Bryan Singer might not be among the names that spring to mind when you think of the new "Battlestar Galactica." But it could have been the director of "Superman Returns" and not current BSG writer and executive producer Ronald D. Moore who is credited with reviving the show had the Fox Network gone ahead with their version, according to an interview with BSG producer David Eick in iF Magazine.

"This whole thing began in an unorthodox way," Eick said. "There was a script for a project called 'Battlestar Galactica,' which was a continuation of the old series produced by Bryan Singer. It was set up at Fox as a two-hour pilot. They had gotten the script and hated it, and were trying to back out of the commitment. Fortunately for everybody, Bryan had to go do 'X-Men 2' and that gave everyone the out."

With Singer out of the picture and Fox -- the channel responsible for cancelling Joss Whedon's "Firefly" -- no longer interested, the door was open for a new interpretation. But neither Moore, who is now widely credited with reinventing the BSG universe, or Eick were on board right away.

"Back at Universal David Kissinger and Angela Mancuso said, 'Why are we doing this for Fox, when we should be doing this for our in-house network?'" said Eick. "So they said, 'Let's do it as a mini-series and let's throw this bad script out and start from scratch.' David called me, asked if I would like to take it on, and I asked if I could start all over. He said I could, and I started shopping around for a writer. There was already a buyer lined up, and it was formulated that I would produce it, Sci-Fi would be the network it would be on; now all we needed was a writer and an idea."

Eick already knew Ronald Moore, he said, because they had worked together on the supernatural series "G vs. E." Moore had also been a writer and producer on "Star Trek: The Next Generation," "Star Trek: Deep Space Nine," "Star Trek: Voyager" and several of the Trek feature films. Eick was aware that the network wanted the new "Battlestar Galactica" to be different from "Star Trek" and knew that Moore had grown dissatisfied with that franchise. He was confident that Moore, with his experience and outlook, was the writer he was looking for.

"I knew that I wanted to do something very un-'Star Trek' like, and I knew we weren't going to get the go-ahead from the network unless we had something that distinguished itself very loudly as not 'Star Trek,'" said Eick. "I didn't know what that meant, I vaguely knew what 'Star Trek' was and I knew that its conventions had been ripped off and done to death by a hundred other shows. I knew we had to veer away from that, and who better to bring on board than someone who knew 'Star Trek' backwards and forwards and could go right every time they went left."

Choosing Moore also proved to be the right decision for other reasons. His confidence and openness to collaboration particularly impressed Eick. He credits Moore with contributing substantially to the final concept.

"I wouldn't say it's a 50/50 split when one guy actually goes and writes the teleplay," Eick said. "Ron wrote the thing. On that front there was a lot of imagination and conjuring. Prior to his starting that gauntlet of pain there were a number of very lengthy and involved meetings talking about what we wanted to achieve with the series. We talked about characters, plot and how we wanted to tone the style of the work. There was a lot in place for him to sort of use as the backboard as he was going through the writing. After he had a draft, we then went through two complete revisions before we submitted it to anyone."

For his part, Eick wanted to approach the show from the perspective of a BSG neophyte. He therefore avoided watching the original series pilot during the development process.

"Ron and David Breck, who was attached to direct at the time, and myself were sitting at the Pino Hollywood Bar talking over broad strokes about what the concept could be," said Eick. "We kept coming up with the idea of going home and watching the pilot. I saw this as an opportunity to be the voice in the room that had not seen the pilot and needed to make the writing understandable from that point of view. It can't just work for the people who are familiar with the "Battlestar Galactica" mythos. I went through the entire development process, all of the story breaking, all of the characterization without watching it. As soon as the network signed off on it and Ron went off to write his gauntlet of pain, that weekend I got the pilot and watched it."

In Part Two of this article, Michael Simpson will report on questions about future developments in "Battlestar Galactica."