Star Trek News

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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Damon Lindelof is currently writing the Star Trek sequel with Roberto Orci and Alex Kurtzman. Over the weekend he was nabbed on the red carpet at the Creative Arts Emmys where he talked about the team’s goals for the Trek follow-up and again drew comparison’s to that other big recent franchise follow-up, The Dark Knight.   Lindelof: [...] 235

Roberto Picardo, Star Trek Voyager’s EMH, will be starring in SyFy’s Monsterwolf, which will air this autumn.

Monsterwolf, an original SyFy movie, will feature Picardo as Mr. Stark in a movie about what happens when an animal spirit is inadvertently released.

According to the SyFy press release, “Monsterwolf premieres Saturday, October 9, at 9 P.M. On the outskirts of a small Louisiana town, a drilling crew sets blast charges to tap an oil deposit, releasing the Kachinawaya, a Native American animal spirit meant to protect Indian lands from invaders. Stars Robert Picardo (Star Trek: Voyager, Star Trek: Deep Space Nine) and Jason London (Wildfire).

In a new interview with Kougar Magazine, Marina Sirtis lets her hair down and discusses everything from her career and the expectations of Hollywood, to middle-aged sexuality.

One of the benefits of being a Hollywood actress that Sirtis enjoyed was being a sex symbol. Even though she is a feminist, she did not find the two incompatible. “People say to me, because I’m a bit of a feminist with a small ‘f,’ people say, ‘How can you be a feminist when people regard you as a sex symbol?’” To answer those people, Sirtis refers back to her past.

“And I’m like, okay, first of all,” explained Sirtis, “when you’ve been ugly, if you had said to me when I was 12, you’re going to be a sex symbol when you’re older, I would’ve laughed and said, ‘Are you high?’  So, to me it’s like a huge compliment. And especially as I’m older. I was in my thirties when I became a sex symbol; it wasn’t something that happened when I was young. And I think it’s great. I mean, I really think it’s great. However, the body, it was hard to maintain!”

There’s a downside to maintaining that image, the necessity for many actresses to undergo plastic surgery. Sirtis had her own plastic surgery, but regrets it now. “Well, first of all, it doesn’t make sense for actresses,” she said. “It doesn’t make sense for actresses to have plastic surgery because there’s no point in looking forty when you’re sixty because you know what? They’re gonna hire somebody who’s forty.

“One of the reasons I’m so adamant against plastic surgery is because I fell into that trap of being the Hollywood starlet. And I had beautiful boobs. But as I got older, of course they got softer and they didn’t stay where I wanted them to stay so I went and had my boobs done. It is the worst thing I ever did; I regretted it from day one, which is maybe why I’m so adamant against everything else now, because I hate ‘em. And because I hate them, people ask, “Why don’t you have them taken out?” Because I think that again is feeding into that whole thing of let’s fix it, let’s fix it, let’s fix it. You don’t have to fix it. I made a decision, I’ve made my bed, I’m lying in it.”

Sirtis also discussed menopause, saying that it was her “mission in life” to talk about it. “…It’s like a dirty little secret,” she said. “No one talks about it, your mother doesn’t talk about it, it’s like it’s something you should be ashamed of. You don’t talk about it. I mean I’m sitting there fanning myself with a fan. You know what? I’m not in The Importance of Being Earnest, I’m having a hot flash, you know? Again, it’s an acceptance, it’s natural. The same way we start our period, you know, one day it’s gonna end. And things happen to you when your period ends.”

Brannon Braga and Rick Berman had a different Star Trek: Enterprise in mind than what actually ended up airing, plus Braga says that if he could redo the Star Trek: Voyager finale, he would make a surprising change.

Had Berman and Braga had their way, fans would have seen some Earth-bound shows for Enterprise, especially in the beginning. “Rick Berman and I had a little bit more of a raw conception of Enterprise than maybe the studio was comfortable with,” explained Braga. “It was actually set on Earth for a while – the building of the first starship, kind of like J.J.’s. We wanted to do the launch of the first starship and take it maybe a little bit more retro, and we initially didn’t have the futuristic temporal cold war aspect of it.”

But their plans had to change when it became apparent that their bosses weren’t on board with this version of Enterprise. “The studio was a little nervous about the prequel concept and they felt that Star Trek should be going forward, not backward,” said Braga. “So we introduced this recurring element of a Star Trek far beyond Kirk’s time, or even Picard’s time, to satisfy their concerns, which I thought was interesting. But initially our concept of Enterprise was really raw and basic and ‘prequelly.’  I’m not saying it would’ve been better but it would’ve been a little bit different. It’s a collaboration; it’s a collaboration, it’s their franchise, it’s their money. We did the best we could to accommodate their notes.”

When it comes to Star Trek: Voyager, Braga can now say that he would do something different if he had the chance to redo the Voyager finale. “It was my feeling that Seven Of Nine should have died,” he said. “If you watch the episode Human Error, written by Andre Bormanis, it was not only a heart-breaking episode in that Seven Of Nine learns, as she begins to explore her human emotions, that she can’t experience them. There’s a Borg chip inside her that will kill her if she tries to do so. First of all, that’s kind of an interesting ‘rape victim’ analogy or whatever you want to call it, about a damaged woman who can’t get past what happened to her, but I also always saw it as a crucial episode that would set up the finale.

“This was a woman who knew she was neither here nor there. She couldn’t go back to the Borg, nor would she want to, but she could never be fully human, so she was doomed. And I wanted to have her sacrifice herself to get her shipmates home.”

The full interview can be found in issue #199 of SFX Magazine.

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Is it all over for Ensign Sue? She has met the fate of many a red shirt before her, but her story continues with the 25th strip of Ensign Sue Must Die, the comic strip inspired by the new Star Trek movie.       Ensign Sue Must Die 25: God is a loving maker story by Clare Mosley, art [...] 27

Two weeks ago TrekMovie hosted a fan panel at the Creation Star Trek Star Convention to discuss the 2009 Star Trek movie, and the 2012 sequel. Joined by Larry Nemecek, Mary Czerwinski and Vernon Wilmer, we (and the audience) discussed and debated the new universe of Star Trek. You can watch video of the full [...] 198

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