Star Trek News

The Hollywood Xpo coming to Universal City, CA in October is an event chock full of Hollywood, and Sci-Fi celebrities, including a "Trek XPo" full of Star Trek luminaries from all the Trek TV shows, including Walter Koenig, Nichelle Nichols, Jonathan Frakes Michael Dorn, Rene Auberjonois, Robert Duncan McNeil, Connor Trinneer, and many more. Weekend [...] 10

Walter Koenig (Pavel Chekov) turned to writing after the original series of Star Trek ended production.

Sitting around waiting for that next job to appear was not working out well for Koenig. “When the series ended,” he said, “I was without any employment. The phone didn’t ring, and I found myself having no reason to get up in the morning. It was that depressing.”

Koenig decided to do something to give himself purpose, to keep busy and to push away the depression. “I decided at some juncture that if I was going to maintain my sanity and some kind of emotional equilibrium, I had to give myself a purpose, a target, an objective,” he explained. “That became writing. It gave my life structure. I knew that every day I was going to get up and write for four or five hours. It brought some emotional equanimity with it.”

The end result was his first novel. “Over the course of about six months, I wrote a novel,” said Koenig, “even though I had never written before, and I put it away because a couple of people I started showing it to didn’t like it. A couple people loved it, but I always go with the people who didn’t like it. I assumed they knew what they were talking about.”

Not waiting around for the novel to be published, Koenig branched out into other writing projects. “Eighteen years later, [the novel] got published, but in the interim I started writing screenplays,” he said. “I wrote an episode of the animated Star Trek and [scripts] for several prime time televisions shows, then found myself on this course. I found it aesthetically rewarding and something I could always do when the work as an actor wasn’t available. I started writing, not because I was inspired by Star Trek to write, but because I just needed to find a way to survive. To psychologically and emotionally survive at a time when things were really kind of ruined. I had a wife and a small child, and I wasn’t making any money. I needed a purpose and to be committed to something. The writing provided that.”

Koenig’s latest writing project, a four-issue comic miniseries titled Things To Come, will be published next year.

Back in 1989 Harve Bennett (producer of Star Trek II, III, IV & V) proposed that the Star Trek franchise needed to be restarted with Kirk and Spock being recast for a move set at Starfleet Academy. Work began on the project, including a script, but Paramount decided to stick with the original crew for [...] 183

LeVar Burton, best known to Trek fans as Star Trek: The Next Generation’s Geordi La Forge, will be hosting this year’s IndieCade Red Carpet Awards Ceremony and Reception.

IndieCade, “dedicated to bringing together the freshest, most innovative and creative minds and works in independent game design,” was founded in 2005 and holds an annual international festival and series of exhibitions, conferences and other “happenings for the future of independent games.”

“As an artist and storyteller, I wanted to support IndieCade and independent game developers,” said Burton. “As a passionate gamer, I am a longtime fan of the creative visionaries that are the heart and soul of the gaming community, which is why I’m particularly happy about my association with IndieCade.”

Ticket sales and information on IndieCade 2010 can be found at their website located here. This year’s award ceremony, which will announce winners in ten categories from among the three hundred and sixty games in competition, will take place on Friday, Oct 8, at 8 PM at Sony Pictures Studio in Culver City, Ca.

Today we present the finale of the Star Trek movie inspired parody comic strip Ensign Sue Must Die. Find out how it all ends for Sue…or is it the end?       Ensign Sue Must Die Finale: Ensign Sue gets another chance story by Clare Mosley, art by Kevin Bolk, written by Clare Mosley and Kevin Bolk (click to see [...] 53

In Sci-Fi TV this week we start off with a first look at the Doctor Who Christmas special and get some new details on the return of Torchwood. We also have another peek at Smallville’s final season, and a trailer and premiere date for The Walking Dead. All that plus the latest previews (including a [...] 65

Today there are a couple updates on what members of the Star Trek team are doing outside Star Trek (with Steven Spielberg). Trek co-writers Alex Kurtzman and Roberto Orci are working with Steven Spielberg to bring Joe Hill’s "Locke & Key" IDW comic series to the small screen. Plus we have an update on [...] 25

Veteran Star Trek writer producer Brannon Braga, the same writer who controversially wrote the deaths of both James T Kirk and Charles "Trip" Tucker", has revealed in a new interview that he also wanted to kill off another of Trek’s best known characters: Seven of Nine.   Braga on Seven and Voyager finale Braga’s latest comment comes [...] 123

Before Jeri Ryan and Jolene Blalock, Star Trek: The Next Generation looked to Marina Sirtis to add sex appeal to the sci-fi franchise in the 80’s and 90’s. In a new and very frank interview, the actress talks about what that was like for her and regrets she has as well. Excerpts below   Marina Sirtis talks [...] 71

KISS’s Gene Simmons finds out that William Shatner is very good at finding the “raw nerve” of his guests, even if they don’t realize that they have one.

In a clip featuring an episode of Shatner’s Raw Nerve seen earlier this year, at first Simmons claims that he doesn’t “have any raw nerves to touch,” but he soon found out that that wasn’t the case.

“If you listen to the interview,” Simmons added, “I abide by my mother’s philosophy which is any day above ground is a good day.”

But a memory of his mother’s response to a government official hit a raw nerve. “I need for you to raise your right hand,” the official told his Hungarian-born mother, a survivor of the Holocaust, who was going to swear that she would not try to overthrow the government of her newly-adopted country. “And my mother, bless her, went like this,” said Simmons, making a Nazi salute, “because she didn’t know what he meant. He said, ‘You will never have to…,’” and with this Simmons paused, overcome with emotion, before continuing with his story. “‘You will never have to do that ever again.’”

Back in February, TrekToday reported that Star Trek XI co-writers Alex Kurtzman and Roberto Orci would be working on an adaptation of Locke & Key and it was expected to be made into a movie.

An update to this news reveals that the adaptation will be a television project instead.

The Locke & Key comic series was originally written by Joe Hill and illustrated by Gabriel Rodriguez. Locke & Key, set in the village of Lovecraft, is the story of the Locke family, who move to their estate (Keyhouse), after the murder of the head of the family by a deranged high school student.

Three teenaged brothers; Tyler, Kinsey and Bode Locke, find mystical doors which are capable of transporting them to different worlds as well as granting them special powers.

20th Century Fox will team with Stephen Spielberg’s DreamWorks TV to produce Locke & Key. Josh Friedman, (Terminator: The Sarah Connor Chronicles) will write and executive produce the adaptation.

Damon Lindelof spoke briefly about Star Trek XII last weekend, sharing the goals of the writers and comparing the creation of the sequel to Star Trek XI to the sequel to Batman Begins.

The first movie was easier in some ways, as all one had to do was to introduce the characters to the audience. But after the success of Star Trek XI, expectations are high and Lindelof does not want to disappoint.

“You know, the bar is very, very high for the sequel,” he said. “But I think we are looking at a movie like The Dark Knight which actually sort of went one step beyond Batman Begins. It was really about something and at the same time was a superhero movie. So we don’t want to abandon all the things that made the first movie work — and have it sort of be fun and emotional, but we also really want the movie to thematically resonate, so we are putting on our highfalutin hats.”

When asked by the reporter if Star Trek XII, like Avatar, would address the importance of rainforests and why they should be saved, Lindelof answered humorously. “Well, I think Avatar did a pretty good job of getting the rainforest message across,” he said. “Maybe we will put a bumper sticker on the Enterprise.”

After Star Trek: The Motion Picture, Harve Bennett was called in to see if he could make a better movie for less money. The result was the critically acclaimed Star Trek II: The Wrath of Khan followed by three Star Trek movies after that.

Bennett was a successful television producer with shows like Mod Squad, The Six Million Dollar Man and The Bionic Woman already under his belt. When asked if he could do a better Trek movie for less money by Gulf & Western boss Charles Bludhorn, he told them he could make four or five such movies. “Do it,” said Bludhorn.

When Bennett watched the original series episode Space Seed, he knew he had what he needed to make a good movie. “It was like God had sent a present down to me,” he explained. “Space Seed ends having deposited Khan (Ricardo Montalban) on some desolate planetoid and Kirk, I think it was, saying ‘If we came back in twenty-five years, I wonder what he’d be like.’ And Spock says, ‘Hmm.’ I jumped up out of my seat and said, ‘Thank you, God! Thank you. That’s it. That’s my story.’”

Bennett worked with both William Shatner and Leonard Nimoy as directors, and he found it easier to work with Nimoy than with Shatner. “Leonard came to me after Wrath of Khan and after his death scene and he said, ‘This is a lot of fun.’ And it was. We all said it was a very jolly set. He said, ‘I’m game for another one, but I’d like to direct.’ I said, ‘Terrific. I know what the next one has to be, and you got it.’

In the fourth movie, there was a little trouble with Nimoy, who felt he was ready to direct alone, but it was soon resolved. “He got a little more resentful during Star Trek IV because he figured he had proved himself,” said Bennett. “So we had a little friction there, but we resolved it and he went on to do a magnificent job on IV. His emergence as a director was his skill triumphing over his lack of experience”

But Shatner was a different story. “It is an unpleasant memory. I had a wonderful relationship with Bill. I could handle him and so forth, but as chief of the set it was going to be very difficult.” Bennett didn’t like Shatner’s idea that the story would be about finding God and the two argued about it. But in the end, the two came to the agreement that “‘OK, we will never really find God. The journey to try to find God will be the picture.’ That’s the premise on which we proceeded, but the fact of the matter is it was still a shaggy-dog story. It was a story that could not reach a climax because you could hint at God, you could present an abstraction, but it wouldn’t be satisfying dramatically.”

Bennett decided against producing Star Trek VI: The Undiscovered Country when Paramount decided against his “Starfleet Academy-style” film. “It was the best script of all and it never got produced,” he said. “…Basically it was a love story and it was a story of cadets, teenagers. And, in order to get Shatner and Nimoy in, we had a wraparound in which Kirk comes back to address the academy and the story spins off of his memory. At the end, Kirk and Spock are reunited and they beam back up to Enterprise, which would have left a new series potential, the academy, and a potential other story with the original Trek cast. All the possibilities were open, the script was beautiful, and the love story was haunting, but it didn’t happen.”

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