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  • Gene Roddenberry’s son Rod talks about “Think Trek”

    Gene Roddenberry’s son Rod talks about “Think Trek”

    Rod Roddenberry
    Rod Roddenberry

    It would be difficult to find a writer that’s had as much influence on the world as Gene Roddenberry. In creating ‘Star Trek,’ Roddenberry gave the world one of the biggest science fiction properties of all time. But the deeper philosophy of the show, one that predicted a future of tolerance, equality, and diversity continues to inspire people to look ahead with hope for a positive future. For the 100th anniversary of Roddenberry’s birth, his son Rod talked to us about the Think Trek project.

    Moviefone: What’s the inspiration behind Think Trek?

    Rod Roddenberry: It’s been a challenging year-plus for a lot of people here. And of course, coming up to my father’s centennial, I really wanted to celebrate him, and certainly not just him, but, of course, the ideas that he infused into ‘Star Trek.’ It is a little weird to say, “Hey, we’re going to celebrate my…” It’s going to sound graphic, but, “My dead father’s birthday, 100th birthday.” Sure, for a son, it’s celebrating my father, but for the public, it’s everything that he embodied. Of course, Star Trek being it. But even more than that, the ideas and ideals behind ‘Star Trek.’

    The Think Trek campaign, the Be Trek campaign, the Make Trek campaign, and there’s a couple others I’ve already forgotten. We’re taking advantage of social media, like you’ve got to do, especially right now. And what’s really fun about it is that we’re inviting anyone out there who sees something in their daily life that might even have the shape of something ‘Star Trek.’ The Enterprise in the clouds or the insignia somewhere in a stain on your desk. Take a picture of that and hashtag it with Think Trek. And that’s the fun part of it. But we’re really trying to do is keep the philosophy of ’Star Trek’ out there and the ideology of ‘Star Trek.’

    MF: I was just reading something the other day about stories that Leonard Nimoy would talk about. People would come up to him and say, “Oh, I’ve decided to get into geology or biology,” and start talking to him about science as if he was Spock. And he’d come up with an answer, like, “Well, it sounds like you’re on the right track,” rather than puncture the balloon. Does that happen to you too? People share that kind of inspiration?

    Roddenberry: 100%. Yeah, as a young kid, certainly a late bloomer in many ways. When I was a little kid, I watched ‘Starsky and Hutch,’ and ‘Adam-12,’ and ‘Knight Rider,’ and those kinds of shows. I didn’t really get ‘Star Trek.’ In fact, I grew up with ‘Star Wars.’ I love ‘Star Wars’ and I still love ‘Star Wars.’ I’m not saying anything negative about it, but it was a bit more of the classic superhero, good guy, bad guy, villain idea, which is great. I still love it. I still watch it. But ‘Star Trek’ was a little bit more thought-provoking and intellectual, and it took me a while to there. It wasn’t until I was much later in life and, sadly, around the time that my father passed away, that I really started to pay attention. Part of that was me also rebelling against my father when I was a teenager, not wanting to have anything to do with any of that stuff. But anyhow, I digress.

    So, after that, I would go to conventions. I worked on a TV show called ‘Earth: Final Conflict,’ and people would come up to me left, right, and center and say, “Your father really inspired me. ‘Star Trek ‘really inspired me. ‘Star Trek’ gave me hope for the future.” Whether they had a severe handicap, whether they lived in some sort of abusive, perhaps, childhood or relationship, or whether they were just never told they could be or do anything. People said, “Because of ‘Star Trek,’ I’m now a doctor. I have married. I have three kids. I believe in a future that’s inclusive and not exclusive.” And that blew me away, that a TV show could do that. And, slowly, over a period of probably, I’m sure, a decade or so, I became more and more proud of what ‘Star Trek’ was, what my father had created. And to this day, anything that I do, I try in my own way to incorporate some of that into it.

    MF: At what point in your life are you able to look at the legacy and think, “Man, that was my dad.” What did that feel like, coming to that realization?

    Roddenberry:     Yeah, I can touch on many things there. I did a documentary that was released in 2011, 2012 called ‘Trek Nation.’ And I spent 10 years making that documentary, mostly because I didn’t know what I was doing. I had a fantastic team around me who definitely did know what they were doing, but it just took us a long time. So, in that journey, I went through the struggles of, “Who am I? Who’s my dad? Am I supposed to be my dad, following in his footsteps? Am I supposed to be Gene Roddenberry?” And it was an incredibly cathartic and wonderful experience that never made it onto camera because it wasn’t about me on camera, it was about my father. But I had an incredible journey and I became very comfortable with, “I’m, I’m just me, I’m Rod Roddenberry.” I’ll never be Gene Roddenberry. I don’t want to be Gene Roddenberry. Not because I don’t love him and respect him, but there should only be one Gene Roddenberry.

    I’m going to do what I’m going to do, and I’m going to do the best I can at it. I may not create a world-renowned television series, but I have the opportunity to work on it. I have the opportunity to carry on the vision. I have the opportunity to create a foundation and work with a whole bunch of philanthropy and find other people who are working towards that future. So, I am very proud of my father, and I’m very proud to be one of the many, many people who are carrying it on.

    MF: I have to imagine there were fascinating conversations between you and your mother too. Was she helpful in that understanding?

    Roddenberry: Well, not to, as you say, puncture the balloon, but I was a very rebellious preteen and teenager. My father passed away when I was 17. And then after that, my mother and I had communication issues. And so, unfortunately, with neither one of them did I really have the opportunity to sit down and have an adult conversation. And, listen, I’ll take my side of that, which was, I didn’t mature that quickly. I was still an irresponsible, immature, self-centered teen and 20-year-old. I don’t want to paint myself as a horrible little bastard, but I was not as considerate and empathetic of other people and other people’s lives. And it did take me a while, and I’ve still got a long way to go, but it did take me a while to start seeing the world in that way. I’m 47 now. I’ve still got a ways to go, I hope. But I’ve figured a few things out, and at least I know the direction I want to head in.

    But to partially answer your question, my mother championed my father all the way through. She loved him more than anything in the world. And it took me a while to really see the turmoil she went through after he passed away, and some of the personal issues that happened in our lives because of that. And she fought for him and loved him. And then she went around the country, giving speeches, using his own speeches. And so, she truly loved him. She got the philosophy. She knew the fans are the ones who deserve the credit because they kept ‘Star Trek’ alive. And she went around the country telling them that.

    MF: I think one of my personal favorite things about ‘Star Trek’ is the hopefulness, this positive vision of where humanity’s going. Where are you seeing that in your day to day? And are there things that you see and think, “Oh yeah, this is something Dad would be really happy to see?”

    Roddenberry: It’s a very crazy time right now. As crazy in the ’60s, it’s a crazy time now. Star Trek had a lot to say that needed to be said then. And, unfortunately, there’s a lot that still needs to be said today. And one of the most beautiful things that ‘Star Trek’ had was the IDIC philosophy. IDIC, Infinite Diversity from Infinite Combinations. And that really was the backbone of ‘Star Trek,’ no matter what anyone says. That is the true appreciation of all things that are different, both in form and in idea. The crew of the Enterprise wasn’t searching the galaxy for weird-looking aliens. They were out there looking for species and creatures that looked at the universe in a way different from ours. Because we had learned at that time, by that point, we had come together, and we learned it is the things that are different that help us grow and evolve intellectually. Without those around us, we become stagnant.

    And listen, we have had such an issue with that throughout our human history. And we still have that today, sadly, but we all have it. I can sit here and preach it. It’s very easy for me to become judgmental and point at someone and say, “What an idiot.” It’s that moment that on occasion that I step back, I’m like, “Wait, I remember when I did that last year. I remember, I was just having a bad day.” It’s to have some empathy for that person. So, to appreciate diversity and have empathy for all life around us is the key message in Star Trek. And I’m preaching to the choir, but we need it more than ever.

    MF: What are some things in Think Trek and at Roddenberry Entertainment that you’re particularly proud of?

    Roddenberry: Well, of course, we work on the new ‘Star Treks,’ but just staying away from that and really talking about my father’s centennial, we’ve had to divert a little bit. Everyone, because of the pandemic, has to shift and change. And once again, we’re having to do that because of the Delta variant. We had some public things that we were planning, but now we’re really focusing on the online campaigns.

    And, I’ll give the example, we’ve got one called Make Trek. Everything’s Be Trek, Make Trek, See Trek. Make Trek is fantastic. We found an incredible block builder who was on the series LEGO Masters. His name’s Samuel Hatmaker, and he had these incredible collages of Hollywood characters and stuff like that. So, we enlisted him to help us make something representative of my father and his philosophy is for the centennial. And in the end, it will be five. But right now I believe we have four really incredible pieces of mosaic art using the building blocks and LEGO. And they’re huge. They’re life-size. They’re spectacular. They’ve got Easter eggs all through them. They’re great. They are available to see online. Some of the Easter eggs you may not see until you’re up close.

    Everything’s fun. Everything’s just to bring awareness. But what dug a little deeper is we wanted to get 100 quotes out there. My father had a lot to say in the ’60s, he has a lot to say now. My father still has a ton to say. So, we went through all the speeches, all the interviews he did, all these things. And we pulled out these quotes that were very relevant. Starting 100 days before his actual birthday, which is August 19th, we had celebrities say them online.

    And then we created a podcast with two incredibly talented hosts who dug in deep to these quotes. What do they mean? Were they relevant then? Are they relevant today? And they bring in a guest that gives a unique, different third perspective about them. And it’s really interesting to get into some of these ideas. Because they’re not just words, they’re real ideas and commentaries on humanity. And I’ve just been listening to them. I’m getting to be a part of the last few. And it is truly beautiful. My father had a true, in one of his quotes, love affair for humanity.

    MF: When you’re getting the quotes from famous people, have you come across anyone that you have that moment of, “Oh, that person likes ‘Star Trek’? No way!”

    Roddenberry: So, that was part of the documentary. In my time before the documentary, traveling around the world, going to conventions, it was very interesting to meet the people who like Star Trek. I met people of different faiths and religion who love Star Trek. And in my mind, I was like, “Wait, how does that work?” Not only religion, but different kinds of religion. And then you’ve got political figures, you got NFL stars, you’ve just got the gamut of people out there who find a beauty in Star Trek. And what I love about that is the commonality that we all share. That idea that one day, hopefully sooner rather than later, we embrace our uniqueness and come together and become a United Continents of Earth or whatever you want to call it. That is the most beautiful thing. So, I’ve been blown away many times with stories like that.

    You can get more information about Think Trek at Roddenberry.com.

  • 15 Things You Never Knew About ‘Star Trek’ on its 10th Anniversary

    15 Things You Never Knew About ‘Star Trek’ on its 10th Anniversary

    Paramount Pictures

    It’s now been ten years since Paramount Pictures rebooted one of the greatest sci-fi franchises of all time and gave us a brand new “Star Trek.” This film helped reinvigorate the franchise and made stars out of the likes of Chris Pine, Zachary Quinto and Zoe Saldana. While we continue the wait for a a fourth movie that may never happen, enjoy this fun trivia about the making of this epic reboot.

    1. The origins of the reboot can be traced as far back as 1968, when “Star Trek” creator Gene Roddenberry announced at a fan convention his plans to create a movie prequel detailing the formation of the Enterprise crew.

    2. Before this film materialized, Paramount was developing a different reboot called “Star Trek: The Beginning.” This version would have been set during the Earth-Romulan War and centered around Kirk’s ancestor Tiberius Chase.

    Paramount Pictures

    3. The crew relied on an abandoned Budweiser plant factories to depict the cluttered engine rooms of the Enterprise.

    4. John Cho was initially reluctant to play the role of Hikaru Sulu, as Cho is Korean American and Sulu is Japanese American. However, original Sulu actor George Takei encouraged Cho to take the part.

    5. In certain scenes, the special effects team had to completely reanimate Eric Bana and Leonard Nimoy‘s mouths. That’s because Bana severely injured his teeth and Nimoy’s dialogue was changed during the older Spock’s first encounter with Kirk.

    Paramount Pictures

    6. Kirk is shown eating an apple during the Kobayashi Maru training sequence. This mirrors a scene from “Star Trek II: The Wrath of Khan” where an older Kirk eats an apple while recounting the story of that infamous scandal.  According to director J.J. Abrams, this homage was completely accidental.

    7. Winona Ryder was cast as Spock’s mother Amanda, despite being only six years older than Zachary Quinto. This is because the film was originally supposed to include an early scene of Amanda giving birth to her son.

    Paramount Pictures

    8. “Star Trek: The Next Generation” star Wil Wheaton provided voiceover dialogue for many of the Romulans on Nero’s ship.

    9. Karl Urban‘s Dr. McCoy mentions joining Starfleet after going through a nasty divorce. This pays homage to an unused story from writer D.C. Fontana, which was originally written for Season 3 of the TV series.

    10. There’s a reason Nero is MIA for so long in between traveling into the past and battling the Enterprise crew. A deleted subplot reveals that Nero  and his crew were captured by Klingons and imprisoned for several decades.

    IDW Publishing

    11. IDW Publishing released several tie-in comic books that flesh out the events surrounding the film.  2009’s “Star Trek: Countdown” explores the events that led to Nero’s journey into the past and features Captain Picard as a major character. 2010’s “Star Trek: Nero” expands on the movie’s deleted Klingon subplot.

    12. This turned out to be the final “Star Trek” film Majel Roddenberry worked on. Barrett provided the voice of Starfleet’s computers dating back to the original TV series. She passed way in December 2008, two weeks after completing her dialogue for the reboot.

    Paramount Pictures

    13. A lucky few fans were given a surprise early screening in April 2019. The Alamo Drafthouse advertised a screening of “The Wrath of Khan” with a special 10-minute preview of the reboot. Instead, Nimoy and the film’s writers interrupted the film and asked attendees if they’d rather watch the new “Star Trek” instead.

    14. Paramount initially planned for a fourth film in the reboot series to follow 2016’s “Star Trek Beyond,” one which would bring back Chris Hemsworth as George Kirk. However, the film was canceled in January 2019 after negotiations broke down with Pine and Hemsworth.

    Paramount Pictures

    15. “Star Trek” may be getting rebooted all over again. Quentin Tarantino has pitched his idea for a movie and has voiced an interest in directing after completing work on “Once Upon a Time in Hollywood.”

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  • ‘Outlander’ Showrunner Ron Moore Talks the New Season and 30 Years of ‘Star Trek: The Next Generation’

    Few writer-producers in television have had the kind of impact as Ronald D. Moore has.

    From his earliest work on “Star Trek: The Next Generation” and “Star Trek; Deep Space Nine,” to his acclaimed reinvention of “Battlestar Galactica,” to his current run bringing author Diana Gabaldon’s cherished historical romance novel series “Outlander” to life, Moore has been engaging and entertaining fans for more than 25 years.

    With “Outlander” launching its third season Sept. 10 — much to the relief of the show’s diehard fans, who have dubbed the agonizing 16-month wait between seasons “Droughtlander” — Moore joined Moviefone to discuss the making of the newest episodes, the challenges of the new season’s constant hopping through time and countries, and the pleasures and pains of keeping the series’ central lovers Claire (Caitriona Balfe) and Jamie (Sam Heughan) apart.

    Moore also reflected on his long involvement with “Star Trek: The Next Generation,” which celebrates the 30th anniversary of its Sept. 28, 1987 premiere this month, including his experience with “Star Trek” creator Gene Roddenberry and his favorite personal contributions to the “Trek” mythos.

    Moviefone: What were the big challenges for you in the new season of “Outlander” on both a storytelling level and on a production level?

    Ronald D. Moore: The production challenges were much bigger. The scope of the season is so big. Traveling through the different time periods –- not just 20th century to Scotland, but also ’40s, ’50s, and ’60s in the 20th century. And then all the Scottish stuff. Then pivoting the show in the middle, and going to South Africa, and the ships, and then Jamaica. It was very complicated production-wise. That was easily the biggest challenge.

    In terms of story, actually, this was an easier book to adapt than the prior season was, so that laid out pretty well. Just in terms of story, probably [the most challenging aspect] was figuring out what the Claire/Frank story was going to be. That took the most thought, because it wasn’t really in the book, so we constructed it from various other books and backstories, and things that were suggested but maybe not clearly defined.

    Was it at all worrisome keeping your two leads apart for a length of time in the story?

    Not to me. I kind of felt like, every week, the audience is going to be saying, “I can’t wait for them to get back together.” But good. You want to build that yearning and that desire, so that when it happens, it has a big emotional payoff. I feel like if we they had gotten back together after one or two episodes, it’d be nice, but it’d be kind of like an “Okay -– great.” Holding it as long as we’ve held it, I think that builds the suspension and tension.

    What do you think it did for the characters to leave them apart for so long, in the ways you were able to explore them?

    It’s nice to see them in isolation from each other, because so much of the show is about them together. Splitting them up allows you to sort of see them interact with other people more, and sort of explore them in a different way, so that the relationship between the two of them isn’t front and center.

    So you can do things: Jamie’s relationship with his family gets a little bit more time. His relationship to John Grey and Murtagh, and Willie -– you open up all these other doors that, when it’s just Claire and Jamie, that sort of dominates everything else. There’s plenty of that to play in the show, so it was nice to have a one stretch of time where we could do other things.
    Did you want to try to keep your two stars apart as well, so there might be a little extra magic when you did finally get them together on camera?

    I don’t know that we talked about that overtly. Not really. I just wanted to keep them apart for the audience. If you look closely through those episodes, you’ll see that, even when they’re thinking about each other and they’re either doing flashbacks or hallucinations, or whatever, we were careful never to put them in the same frame together, so that the audience never had a moment of the satisfaction of seeing the two leads share the screen. So that was a deliberate choice. They were still sort of around each other in Scotland, so they weren’t really in isolation.

    Did you have any surprises along the way as you were in production, little zigs and zags that you hadn’t anticipated but turned out well?

    The only thing that comes to mind off the top of my head is, in the Battle of Culloden, this sequence between Jack and Jamie was not quite as big and interesting as it was on screen. I wrote it, that they have this moment, and the two men fight, and they collapse together. But the director and the cast just opened it up more and gave it a deeper emotional resonance.

    It was also the serendipity of they just happened to be shooting at magic hour when that sequence happened. It’s a gorgeous sky. It looks fantastic. A lot of that was just an accident, and they just embraced it and went for it. Then Tobias [Menzies] and Sam found that moment… All that wasn’t scripted -– that’s just something that they found. So that’s an example: you just find something and it works really well.

    Did you cast your John Grey [with Australian actor David Berry] with the thought that this is a character that does have his own adventures, and maybe you will bring those to life on screen sometime?

    A little bit in the back of your head you’re thinking about that. That’s come up in casual conversations. It’s not really in active development, so we didn’t really set him up with that specifically like, “Oh, and this is potentially a lead of another show.”

    What do you love about what you guys have been able to bring to Diana Gabaldon’s stories at this point?

    I think we’ve just opened up the world a bit. Primarily, the stories are told from Claire’s POV. In Season One, we hewed pretty closely to that. But as the series has developed, you start broadening it out and opening the show up a little beyond Claire’s internal dialogue with herself, and her single perspective on the world starts to broaden out to Jamie and to other characters. It’s really nice to sort of have opened up the whole world of “Outlander” a little bit more on camera.

    As a crew, were you very excited to create the other eras? To break away from the historical period that you’d already spent a lot of time in?

    I don’t think anybody was excited to do the other periods, except maybe the writers! It’s just a pain in the ass for production. They have to keep track of all the stuff: “What’s Claire’s hairstyle in the 50s versus her hairstyle in the ’40s? Wait a minute -– now we’re in 1968. Do we have the right set dec for that on the same set, and later, tomorrow, we’re shooting Jamie in Scotland!” It doesn’t make anybody happy to go sliding around time.

    What got you creatively energized when you think about the next season?

    Again, it’s a whole different show. Now it’s the American colonies, about a decade before the American Revolution, in the hinterlands of North Carolina. You’re essentially doing version of “Little House on the Prairie.” It’s a pioneer story. You’ve got Native Americans, you’ve got Antebellum south with slaves. You’ve got the first stirrings of things that will become the American Revolution. You’ve got new villains.

    Like every year, it’s “Oh, we’re starting from zero, and what’s this year of TV going to be?” It’s exciting. It’s challenging. It’s tiring, because you would like the familiarity and the comfort of just, “Okay, let’s go shoot in the CIC again.” You long for those kinds of days. But creatively, the show never gets boring. You’re never sort of like, “Oh yeah, we’re doing one of these episodes again.” It’s a completely different challenge every time you sit down to write one.
    I also wanted to ask you about “Star Trek: The Next Generation,” and the 30th anniversary.

    Is it? This year? Sh*t. I must be getting old. Wow, that’s a trip.

    What does that mean to you now, looking back to see what you all were able to accomplish with that series, with that group of characters, with that group of actors, against almost impossible odds?

    It’s hard to really think about it in those terms. We were so inside of it, and it was such hard work, and we were doing it so intensively. Now, I feel like doing 13 episodes or 16 episodes is a back-breaker, but we were doing 26 a year — and you just did so many of them, and you were constantly writing and constantly producing. It’s amazing we were able to do it at all.

    But it is remarkable. It’s difficult, in some ways, to remember what it was like. When I started on the show in its third season, it was not really accepted as real “Star Trek.” The fans were very skeptical, and the fans were kind of split. There were those who liked “Next Gen,” and there were those that hated it. I remember going to a convention when I was still a fan, and there were like the bumper stickers and the t-shirts that were about “real” “Star Trek,” and various things -– “the bald guy” was not accepted.

    And then that all shifted and changed, and suddenly, it became “Star Trek.” It’s really funny to remember that there actually was a moment when “Next Gen” wasn’t taken seriously by the fans themselves, who almost didn’t embrace it. Even though they were watching it religiously, they were still bagging on it privately and among each other.

    So I guess I’m just really proud of the fact that we just loved the show ourselves, and we were committed to what we were doing, and we never doubted for a minute that it was “Star Trek.” We just sort of waited for everyone else to catch up.

    What were the big tools that you walk out of that experience with as a writer and as a producer?

    It was becoming a writer and a producer. “Next Gen,” I was there for five years, and I learned writing. I learned what it was to write for television. I was a complete neophyte. I’d never written for TV before, and I was surrounded by much more experienced writers. By the end of that experience, I had learned television writing and television production.

    When I went to “Deep Space Nine,” it was like a graduate course. It was like, “Okay, now let’s push even further. Let’s get deeper inside of character. Let’s challenge the format itself. Let’s try to make it more serialized. Let’s challenge the idea of what ‘Star Trek’ could be.” So it really taught me not to be satisfied with what a show is, that there was always a better show that you could make tomorrow. [That] was really the biggest thing that I took away from that experience.
    Being a fan before you got involved with the show, what was your favorite contribution to the “Trek” mythology? You obviously gave a lot to the Klingon empire.

    A lot to the Klingons. You know what the funny thing is? I really liked naming starships! I really enjoyed that. If there was a chance to name a starship, I love doing it, and creating a different class of starship. I really got into that.

    I was always pulling back into references of either naval history that I thought were really cool, or I was naming ships after the Hornblower series, or something else — or some random ship that had been mentioned once in an original series episode and I was going to do a new one. That was, like, my favorite gig. I always liked to name starships.

    I know that Gene Roddenberry wasn’t in his best health around the time that you came on, but were there things that you learned from Gene in particular from your personal encounters with him? Or just from the way he organized the show?

    The show was pretty disorganized when I got there, so I sort of learned, “Don’t do this.” I started third season; he was still definitely involved third season. He rewrote a script while I was there. He was throwing out scripts. He tried to throw out a script of mine, but didn’t, ultimately.

    Then his health kind of started declining as the fourth season moved on. I didn’t really have many story meetings with him. He was just a genial, bear-like guy, with a quiet sense of humor. Everyone really kind of liked him as a person, intuitively. He just had this enormous reputation.

    But you were catching him in a moment of decline, physically, and he was starting to step away from the show more and more. So yeah, there weren’t really TV writing lessons that I had an opportunity to really get from Gene.

    As a fan of the original show, what were the inherent qualities that you were excited to perpetuate forward, those “Star Trek” essences that you really wanted to have in “Next Generation?”

    I really wanted to hang on to the nautical and naval traditions that I thought were embedded in the original series. When Gene started talking about “Next Gen,” Starfleet wasn’t really a military organization, and they were starting to drop more and more of those little touches around the show.

    I thought those were really compelling, and really gave The Original Series a specific identity as a ship in space. So I kept putting those things back in: Everything from, like, the nautical bell at a court marshal hearing, to dress uniforms, to sort of little ways of there being a watch on the bridge, watches relieving other watches on the bridge. Who was the officer of the deck? The chain of command. I was always trying to keep those as part of the “Star Trek” traditions.

    I thought that was important, because it identified what Starfleet was, and it gave a hierarchy and an ethos, and sort of an idea to what there was — even though, yeah, they were more explorers and scientists and so on. There was this core nautical, naval identity of who they were.

    We got to see the original cast in their older years, working together, playing those characters. Would you love to see the “Next Generation” cast get a chance to revisit their characters and be together again at least one more time?

    Yeah, that’d be a kick. It’d be a lot of fun. None of them look quite as old as they did in “All Good Things” [the series’ final episode, set in part 25 years in the future] in all fairness. Patrick [Stewart] looks much better than the way we portrayed him in “All Good Things!” So none of them have aged even as far as what we said they would. But it would be a kick to put that group back together and do something. Yeah, that’d be a lot of fun.

  • Long-Lost ‘Star Trek’ Footage Presents a New, Not-So-Final Frontier

    STAR TREK (1966) original television series castCall it a 50th anniversary present or the ultimate “Star Trek” holiday gift: either way, fans of the sci-fi franchise — especially the original 1966 TV series that started it all — are about to unwrap something special.

    “The Roddenberry Vault,” which debuts on Blu-ray Dec. 13, is a startling three-disc time capsule that takes viewers viscerally back to “Star Trek’s” very beginnings. For years, “Trek” creator Gene Roddenberry had maintained a warehouse space that was kept up long after his death in 1991. When Roddenberry’s son, Rod, investigated its contents almost a decade ago, he made an astounding discovery: reels and reels and reels of long-believed lost production footage from the set of the original series, which aired on NBC for three seasons from 1966-1969.

    The husband-and-wife team of Mike and Denise Okuda have a long association with the “Star Trek” franchise: Mike designed the now-iconic look of the computer displays seen in “Star Trek: The Next Generation” and subsequent sequel shows, as well as serving as technical consultant on the show’s pseudo-future science; Denise has served as a scenic artist and computer and video supervisor on various film and TV incarnations of “Star Trek”; and together the couple have co-authored several books about the series — including the seminal and recently updated “Star Trek Encyclopedia” — catalogued historic memorabilia for from the productions for Christie’s auction house and created special DVD content and consulted on high-definition upgrades of the series.

    Over nine years, the two passionate uber-fans painstaking reviewed the bits and pieces of film discovered within the warehouse, looking for historic and archival gems that would ultimately shed a unique and brand-new light on a 50-year-old series that has been discussed and dissected by legions of fans: lost scenes from the classic episode of “City on the Edge of Forever,” evidence of an alternate ending to “Who Mourns for Adonais?”; a long-suspected deleted sequence between James T. Kirk and his orphaned nephew, Peter, from “Operation: Annihilate!”; a long, unedited, single-camera take of Leonard Nimoy in character as Mr. Spock.; and more.Deleted scene from STAR TREKThe result of their labors — as spotlighted in “The Roddenberry Vault” among a series of extensive documentaries, special features collected clips, interviews of “Trek’s” original cast and creators and a roster of current Hollywood movers and shakers they inspired, and a dozen original episodes presented for context — will be, for “Star Trek” fans everyone — downright thrilling, as the Okudas recounted exclusively to Moviefone.

    Moviefone: I would imagine that you are thrilled to bring these amazing discoveries to the “Star Trek” fandom at large. When you first got wind of the possibilities locked up in all of these film canisters, given how close you’ve been to the franchise over the years, tell me what was running through your mind when you first found out you were going to have the chance to go spelunking.

    Denise Okuda: It was a dream come true. For years, I just felt like there was more out there. We’ve seen clips of things that were filmed. We’ve seen stills like the end of “Operation: Annihilate!” with Peter Kirk on the Bridge. We know this was filmed. So where is that film? For years and years and years and years, I would ask directors, I would ask people, and nobody knew where it was.

    I just had this faith that something was out there. So nine years ago, when we were contacted, we were told to meet at this obscure warehouse in Los Angeles. We signed nondisclosures, and they took us in to this room where there were rows and rows and rows of cans of film.

    Mike Okuda: It was very much a “Raiders of the Lost Ark” moment. We walked in. They showed us the films and our jaws just dropped.

    Denise: Dropped! And, of course, because we know “Star Trek” very well, and I don’t know why, but dialogue just sticks with me, we started looking at some of the stuff, and it was like, “Oh, my God. That’s an alternate take,” or, “Oh my God, that’s an omitted line.”

    It’s like Christmas and Easter and Halloween, and any other special holiday that you could think of, wrapped up into one, and we cannot tell you how thrilled and excited we are that other “Star Trek” fans like us are going to be able to see this stuff. We’ve been waiting for this day for nine years.Temp special effects footage from STAR TREKAs you started exploring, how quickly did you start finding the most significant pieces that have been hidden away? Did they slowly reveal themselves, or was it early on you were like, “Oh, we’ve got a goldmine here?”

    Mike: The footage wasn’t organized, so when we saw them, it was almost entirely in random order, which means you’d have a whole bunch of things that were, “Eh? Basically the same that’s on the air.”

    Then, suddenly, there’d be a line of dialogue, but we were lucky: very early on, we found the footage from “Operation: Annihilate!” There’s a famous scene that everyone knew existed because they’d seen clips of Kirk’s nephew Peter coming on the Bridge, and it was a different ending to the episode. We found some of that footage. Needless to say, we were thrilled.

    Denise: Now, you need to remember, and what we try to tell people, is that these are snippets from the cutting room floor. There aren’t many entire scenes that are intact. Most of this is alternate takes, omitted dialogues, different angles. Some of them are relatively short. Some of them are a little longer. But it’s magical because this stuff, we’ve never seen before. It was the cutting room floor. It was meant to be thrown in the trash, and it was rescued.

    So if you are big fans of “Star Trek,” as we are, and you know the scenes and you know the dialogue and you can tell that there’s new dialogue, that’s really special. But if you don’t know, then we will give you context. And how we did context was through a couple of documentaries.

    Our coworker, a very fine filmmaker, The Big Bang Theory.” We talked to [original series writer/producer] Dorothy Fontana. We talked to several of the original series actors. So we hope that there’s something for everyone on this Blu-ray.

    From watching the documentaries, it sounds like, perhaps, that legendary, lost alternate ending to the episode “Who Mourns for Adonais?” was the Holy Grail that you were looking for, and you had some success. Tell me about that particular one, and then some others that were just truly tremendous finds among all of these little snippets.

    Mike: One of the most satisfying pieces we found wasn’t a deleted ending, but was some dialogue that was cut, purely for time, from “The City on the Edge of Forever,” when just after Kirk saves Edith Keeler from falling down the stairs, they exchange a romantic moment. But after that moment, there were several lines of dialogue which were very sweet between the two of them, and you can just see that they’re in love. It’s a great character moment for both Kirk and Edith, and of course it makes Edith’s subsequent death that much more poignant.

    Denise: I think another thing that is very special is what I call the fly on the wall. It puts you there behind the camera. You can see the shooting company. You can see the actors getting ready for their takes. That’s like being there. For anyone that is a fan of “Star Trek,” that’s a very magical feeling.

    Michael and I worked on the other incarnations of “Star Trek.” We never, of course, worked on the original, but that’s our favorite. And so to be there, vicariously, watching this footage was very, very special, and an unexpected treasure. We knew that there would probably be omitted dialogue and alternate takes, because you shoot a master and then you shoot the close-ups and so forth. So we figured there would be some of that, but we also were very pleased to be able to have that experience of being there.

    You present so much material on the disks. Is this just scratching the surface of what you discovered? Is there a lot more, and is there any plan to figure out a way to get that out there for the fans to see?

    Mike: We tried to use the best material, and we’re not aware of any plans in the future. We certainly did not approach this saying, “OK, let’s hold some stuff back for another product.” We said, ‘Let’s go for it. Let’s make this as good as we can. This is a lot of good stuff.”

    Denise: Yeah, we worked really, really, really hard on this project. It’s a passion project, as you can imagine. Roger and Mike and I worked just seven days a week for months and months, trying to mine the best stuff, weave it into the documentaries, so that we could share the best, the very best stuff. So I think that’s probably, this is it, and we’re so lucky to have what we have.

    How did working on this project make you think about the original series or Gene Roddenberry or any aspect of the phenomenon that is “Star Trek” in a different, new, or fresh way?

    Mike: We grew up with the original “Star Trek” series. We watch the reruns all the time. So we started out as fans of the show. We started with “Next Generation.” We were connected with the productions, so we have a different perspective on this show. That is, we love the [sequel] shows, but we think of them as, “This is what I worked on.”

    You have a different relationship to it. So watching this footage from “The Roddenberry Vault,” you get a sense of the team that’s involved. You get a sense of what the actors went through. You get a sense of what the writers did. One of my favorite bits in “The Roddenberry Vault” is watching these moments of Leonard Nimoy. You can see him working on in his brain how to play the character of Spock. You get a sense of, as Denise said, what it was to be there.Leonard Nimoy and DeForest Kelley in STAR TREKIs this the last undiscovered bit of “Star Trek,” do you imagine? Or are there still places to look for amazing discoveries like this? It feels like, here we are, 50 years later, and 50 years from now there’s still going to be an appetite for this kind of material.

    Mike: If you had asked this before this stuff was revealed to us, we would have said, no, there’s nothing else. So who knows?

    Denise: Who knows? But I can’t imagine. I’m happy. I’m satisfied. I still can’t believe how lucky we are, and how lucky everyone is going to be when they see this Blu-ray, that we have the opportunity to see this lost footage and be there on set, vicariously. I’m almost speechless, but you can tell I’m not speechless, because I’m so absolutely head-over-heels excited that this is finally, finally coming out.

    I have to say, all of the interviews were a treat, but there seemed to be something special about William Shatner‘s comments in the documentaries. Did you guys get the sense of that? Was there a little bit more magic in his memories this time around?

    Mike: I think you’re exactly right. We had originally arranged to do a very short interview with him, and Bill just kept saying, “Oh no, I just want to keep talking.” He delved into his feeling as an actor, into the process of bringing to Kirk to life, of living in Kirk’s emotions, and he spoke of the drama of the storytelling of “Star Trek’s” mythology. Frankly, I’ve never heard him open up like this before.

    Denise: I’ve not, either, and we had occasion to work with Mr. Shatner on several of the feature films, and also just see him from time to time, and of course listen to many interviews that he’s done. Roger Lay conducted the interview, and he’s very skilled at asking questions and doing interviews, puts people at ease. But I have never seen an interview with Bill Shatner like this before. He was so gracious and so giving and so open that we share your opinion as well. We were blown away, quite frankly.

    Next year, we’re looking at the 30th anniversary of “Star Trek: The Next Generation,” a series in which you of course were so intimately involved. Anything special on the horizon that we can look forward to, to kind of mark that big anniversary?

    Mike: Honestly, we haven’t thought that far ahead!

    Denise: We just wrapped the “Star Trek Encyclopedia,” which took two years to do, and “The Roddenberry Vault,” which took around nine years to do, and we just wrapped relatively recently. It was a really tight deadline. So, right now, we’re decorating our Christmas tree, and we’re doing Christmas cards, and we’re playing with our dog. So we don’t know. January is around the corner, and I hope something transpires because it’s a real special anniversary.Mike Okuda & Denise OkudaWhat keeps you guys motivated to do the great archival work on the “Star Trek” franchise that you’ve done?

    Mike: Like so many other people, we’re “Star Trek” fans. We love the stuff, and we know how much “Star Trek” has meant to us, and we know how much “Star Trek” means to so many people, and it’s worth it to do it.

    Denise: Mike and I feel very, very strongly in the vision of Gene Roddenberry for hope for the future, that we are one human family, and that we need to be kind to each other. And particularly in the world right now, that is sorely lacking. And, so, we feel that through “Star Trek,” we can reach out to other people and say, “Hey, you know what? It’s going to be OK, and we need to pull together, and we need to be kind to each other.” I think that that is something that’s extremely important and part of the reason we enjoy these projects.

    Gene Roddenberry was a great futurist, but do you imagine he envisioned that preserving this material was the right thing to do, to keep it all stored away, at a time when archiving television material was not the norm? Do you think he suspected the significance it was going to have?

    Mike: We have no idea what Gene thought. But his son, Rod Roddenberry, he, from a fairly early age knew the stuff was there, and he was the one who actively preserved the stuff, even after his mother was gone. So Rod Roddenberry certainly had understood that this stuff was unique, and thank goodness he did what he did.

    Denise: We also have to give a big shout out to CBS and to CBS Home Entertainment … I think they thought we were crazy at times, because we were so passionate. We just fought. We just said, “No, we’ve got to do this. We’ve got to squeeze every inch out of this so we could put it into this Blu-ray set of discs and share it with other ‘Star Trek’ fans.” We kept saying “It’s really, really important. And it’s the 50th anniversary. So that’s kind of just a tip of the hat to CBS for their support. We can’t thank them enough.

  • Writer-Director Nicholas Meyer Looks Back on ‘Time After Time’ and Forward to ‘Star Trek: Discovery’

    Malcolm McDowell in TIME AFTER TIME, the USS Discovery in STAR TREK: DISCOVERYWriter-director Nicholas Meyer‘s career is still going strong after more than 40 years in the business, and it’s already proven to have a timeless quality.

    Meyer first burst upon the entertainment scene with his bestselling 1974 novel “The Seven-Per-Cent Solution,” featuring Arthur Conan Doyle’s enduring fictional icon Sherlock Holmes encountering the real-life father of psychoanalysis Sigmund Freud. Meyer sold the novel to Universal Studios on the condition that he be allowed to write the film’s screenplay.

    The film’s subsequent critical and commercial success and his Academy Award nomination for Best Adapted Screenplay allowed him to make a similar bargain on his next film, “Time After Time“: He’d adapt Karl Alexander’s novel — featuring real-life pioneering science-fiction author and futurist H.G. Wells (played against type by Malcolm McDowell) actually traveling through time to the present day in pursuit of legendary serial killer Jack the Ripper (David Warner) — if he could direct it himself. “Time After Time” became one of the most popular films of 1979, later gathering a devoted cult following over the passage of decades that most recently resulted in a new Blu-ray release from Warner Archives.

    In the interim, Meyer would become closely associated with another enduring staple of popular culture. He was the writer-director behind “Star Trek II: The Wrath of Khan,” widely considered the best of the “Star Trek” films; he co-wrote “Star Trek IV: The Voyage Home,” the warmest, funniest, and most commercially successful of the franchise; and he wrote and directed the final big-screen adventure of the original Enterprise crew, “Star Trek VI: The Undiscovered Country.”

    And just to show that — perhaps especially in Hollywood — time has a way of coming around again, Meyer is returning to the Starfleet fold as a writer-producer on the forthcoming streaming series “Star Trek: Discovery” for CBS All Access, even as “Time After Time” is being adapted by Kevin Williamson (“Scream“) into a weekly TV series for ABC; both series premiere in 2017.

    Now considered not just a classicist but a maker of classics himself, Meyer joined Moviefone to gaze backward through the years at his debut film, and to look to the 23rd century horizon for his next project.

    Moviefone: It was a pleasure to revisit “Time After Time,” as I do frequently. When you think about this film — your first directorial effort — what is the feeling that bubbles up to the surface when you look back on it?

    Nicholas Meyer: The first feeling is what enormous fun it was to make a movie, and how easy I thought it was — you learn all the wrong lessons. I had such a wonderful time. I was surrounded by so many very, very able people keeping me from making worse mistakes than I did. I remember plunging into a real depression when the shooting was over because I was having such a great time.

    The second thing that I remember, almost concurrently, is all the mistakes I made, all the things I did wrong, all the things I didn’t understand and know how to do. I look at it — it’s obviously a very good movie; people have always loved it from the very beginning, but to me, it’s a good movie despite all my mistakes. I can’t help thinking it would have been an even better movie without them.

    One of the things that strikes me is that there were certainly time-travel movies and television shows prior to this, but this movie really takes pleasure in the complications of time travel, things that are a little heady, and that we hadn’t seen that often in these kinds of stories told on screen before you made it. Tell me about approaching that kind of challenge — to make this story make sense to the uninitiated, as far as time travel goes.

    I have to preface my remarks by saying that artists are not the best judges of their own work, any more arguably than people are of their own characters. The Scottish poet Robert Burns wrote, “I would that God the giftie gie us to see ourselves as others see us.” It’s tough. It’s tough. So what I’m saying is sort of speculation that it should be treated as just another opinion. Because it is the filmmaker’s doesn’t make it definitive, and definitive is not a word in my opinion that belongs in any discussion of art.

    Anyway, having said all that, it seems to me that the virtue of the movie is that, ultimately, it’s less about time travel than it is about … it’s a sort of sociological investigation into societies of over 100 years ago, and now, and what has and what has not changed. In other words, it’s the time travel movie that has meat on the bones.

    Which is not to say that Wells’s novel doesn’t have them, because that novel supposes that in the distant future, the human race will have broken down into two subsets, the ineffectual and beautiful Elois, and the dangerous and primitive Morlocks. That may or may not happen. But “Time After Time” deals with more familiar contrasts. The contrasts between 1893 and 1979, and finds some mordant and distasteful irony in the fact that it’s the Ripper who feels at home, and Wells, whose failed predictions of a utopia is lost. I think it’s a movie with some mental meat on the bones.

    Throughout your career, you’ve demonstrated an affinity for these iconic figures in the popular consciousness, whether they’re fictional, like Sherlock Holmes or “Star Trek,” or real-life but legendary and mythologized characters like H.G. Wells and Jack the Ripper. Why do you think you have a knack for getting to the meat of those figures, but also putting a fresh twist on them for the audience?

    I really don’t know, and again, taking what I say with a grain of salt as just one opinion, it seems to me that the difference between my novel, say “The Seven-Per-Cent Solution,” and the movie “Time after Time,” is that “The Seven-Per-Cent Solution” is a story of contrasting characters, individuals — Freud and Holmes — whereas the movie of “Time After Time” is really concerned, in a way, with archetypes: Wells standing in for civilization and a civilized, progressive, humane, forward-looking man. And The Ripper standing in for mindless, malevolent destruction.

    They seem to me, at any rate, in “Time After Time,” to be archetypes in that sense, more than they are individuals. This is just my opinion. As to why I have an affinity for this stuff, I wish I could tell you. I wish I could tell myself, but I don’t know!

    You’ve had to stand up for all of your casting choice for leading man, Malcolm McDowell. Tell me why that was important to you, at a time when Hollywood saw him primarily as a villainous type.

    I think it’s very interesting. I love actors, and I love acting, and I love watching them become different people. It is true that actors, not only in Hollywood but on the stage, are easily typecast. Eugene O’Neill‘s father was typecast all his life as the Count of Monte Cristo. He was Edmond Dantès. He couldn’t escape it. But I think that is arguably wasting talent and wasting an actor, and it’s sometimes fun to see an actor that you associate as one kind of character, jump into something completely different.

    Having seen Malcolm McDowell as Alex the bad boy in “A Clockwork Orange,” and then turning around and see him as Wells, this sort of civilized and gentlemanly guy, it’s charming, it’s a nice contrast. By the same token, we think of Alan Arkin as this comedic sort of person, but you look at him in “Wait Until Dark,” and he could scare the sh*t out of you. He was one scary dude.

    It’s exciting to give him a chance, and to give us a chance to see those contrasts. It makes him a more interesting personality to watch while, arguably, it’s certainly true that it’s easier for Hollywood to shorthand these people. Same thing with Fantasy Island,” and whatever, but we forget some of his other roles, and of course as Khan, as the supremely malevolent villain.

    On the subject of “Star Trek,” you’re hard at work on your contribution to the upcoming series, “Discovery.” What philosophical approach are you bringing to the material? I know that you became a student of “Star Trek” while you were working on the movies and refining your understanding of it. What did you take away from that time with the franchise that you’re hoping to layer into what’s happening now?

    I don’t know that it’s very radical, but I would say that I’m a very Earth-bound person. So “Star Trek” has always worked best for me when it felt most real. So whether it’s the stories or the costumes, and I’m just a cog in the wheel on this particular show — it’s not my show; I’m just working on it, but I’m trying to make things believable, and satisfy myself that they are genuine, as opposed to so fantastic that I kind of lose my bearings and don’t know exactly where I am.

    I think the best of science fiction always reflects what’s going on with human beings. I keep trying to keep it, no pun intended, grounded.

    You quickly connected the dots between “Star Trek” and C.S. Forrester’s naval hero Horatio Hornblower and found the literary connection that helped you with the material — something that you later discovered “Trek’s” creator Gene Roddenberry also had in mind. Have you found something similar in your new work on “Star Trek,” or are you continuing to mine the Hornblower aspect?

    To me, the Hornblower aspect is ground zero for it. To me, once you use that as a template, everything else sort of, and I hate to say stems from, but fits in or grows from that conceit.

    Having said that, there are other ramifications, I think. If you look at “Star Trek VI,” that was very much inspired by the headlines of 1989, 1990, the wall coming down, and in particular the coup d’état that took place in the Soviet Union, which, by the way, the movie predicted. We shot it before it happened. When Gorbachev disappeared, we were already in the cutting room. We didn’t know whether that poor man was alive or dead.

    But that headline, as I said a little earlier, what happens during the course of life on Earth is a lot to do with what science fiction reflects, or recounts, or allegorizes, if that’s a verb, but it’s always about the human condition, no matter what planet they say they’re on.

    You directed a pretty landmark piece of television with “The Day After,” and here we are in this bold new era of TV. What’s got you excited about the possibilities for you in the new models of television that you’re working in with “Star Trek“?

    There is no question, as far as I can tell, that most Hollywood movies are not as interesting as the work that’s being done on television. Now, my standard is not the eye candy standard. It’s not about CGI, and motion capture creatures, and fantasy. A little of that goes a long way with me, and I get tired of it. It is much more interesting for me to watch people trying to figure out sh*t, and how to be alive, and solve human problems.

    So I’ve done two Philip Roth movies. I did “The Day After.” These are about what one would like to think of as grown-up stuff, and I guess what is generically described as, “Oh, drama — you like drama.” The answer is, “Yeah, I do.” Whether it’s drama, per se, or comedy for that matter. I can only look at the exploding car so many times, and all the escapism that Hollywood movies in particular seem so enthralled with. It seems like the worse trouble planet Earth gets into, the more we make these escapist, costume sci-fi things.

    But in a way, I’m much more involved or engaged by movies like “Transparent,” or “The Crown,” or “Orange Is the New Black,” or “Breaking Bad.” For a writer, that’s much more interesting.

    Your movies have been loved for decades now, and you’re still hard at work. Tell me about that experience, keeping it fresh and creatively exciting on your side of the equation.

    I think you have to be very vigilant, so as not to either believe your own press or lose sight of your own standards, in a way, which is hard. It’s very hard because you can start to coast on things that you know how to do, or think that you do well, or other people think you do well, and you have to fight for a certain level of objectivity, which is not always easy to attain, and I’m not sure that there’s a royal road that leads to attaining it.

    But you’re always having to look over your shoulder and say, “Is this first class? Is this really something that you can be comfortable putting your name on?” Or are you just, as they say, “phoning it in,” and plowing furrows that have already been plowed by either you or somebody else? I always say, when I’m teaching a class, I say to these young or younger filmmakers, I say, look, as artists, the only thing you have to offer is yourself. If you’re just going to do it like the next guy, then move over and let the next guy do it, because it’s going to be boring.

    I have to be sure that what I’m trying to come up with is something that I really feel and that excites me. The French director Robert Bresson once said, “My job is not to find out what the public wants and give it to them. My job is to make the public want what I want.” And the trick is to figure out: What do you want? What do you want? Not what you think other people will want. What do the fans want? To hell with that. The fans don’t know what they want until they get it. If it was up to the fans, Spock wouldn’t have died.

    You’ve always shown such a fondness and respect for classic material. That’s a word that’s been now applied to your own work, and people quote lines that you wrote back to each other. What is that feeling like, at this stage in your career, to know that you’re considered an author of classics, in a sense?

    It feels really good. I like it. It feels great! It’s nice. It feels like that the work has meaning, that it was in some way built to last. Who knows what the word “last” means. When Henry Kissinger went to China in 1973, and he got into a conversation, presumably with the help of an interpreter, with Zhou Enlai, and he said to Zhou Enlai, “What do you think of the French Revolution?” And Zhou said, “Too early to tell.”

    A lot of times I think that when we talk about things, and we’re very lavish, we’re quick, especially reviewers, to praise things. We say, “Oh, this is a masterpiece.” I once remember getting into a conversation with my father who had introduced me to the play of “Cyrano de Bergerac,” and I said, “Wow, this is a great play.” He said, “Do you think so?” I said, “Yeah, definitely. Great.” He said, “Well, let’s talk in a hundred years, see if you still think so.”

    I just hope that in 100 years, if any of us are still here, or our descendants, or we haven’t blown ourselves to smithereens, that somebody would be quoting a line or two of mine, even if they don’t know it was written by me.

    Let’s close on the topic of genre. You’ve made two movies, with “Time After Time” and “Star Trek IV: The Voyage Home,” that land routinely on people’s all-time great time-travel films. What do you think is so appealing, eternally, to you and to the mass audience about the time travel story?

    It’s such an intriguing notion that it’s the only kind of travel that hasn’t happened, apparently. We’ve gone to the moon. We’ve gone to Mars. We haven’t walked around it yet, but we’ve trolled around it. We go under water. We’ve found the Titanic. The only kind of travel we haven’t done is maybe travel that’s either much faster, or travel that takes us into another dimension. There’s something intriguing about that possibility, I think.

    Movies, for example, are such an inherently visual medium that the contrasts that two different eras presented with arguably the same characters wandering through totally different worlds. I know that Fox keeps trying to do another kind of travel movie. They want to do a remake of “Fantastic Voyage,” which is another kind of travel — travel inside the body — and I’ll certainly be eager to see that one.

    We like being taken by movies to places that we normally can’t go, whether it’s Antarctica, or the place where “Game of Thrones” takes place [Westeros]. Movies can take us places. Taking us through time is maybe the ultimate place where they can take us.

  • ‘Star Trek’ Stars From Across Its 50-Year History Share What Their Voyage Means to Them

    To celebrate the 50th anniversary of “Star Trek,” which first aired on Sept. 8, 1966, and has continued to boldly go forward as one of the most enduring, influential and visionary television creations of all time, Moviefone is offering a week-long look at five decades of the futuristic franchise.

    No television series has enjoyed such a unique and unlikely path to becoming a cultural phenomenon as “Star Trek.” Creator Gene Roddenberry‘s pioneering vision for an adult, ambitious and allegorical science fiction series featuring explorers aboard the starship Enterprise experienced rocky beginnings as a failed pilot deemed “too intellectual” by NBC.

    But the network gave the premise a second chance and, with the addition of more action and an appealing triumvirate of new leads Captain Kirk, Mr. Spock and Dr. McCoy, fueled by William Shatner, Leonard Nimoy, and Deforest Kelley‘s delightful chemistry, the forward-thinking series got a second chance at life, airing for the first time 50 years ago today, on Sept. 8, 1966.

    What followed has become legendary in the creation of what would become a full-fledged franchise, including the highly-rated syndicated series “Star Trek: The Next Generation” and its subsequent shared-universe series; the box office-dominating films that rebooted the “Star Trek” originals with new actors; tie-in novels and comic books; and a massive merchandising empire.

    But, at its core, “Star Trek” has always been a story about humanity, both on screen and behind the scenes. And to that effect, Moviefone has spent the last several months of the sci-fi phenom’s golden anniversary in the company of many of the key creative people at the heart of its various incarnations, gathering their takes on what it’s meant to them to occupy a place within the singular sensation called “Star Trek.”2016 Summer TCA Tour - NBCUniversal Press Tour Day 1 - ArrivalsWilliam Shatner (actor, Capt. James T. Kirk, “Star Trek: The Original Series,” “Star Trek” theatrical films I-VI, “Star Trek: Generations”): We’ve invented, through science fiction, a mythology, and “Star Trek” is a huge part of that. So many great science fiction writers had ideas for “Star Trek,” even if they didn’t write exactly for “Star Trek,” so it was 50 years as a mere television show, and through various iterations expanded to affect a great deal of our culture, far beyond anything we know.

    I mean, I wrote a book called “I’m Working on That” based on Stephen Hawking’s statement, when he walked into the set of “Star Trek” and saw these cheesy boards painted to look like … what’s the stuff we use for energy? … dilithium crystals. That’s how we were able to go so fast to cover the vast distances of space. Stephen Hawking said “I’m working on that.” It goes out in waves, and it seems somewhat innocuous, because it’s a television show, but in this case, this phenomenon has lasted 50 years.Premiere Of 20th Century Fox's "Independence Day: Resurgence" - Red CarpetBrent Spiner (actor, Lt. Commander Data, “Star Trek: The Next Generation”): “Star Trek” is the most amazing phenomenon. I think it’s the great American narrative. Because anything that has gone for 50 years you have to take seriously. There were a lot of people who think “Star Trek” is practically a religion. There are other people who think it’s absolutely silly. It’s somehow all of those things combined, and that’s what makes it wonderful.

    Even if you think it’s completely ridiculous, you have to kind of say, “What is this that’s gone for 50 years? I’ve got to at least check it out.” There’s something going on here, and it’s affected a lot of people. We’ve all had people come to us and say, “It’s because of your show, it’s because of you, that I am now a doctor or a scientist or …” So there’s something more going on there than meets the eye. There’s a wonderful action-adventure show, but there’s also something deeper and more profound.

    Dorothy “D. C.” Fontana (writer and story editor, “Star Trek: The Original Series,” “Star Trek: The Animated Series,” “Star Trek: The Next Generation”): We told good stories, I think. I’ve said this over and over: we were telling stories about things that were going on in our world, under the guise of science fiction. We were telling stories about racism, and sexism, and political things that were going on in our country, and in the world. We were doing stories about, well, just about anything — the Vietnam War, that was a big one. Nobody else could mention the Vietnam War, or even that we were in it, but we could, under the guise of science fiction.

    We reached out to people. We tapped them on the head and say, “Hey, are you paying attention?” But we were doing it in the guise of interesting science fiction stories. We had some great science fiction writers on the show, especially in the first year, who brought that wonderful element of exploring topical themes under the guise of science fiction.Star Trek Beyond Asia Tour - Beijing Press ConferenceChris Pine (actor, Captain James T. Kirk, “Star Trek,” “Star Trek Into Darkness,” “Star Trek Beyond“): It’s fun playing a leader when sometimes you don’t always necessarily feel like a leader yourself. So you learn what that’s like because on set naturally then you’re saying stuff that sounds leader-ish. So then you sometimes assume the part. There’s some learning lessons there. I suppose my reluctance in that regard kind of maybe reflects in the character himself, because I think we all have times where we either want to be front seat or backseat drivers.

    I appreciate in this latest installment playing a character that was a bit more existentially indecisive and lost and seeking some sort of new guidance, or new propulsion, or new energy behind what he was going to do, because sometimes things change when you’re a little bit older.Star Trek: Mission New York - Day 3Star Trek: Deep Space Nine”): Initially, when I watched the show in the ’60s, it meant what everybody talks about as that inclusion of different characters, different races, and hope for the future — all the kind of stuff that we know about. And then, when I was in college, it was about great fun and getting your mind off of your school work and everything just for an hour, just to not really concentrate on other things, having a good time.

    Then later on when I got the show, it was about, “Wow, great! It’s a great character. I’m going to do a really great job. I’m really happy about this. I’m a working actor again.” And then it became the people I worked with. That was the most exciting part.

    David Gerrold (writer, “The Trouble with The Tribbles,” associate producer, “Star Trek; The Next Generation”): Gene Roddenberry gave us “Star Trek” [and] he was passionate about “Star Trek.” And if it hadn’t been for him, we’d have never had the show. So we have this incredibly iconic thing that is going to change our culture for generations to come, because it’s about the possibilities of the future, it’s about a future where we’re all thriving and doing well and all have opportunities and we’re all included.

    it’s a very positive view of the future, and I give Gene enormous credit for that, because I don’t think anybody else has been able to create that kind of a vision of a future that works for all of us, with no one and nothing left out.Amazon Red Carpet Premiere Screening For Season Two Of Original Drama Series, "Bosch"Star Trek: Voyager”): It’s an optimistic, hopeful view of what we could possibly achieve in the future as humanity. If we can get it together. That’s what Gene was so brilliant at with the original series, in the very beginning, was showing in the height of the Cold War, a Russian officer on the bridge. Not that long after World War II, a Japanese officer on the bridge. Blacks, whites, women, everybody. And everyone was together and everyone worked together.

    I think it’s so important for us to see that now as a society. Not just in America, although really specifically here, but the whole world. We need to not be afraid of everyone who’s different. We’ve got to embrace our differences and realize that we’re stronger together, and we’re all inherently the same when it gets down to it."Star Trek Beyond" UK PremiereJohn Cho (actor, Hikaru Sulu, “Star Trek,” “Star Trek Into Darkness,” “Star Trek Beyond”): In the “Star Trek” setup, you’re going into space and seeing so many different kinds of species, it does become comically apparent when you look around the planet Earth that we live on that we do have so much more in common than we don’t. You know? So the little things that seem to divide us here in our present time seem even more exaggeratedly small after seeing an episode of “Star Trek.”Simon Pegg (actor, Montgomery “Scotty” Scott, “Star Trek,” “Star Trek Into Darkness,” writer, “Star Trek Beyond”): The first thing I saw was the animated series, funny enough, which ran I think from like ’72 to ’74, I think, which had the original cast. And as a very young child, I was like three or four, it caught my eye. Then I found out there was actually a live action version that pre-dated it, and I started watching that. I found that scary at first. I found that “The Corbomite Maneuver” and the terrifying Balok was the figurehead of my childhood nightmares.

    But it was still like something I had to watch. And that grew into a love of its kind of intelligence. As I got older, I started to understand just how much weight it carried, allegorically. It’s meant different things to me over the years. And obviously, now, it kind of means the world to me.Premiere Of Paramount Pictures' "Star Trek Beyond" - ArrivalsKarl Urban (actor, Dr. Leonard “Bones” McCoy, “Star Trek,” “Star Trek Into Darkness,” “Star Trek Beyond”): I remember watching “Star Trek” when I was a kid with my dad, and then I watched “Star Trek” with my kids. There’s something about “Star Trek” that just has this enduring appeal. It’s a hopeful, positive, optimistic vision of the future, and it was a fun show.The Cartier Fifth Avenue Grand Reopening EventZachary Quinto (actor, Mr. Spock, “Star Trek,” “Star Trek Into Darkness,” “Star Trek Beyond”): I think Leonard Nimoy would be really proud of what we accomplished … I take it seriously, and I feel like this is one of the most beloved characters in popular culture. He made it so. I see my responsibility as carry on his legacy and honoring the work that he put into this character, and the love that he lived with it for so long.5th Annual Critics' Choice Television Awards - Red CarpetScott Bakula (actor, Capt. Jonathan Archer, “Star Trek: Enterprise”): I fell in love with it, really, in re-runs when I was in college, because it was on every night, followed by Tom Snyder. So everything stopped, and we would watch “Star Trek.” I lived in a fraternity house: “Star Trek,” Tom Snyder every night. And I loved the camaraderie of the show. They had the brotherly kind of love that I just thought was great. I hadn’t really seen it on television at that point.

    I loved the humor of it, but, mostly, at the end of the day, I just loved that relationship on that bridge. That’s why I wanted to do it and try and build something similar — you can’t repeat it, but similar on our show.

    Star Trek: Discovery”): I fell in love with “Star Trek” before even seeing “Star Trek.” And when I was a small child, too young to go to church, my brother had built a model of the Klingon cruiser and put a battery in it and turned off all the lights in the house and was flying it though.

    And I saw this ship, the silhouette of this ship, and my mind was lit on fire because I wanted to know who that ship belonged to, what they were like, where did they come from? And I started asking those questions and then I got to see “Star Trek” and I got to see an even bigger world than I imagined.

    Justin Lin (director, “Star Trek Beyond”): My family immigrated to the States when I was eight. They had a little fish and chips shop, and they would close at 9 and we’d have dinner at 10. At 11, “Star Trek” came on Channel 13, so my brothers and I would talk our way into just hanging out with them. So, from 8 to 18, that was our level of engagement and our family time.

    I remember moving to a new country felt like it was just the five of us. But watching “Star Trek,” it instilled in me that family is not just by blood. It’s through shared experience. That’s what “Star Trek” gave me. Our engagement was through re-runs, but every night, it was a new adventure with new obstacles and new challenges. That sense of discovery and exploration was a big part of growing up. My friends all had the little “Star Wars” figures, but we didn’t have any of that: we had “Star Trek.”Premiere Of Paramount Pictures' "Star Trek Beyond" - ArrivalsJ.J Abrams (director, “Star Trek,” “Star Trek Into Darkness,” producer “Star Trek Beyond”): I’m a late adopter, to be totally honest. I was not a “Star Trek” fan as a kid, and I realized what I missed out on, because I got to fall in love with it watching the shows when I started working on the films.

    Michael Giacchino (music score, “Star Trek” (2009), “Star Trek Into Darkness,” “Star Trek Beyond”): I grew up in the early ’70s, so that’s how I watched it — I didn’t see it when it first aired. But I remember the first time I saw it thinking, “What is this? What on Earth is this show?” And I just kept watching it and watching it. And then I was asking about, “Can I have the action figures? Can I have the play set? The Enterprise play set?” Which I still have all that stuff. I still have it!

    It was sort of my first science fiction love. That show introduced me to science fiction, and then all of a sudden I was in love with “2001,” and I just kept going from there. But it was my gateway drug into sci-fi. [The original series music is] so iconic, because we’ve all watched those things so many times. And Alexander Courage’s theme is the greatest.

    Karl Urban: If it wasn’t for the fans, we wouldn’t be here. This show would have been cancelled in the second season.

    Simon Pegg: You’ve got to remember that it’s because it comes out of love and it comes out of a great sort of affection for something, which you can’t help but feel positive about. I get it. We all have our own feelings about “Star Trek.” It means something to all of us in different ways. What we tried to do with “Star Trek Beyond” was kind of try and embrace everybody that has come before, and everyone that hasn’t come yet.

    It’s almost like you can cross an episode of the original show with what you get from a modern blockbuster: “This is the hybrid — it’s year one and year 50 together.” That was our dream.Entertainment Weekly Hosts Its Annual Comic-Con Party At FLOAT At The Hard Rock Hotel In San Diego In Celebration Of Comic-Con 2Adam Savage (“Mythbusters” host, “Star Trek” fan): I grew up with the original series airing on television in the early ’70s. I watched every episode a million times. Science fiction has always had these two pulls, but one of them was about real social commentary, and that’s where “Star Trek’s” strengths are. I grew up inculcated with a sort of lovely liberal, diverse ethic that “Star Trek” baked right into the show, and that came right from Roddenberry.

    I will say, as a fan, every single human I’ve ever met within the “Star Trek” franchise is awesome. It’s like, this is a franchise born out of a cohesive work unit, and it really shows in the movies that they make.

    Michael Dorn: I still don’t know what “Star Trek” means — I really don’t! … CHiPs.” I didn’t know this until we had this conversation: Bob said, “You know, Michael, you created a character that’s an icon. That this guy is not just some guy, I mean, this is a guy that’s going to last, and it’s rare. You’re in the top .001% of actors who have done anything like that.” And at that point, that’s when I went, “My God, you’re right.” That’s when it kind of hit me.

    Jeri Ryan: It’s amazing the doors this has opened for us to get to meet people that are actually doing what we pretended to be doing on the show is really cool.

    Scott Bakula: I talked to a guy on the International Space Station with NASA. We sent up DVDs of our show, and he was watching it in space. We talked until Earth moved enough so we couldn’t talk anymore. We talked and talked and he said, “I’m going to lose you, sir.” He kept circling the planet. That was pretty cool. He made a video and sent it to us of them floating around up there and hanging out. It was combining all of it, it was completely surreal.

    We met a lot of the astronauts, who would come to the set, and to actually speak to somebody who was doing it up there was just something you wouldn’t expect you’d ever get to do in your life.

    Michael Dorn: I was a big airplane buff when I was growing up — I loved airplanes and I loved test pilots and I loved my cereal boxes, the boxtops with Friendship 7, John Glenn’s capsule. Those are the guys that I had a chance to meet that really kind of fueled my youth. That was amazing, because you’re talking about — they went to the moon! I mean, come on! Those are the guys that I just loved.

    Jeri Ryan: Specifically, for the character that I played, I heard from a lot of people on the autism spectrum who could relate to her, and said that this really helped them to see someone on TV, who kind of acted the way they did, and wasn’t sure of what they were doing, and was trying to figure things out socially, and that’s how they felt. And it was so touching for me, and I love that that was something that people could feel

    Scott Bakula: I was at the Griffith Park Observatory with my whole family, and a gal there came up and said “Hi, I work at the Jet Propulsion Laboratory. I sort of started working there because of ‘Star Trek.’” “Oh, that’s very nice. What do you do?” “You know the little thing that just landed on Mars?” she said, “Well, I kind of built that.”

    I said, “Are you kidding?” “Yeah, and I’m actually running it around Mars.” I was like, “Wow!” Yeah, and she’s like, “I’m such a fan of your show.” I said, “Forget about my show! How about you? You’re unbelievable!”

    William Shatner: For me, I love talking to people and finding the story and the character of who this person is and how they lived up to this point, and I’ve done shows in that way. I’ve just come back from Vancouver, where I was talking to the great geneticist from Amherst College, Dr. David Suzuki.

    It’s meeting people like Dr. Suzuki, astronaut Chris Hadfield, who I just interviewed a couple days ago at JPL — all of JPL subscribes to “Star Trek.” As does NASA. I’m doing a show for NASA, and all of NASA is enamored of “Star Trek.” I went to the doctor and he said “I became a doctor because of ‘Star Trek.’ Now spread your legs.”

    Brent Spiner: I had the opportunity to meet Dr. Hawking because he did an episode of the show. We met all of the Mercury astronauts, they were all still with us at the 30th anniversary of Alan Shepard’s first flight. It was overwhelming, and at that event was also Bob Hope and Walter Cronkite, and we were there, as pretend heroes.

    But for me, the most rewarding experience has been meeting all of these people: all of the family of “Star Trek” that have been in all of these episodes and films. The great creative people that I’ve got to rub shoulders with has been amazing. It’s a huge family at this point.

    Zachary Quinto: Hands down, my favorite part of filming these movies is getting to spend all my time with these people who are incredible. It keeps being brought up that we’ve been doing this for almost ten years, which is kind of unfathomable, but it was 2007 when we made the first movie. We are truly a family to one another. Even though we only get to work together every few years, we stay in touch and we stay connected. These are people that will be in my life for the rest of it. That to me is easily the best part about the experience.

    Justin Lin: I remember stepping into the hallways of Enterprise. The lights aren’t on and it’s still [being painted] and stuff. Just walking in there and feeling like, “Wow, I’m now part of this.”

    Karl Urban: Anytime you’re on the bridge of the Enterprise, and there’s 50 million buttons, you cannot help but go and push every single one of them. Just to see if something’s going to happen.

    J.J. Abrams: To be talking about the 50th anniversary is insane! I was born the same year that “Star Trek” was, and I know how old I feel. So the idea that this thing endures is incredible, and a real honor to be part of.

    Simon Pegg: I love that the universe is a boundless place and there’s so many adventures to be had. And as long as we have this idea that we might not just all kill ourselves and die in a big fire, we might actually become slightly more enlightened, slightly more tolerant beings and go off into space — THAT is a lovely idea that I think secretly the vast majority of us want to achieve, you know? “Star Trek” will live forever.

    Rod Roddenberry (son of “Star Trek” creator Gene Roddenberry; executive producer, “Star Trek: Discovery”): You probably can’t put this, but I think my dad would say, “Holy sh*t, this is amazing!” You know, he used to do something pretty funny. He would get on stage, and he would fold his arms and kind of look at the audience and say, “Yep, just the way I planned it!” in a joking sort of way. But I know he’d be honored and thrilled, and he’d want to give so much credit to the fans. I think he’d be blown away by it, absolutely.

  • ‘Star Trek’ Writer David Gerrold’s Tribbles Remain Popular 50 Years After Their Population Explosion

    Engadget Expand NY - Day 3To celebrate the 50th anniversary of “Star Trek,” which first aired on Sept. 8, 1966 and has continued to boldly go forward as one of the most enduring, influential and visionary television creations of all time, Moviefone is offering a week-long look at five decades of the futuristic franchise.

    In 1966, David Gerrold was a 22-year-old fledgling writer who caught the debut broadcast of a then-brand new science fiction television series called “Star Trek.” Within a year, he was not only a writer working on the show, he had created one of the soon-to-be iconic series’ most unusual — and whimsical — alien life forms. And today, 50 years later, “The Trouble With Tribbles” remains a hallmark of the original series’ episodes.

    Gerrold would enjoy a long and fruitful association with Star Trek: The Animated Series,” including the follow-up episode “More Tribbles, More Troubles”; the unrealized 70s-era sequel series “Phase II,” which paved the way for the later theatrical films; and the earliest days of “Star Trek: The Next Generation,” as well as penning both fiction and nonfiction books on the subject of “Star Trek.”

    Gerrold’s television work stayed largely rooted in genre — he created the Sleestaks of “Land of the Lost” and penned episodes of sci-fi series like “Babylon 5” — and he had an acclaimed and prolific career as a science fiction novelist, most notably with his semi-autobiographical Hugo and Nebula award-winning novelette “The Martian Child,” which became a full novel and then the 2007 film of the same name.

    Over the course of Gerrold’s career, “Star Trek” fans have multiplied almost as rapidly as Tribbles and the writer has seen the phenomenon only increase in scope and influence over the course of five decades. With much of his work on the franchise now collected with the newly released “Star Trek 50th Anniversary TV and Movie Collection” — featuring all three seasons of the original ’60s series, the six theatrical films starring the original cast and, for the first time in HD, every episode of the animated series — Gerrold shared his remembrances of getting in on the ground floor of one of the most celebrated and enduring properties in television and film history.

    Moviefone: You’ve certainly have enjoyed a long and fruitful association with the “Star Trek” franchise, and you started as one of the earliest fans. I’d love to hear about the first time you watched “Star Trek,” and the effect that it had on you.

    David Gerrold: It was September of 1966 — God, I can’t believe it’s been that long ago! — and we saw this network advertising a new series, and I saw one commercial for “Star Trek.” I thought, “What the hell is that?” I was a big science fiction fan, and here comes this spaceship that doesn’t look like anything we’ve ever seen before. And I thought, “Well, that is the stupidest looking spaceship I’ve ever seen,” right?

    It was 8:30 on Thursday night, so I tuned in, and the episode was “The Man Trap” by George Clayton Johnson. And I was watching it, I was like, “Beamed down? They don’t land? That’s kind of dumb. It violates the laws of physics.” They had this guy with pointed ears who has no emotions, and I think, “Well, that’s not going to be a really interesting character …” I’m sitting there being very skeptical.

    They arrive on the planet, and the scientist is investigating some kind of alien pyramid. And I look at the set direction, the set design, and the doorway to the alien pyramid is not human proportion. Somebody on that how was trying very hard to create an alien environment — a believable alien environment!

    The story as it happened was not bad, because a little bit later on when the salt vampire creature is walking down the hall, and here comes Uhura, the salt vampire creature shows up as a very handsome black man for her. And I realized that was very clever. Because it shows the creature showing up as desirable.

    So that was when I started to get hooked, and I thought, “Well, I don’t want them to screw it up, and I know science fiction, and I know script format, so I’m going to submit an outline.” I submitted an outline, Gene L. Coon [the showrunner] was very impressed with it, and invited me to submit outlines to the show, and I submitted “A Fuzzy Thing Happened to Me,” and they bought it.

    Were you aware of what a Cinderella story that was at the time? Or did you think, “Oh, this is just how showbiz works”?

    I was very conscientious about structuring the story so that it would play as a story. I didn’t realize how funny it was until after the story was very carefully outlined, and Gene L. Coon said, “Put this piece back in. It’s the funniest piece in the show.” That was the scene between Kirk and Scotty asking about who started the fight. I began to realize there’s a lot of humor in it that I’m just going to see where it goes.

    I was very pleased that it turned out even funnier than I thought it would be, because I wanted to be quietly whimsical, and it turned out to be laugh out loud funny, which was even better. I was even happier, because I always wanted to be good at comedy.

    The night it was aired, a friend of mine was raving about how good he thought it was. And I turned to him and I said, “It’s only one episode of one TV show. In 20 years, who’s going to remember it?” It’s 50 years later. The universe must have said, “Challenge accepted, David.”

    Where did the first notion of Tribbles come to you, and did they emerge fully formed as we see them in the series?

    Well, I wanted to do rabbits in Australia [which historically bred at an uncontrolled pace], and I realized that we can’t do live creatures because of all kinds of just technical concerns, and concerns for the animals. So I thought, “What can we do to represent these creatures?” My girlfriend at the time, Holly Sherman, had a keychain with fluffy, black ball on it, and I thought, “That’s it! We use black balls.”

    I described them as black balls, and the prop man, Wah Chang, who’s worked on a lot of big movies, hired a lady — I forget her name — and she showed us about 500 or 600 Tribbles, and we used those in the show. We just had a great time with them. They photographed beautifully.

    Another one of your big contributions is Captain Kirk’s middle name, Tiberius. I’m very curious where that inspiration came from.

    I’m a big fan of Roman history, so I had just been reading a book about how the ancient Romans were experts in torture, and Tiberius was just a monster. Dorothy Fontana and I were on a panel at a “Star Trek” convention in New York, and one of the fans asked, “What does the T stand for?” Without thinking, I said “Tiberius.” That got a big laugh.

    And then a year later, we were doing the animated series, and just for the hell of it, I had somebody address him as Captain James Tiberius Kirk. Dorothy got on the phone and checked with Gene Roddenberry. He said, “That’s fine with me — go ahead!” I don’t think he was paying too much attention. He was like, “Tiberius — okay, great.” So it got put into that animated episode, and from that moment on he’s been James Tiberius Kirk.

    Gene Roddenberry was a complicated man. Tell me a little bit about your relationship with him throughout the many years you were involved in “Star Trek.”

    Well, I admired Gene a lot. He was a great visionary, and he was absolutely a charismatic public speaker. That was a strength of his: that he could inspire people, and when he talked story and said, “I want you to write the story that you can’t write anywhere else,” that was very exciting. You wanted to write the best story you were capable of. You wanted to write a better story than you were capable of.

    The problem is that Gene had a — I don’t know how to phrase it tactfully: he had a dark side. I think he was insecure around other people with talent and ability. I’m not certain. So he wasn’t very good at sharing the fame. He’d speak to an audience, he’d talk about what he created, and he rarely acknowledged what anybody else had contributed to the show.

    When I came aboard “Star Trek: The Next Generation,” at the beginning it was very inspiring, because we had this blank slate, we had this blank canvas to fill. But when his lawyer appointed himself chief of staff for the entire series, and took advantage of Gene’s failing health and brought aboard a bunch of producers who did not know “Star Trek,” and didn’t want to listen to Dorothy or myself — we did know “Star Trek” — it became a very unpleasant situation where office politics got out of control.

    And Gene was no longer quite the master of his own show. We were never quite sure what was true from one day to the next. So it was very unfortunate, and when I left the show … this was the one flaw in his character that I found most difficult: Gene always had someone else to blame. No matter what went wrong, he didn’t manage it well. It was always, “It’s NBC’s fault,” “Paramount’s fault,” “It was Harlan Ellison’s fault,” “It was the studio’s fault.” When I left the show, Gene blamed me for a while, and that hurt a lot because I had only wanted to just do the very best “Star Trek” for Gene. So I felt a little bit betrayed.

    Now, after I got past that, I realized he’d done me a favor because I wouldn’t have adopted the most marvelous little boy and became a dad, and got to write some of the best novels of my career. Thinking back on it, I think I learned a lot from Gene. A lot about how to be good, and a lot about what not to do. Despite any issues I might have had with Gene, he gave us “Star Trek,” and I think that mitigates a lot, because he was passionate about “Star Trek.” And if it hadn’t been for him, we’d have never had the show.

    So we have this incredibly iconic thing that is going to change our culture for generations to come, because it’s about the possibilities of the future, it’s about a future where we’re all thriving and doing well and all have opportunities and we’re all included. So it’s a very positive view of the future, and I give Gene enormous credit for that, because I don’t think anybody else has been able to create that kind of a vision of a future that works for all of us with no one and nothing left out.

    So despite any issues I might have had with Gene at the time, I have to acknowledge that he did something remarkable and extraordinary.

    One of the other unsung heroes of “Star Trek” is Gene Coon, and I’d love to hear more of your memories of him in particular. He’s a little bit of a mystery man to the public at large as far as his great contributions to “Star Trek.”

    I admired Gene L. Coon as a consummate producer. He understood you had to have a good script, you had to have the right actors for it, and you had to have it be about something. And he understood that Tribbles could be that way, but he also understood that with every other script that passed under his desk, under his management, under his responsibility, whatever.

    He understood that it was that every episode had to have a specific sparkle to it, whether it’s a comedy or a drama, or a tragedy, he understood that there needed to be this magic, or a statement that had to be really pertinent. So operating from that context, he encouraged writers, and he listened well to writers, and he listened to ideas, and if the ideas worked, he said, “Yeah, that’s it. Let’s do that.”

    He was a charming man, but, pardon the expression, he was also a no-bullshit man. He was focused on getting the job done. So if you were in a conversation with him, there wasn’t a lot of chitchat. It was, “Let’s solve this challenge ahead of us. Let’s tackle this challenge and see what we can do that’s clever, and exciting, and interesting.” I cannot say enough good things about him.

    I mean, I won’t say he was flawless. He smoked those God awful cigars that killed him. But in terms of, if I had to pick one producer who I would love to work with again, and again, and again, he would be way up there near the top of the shortlist. Probably the top. He respected writers.

    We know that there is definitely more “Star Trek” in the future with “Star Trek: Discovery,” the new show headed up by Bryan Fuller. You want to sit down with the producers and see if there’s a story you can pitch them?

    Well, they’re doing a story arc across 10 episodes, so everything has to be integrated into their story arc. So I think that they have a writers’ room. I know Bryan Fuller and Nick Meyer — they’re just spectacularly good writers. They’re very optimistic that they’re going to come up with something very exciting. I look forward to seeing what they’re going to do. So far, my phone hasn’t rung, but if it did, I’d be there in a heartbeat!

    Here we are at the 50-year mark in this franchise that was a huge part of your life for a very long time. What does it mean to you to see everything that it’s become: a phenomenon; a way of life, in many respects? It’s a singular, beyond-a-television-show kind of experience. Tell me what that means to you.

    Well, it’s like being one of the Beatles, only without being mobbed everywhere you go. It’s that you get to see that something you did, something you created, has had this enormous impact on the audience, and that’s probably one of the luckiest experiences a writer can have, is to see that the audience has responded so enthusiastically. It lets you know you weren’t wasting your time.

    I find it sometimes overwhelming, sometimes embarrassing because … I’m speechless sometimes. I’m amazing at the enthusiasm of the audience. That they have connected so strongly, and I’m humbled by it. It was my first show, and all of a sudden here I am part of something so iconic that it has changed the world.

  • Writer D. C. Fontana Looks Back on 50 Years of ‘Star Trek’

    star trek 50thTo celebrate the 50th anniversary of “Star Trek,” which first aired on Sept. 8, 1966 and has continued to boldly go forward as one of the most enduring, influential and visionary television creations of all time, Moviefone is offering a week-long look at five decades of the futuristic franchise.

    Over the course of her half-century-plus Hollywood career, television writer and story editor Dorothy Fontana — better known as Bonanza,” “The Streets of San Francisco,” “Kung Fu,” “The Waltons” and “Dallas,” earning prestigious awards and nominations along the way. But there’s one particular association that towers about the rest: “Star Trek.”

    In the mid-1960s, Fontana was in her 20s and had already sold several teleplays when she became the secretary for producer Gene Roddenberry, who was soon to launch his most sensational and enduring television concept. He opened the door of opportunity for the fledging writer (who’d used her initials as her screen name to sidestep prevailing gender biases in the industry), and within the first season elevated her to story editor. Along with leaving her creative fingerprints on many episodes, Fontana would particularly make significant contributions to the backstory and development of the show’s breakout character, Mr. Spock, and the culture of his home planet Vulcan.

    Fontana would go on to build an impressive TV career working across all dramatic genres, but “Star Trek” remained near and dear: she was the associate producer of the Emmy Award-winning 1973 Saturday morning “Star Trek: The Animated Series” and wrote its most acclaimed episode, “Yesteryear”; she assumed the same duties in the first season of “Star Trek: The Next Generation,” including co-authoring the 1987 pilot episode “Encounter at Farpoint” along with Roddenberry.

    With the lion’s share of Fontana’s “Star Trek” work featuring the original cast now available en masse within the newly released “Star Trek 50th Anniversary TV and Movie Collection” — featuring all three seasons of the original 60s series, the six theatrical films starring the original cast and, for the first time in HD, every episode of the animated series — Fontana joined Moviefone to look back at her storied storytelling career in the 23rd and 24th Centuries.

    Moviefone: It must be fun to sort of enjoy this 50th anniversary celebration and to kind of revisit your memories about the whole “Star Trek” phenomenon. Tell me about your early interest working with Gene Roddenberry, and deciding that you really wanted to go for it and get a chance to write some episodes.

    Dorothy Fontana: Well, I had known Gene Roddenberry since 1963 when I first went on his show “The Lieutenant” as secretary to his associate producer Del Reisman. Then I got to know Gene a little better when his secretary was stricken with a terrible bout of appendicitis and I went to work for Gene in her absence, and someone came in to fill in for me with Del.

    Gene found out that I already had six credits in television — three stories, two scripts and a rewrite. They were for Westerns, so I was not unaccustomed to the action scene. I didn’t know too much about science fiction. I knew a little bit. I loved “The Twilight Zone” of course — everybody did. But I wasn’t too into science fiction per se.

    Then Gene assigned me, when we were going to do “Star Trek,” and we knew we were going to do “Star Trek,” we at least had the pilot to do, and we were promised it would be a series, he set me to reading anthologies of science fiction stories, the best of this year, that year, the best science fiction from particular writers, etc. And I must have gone through about 50 books, reading the short stories and notating, this might work for the projected “Star Trek,” this might for projected “Star Trek.” In other words, looking for stories we might buy.

    Then I broke them down for Roddenberry, and gave him a report. So that got me more into being interested in science fiction in general, and what kind of stories can we tell within the scope of this spaceship going out into our galaxy, seeking out new life, new civilizations etc, etc. But it was reading all those wonderful anthology stories, short stories, written by well-known writers in the science fiction genre that really peaked my interest.

    You’ve made so many contributions to the lore of “Star Trek,” particularly in the realm of Mr. Spock and the Vulcans. What are you proudest of as far as your contribution to “Trek,” both in its mythology — and behind the scenes?

    Well, I was the one who wanted to find out who Mr. Spock was behind that Vulcan exterior. And in “This Side of Paradise,” which is a major rewrite that I had to do, we got a chance to look behind that exterior and see who was inside. Who was the human Mr. Spock? What is he like when he’s not being Vulcan? Then, because of two lines at the end of the show where he says to Kirk: “It’s the only time I was happy,” and also there’s another reference to, “My father is a an ambassador and my mother was a school teacher.”

    That got me to thinking about, “Those are the only things we know about him personally. Let’s tell that story!” So I told “Journey to Babel,” which is the episode that I am proudest of and love the most, because we really got into “Who were his parents? Why is Spock Spock, the way he is? What is his relationship with his parents? How did he grow up?”

    And I got to explore that a little more in the “Star Trek Animated Series,” episode called “Yesteryear,” where we were able to go through the Guardian of Forever into Spock’s past and see him as a child, and find out how he grew from being a human Earther to being the beginnings of Mr. Spock as we know him.

    And because you were giving so much great material for Leonard Nimoy to play, I’m curious what your relationship with him was like over the years. Did you have a special rapport with him?

    Well, I keep telling this story because it’s a little apocryphal: In 1960, I sold my first story to television on the show I was working on as a production secretary, “The Tall Man,” and my producer was Samuel A. Peeples, who knew, because I had told him I was interested in being a television writer. I had written short stories about, horror stories, adventure stories since I was 11 years old. I did it for the amusement of my schoolmates and friends. And I said, “I want to get into this.” And he said, “You tell me a good story, and you can write it,” which I did.

    So the first story I sold to television was in 1960 in the spring. It was called “A Bounty for Billy” on “The Tall Man” show, and the guest star was Leonard Nimoy. I went down on the set and had a chat with him, I introduced myself, and he was very nice to a newbie. He was very kind, very pleasant. They liked the character enough — I didn’t write it — but they brought him back in another episode and then they killed him. So I had known Leonard then since 1960.

    In 1964 when Roddenberry showed me the first draft of his potential script, or his potential series, and he had characters, there was Captain Robert April, and there was a doctor, and there was Mr. Spock, “a Martian.” I said, “Who plays Mr. Spock?” And he showed me a picture of Leonard Nimoy, who had done a guest star role on “The Lieutenant,” and I said, “You got it!” And Leonard Nimoy is the only person who was ever considered for, who ever played Mr. Spock.

    But I had known him since 1960 now — I was 21 years old then. We had a good relationship on the show, very good relationship, because of course I knew him. And I got to know Bill [Shatner], and I had a good relationship with him. His office is about three miles away from where I work [today]. I see him often times in a restaurant that’s right in between, and I wave to him, he waves back, and I’ve interviewed for him for his documentaries and his books that he’s been doing. So I know Bill pretty well now, too.

    The funny thing is our birthdays — different years, but our birthdays are within days of each other’s. Bill’s I think is March 22nd, Leonard was the 26th, and mine’s the 25th of March. We kind of had sort of an Aries rapport going on there.

    You came back for the early days of “Star Trek: The Next Generation,” as well, to see the franchise — which was only just becoming a franchise at that point — have a second chance at life, which led to where we are today. What was that moment in time like for you?

    Well, it was fun. Gene Roddenberry and Majel Barrett-Roddenberry took me to dinner. I’m trying to think, I think it was in late summer of 1986. Roddenberry said, “You know, we were going to do another movie, but they given me an opportunity to do a new version of ‘Star Trek’ do you want to be involved?” And I said, “Yeah, sure,” and he said, “Well, I’d like you to write the pilot script.” I said, “Okay. Let’s determine when it’s going to be.”

    David Gerrold had been writing, working with Roddenberry on this, putting together a lot of information, and the bible was created, and it had some basic outlined characters, but I had to put them together in story. I had to make them work. I came up with “Encounter at Farpoint,” and we were going back and forth between whether it was going to be an hour and a half, or an hour, and then Roddenberry would do a retrospective on what the series was, the original series.

    We finally worked it out that I did a 90-minute script, and Roddenberry added all the Q stuff. My part of “Encounter at Farpoint” was the mystery of Farpoint: what’s going on here? What is so strange? And what are the aliens hiding? And introducing the crew who would be going on the spaceship under the command of Captain Picard, and just this whole new setting in, new world, new ship, new captain, and this mystery of what’s going on on that planet.

    That was my story, and the Q stuff was all added by Roddenberry — and John de Lancie came back at least six times, I think, to play Q, and had a good time doing it. And he added a really interesting vibe to the story, but the main mystery was mine. We bounced off that, we went into production, and I thought the characters all worked very well.

    I did want a woman engineer and I had her in the first show or two, and then they went to Colm Meaney, who was a wonderful actor — I really love him. But I wanted to have a female engineer, and I lost that battle.

    Gene Roddenberry’s obviously an interesting and complex figure. When you think about Gene, the good and the bad, tell me what comes to mind about him as a personality and somebody you worked very closely with through a number of years.

    He was a very creative man. Sometimes we would have a problem, I remember on “Star Trek” in particular — “Next Gen” too — where a small group of people take over the entire Enterprise. How did they do that? There are 400 people on the Enterprise. Gene Coon and I couldn’t solve it, banging our heads against a wall saying, “What the hell do we do?”

    And I went into Roddenberry and told him the problem, and I had given him previously this paperweight that was shaped as like an eight-sided figure, a very nice Mexican stone, real polished up and everything. He started pushing that around the desk with his finger and saying, “How about if these invaders on the ship can do this to people? Change them into that. It’s the ultimate essence. That takes care of the crew, doesn’t it? Except for those who have to run the ship? Okay — problem solved!” And that’s what we often did.

    So he had the ability to take a question, kind of out of the blue, a problem, a script problem, maybe a character problem, and say, “How about we do this?” And that usually solved the problem. So he was a real problem solver. He was a very creative man. He didn’t always write very fast, because sometimes it would take him about four days to do a script rewrite — Gene Coon could do it in two — but the rewrites were right down to the details of everything. It was all there on the page. You knew what was going to happen, you knew who it happened to, and how it happened, and why.

    You’ve had such a prolific career beyond “Star Trek.” What were the lessons that you learned working on “Star Trek” that you’ve carried with you throughout your professional career? And on a personal level, how has “Star Trek” enriched your life in the years since you first started on the show?

    What did I learn? I think it was to tell stories about human beings. And usually, there’s a theme of love in there somewhere. Love for humanity, love for another person, love for your siblings, or your family, or whatever. Maybe a pet. But always there’s a little theme of love going on. But I really want to know about human beings. How do they think? How do they work? How do they achieve? How do they grow? Why are they this way? And why are they not better? Those really often are the themes of the stories I tell. I have found it rewarding, and I’ve sold a lot of stories. So I think it’s working for me.

    I have to say I’ve met a lot of wonderful, interesting people, and made some great friends because of “Star Trek.” In a way, my husband and I met because of “Star Trek.” We were working on a Halloween show for a mutual friend. I worked on it for many years, but this was Dennis’s first time. His brother was also working on it. Chance would be, we were doing “Creature From the Black Lagoon,” and we were working on the creature suit. We needed a suit, and I was helping work on it with him. Later on, his brother said to him, “Do you know who that was?” “No.” “That’s D. C. Fontana, from ‘Star Trek.’” “Okay!” So we got along just fine then!

    On the occasion of the 50th anniversary, why in your opinion has “Star Trek” endured and thrived over all of this time? What do you think are some of the magic ingredients that’s kept it alive?

    We had good actors in interesting roles. We told good stories, I think. I’ve said this over and over: we were telling stories about things that were going on in our world, under the guise of science fiction. We were telling stories about racism, and sexism, and political things that were going on in our country, and in the world. We were doing stories about, well, just about anything — the Vietnam War, that was a big one. Nobody else could mention the Vietnam War, or even that we were in it, but we could, under the guise of science fiction.

    We reached out to people. We tapped them on the head and say, “Hey, are you paying attention?” But we were doing it in the guise of interesting science fiction stories. We had some great science fiction writers on the show, especially in the first year, who brought that wonderful element of exploring topical themes under the guise of science fiction.

    I think we reached out and attracted the attention of a lot of people, because we got fan mail you wouldn’t believe. We couldn’t handle it all. We saw the bags come in and then they had to be shipped off to a mail answering service. Ones that were personal to the actors, they got theirs. Ones that we personal to us, i.e. to Gene Roddenberry or whatever, those came into the office. But we saw we had a vast audience, men and women, all ages. Our audience was high school, college, young professionals, young married couples, young families, all the way up. Technical people, science people, creative people, artists, who were getting something from our show.

    So we understood that we were speaking a language that people were hearing and paying attention to, and I think that has carried through all these years. You can sit down and watch “Star Trek” today and say, “Oh yeah, that was a good story. And the story behind that was this …” I just think we told good stories in a good way. We had attractive actors that made people come back too, and then they paid attention to the stories. That’s why it’s still here after all these years.

    And NBC finally realized it I think in syndication. It’s still on the air. You can cruise around, looking at all those channels, here’s “Star Trek.” There’s “Star Trek: Next Generation.” The only one that hasn’t been run very often is “Star Trek: Animated,” which is too bad because we did some darn good stories there too. They have reissued it with some enhancements. Mostly that’s the one that’s been neglected, and those 22 stories were pretty darn good, too.

    And now we have them in glorious Blu-ray, which is fantastic.

    Yes, yes.

    Well, I’ll close by asking you, given that it seems pretty obvious that “Star Trek” ain’t going anywhere, do you still have a “Star Trek” story or two up your sleeve that you’d like to tell?

    I always wanted to do the one about Dr. McCoy’s daughter, Joanna. I think I’m going to have to do that as a novel. But I tried to do it in the third season of “Star Trek,” and I was pitching it to people who has not been associated with “Star Trek.”

    I was told Dr. McCoy could not have a 22-year-old daughter who was a nurse because he was Kirk’s contemporary. I realized then they didn’t know the show, because we always played it and the actors always played it as McCoy being about ten years older than Kirk, and that was the actual ages of the actors. So they were comfortable playing that, and that’s what we did

    So McCoy could have a 22-year-old daughter with whom he was somewhat isolated and alienated because of his many absences, his long absences, and she had kind of grown up without him. Now she’s in his life, and what happens dramatically with these two, and to others around them? That’s a story I want to tell, and I think I’m probably going to have to do it as a novel.

  • Two New ‘Star Trek’ Books Explore 50 Years of Behind-the-Scenes Drama

    star trekTo celebrate the 50th anniversary of “Star Trek,” which first aired on Sept. 8, 1966 and has continued to boldly go forward as one of the most enduring, influential and visionary television creations of all time, Moviefone is offering a week-long look at five decades of the futuristic franchise.

    With the release of their new two-book exploration of the “Star Trek” phenomenon, authors Edward Gross and Mark A. Altman have crafted a definitive — and often downright dishy — chronicle of the 50-year history of the fabled franchise, particularly when the cameras weren’t rolling.

    Taken together, the two recently released companion volumes in their “Complete, Uncensored, and Unauthorized Oral History of Star Trek” opus from Thomas Dunne Books — “The Fifty-Year Mission: The First 25 Years” and “The Fifty-Year Mission: The Next 25 Years: From The Next Generation to J.J. Abrams“ — are an epic exploration at the creation and continuation of Hollywood’s most durable science fiction property, told through the prisms of the producers, writers, directors, actors, executives, staff, crew, fan organizers and other key voices in “Trek’s” unusual five-decade-long existence via largely new and occasionally archival interviews.

    Both individually and as a team, Gross and Altman stand uniquely as the most “insider” of “Trek” outsiders: as entertainment journalists and authors, the writers themselves have decades-long histories covering the various “Star Trek” series and films for a long list of genre and mainstream outlets and books (Altman is now a writer/producer for film and television as well).

    Their perspective on the evolution of the franchise and their connections to sources within its many incarnations are, without question, unequaled, which allowed them to assemble, in oral history form, a behind-the-scenes portrait as sprawling and stunning as “Star Trek’s” on-screen saga. Gross joined Moviefone to reveal the authors’ own odyssey as they become the preeminent “Treksperts” of their time.

    Moviefone: You’ve done so much journalistic work with “Star Trek” over the course of your career. Getting your arms around the totality of it for these two books, did you learn anything that has been right in front of your nose about “Star Trek” that only doing the book revealed to you?

    Edward Gross: I think the biggest thing was in the ’70s, the period between the cancellation of the TV series, and the first movie, “Star Trek: The Motion Picture” The thing that amazed me is that all that stuff — the history is: the show ends, it goes into syndication, the fans start watching the show, they start conventions, conventions lead to the animated series, the animated series leads to attempts at making a movie, or at least, “Star Trek: The Motion Picture.” All of those things have become footnotes in history.

    What we were able to do in the discovery in this was speaking to the guy who came up with the idea of syndicating “Star Trek” against local newscasts. Let’s speak to the first people who started the first fan scene. Let’s speak to the women who did the first convention. Let’s speak to the people who were involved in all of those aborted attempts at bringing it back.

    So my personal illumination was just watching the ’70s expand, from the footnotes in history to what we have in the book, which I thought was good. And that’s what I’m proud of.

    When you write about “Star Trek” in depth and you deal with people like Gene Roddenberry, who are venerated by the fans but they have flaws and feet of clay like anybody else, how hard is that to handle properly in the telling of it without alienating certain members of the fanbase?

    I think it’s finding the balance between the brilliant visionary that he was for coming up with the concept of “Star Trek.” Whatever you want to say about his writing later, he came up with “Star Trek,” he deserves all the accolades in the world for that. But as far as the negatives, it’s like anybody else. What Mark and I tried to do was to make sure that we balanced everything out. If you’re going to have people slamming Roddenberry on this hand, you’re going to have them praising him on this hand.

    The running joke in the first book is, and I think you’ve read it, people would comment about, [William] Shatner was, “Well, Bill’s Bill. Shatner’s Shatner.” I mean, everybody has the same opinion of Shatner. But we also try to sing the praises of Captain Kirk and his portrayal of Captain Kirk, and what he brought to that role.

    I think, also, in Book Two, when had more of that kind of stuff where there’s negatives, we try to balance it with the positives. I think that’s the best way to approach it, because you’re not going a hatchet job, you’re trying to present the history, and more importantly, you’re letting the people who live that history present that history. It’s not Mark and I presenting the history. We’re merely sort of the conduit for them to get their views out.

    What was the balance of original material in the book versus what you guys had in your archives of interviews you’ve done over the years? Obviously, you include quotes from those who’ve passed like James Doohan and DeForest Kelley, but then there’s a lot of fresh material, too.

    It’s pretty high on new stuff. We sat down with a lot of people for a lot of hours. Mostly for the people who are gone. That’s where our archives really came in handy, is where it’s like, “Okay, can’t speak to [frequent original series director] Marc Daniels; we can’t speak to this one, we can’t speak to that one.” So that’s where we would have to dip back, because there’s no choice, but we’ve spoken to these people.

    [“The Trouble With Tribbles” screenwriter] David Gerrold we interviewed for, like, seven hours years ago. We went back to David now, but we had seven hours worth of interviews with David Gerrold, so it’s that type of thing. A lot of the archives went untouched. Like a lot of our stuff, even if the interviews were old, they never saw the light of day until now. It’s like, “We never ran this — let’s run that. This is interesting …” and that kind of thing.

    Of the newer stuff, what was, for you guys, the best get? What was most exciting when somebody said, “Yeah, I’ll talk to you”?

    Believe it or not, there are two people who I didn’t know that was the best get until we got them. [Producer and showrunner] Gene Coon‘s secretary, Ande Richardson, provided an insight into Coon and working on that show — a really amazing discovery.

    And then, for the movies, it was Deborah Arakelian, the assistant to Harve Bennett and Robert Sallin, who just opened up the making of “Star Treks” II and III in a way that it had never been opened up to us before, anybody before. They provided an insight you don’t normally get, and believe it or not, those were the “ah-has!”

    And in Book Two: Next Generation.” I don’t think anybody interviewed him except me. At the very last minute, I remembered that I had an unlabeled black mini-cassette in a box of mini-cassettes in my basement. And I went down there and I dug two tapes and I found the Burton Armus interview. So this lost interview of Burton Armus, it’s like, “We have Burton!” His comments on Season Two of “Next Gen” is just great. So illuminating.

    So you have the big picture: What makes “Star Trek” so unique as a pop culture property and phenomenon — the durability of it all, the mass appeal of it all?

    I think the mass appeal of it really goes back to the corny, clichéd hope. When “Star Trek” debuted in ’66 and through its run, think of what it was up against in terms of the real world, in terms of what was going on with the Cold War and race riots, Vietnam, and everything else that was going on. And here’s this little beacon of hope that said, “We’re going to be okay. It’s going to be okay.”

    Great. Flash forward 50 years: look at the world around us again. Look where we’re at, with so much horrible stuff going on … It is a very troubling time again. And what have we got? We’ve got this new movie “Star Trek Beyond,” which I thought was terrific. I thought it captured the old show, and yet, it’s the best “Star Trek” movie you’re going to get in 2016, in terms of action, and scope, and philosophy.

    The new TV series “Star Trek: Discovery,” I think is going to totally embrace the ideals of “Star Trek,” which are applicable today as much as it was in 1966.

    Tell me your gateway into “Star Trek.” Why did it become such a fun passion for you?

    When I was a kid in Brooklyn, during the course of the series I was six to nine, and my friends and I would go out in the street and play “Star Trek.” We didn’t play baseball — we played “Star Trek.” It started there as sort of, “Oh, the cool science-fiction show.” I, like so many people, I caught it in its original run, but to me it was just a cool science-fiction show.

    In the reruns in the ’70s, it just captured my imagination — and what really captured my imagination was not only the allegories, but the Kirk, Spock, and McCoy relationship. That to me was unlike anything I’d ever seen on television before. That kind of connection between the characters. And it started, and of course it just grew from there. Through “Starlog” and everything else.

    Nobody knows this show better than you and Mark, outside of the people who made it —

    Well, we’d like to think so!

    How did the combining of your talents go? Tell me the history that you guys have, just knowing each other, and then working on this massive project together.

    We worked on some stuff back in the ’80s and ’90s together. One day I called them up and said, “Hey! You got ‘Star Trek,’ I got ‘Star Trek’ — we should talk.” And we did, and we worked on some things.

    I think the fun of it was Mark would get interviews with certain people, I would get certain interviews with people. Then, I’d write him and say, I got an interview with so-and-so — like, it was specifically Gerald Isenberg and Philip Kaufman. I just got off the phone with Philip Kaufman. I get a phone call a few minutes later, and in his best Kirk/Shatner he would go [quoting “Star Trek: The Motion Picture”] “Stop … competing with me, Decker!” And that became our catchphrase through the books: “Stop competing with me!”

    It was such a joyful project for the two of us. We were so excited. We’re friends for decades, but we really got tight on this, and we really worked closely on this. It was a true collaboration. He’d go right to the “Enterprise” chapter, for instance, I’d write the “DS9” chapter. He’d write the “Next Gen,” I’d write “Voyager.” Then we’d go over each other’s thing. It was a great collaboration.

    In the course of your career, give me your best day working on something “Star Trek”-related.

    The favorite day. I have to say, being on the set of “First Contact” and watching them film a scene that I can still watch to this day. I was there. I mean, I was on the set of “Voyager” once, and that was fun, too, but the “First Contact” really stands out as far as my stepping into that world in a way that I was never able to before, and I think “First Contact” allowed me to do that. I didn’t get to sit in the captain’s chair, but I saw the captain’s chair. That was kind of cool.

    I’ll ask about fandom in “Star Trek” general, because the fans have kept it alive and they’ve had so much fun with it in doing so. They like playing around with it and their love of it. Is that, too, part of the charm of “Star Trek” — the fan enthusiasm and taking it to sometimes goofy extremes?

    I think that’s part of it, although people mock that part of it I think, a lot. But it’s fun, and people enjoy it, and what’s the harm if it’s not hurting anybody and they’re getting great enjoyment, and it bonds them. I don’t think there’s anything wrong with that.

    But the bottom line is this: now granted, this is a new generation of fans, but I think you cannot take away from the fact that the fans are the ones who kept this going when it got cancelled. And if it wasn’t for the fans, there would be no “Star Trek,” beyond the original series, and I give them full credit for that.

    They are the ones who for the first time in television history said, “No, you can’t cancel my show. I refuse to accept cancellation.” And they were right. And look where we are now, 50 years later.

  • Bryan Fuller Reveals New ‘Star Trek’ Details, Says Series Will ‘Eventually’ Revisit Characters

    42nd Annual Saturn Awards - ArrivalsFifty years after the dawn of its original five-year mission, it’s clear that there’s very likely no final frontier when it comes to “Star Trek.” And even as fans celebrate its rich history on the 50th anniversary, Bryan Fuller is ready to captain “Trek’s” Next Iteration into an even bolder future.

    Following its debut in 1966 and an abbreviated three-season network run, creator Gene Roddenberry‘s “Star Trek” has become, in the intervening five decades, the most singular (and profitable) phenomenon ever spawned by the television medium, and holder of many unique distinctions: one of the earliest series ever given a second shot at a pilot when the first outing proved a bit too cerebral but showed great potential; cancelled not once but twice, after a massive, organized fan letter-writing campaign earned a reversal on its first axing; one of the first bona fide syndication sensations, broadening its cult audience into legions of viewers; one of the first series to be adapted into animated form, reuniting the bulk of the live-action cast; and the first-ever series to spawn the fan-centric convention culture and eventual online communities that reign today, attracting and uniting the passionate fanbase, both literally and virtually.

    There’s more: A sequel series was conceived to launch a fourth broadcast network that never came to be in the 1970s, but (with a little help from the sensational popularity of “Star Trek: The Next Generation” proved the durability of the concept beyond its beloved original cast — it won Peabody Awards, built a merchandizing juggernaut and launched a profitable first-run syndication market that subsequently gave birth to hits like “Baywatch” and “Xena: Warrior Princess” before ending on its own terms after seven seasons and moving into its own film series.

    Additional shows like “Deep Space Nine” built the brand, predicting dynastic TV like “Law & Order” and “CSI,” and with “Star Trek: Voyager” the franchise got around to launching a new broadcast network, UPN. After a period of cultural oversaturation and subsequent dormancy, “Trek” was successfully rebooted, reimagined, and re-youthified by former TV wunderkind J.J. Abrams into a faster, flashier, and equally popular new film series, proving yet again that “Star Trek” could continually go where no TV series has gone before.

    And this is merely the show business pedigree. The social impact of “Star Trek” over its 50-year mission — from including a multiracial crew with minorities in command roles at the height of the Civil Rights struggle to TV’s first interracial kiss; from the innumerable fans it inspired to pursue careers in the sciences and the arts to its fictional technologies turned fact today; and from William Shatner‘s musical career to the Internet dominance of George Takei — is, quite frankly, without measure or precedent.

    Which brings me to Bryan Fuller, recently anointed at the next television caretaker of the “Star Trek” storytelling legacy, which once again pioneers new ground as the flagship original series of CBS’s All Access streaming service.

    If Fuller’s pedigree as the creator of beloved, creatively adventurous series — both original, like “Pushing Daisies,” and building out pre-existing lore, like “Hannibal” — isn’t enough to excite fans looking for a return to the “Trek” tradition of provocative allegorical storytelling, consider that not only has Fuller already worked in the show’s universe as a writer for “Deep Space Nine” and “Voyager,” he’s assembled a dream team of supporting creators from “Trek’s” diverse history to work on the show.

    Among them are filmmaker Fringe,” “Hawaii Five-0″ and ‘Scorpion”; writer-producer Joe Menosky, a veteran of three “Star Trek” syndicated series; and Roddenberry Productions’ Trevor Roth and Rod Roddenberry, the son of the former airline pilot-turned-LAPD speechwriter-turned-TV writer-producer who created it all.

    While visiting the Saturn Awards, the sci-fi/superhero/fantasy equivalent of the Oscars and Emmys, I had my first chance to chat with Fuller since the new “Trek” series was announced, and as our conversation reveals, the as-yet-untitled new series he’s working on may be exploring even more new worlds, new civilizations and, perhaps most importantly, new philosophical questions about human existence at the furthest reaches of the galaxy. The series will never travel far from the legacy he hopes it upholds.

    Moviefone: You have a history with the franchise, you’re going to have more history with the franchise. As we approach the 50th anniversary, what has “Star Trek” meant to you over the years?

    Bryan Fuller: Oh, well, it’s the promise of a better world. Not only is it wonderful high-concept science-fiction storytelling, but it is the promise that we’re going to get our sh*t together as a species, fix our planet, and move out to the galaxy as a team. I think that’s the most exciting … that’s the most promising thing that “Star Trek” offers, is a vision of the future where we do all get along.

    You have a dream team assembled — creative people plucked from various eras in “Star Trek” history. What has that aspect brought to the table for you, in terms of who is putting the show together?

    I think it’s really about making sure that we maintain authenticity. One of the things that I am so excited about is working with Joe Menosky again, who I worked with on “Voyager,” and who was a pivotal writing in “Next Generation,” and a mentor of mine. So it’s wonderful to be working with him on “Star Trek.”

    It’s wonderful to be working with Nicholas Meyer, who I’ve admired for a long time. I pinch myself from time to time just being in the room and having the conversations that we’re having.

    Nick in particular is known for, arguably, the best of the movies, really: “Star Trek II: The Wrath of Khan.”

    I agree.

    What has he brought to bear on the new series, with that distinctive dramatic sensibility that he has?

    Well, a clarity and a cleanliness to the storytelling. An ability to ground science-fiction in a relatable way, and also making sure that we’re telling character stories.

    There’s been a lot of speculation about the format and setting of the new series. What would you like to put out there now, to wet the appetite for the audience?

    I mean, it’s funny. I’ve read that we’re [set] before “Next Generation,” after [“Star Trek VI: The] Undiscovered Country,” which is false. I’ve read that it’s an anthology show, which is not accurate. So it’s interesting to see those suggestions, and seeing the truth mixed in with them and going like, “Oh, they got that part right…” But it’s sort of on the truth-o-meter on PolitiFacts. It’s sort of like some truth, and a lot of like, “No — pants on fire! That’s not true.”

    People got excited about the word “crews,” plural, in the teaser trailer.

    Yeah.

    Does that have a specific meaning? Or was that sort of a word that was used?

    No, I think we will be seeing lots of crews in the story. One of the things that is exciting for me is that we are telling a “Star Trek” story in a modern way. We’re telling a 13-chapter story in this first season. It’s nice to be able to dig deep into things that would have been breezed passed if we were doing episodic and had to contain a story to an episode.

    Would you like to revisit any characters? Is there a window open to bring in characters that have been established in the canon?

    Eventually. Eventually.

    Is the streaming aspect of it — is that going to affect it at all? Are you going to drop them all at once? Do you even know yet?

    No, it’s going to be weekly. And what it does allow us is, we are not subject to broadcast standards and practices. So we can have profanity if we choose — not that I want to see a “Star Trek” with lots of profanity. But we can certainly be more graphic than you would on broadcast network television.

    Tell me about the allegory element that is so potent in “Star Trek” storytelling, and what you want to do, what boundaries you want to push in this day and age.

    Well, I think that “Star Trek” is a show of firsts. And in researching the characters for this new iteration of “Star Trek,” I’ve been talking to Mae Jemison, who’s the first black woman in space, and who saw “Star Trek” in the ’60s and who saw Nichelle Nichols [as Lt. Uhura] on the bridge of a ship and said, “I see myself in space.”

    So there’s something wonderful about the legacy that Nichelle Nichols represents as giving a gift to people who weren’t previously able to see themselves in the future. We are going to be continuing that tradition of progressive casting and progressive character work to be an inclusive world.%Slideshow-219909%