Media Share 9/MEDIASHARE_09.ISO/mag&info/comments.zip/COMMENTS.TXT

Text File | 1991-12-17 | 16KB | 297 lines

The following articles appeared in the UseNet NewsGroup REC.ARTS.STARTREK


From: [e-mail] (Horowitz, Irwin Kenneth)
Subject: Article on Rick Berman in today's TV Times...
Message-ID: <[e-mail]>
Date: 15 Dec 91 17:50:00 GMT
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Organization: California Institute of Technology
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Folks,

This article appears in the TV Times section of today's (12/15) Los
Angeles Times.  It appears to have been reprinted from the Hartford Courant.
I give it here in its entirety...(reprinted w/o permission).

        'STAR TREK' COMMANDERS HAVEN'T VEERED FROM THE ORIGINAL MISSION
                                By James Endrst
                             The Hartford Courant

        It's hard for some "Star Trek" fans to imagine a universe without Gene
Roddenberry.

        When he died in October, it must have seemed like the Starship Enter-
prise lost its captain.

        But Roddenberry, the creator of the '60s NBC sci-fi series and its
'80s reincarnation, "Star Trek: The Next Generation," had his No. 1 in charge.

        Meet Rick Berman, executive producer of "The Next Generation," the man
who, in fact, has piloted the series for the past two seasons.

        Fear not, Trekkers, the man at the helm has a firm grip on the wheel.

        Berman, who's been with "The Next Generation" from its Emmy-winning
start, recently offered what must come as comforting words for those who fear
for the future.

        "Staying true to Gene's vision is a very specific task, which is
involved in every single thing we do," he said.

        The fact of the matter is, however, that Berman has been steering "The
Next Generation" for more than two seasons.

        "Gene's involvement in the show was total during the conception of the
series," said Berman.  "He created the shows, he created the bible :the
outline of the show:.  It was his story.  It was his idea."

        But, Berman continued, "In the second season he began to step away.
And by the third season his involvement was quite a bit less."

        Mutinous words from a traitorous second-in-command?  Hardly.
"We were very close professionally and very close personally," said
Berman of Roddenberry, who 25 years ago launched the USS Enterprise on a
mission that has continued on television and in movies ever since.

        The original crew, Capt. James T. Kirk (William Shatner), Mr. Spock
(Leonard Nimoy), Dr. Leonard "Bones" McCoy (DeForest Kelley), Engineer
Montgomery "Scotty" Scott (James Doohan) and their 23rd-Century comrades, were
succeeded in 1987 by Capt. Jean-Luc Picard (Patrick Stewart), Cmdr. William
Riker (Jonathan Frakes), Lt. Geordi LaForge (LeVar Burton), Lt. Worf (Michael
Dorn) and Lt. Cmdr. Data (Brent Spiner) of the 24th Century.

        And, dare we say it?  "The Next Generation" has outperformed the
previous generation on many, if not all, levels.  Now in its fifth season--
the original lasted three--"Star Trek: The Next Generation" has become one of
the most successful hours in syndication history, garnered multiple Emmys, and
recently was named best syndicated series by the nation's TV critics in a poll
conducted by Electronic Media.

        Yet Berman is the first to say he's not a fan of side-by-side
comparisons.

        "I don't like the sense of competitiveness," he said.  "There are
 people who run contests--`Which show do you like better?  Which captain do
you like better?'--what's important to me is they're two entities that are
connected."

        There was, perhaps, no better example of that spirit than the recent
two-part episode featuring Mr. Spock and a mind-melding with Capt. Picard.
The original "Star Trek," Berman said, "was created by '60s people for
a '60s audience" and were it not for the mythological aura surrounding those
shows, he noted, it might be more apparent that they don't hold up so well.

        But the universe Roddenberry created has remained consistent, which is
one of the reasons, Berman said, "I have not attempted to change the show in
any dramatic fashion."

        He thinks "The Next Generation" has a more serious edge than its pro-
genitor, which was "a lot more fun and more swashbuckling and sexy than our
show is, but I think the television in the '60s called for that."
------------------------------------------------------------------------------
Irwin Horowitz                        |"Suppose they went nowhere?"-McCoy
Astronomy Department                  |"Then this will be your big chance
California Institute of Technology    | to get away from it all!"-Kirk
[e-mail]                |       from STII:TWOK
[e-mail]                 |
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From: [e-mail] (Horowitz, Irwin Kenneth)
Subject: LA Times article on Nick Meyer
Message-ID: <[e-mail]>
Date: 17 Dec 91 17:44:00 GMT
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Folks,

Yet another in a lengthy series of LA Times articles on our favorite
pasttime.  This one deals with Mr. Meyer's views on Star Trek.  Minor spoilers
for ST VI may pop up within this article, so if you haven't seen it yet (and
why not? :-), and don't care for spoilage, then hit 'n' now...(reprinted w/o
permission)

                       NICHOLAS MEYER'S UNKNOWN UNIVERSE
           'Star Trek' Director Keeps His Distance From the Cultists
                               by Chris Willman
                             Special to the Times

        A studio press release promoting "Star Trek VI: The Undiscovered
Country" makes passing note that Nicholas Meyer, the director and co-writer
of the hit sequel, "unabashedly considers himself a Trekker."  This is not
an unreasonable assumption, given that the three "Trek" films Meyer has
worked on are considered by many series devotees to be the better of the six
produced.

        Talk to Meyer, though, and you get a different story.

        "I'm not a 'Star Trek' buff, I'm not a fan, I don't know anything
about it," he proclaimed, sitting in his Paramount office one morning in
front of a poster for the film that made an impressive $18-million opening
weekend bow, and has continued to stay in the Top 10, with $30.4 million
in box office receipts to date.

        "The 'Star Trek' movies that I make are movies meant for the general
audience, for people that wander in off the street and don't know anything
about it...And since I am not a Trekkie, the fans, as it were, must sort of
get what they can from it.  Since they seem to be wildly enthusiastic over
II, IV and now VI, I think I must be doing something right in relation to
them.  But I never took them into specific account."

        As if to cement his seeming irreverence toward the 25-years-and-
running phenomenon, Meyer even uses the dreaded term Trekkie, which hardcore
cultists have been known to heatedly  disdain in favor of the preferred
Trekker.

        Leonard Nimoy, who conceived the new film's storyline before
recruiting past collaborator Meyer to develop it, has a slightly different
take on the director's seeming lack of awe for the "Trek" canon and its
millions of liturgists.

        "I don't know about his irreverence," says Nimoy of Meyer.  "I prefer
to think it's a pose.  I think it's a posture which in effect says, 'I
dare not let myself get sucked into a reverie here or an acolyte position.'
And I think he's absolutely right.  I think his handling of the subject matter
is very, very good.  But I think it essentially comes from a chosen position.

        "At least I hope it does." Nimoy laugh heartily.  "I'd hate to think
that he really believes that we're a bunch of :expletives: running around
in these funny suits."

        Rather than take offense at Meyer's lack of worshipfulness, longtime
fans have responded enthusiastically to Meyer's mix of tongue-in-cheek nods
to well-established character quirks and breezy treatments of allegorical,
topical themes--a slightly more ironic twist on the macro and micro elements
that first made the series a cult favorite in the mid-'60s.

        So, in the case of "Trek VI," have the reviews, a response Meyer says
was not quite as certain a given as the hefty opening-weekend grosses.

        "It was really nice to make a film that not only does business," he
said, "but also :succeeds: critically--however grudgingly.  After all, it's
'Star Trek' and it's No. 6 and first you have to review the toupees or
whatever."

        Meyer is the first non-cast member to direct one of the space journeys
since he helmed "II: The Wrath of Khan" back in 1982, after previously having
been best known for the time-travel fantasy "Time After Time" and several
award-winning mysteries.

        By the time Meyer was brought in to co-write "IV: The Voyage Home"
late in that project's development, Nimoy was taking his second turn as
director, to be followed on "V" by fellow co-star William Shatner.  Since
it might have seemed that being allowed the director's chair was a condition
of continued acting involvement in the series for the leads, it's almost a
surprise that...

        "...Uhura didn't seize the helm?" he quips, finishing the question.

        "Not really.  I don't think they wanted to take any chances, there
was so much money involved.  And I think that it's really a very dangerous
thing--and not a very fair thing, either, I might add--to ask somebody to
make their feature directing debut with a $30-million-plus movie."

        Despite instigating what was envisioned as a 25th-anniversary capper,
at the suggestion of Paramount's then-head, Frank Mancuso, Nimoy opted out
of directing as well this round, wearing only an executive-producer hat in
addition to his other duties.

        Said Nimoy, "I love acting and directing, but I don't love doing both
of them simultaneously--particularly in the Spock character, which is a two-
hour makeup.  But I enjoyed being kind of the consultant figure on a day-to-
day basis.  And Nick is bright, he's talented, he's fast and he gets it.  He
responded well to the ideas that I was offering, and he expands on them--
immediately, quickly.  He can take the ball and run.  I was counting on that."

        After a mid-1990 meeting with Nimoy, Meyer opted to start writing
before he agreed to direct, but eventually found himself having too much fun
not to: "It's such a good story," enthuses Meyer--describing himself as "a
storyteller, not a genre man"--waxing fannish over his own work (co-scripted
with partner Denny Martin Flinn).  "It has all the things you'd want to see.
I mean, it has a trial scene, it's got an assassination, it's a P.O.W. movie
with a prison break in it, and it's got a locked-room mystery!"

        Plus, no less significantly, the essential topicality.  "Trek VI" is
an allegory for the breakup of the Eastern Bloc, with Klingons standing in
for Soviets; it also follows in the long tradition of right-wing conspiracy
theory films like "The Manchurian Candidate."

        With an attempted coup in the midst of increased post-detente freedom
being an essential plot point, current events turned in the movie's favor
during filming.  This was in sharp contrast to "Company Business," Meyer's
last filmmaking experience, which he calls "the very worst experience in my
life."  That East-West spy saga was released in early '91, a year after its
completion, and well after its Cold War holdover story held any relevance.

        With "Trek VI," he got another shot at it.  "It's two movies made on
exactly the same subject.  We were so astonished when the :Soviet: coup
happened, because we thought, 'Oh my God, this is incredible!  It's just like
our movie!'  You know, when you're working on a film, your world view totally
shifts to distill everything through, 'Is this good or bad for the movie?'
Never mind that Gorbachev might have been dead or under house arrest or what
was gonna happen with all those nukes floating around the Soviet Union."

        Meyer maintains that his message is less idealistic than the tradi-
tional "Trek" humanism.

        "You get into interesting philosophical waters, because Gene Rodden-
berry, the creator of all this, believed very much in the evolutionary
perfectability of man.  And I don't.  As I look through human history, I see
no evidence--none--of human progress toward solving any of the big problems.
I see a great deal of technology, I see a great deal of artistic triumph.
But do you really think that we could weep over Romeo and Juliet or the
plight of Oedipus if in fact we were not exactly the same people as those
people?"

        By this time, Meyer is actually shouting, in the friendly, confron-
tational, all-italics tones of a college English prof, which he often
resembles in the literary references that pepper both his wide-ranging
conversation and his in-joke-laden scripts.

        "If we had really changed, Hamlet's indecision, the death of Romeo
and Juliet and the catastrophe of Oedipus, they wouldn't move us, we wouldn't
know what the hell they were talking about.  But we identify with them as if
it were not yesterday but today.  You can do that stuff in modern dress and
it works.  So please don't try to tell me that by the 23rd Century, short of
lobotomy or doing something to your brain with drugs, that we're gonna change.

        "I don't think we're gonna change.  We're just gonna keep on trying
to be better.  The things that dignifies us as human beings is not our
accomplishments so much as our efforts.  We strive.  And that's what Kirk is
trying to do.  Kirk learns about his prejudices.  What's the theme of this
movie?"

        Class?  "The theme of this movie is fear of change.  Fear of change.
Better the devil you know than the devil you don't know."

        The "undiscovered country" of the title is, of course, Shakespeare's
perpetually quoted synonym for the future.  Speaking of which...

        Is this really the last voyage?

        Shatner has said "never say never."  To that, the somewhat more
definitive Nimoy responds, "I understand his position.  I'm betting money that
we're done.  I could lose, but at the moment, I'm betting money that we're
done."

        And Meyer?

        "With this cast, I believe it is the last one."  Of course, adds the
director of Nimoy's premature cinematic death knell in "II" nine years ago,
with some wry caution, "I thought Spock was done, too."

        Spoken like a true non-believer.
------------------------------------------------------------------------------
Irwin Horowitz                        |"Suppose they went nowhere?"-McCoy
Astronomy Department                  |"Then this will be your big chance
California Institute of Technology    | to get away from it all!"-Kirk
[e-mail]                |       from STII:TWOK
[e-mail]                 |
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