Star Trek

[LizzieMaine]

But they both loved cats.

"Felis catus
Is your taxonomic nomenclature
An exothermic quadruped
Carnivorous by nature!"

 

[MisterCairo]

And I'm not going to explain again why I hate, HATE, HATE the new Abramsverse feature films. They're "not your father's Star Trek"

Not your father's Star Trek - and the primary reason they are bum gravy.

Bill was also a well-known Shakespearean actor. That wouldn't mean much to the average TV viewer in Sheboygan, no, but it gave him some cachet in the business. It was considered quite a coup for Roddenberry & Co. to sign Shatner; he was thought of at the time as a hot, up-and-coming young actor.

My home town of Stratford, Ontario, is quite proud to have hosted Bill Shatner over the years:


http://www.ctvnews.ca/entertainment...days-as-he-accepts-award-in-toronto-1.1507814

 

[Zombie_61]

My home town of Stratford, Ontario, is quite proud to have hosted Bill Shatner over the years:

There, that's better.

 

[Fading Fast]

...But something Solow and Justman reveal that I had never heard before was that *Shatner* also insisted on a percentage -- and he got it. This, they believe, is the main reason he dug in so hard on being "star of the show," because that gave him the leverage to keep that percentage in his contract from season to season....

I read (years ago, don't remember the source and have no idea if it is true) that Shatner did not have a percentage of the original ST and that after the show went off the air and he got divorced (and basically gave most of his money to his wife), he was living out of his car for awhile.

This is why (again, I read years ago and don't remember the source) that for both the ST movies and "T.J. Hooker" he drove a brutally hard bargain demanding a percentage or a lot of upfront money.

If he did get a percentage of the original ST, does that mean he was getting residuals from all the re-runs of it in the '70s (and even up to today)? If so, my God, that must be one heck of a lot of money over all those years.

 

[Trenchfriend]

But they both loved cats.

"Felis catus
Is your taxonomic nomenclature
An exothermic quadruped
Carnivorous by nature!"

All technocratic Aspie-like people do like cats...

 

[LizzieMaine]

The way percentage deals work in Hollywood is that the percentage is calculated as part of the *profit*, not the gross. Trek TOS lost money for Desilu/Paramount every year it was in production, so I'd imagine that when The Shat came around looking for his cut he was shown a set of books printed in bright red ink and told to go peddle his papers. Hollywood accountants are like that. Shatner's piece of the action was, according to Solow and Justman, twenty percent of the profits -- but twenty percent of nothing is nothing.

The story has always been that the Trek syndication boom didn't really hit until 1971-72, when all of a sudden the show was everywhere at once. But Solow and Justman reveal yet another fact that I'd never seen mentioned before -- while the third season of the show was in production, a company called Kaiser Broadcasting, which owned a chain of independent UHF stations, bought the future rerun rights for an undisclosed sum, which money doesn't seem to have reckoned into how either Desilu or Paramount figured profit and loss on the show. After Desilu merged with Paramount, Paramount didn't seem to want anything to do with the show, and offered to sell the whole package to Roddenberry for $150,000 -- but he wasn't making any money either, and couldn't raise the cash. *His* cut was only 26 percent of the profits, so he wasn't taking anything out of the show between cancellation and the syndication boom either. He was reduced to eking out a living selling Trek merchandise by mail order out of his garage, while trying to raise money to produce various unsuccessful pilots ("The Questor Tapes," etc.)

Paramount emerges as the really sleazy player in all this -- they were telling both Roddenberry and Shatner that TOS hadn't made back its production costs as late as the early 1980s -- despite the fact that global syndication revenues, when added up, came to well over $79 million by that point. Roddenberry ended up suing the studio for access to the books, and there was a huge cash settlement to the tune of over $5 million a few years before his death. Shatner's deal appears to have been renegotiated, and I believe he now owns a small percentage of the entire Trek franchise -- all the shows, movies, books, merch, etc. Nimoy seems to have gained a similar arrangement before his death.

As for residuals, that's a union thing, not a percentage deal. All members of the Screen Actors Guild working in television in the 1960s had contracts requiring residual payments for the first three reruns of a filmed program once it had gone off network. Shatner had, as part of his star contract, a promise of twenty percent of his original salary for each of the first *five* reruns, but everyone else had the standard SAG three reruns.

That's all they got -- and for the Trek cast, those payments were finished by 1970, thanks to the Kaiser deal. So when the original cast complained everybody was getting rich off TOS but them, they had a point.

 

[Doctor Strange]

Shatner didn't get a percentage of Trek, and was indeed broke and scrambling for work for several years afterwards. There were few/no deals like that in TV at the time. Small residual payments for a certain (small) number of rerun showings, yes... but that didn't add up to much.

More to the point, everybody seems to forget that Trek wasn't a profitable show in its original run, and that it took a few years of it being syndicated in many markets worldwide for the money to start rolling in... and the bulk of that went to Desilu/Paramount/Gulf+Western/etc. - the sequence of acquired corporations that actually owned the series. Even Roddenberry's Norway Productions got very little, which is why he was selling film frames salvaged from the cutting room floor, script reprints, Trek costume arrowhead patches (I got one and had my mom sew it on the chest of a B-15 knockoff), and other dubious souvenirs through his Lincoln Enterprises. Trek didn't really become a money-printing machine until the mid-70s. And for the actors, it was strictly their convention appearance fees, not anything from the series itself.

[Addendum: I should have known that Lizzie was writing an even more detailed response at the same time I was!]

 

[Fading Fast]

Thanks for the info Lizzie and Doctor Strange.

By this point, Shatner's "small percentage of the entire Trek franchise" has to be quite a number.

 

[LizzieMaine]

Well, when Trek was at its revenue peak in the mid-1990s, it was said to be bringing in well over a billion dollars a year for Paramount from all revenue sources -- TV, movies, home video, merchandise, live attractions, and publishing. How it managed to go from that to near-complete irrelevance in less than a decade is an even more astounding story having to do with the bizarre tangle that was CBS/Paramount/Viacom around the turn of the 21st Century.

 

[Fading Fast]

Well, when Trek was at its revenue peak in the mid-1990s, it was said to be bringing in well over a billion dollars a year for Paramount from all revenue sources -- TV, movies, home video, merchandise, live attractions, and publishing. How it managed to go from that to near-complete irrelevance in less than a decade is an even more astounding story having to do with the bizarre tangle that was CBS/Paramount/Viacom around the turn of the 21st Century.

But it ticks on - new TV series on the way, the new "rebooted" movies - all money for James Tiberius I assume.

 

[LizzieMaine]

I'm not sure they're going the right route with the new show, either creatively or in the way they're planning to distribute it, but we'll see. But in any event, even the recent movies haven't given Trek the level of omnipresence that it had twenty years ago -- I happened to walk thru the toy department at Walmart the other day, and there was plenty of Star Wars junk for sale, but not one single item of Trek merch. No dolls, no model kits, no replica hardware, none of the stuff that was everywhere in the '90s. And other than the most recent movie, there weren't any Trek DVDs or Blu-Rays in that department either.

This is unfortunate. For the first time in years, all the Trek shows are available in reruns on one cable channel, the "Heroes and Icons Network," which programs them in a continuous bloc six nights a week, so there's plenty of opportunity for viewers to get on board the franchise -- but CBS/Paramount does absolutely nothing to capitalize on this. It's like they're bound and determined to sell and promote *only* the Abrams-era movies and this new show, not any of the back catalog, and given the sheer amount of material in that catalog, it would seem they'd want to to use it if only to churn up excitement for the new series. But nothing, bupkis, nada. Usually when something "irrational" is going on in the entertainment business you'll find lawyers and accountants in back of it, so I suspect that their reluctance to promote the old shows is tied up deeply in deals and contracts that the public doesn't get to know about.

If I was the paranoid type, I'd think somebody at CBS/Paramount really didn't like Rick Berman, because they've gone out of their way over the past ten years to avoid anything having to do with the Berman-era Trek shows and mythology.

 

[Doctor Strange]

BBC America has also been running several Trek series - TOS, TNG, VOY - in blocks, and with less commercials. That's where I find myself getting drawn in these days.

But knowing that H&I is running all five series back to back really warms my "Old Ones, the ones who made us" Trekker-since-9/8/66 heart. If this were happening in the old pre-home video, pre-streaming video days, it would a huge mega-event for Trek fans. These days, it's barely a footnote.

I have no plans to watch the new CBS series, of course. It's set "ten years before Captain Kirk" - and that's Chris Pine Kirk, not Bill Shatner Kirk. That's the wrong Kirk, at least for me.

 

[LizzieMaine]

A "ten years before Kirk" show set in the original continuity could be wonderful -- a real look at the Starfleet of the "Pike Era." What were other ships in the fleet doing then? What were the Klingons up to? That's supposedly the idea of the new show, but the problem is, from what I've seen, is it doesn't look or feel anything like what we know the Pike Era to be. Sure, a show done with 1964-style set design and effects wouldn't fly in 2017, but it's possible to do a show that feels consistent with the established period without discarding it entirely. Gooseneck viewers! Grey landing-party jackets! Turtlenecks! Loud, humming transporters! A few little details like that would respect the past history while not having to cling slavishly to every little thing.

What I've seen of the new show simply doesn't look even remotely like what past Trek has established the 2250s as looking like. It does, however, look like a logical continuation of the Trek Universe past the late 24th Century -- so I really don't get why they didn't go ahead and just make a show in that period. Post-Dominon War there are so many good stories that could be told, but outside of comics and novels, there's zero chance that any of them are going to be told. Why not?

 

[Trenchfriend]

From "First Contact":

 

[Zombie_61]

...So when the original cast complained everybody was getting rich off TOS but them, they had a point.

Over the years I've read comments from almost all of the primary and secondary cast members from the original series, and they all said essentially the same thing--during and after the run of the show everyone seemed to get rich but them because of the way residuals and merchandising and such were handled in the 1960s, and they had all signed contracts that were not much more than common "boilerplate" deals for the era. They also added that it was only when plans were being put into effect to start Star Trek: The Motion Picture that they were all in a better position to negotiate better deals, and that was when they started to see some money roll in.

...What I've seen of the new show simply doesn't look even remotely like what past Trek has established the 2250s as looking like...

I recently read that the reason Star Trek: Discovery doesn't look like any previous incarnation of Trek is because CBS owns the television part of the franchise, and Paramount owns the theatrical movie part of the franchise, and neither will allow the other to use any of their intellectual property even though they're both involved in Discovery's production. So far, that has been the only explanation that made sense.

Rumor has it that CBS has so little faith in Discovery's success at this point that they have Nicholas Meyer working on a different Trek series (one that will allegedly be far more similar to the original series) to replace Discovery when it fails. One way or another, it'll be interesting to see how this all shakes out.

 

[Trenchfriend]

A "ten years before Kirk" show set in the original continuity could be wonderful -- a real look at the Starfleet of the "Pike Era." What were other ships in the fleet doing then? What were the Klingons up to? That's supposedly the idea of the new show, but the problem is, from what I've seen, is it doesn't look or feel anything like what we know the Pike Era to be. Sure, a show done with 1964-style set design and effects wouldn't fly in 2017, but it's possible to do a show that feels consistent with the established period without discarding it entirely. Gooseneck viewers! Grey landing-party jackets! Turtlenecks! Loud, humming transporters! A few little details like that would respect the past history while not having to cling slavishly to every little thing.

What I've seen of the new show simply doesn't look even remotely like what past Trek has established the 2250s as looking like. It does, however, look like a logical continuation of the Trek Universe past the late 24th Century -- so I really don't get why they didn't go ahead and just make a show in that period. Post-Dominon War there are so many good stories that could be told, but outside of comics and novels, there's zero chance that any of them are going to be told. Why not?

A TV-series with the plot of developing and establishing the starfleet before the whole federation-time. The time after Zefram Cochrane.

 

[LizzieMaine]

A prequel to "Enterprise" has possibliities. James Cromwell is still alive and acting, and would be interesting as an elderly Cochrane getting ready to flee into the future established for him in TOS. Maybe it's the office politics that drive him away from Earth.

I think it's interesting that the very first thing CBS did when it got control of the Trek franchise was to completely liquidate its entire inventory of production assets -- costumes, props, set pieces, the works -- in a series of public auctions. Nothing says "Get stuffed, Trekkers" like turning the franchise into a big flea market.

 

[Fading Fast]

On the last several posts:

I'm with Lizzie, if the old ST stuff isn't being jammed down our throats to squeeze every last dollar out of a Captain Kirk lunch box, then the answer lies in lawyers and accountants fighting like hell.

As to the flee market liquidation, having worked in Corporate America, sometimes a new "regime" comes in to run the company or business line and "to make its mark," "to move things forward," blah, blah, blah they can't wait to get rid of established practices and even profitable business lines in some ego-driven need to really "own" the business going forward. Anyone who thinks businesses are all run purely for profit hasn't worked in business and seen what egos can do to a bottom line.

I thought the TV series "Enterprise" did a respectable if uneven job of taking Trek back to before the original series. That show was set, I think, about 100 years before Kirk's time. To go back ten years seems a bit odd to me as it would have to tie to a known-to-its-audience future pretty closely which can be hard to do in a weekly series looking for new drama each week.

 

[Doctor Strange]

Again, it's worth noting that this new series is part of the new timeline which consists of just three feature films, not the 600+ hours of older Trek. So it's not set between Enterprise and the original series, and doesn't have to worry about messing with their continuity. They will just riff on - and rip off - the characters and events of the old timeline. Now with modern special effects and a hipper, more diverse cast!

You'd think they would have learned from the many mistakes of Enterprise that retro-continuity is a dicey prospect. But it's clear that the days of Roddenberry, Berman, etc.- producers who had strong visions of what Trek could be, visions that they believed in and worked hard to create - are done. It's just another corporate franchise now, with the money men leading the charge, and it's just gonna be the same damn Trek story tropes over and over, with continually diminishing returns.

 

[Fading Fast]

⇧ as always, good points (and a bit of bitterness - but fair). So why do you think they chose to set the new series only ten years before the "re-boot" timeline?