucy gave this to me while making "A Fistful of Dinars" in the first season of "Xena: Warrior Princess."

writers, no staff, no nothing.  I took advantage of this momentary anomaly and quickly reworked a Hercules story that I had written (with my friend, Jack Perez) into a Xena story.  This was the second Xena episode, “Chariots of War,” and doesn’t even have Gabrielle in it.
       I directed the 15th episode of the first season of Xena, “A Fistful of Dinars.”  My big contribution to the show at this early stage was that Lucy kept grimacing to show her toughness as Xena and I urged her to knock it off.  I kept saying to her, “You’ve got a beautiful smile, show it.”
       “But I want to look tough,” said Lucy.
       “Xena’s the toughest babe on the block, she can afford to smile.”
       So Lucy began to smile more (see the accompanying photograph and inscription).
       I directed the first episode of the second season, “Warrior . . . Princess . . . Tramp,” which was my first episode with Ted Raimi as Joxer.  We would eventually do eight episodes together.  I think Lucy, Renee, Ted, myself, and a clever, funny script from Xena’s head writer/co-executive producer, R.J. Stewart, made for a very funny episode.
       In the second season I was about to do “Blind Faith” when Lucy fell off a horse while shooting “The Jay Leno Show” and broke her hip.  Suddenly, a week before were to begin shooting, an entirely new script was concocted and written (by Adam Armus & Nora Kay Foster, who wrote a number of episodes I directed) entitled “For Him the Bell Tolls,” which starred Joxer.  The opening and closing scenes with Xena I shot with a double and Lucy’s close-ups were shot later and put in.
       For the one and only time I also did a third episode that season, “Blind Faith,” which I think is a good, solid, non-slapstick episode.
       In the third season I directed “Fins, Femmes & Gems,” which, has some of the best comedy I’ve done in my career.  Ted and I got together and watched “2001: A Space Odyssey” to pick up good monkey moves for his monkey man character, Attis.  There’s also a flashback in that episode that I’m rather proud of cinematically.  Xena is remembering coming to the same place to fish in her youth and we see her younger incarnation and her little brother run past behind her, thus getting into a flashback without a cut, simply a change of focus.  It then comes back to the present by morphing young Xena into present-day Xena, which worked quite well.
       In the fourth season I directed two episodes, “In Sickness & in Hell,” where Xena and Gaby are both ill in various ways -- head lice, skin crud, etc. -- and “If the Shoe Fits . . . ,” a reworking of “Cinderella.”  Both are highly silly episodes, and I like them both a lot.
       In the fifth season I did “Kindred Spirits” and in the sixth I did “Soul Possession,” both of which contain some good, funny moments.
       I also have a story credit on another episode, “Locked Up & Tied Down,” which Rob Tapert and I wrote together, and which I also believe turned out to be a pretty good, non-comedy episode.
       I’m proud of all of the episodes I worked on.  “Xena” has been the best, long-running experience of my professional life and I’d sincerely like to thank everyone involved: Rob Tapert, Lucy, Renee and Ted, Eric Gruendemann, Chloe Smith, Liz Friedman, R.J. Stewart, Steven Sears, Simon Ambridge, Paul Grinder, Donny Duncan, Robert Gillies, Di Rowan, Bernie Joyce, Rob Fields, Jim Pryor, Tim Batt, Alex Tydings, Kevin Smith, Karl Urban, Peter Bell, Edith, Sue, Dave, Moira, Phee, Sally, Jane, Tracy, George (Port & Lyle), Luke, Keith, Linda, Charlie Haskell, Rick Allender, and all the other great crew and cast people who have all done a terrific job over the past eight years.
       Thank you so much, I’ve really and truly loved it.

-Josh Becker