8 thoughts on “Trailer for “Chaos on the Bridge”

  1. I’m interested, but yeah that’s a bit steep. More than cable charges for movies. So I’ll wait to hear whether it’s good, and then…. maybe.

    I remember that the original series’ cast wasn’t pleased with the idea of a new Trek. Nimoy (IIRC) said Roddenberry was trying to “catch lightning in a bottle twice,” and didn’t think much of its chances. And for the first three seasons, he was right. I’d be interested in behind-the-scenes of what happened to change that. I have vague memories of writers being fired en masse, but there had to be more to it than that.

  2. And for the first three seasons, he was right.

    I seem to recall there was a writers’ strike, and the first season was really grim in quality.

  3. As I understand it, Roddenberry was also at that point very much under the control of his lawyer, who worked very hard at consolidating his own power while trying diminish everyone else’s with Roddenberry, and who was engaging in all sorts of shady, manipulative behavior.

  4. No, it wasn’t the lawyer…

    Sadly, after decades of drinking and drugging, Roddenberry was no longer himself..

    The sad reality of the series was it kept getting better in direct relationship to how little Roddenberry had to do do with it.

    (One of the oddest factors to realize about Roddenberry is that he NEVER WROTE A PRODUCED SCRIPT on his own, following TREK’s original pilot, in 1964. Harlan Ellison used to make fun of him, saying he wrote gibberish… And while that’s hardly true, reading some of his treatment drafts from the 1970s certainly shows some kind of a diminished capacity.)

    Roddenberry’s reality was almost always directly at odds with the public image–or at least the fandom image–that emerged around him. (There’s even evidence that making STAR TREK multi-racial was NBC’s idea… “The Cage,” the first STAR TREK, is basically lilly white. NBC also never objected to a woman second-in-command. They did object to Roddenberry casting whom they considered his mistress–not particularly fair, since Barret was actually terririfc in the role, of Number One! Roddenberry fairly consistently would weave a mythology about his life…)

    Years ago, after much double and triple checking, I broke the story of Roddenberry’s treatment for the hoped for second STAR TREK movie… It was a time travel tale which had the Enterprise going back again to the 1960s…. But this time, they let Kennedy be assasinated. (In fact, I have a possible memory that one rumor was that it was Spock with his hand on the trigger…)

    Howard Zimmerman, my editor at STARLOG felt strongly that the story should be run. My contacts at Paramount–who may well have leaked the story to me on purpose–stood firm that all this was true…

    When the piece ran, Roddenberry’s office supposedly went nuts, and folks swore it wasn’t accurate.

    Just a few years ago, reading the memoir of Susan Sackett, Roddenberry’s long time secretary and paramour–and featured in this new documentary–my “exclusive” was finally confirmed.

    I’m surprised if Dorothy (D.C.) Fontana isn’t included in this film. Sadly, she was one of the long time friends and associates of Roddenberry’s most mistreated by him in that first season of NEXT GENERATION.

    (One of the oddest decisions Roddenberry ever made was not to do a joint promotion for the third season of the original TREK: making Robert Justman (who had been the production whiz who helped make much of TREK’s magic a budgetary-conceivable reality) and Fontana the joint producers. Fontana, of course, had been the series’ story editor. A Fontana/Justman team, under Roddenberry’s executive producership, could have been really wonderful.)

    It’s also important to remember how perfectly nice and charming Roddenberry could be, when it was of absolutely no advantage to him to be so! There was great legitimate kindness in the man.

    But when it comes to NEXT GEN… Remember, David Gerrold wrote much (all?) of the series’ “bible,” (under Roddenberry’s supervision, of course)… And, just one of Roddenberry’s original, odd ideas: The Betazoid women should be three breasted….

  5. P.S: The writers strike was in the SECOND season, and led to a couple of scripts that had originally been written for the ALMOST TV series in 1978, the one that would haveunited the original crew (sans Nimoy), instead of a feature film. (One day, I’ll tell you the story of TOURING those Enterprise series, in November of 1977, just shortly after that planned TV show was nixed….)

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