This Writer Wrote

A full Hollywood-type premiere is being planned for a new Star Trek Internet episode at the Fine Arts Theater in Beverly Hills on August 23, 2007.

“World Enough and Time,” which stars well-loved Star Trek actor, George Takei, is the fourth episode created by a group of fans for www.startreknewvoyages.com, a site dedicated by actor James Cawley (Kirk) to fulfilling the 5-year mission of the original Star Trek series, and showcasing new actors in the beloved roles of Kirk, Spock and McCoy.

Nevertheless, “World Enough and Time” stands out as a unique episode in that Cawley’s team has been joined by many Hollywood TV and Film professionals, like me, who were brought aboard by our friend and colleague, Marc Scott Zicree, who co-wrote, directed and executive-produced the episode. With all of our talents combined, we’ve created a spectacular product for the Internet, the likes of which have never been seen before.

Most of us professionals who got involved in making “World Enough and Time” have been Star Trek fans for a long time. Some in our group were fortunate enough to work on some of the Paramount-made series but for many of us, original Trek was long gone before we got into the business. For me, in particular, I grew up on Star Trek, but back then, all we could do was watch reruns, write fan-fic, draw artwork, and make models. With the explosion of new technology today, fans are able to make their own live-action episodes and show them to audiences around the world on the Internet without needing studio or network backing. Supported in a large part by James Cawley’s successful career as an Elvis impersonator and the generosity of participants, www.startreknewvoyages.com is an impressive endeavor.

Participation in the creation of “World Enough and Time” episode became a must for me when Marc showed us a clip of the episode made prior to ours. I was blown away by how good the special effects were – they were as good as any I had ever seen on my television screen. “That’s because the effects on New Voyages were done by Doug Drexler who did the effects for Enterprise and then went on to do the effects for Battlestar Galactica,” Marc Scott Zicree informed me when I sat down to talk to him about the upcoming premiere. “He’s one of the top guys, if not the top guy in the industry. He’s an Oscar winner. In fact, he was working on Enterprise while he was doing the earlier episodes of New Voyages, so he had to work under a pseudonym — the pseudonym was Max Rem on the previous episodes. I assume he chose the name Max Rem because he wasn’t getting much REM sleep. I should ask him about that, but I’m sure that’s the reason.”

With this premiere being essentially the first of its kind, I asked Marc what fans can expect to happen on August 23rd at the Fine Arts Theater in Beverly Hills. “There is going to be a 3pm screening for cast and crew, a 7pm screening for cast and crew and VIPs, showrunners, celebrities, etc.,” he explained, “and possibly a 9:30 pm screening for the public but we don’t know that yet, that’s not been confirmed. Then it’s going to be followed by a three-day Star Trek festival showing all ten movies in order. That’s a paid event. The screening of the Star Trek New Voyages episode isn’t. In addition, anyone anywhere in the world can go online at www.startreknewvoyages.com and register in advance and be able to watch not only the episode streaming August 23rd when it premieres, but in real time, the real event with George getting out of the limo and walking the red carpet, all the celebrities, the interviews with the celebrities, the panel after the screening. So it will be literally like they have a front row seat at the premiere.”

If that’s not enough, fans can go online at www.startreknewvoyages.com and register for a contest, where on Aug. 15th there will be drawing and one lucky winner will be flown to LA, put up in a hotel and have dinner with Marc and George before going to the premiere.

With all this going on, I wanted to know what Marc thought made this a ‘must see’ episode for anybody who loves the original characters. “For those who know the original series, there are only 79 episodes,” he explained. “But the people who have been seeing it who are fans of the original show have been calling it the 80th episode, which I consider high praise. In fact, that’s what we were trying to do, because if you loved the original show, this not only captures the feel, the look, the style, the energy and the emotion of the original show, it also brings the modern, cutting-edge special effects plus a level of acting, I think, beyond anything you ever saw in the original Star Trek. George Takei is just brilliant in this. It features him and focuses on him, plus we introduce a new character, his daughter Alana, played by Christina Moses.”

The daughter whom Sulu gains when he’s marooned for thirty years on an alien planet is such a tour-de-force for Christina Moses that the Oscar-winning producer of “Ordinary People” and showrunner on Medium, Ron Schwary, said upon seeing her performance, “That’s a star. She’s a star right there.” Marc testified further that, “It’s an amazing performance, a phenomenal performance, and the audience is moved to tears every time we show it. And I am, too.”

I told Marc that his co-writer, Michael Reaves had described this episode as a “City on the Edge of Forever” for Sulu. “Yes, I think that is very accurate,” Marc agreed. “That is certainly the high watermark we were aiming for. “City on the Edge of Forever” is my favorite Star Trek episode. It’s the only episode where you believe Kirk is actually in love with someone. It’s an episode where the stakes are very real and very high. It isn’t just a hook to save the day and go merrily on our way. It has an emotional cost and I think all good drama should. And so yes, I think that is exactly right and when we were crafting it, Michael and I were looking for ways to really find an emotional truth and really have it be powerfully moving to an audience. And it was. And it is. And I think we succeeded in our aim.”

For a veteran writer/producer with hundreds of television credits (including Sliders, Deep Space Nine, ST:TNG, and Babylon 5) to get involved in a project like this is unusual, so I asked him how it came about – and why, since there were other Internet projects — why this one? “I’ve never worked on a fan project of any kind in any medium because I’m a professional and my goal is to reach hundreds of thousands or millions of people with my work and have it be of as high a level as possible. So normally I’d never consider doing what would be considered a fan project, but in this case, Walter Koenig told me that he was about to star in an episode and DC Fontana, who had written and story-edited the original Star Trek, was about to write it.” This prompted him, he said, to go online and watch the second episode of New Voyages, which was a sequel to an original Star Trek episode called “Doomsday Machine.”

“I was thrilled,” Marc said about seeing “In Harm’s Way”. “I thought the sets were great, the costumes were great, the effects were great, the writing was very fun. I really liked the enthusiasm and the vigor and the intelligence of what they were doing and I saw ways to bring the level of production up in every department so it would be on a par with a network show. And that’s what I set about doing.”

Realizing that Star Trek: New Voyages had an audience of millions, Marc also knew that the timing was good. “I had always wanted to work with George Takei and had never found a role that was right for him in anything I had written on the various shows I’ve been on. And thirty years ago, my friend, Michael Reaves, had pitched a story to Star Trek Phase II, which was a series that Paramount spent a year developing that actually never got made. It was going to be a new Star Trek series with all the original cast except for Leonard Nimoy. This was around 1976-77, and they ended up making the movies instead. But back then, Michael Reaves went on to be an Emmy winner and sold 400 scripts and write for Star Trek: The Next Generation.”

The idea Michael pitched was one where Sulu gets marooned for thirty years all in the wink of an eye on the Enterprise and has a family on this alien planet. “It never got made, but now it’s thirty years later and it seems like this would be a great way to do this terrific story and save on makeup because George would be thirty years older and we wouldn’t have to age him.”

Though Paramount had pulled the plug on the series before Michael’s story had gone to outline, let alone script, Marc knew it to be a terrific story to introduce to the millions tuning in to New Voyages. “I knew I’d be working with a brilliant actor in George Takei and it would give me an opportunity, for the first time, to direct an hour television episode, which I had wanted to do, because I had written and produced many hundreds of hours of television, but never directed.”

So how did he manage to fulfill his desires and get George aboard this project, which our co-producer Winston Engle had aptly dubbed, “no studio, no network, no problem”? Once Marc was convinced of New Voyages’s quality and the possibilities inherent in what they were doing, he asked Michael if he wanted to collaborate. “The moment I saw Star Trek New Voyages, I realized that the world of fan films and world of network television had totally merged and you could reach an audience equivalent or superior to a network show without a studio or network being involved.”

With Michael in agreement, Marc approached the New Voyages producers and James Cawley, who plays Kirk as well as executive produces New Voyages. With their blessing, he typed up a three-page synopsis. “I reworked the story somewhat because subsequently, Star Trek Next Generation had done an episode called “The Inner Light” which had Picard marooned and raising a family. It wasn’t the same story, but there were similarities where I had to restructure it to keep it entirely on the Enterprise so it wouldn’t be the same story.” Once Michael Reaves signed off on the changes, he took the storyline to George Takei’s house.

“I arranged a meeting and I sat down with George and I said, ‘I’ve seen you act in Star Trek and all these other things you’ve done and you’re a brilliant actor, but you never got to do the Sulu episode you deserved.’ Because they only gave him little bits of business here and there. I gave him the synopsis and said, ‘I need you to read this now and tell me if you’ll do it.’ He read it right there and he said yes. And we were good to go.”

Good to go meant spending the better part of the next year building a production machine, to augment what was already on New Voyages. Marc brought in his friends from television shows like Battlestar Galactica, Lost, and Heroes, and movies like Spiderman III and the Star Wars films — basically going after “the A-team of people I would want to work with as a director, in terms of special effects, in terms of storyboard, in terms of actors, in terms of every department.” But these weren’t the only people Marc tapped for his vision. “I run a roundtable in LA of writers, directors, actors, producers, composers, editors, novelists. My wife and I have run that for 15 years, building a community of 500 people. There was a lot of good will stored up from all those years of mentoring people and helping people and all of us helping each other and so, a lot of those people rose to the occasion. Also, James Cawley had made three episodes of New Voyages up to that point, so there were a number of people who had worked on that side of the equation.”

With all that talent behind the scenes and a great script (when I read it, I couldn’t believe how moving it was and how much they nailed the voices), it was fitting to work with a consummate actor like George Takei. “He was wonderful, he was absolutely wonderful,” Marc enthused. “He was beyond my wildest hopes and dreams of how terrific he’d be. First of all, he spent months losing… he lost 15 lbs. He lifted weights for months to get in shape for this role because there’s a big swordfight and he’s in leather. He looks spectacular. You’d never guess his age, given how he comes across in this episode. He looks fabulous. My god, I look older than George Takei does.”

But more than how good he looked, Marc said George was spectacular to work with. “He was a dream. We had these incredibly long, grueling, harrowing days of shooting, because again, I knew that as a novice director, I would have a very hard time getting the pace up. I also knew that with half of our crew being nonprofessionals that again would slow us down. And it did. I was there a week and a half early for prep, just to make sure stuff would be ready, and there were still snafus, of course. But he (George) never had temper, never pulled any attitude. He was always part of the team. He was always looking to make it better. He was never part of the problem. He was always part of the solution.”

Shot in a small town in upstate New York, on a small budget that didn’t allow for anything beyond the necessities, the project faced conditions that were less than ideal. Nevertheless, Marc has nothing but admiration for George’s contributions. “He turned in a brilliant performance, I mean, the last take of the last day we shot in New York, he’s on the transporter, it’s the climatic scene, the climatic moment in the entire episode for his character, and he has this one take and this tear rolls down his cheek and it’s absolutely perfect. And it was after… we had started that day with a table read at 10 in the morning, and we were finished that day at 5:30 am and he was perfect. I’d never see anything like that.”

Nevertheless, the episode did not rest entirely on the shoulders of George Takei. The rest of the cast were playing iconic characters, which not only had to be a weighty challenge for them, but for the director as well. “In terms of the standing cast,” Marc told me, “we worked with them for many months to get their acting chops up as high as we possibly could. And they knew they were going to be working with George Takei and they were going to be working with really polished actors. No one was sloughing it off, no one was just trying to phone it in. Everyone was doing their best possible job. My wife, fortunately, having been an actor and having been a director off Broadway, she was constantly working with the actors between takes to get them into the moment.”

Marc went on to explain that he did two things going in to help the New Voyages regular cast. “I wrote the strongest acting demands on Sulu and Sulu’s daughter, Alana, because they were professional actors and I knew that I could get those performances from them. I demanded less of the other actors and I wrote to their strengths as much as I possibly could. Now, Jeff Quinn, who plays Spock, is a pretty terrific actor. Very subtle. Very very good and so I’m just enormously pleased with his performance. James Cawley, I think, does a very good job (as Kirk). John Kelly who plays Dr. McCoy, his day job is as an actual doctor. He’s a urologist. So we worked with him to draw upon his emotional responses in his real life and so ironically, as McCoy, I think he has a bedside manner and a kind of gentleness… he’s not as irascible as DeForest Kelly, but I think he brings his own strength to the role. Charles Root who plays Scotty is a lot of fun. And Uhura, Julienne (Irons), is a wonderful actress. We had Improv and scene study first, and discovered she’s a terrific actress. So I actually wrote a scene between her and George Takei, as Uhura, just to show what she could do as an actor. And she was wonderful.”

Marc can enthuse about “World Enough and Time” for hours, but I think he best summed it up thus. “I think all of us who made World Enough and Time – we’ve created a story that is, I think, one of those powerful Star Trek stories ever done in any medium. I think people will see it and be blown away. I think we’ve changed how television is made, how television is delivered, how television is perceived.”

Not only that, but it is my belief that Paramount is doing this new prequel movie with a new, younger cast, partially because Star Trek New Voyages has taught them that there is a significant audience out there who is hungry for good original Star Trek episodes, and they are willing to accept other actors in these iconic roles. After all, many different actors do Shakespeare.

So mark your calendar for August 23rd and make a date to see “World Enough and Time,” either in person in LA or on the Internet in streaming video. Spread the word to all your friends and become part of the history you’ve help make. I promise that you won’t be disappointed. This was a labor of love on our part and I’d love to reach every Trek fan that ever was and ever will be.