Posted by Randy Barnett:
Interesting Star Trek Initiative:
A reader just passed along to me [1]this link to an interesting
posting by [2]J. Michael Straczynski, the creator of Babylon 5.
(Volokh readers have much praised Babylon 5 to me but I could never
get into it during its first run.) After a discussion of how the Star
Trek franchise evolved to this point, here is how it provocatively
ends:
Last year, Bryce [Zabel (recently the head of the Television
Academy and creator/executive producer of Dark Skies)] and I sat
down and, on our own, out of a sheer love of Trek as it was and
should be, wrote a series bible/treatment for a return to the roots
of Trek. To re-boot the Trek universe.
Understand: writer/producers in TV just don't do that sort of thing
on their own, everybody always insists on doing it for vast sums of
money.
We did it entirely on our own, setting aside other, paying
deadlines out of our passion for the series. We set out a full
five-year arc.
But when it came time to bring it to Paramount, despite my track
record and Bryce's enormous and skillful record as a
writer/producer, the effort stalled out because of "political
considerations," which was explained to us as not wishing to offend
the powers that be.
So on behalf of myself and Bryce, I'm taking the unusual step of
going right to the source...right to you guys, fueled in part by a
number of recent articles and polls, including one at
www.scifi.com/scifiwire in which nearly 18,000 fans voted their
preference for a new Trek series,
and 48% of that figure called for a jms take on Trek. (The other
choices polled at about 18% or thereabouts.)
See, if somebody doesn't like a story, doesn't want to buy it,
that's all well and good, that's terrific, that's the way it's
supposed to be.
But when "political considerations" are the basis...that just
doesn't parse.
So here's the deal, folks. If you want to see a new Trek series
that's true to Gene's original creation, helmed by myself and
Bryce, with challenging stories, contemporary themes, solid
extrapolation, and the infusion of some of our best and brightest
SF prose writers, then you need to let the folks at Paramount know
that. If the 48% of the 18,000
folks who voted at scifi.com sent those sentiments to
Paramount...there'd be a new series in the works tomorrow.
I don't need the work, I have plenty of stuff on my plate through
2007 in TV, film and comics, so that's not an issue. But I'd set it
all aside for one shot at doing Trek right, and I know Bryce feels
the same.
References
1. http://www.fsl.cs.sunysb.edu/pipermail/b5jms/2005-February/005495.html
2. http://www.imdb.com/name/nm0833089/
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