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Feb 08 | While his "Lost" co-stars prepare to pack up and leave Hawaii, Daniel Dae Kim can plan to remain there for at least a few more months. Mr. Kim, who plays the time-traveling tough guy Jin on "Lost," has been the first actor cast in a coming remake of the crime drama "Hawaii Five-O," The Hollywood Reporter said. He has been cast as Chin Ho Kelly, a detective played by Kam Fong in the original series, which began in 1968. The "Hawaii Five-O" revival is being developed by the screenwriters Alex Kurtzman and Roberto Orci ("Star Trek," "Fringe") and Peter Lenkov, an executive producer of "CSI: NY."
Feb 03 | William Shatner has paid tribute to his former Boston Legal co-star Justin Mentell, who died in a freak car accident on Monday. The 27 year old was thrown from his Jeep after swerving off the road near Madison, Wisconsin and died at the scene of the tragic crash. The Star Trek legend was saddened to hear of Mentell's passing - as he's convinced the actor was destined for a glittering career. In a post on his Twitter.com page, Shatner writes, "I'm deeply saddened to hear about Justin Mentell. There's no telling how far up the ladder he may have climbed. My sympathies to his family."
Feb 01 | Journalist Edward Gross posted an article at SciFiTVZone.com called "The Making of the Star Trek Pilots, Part 3: "Assignment Earth"" which takes a retrospective look at the making of the Gene Roddenberry unsold TV pilot "Assignment Earth" filmed at Desilu Studios as a second season Star Trek episode. The article feature rare interviews - including authors involved with the character of Gary Seven in comics and in novels.
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By GustavoLeao / 20:05, 12 June 2008 / General Star Trek
TrekMovie.com posted the first part of an extensive and exclusive interview with Battlestar Galactica producer Ronald D. Moore, in which he talks about his work on Star Trek The Next Generation and Star Trek Deep Space Nine. Here are few excerpts of the interview.
TrekMovie.com: Regarding continuity you were recently quoted saying something to the effect of "Star Trek has too much continuity."... Do you find it ironic that you were the guy back in the 90s saying "let's put more continuity in this thing" and are now the one saying there is too much?
Ron Moore: Yah I do think that is ironic. I can appreciate that. When I started, you have to remember there were exactly three seasons of the Original Series and six movies and two seasons of Next Gen. It wasn't that hard to keep it all straight. You could sit in the writers room and keep it all in your head. By the end of Next Generation we able to do that. As we got deeper into Deep Space Nine it started to become more and more difficult to do that. And as Voyager started to get up and going and it was running concurrently with Deep Space Nine, we all started to get a little stir crazy with it. Because as a writer you want to be able to create things in the moment. You want to be able have something happen on the page. You want a character to talk about an experience that they had and be able to introduce a starship captain and introduce them into a scene and have them start talking about a mission they went on twenty years ago and they remember encountering the Romulan ambassador on a certain outpost and having this strange adventure with them. And you want to be able to invent that. It gets to a point now when you try and invent some scene and everyone goes "I'm sorry but twenty years ago the Romulan ambassador would not be at place" and you go "it doesn't matter how about the Tholian ambassador," "up no sorry, in episode so and so and this episode on Voyager determines the Tholians would be over here..." You start getting caged in. You start getting more and more aware of the strictures of what you can and can't do. And back stories and anecdotes and personal histories have to all fit within this vast map of all these intersecting points of continuity and it becomes incredibly straight jacketed.
The lack of creativity is profound and you start worrying more and more about just coloring between the lines than you are making new and engaging stories. Plus the simple fact that you can't keep it straight. We started having tech advisors on the set - in the art department, like the Okudas, keeping all the continuity for us. And they were becoming more and more useful. But it is frustrating to be in the writers room and tossing out stories then having to stop yourself and go ‘does this work?' ‘does this violate continuity?' And having to call people and check encyclopedias and look up information. You want to have it all in your head and just play. The Trek universe has got to the point where you can't play anymore. It just becomes forbidding. I think it is even more forbidding for a new audience to try to come in and get involved in this new universe. Where do you pick up and how do you understand all these references. It is impenetrable at a certain point. So I was a big advocate of just wiping the slate and starting over. OK this was version one of Trek. Love it. Celebrate it. Watch it forever if that is your cup of tea, go ahead. Let's have version two...let's have another Starship Enterprise with Kirk, Spock, and McCoy and let's tell a different version of the event's. Look at Shakespeare. How many versions of "Cleopatra" can the world stand? As many as you can think of. Let's just do a different take on it and get energy out of it and not worry about all the back stories and not get caught up in what is the first time we supposed to have seen the Romulans. Really we have to now say that we can never do any other back-story with the Romulans except that the first time a human being saw them they looked like Spock's father. We are wedding to that for now on even though it is kind of creaky and there is probably a better way to tell the Romulan story than to rely on that notion. It just seems like you want freedom. You want Trek to be fun. So make it fun.
The full interview (plus an audio version) can be found at TrekMovie.
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You could either change the race of the character
Thats how we ended up with the "Klingons with a bad hair day" on Voyager....I mean...the Kazon.
Thats not creativity.
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or take the more adventurous path and tell a story of how this character was an exception to the rule.
Except thats not interesting television. Spending 20 minutes trying to explain why so and so isn't like such and such is boring.
Yes, continuity facilitates creativity. Having a rich backdrop to work with makes for a rich and textured universe. However, Star Trek right now doesn't have a rich backdrop. It has a series of predefined races who always have to behave in a certain way, to the point of cliche (Klingons are always pissed off, Romulans are always sneaky, Vulcans are always arrogant douchebags, Ferengi are greedy) and it has a string of details that have been littered amongst 5 television series and 10 movies that we as fans seem to want to demand slavish attention to.
Star Trek needs a blank slate, just to wipe out the preconceived ideas of how everything has to be. Deep Space 9 did that a bit, with its reboot of the Ferengi and the Trill. TNG rebooted the Klingons. Its happened before, just never on a big scale because there wasn't as much continuity as there is now.
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Scientists discover the world that exists;
engineers create the world that never was.
-Theodore von Kármán
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Quote from Ronald D. Moore:
"The lack of creativity is profound..."
Bingo.
As soon as lazy sci-fi scribes can't just pull an otherworld chapter out of their arse, they moan about the inconvenience of continuity. Funny, how non-sci-fi fiction writers don't proselytize and nag about being stifled by Earth's long and detailed history, i.e. the "backstory" of human civilization.
This simply isn't a problem for competent storytellers, who recognize continuity as a frame of reality that's essential for a meeting of minds between author and audience.
Moore is talking about riding the coattails of established brand names. For example: Instead of starting a new series with its own brand, RDM et al took the name and concept of Glen Larson's Battlestar Galactica. Had Moore's series been a total botch, his so-called "clean slate" would not have prevented a dishonor to the entire BSG family -- just as ENT is like a stinky backwash into the mouth of Star Trek.
Moore's mindset hardly differs from the "genius" behind all the crappy remakes of pop-cult faves.
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