J.J. Abrams tells us why there’s no Shatner cameo in new Star Trek movie
Q: How do you react to William Shatner’s ire at not having a role in the movie?
A: It was very tricky. We actually had written a scene with him in it that was a flashback kind of thing, but the truth is, it didn’t quite feel right. The bigger thing was that he was very vocal that he didn’t want to do a cameo. We tried desperately to put him in the movie, but he was making it very clear that he wanted the movie to focus on him significantly, which, frankly, he deserves. The truth is, the story that we were telling required a certain adherence to the Trek canon and consistency of storytelling. It’s funny — a lot of the people who were proclaiming that he must be in this movie were the same people saying it must adhere to canon. Well, his character died on screen. Maybe a smarter group of filmmakers could have figured out how to resolve that.
- from Scifi
Tim Kring and Zachary Quinto Talk Heroes Season 3, Sylar, and Spock
Heroes Creator Tim Kring and lead baddie Zachary “Sylar” Quinto played host to a drooling pack of entertainment reporters today, all armed with scintillating questions regarding the return of the beguiled once-wunderkind “Heroes.”
Heroes will return on September 22nd with a three hour spectacular which will include the two hour premiere episode. For Heroes, season three is somewhat of a shot at redemption. Many folks, including Kring himself, were unhappy with the ambling and repetitive nature of Heroes’ follow up season – and it showed in the numbers. Did the god of the Heroes universe and the show’s slimey bad-guy bring any encouragement to the table?
So with one season in the hit column, and one in the miss, Heroes now has to prove it is good enough to have built in Nissan commercials and still be true blue to its fans. Kring was anxious to course correct the show during season two, but the WGA strike ultimately quelled those ambitions. “What people are referring to as season 2 is not season 2 by our design.” Kring told reporters going on to reveal that Heroes: Villains would have been, in some semblance, the second half of season 2.
Not surprisingly, questions for Quinto dominated much of the conference call. Quinto’s nuanced enunciation of Sylar has resulted in one of the greatest villains of television history. Quinto himself expressed a bit of gracious awe over the acceptance of his character by the Sci-Fi/Comic fandom calling us geeks “The most ardent group of fans you could be working for.”
Kring revealed that the plot for Heroes: Villains would encompass 13 episodes. That is, for those who get into the industry side of things, also the exact number of episodes ordered for either new shows or shows that are riding on “the bubble.” Despite that fact, Heroes has indeed been given a full season order of 25 episodes with Kring revealing that the second plotline of season 3 getting 12 episodes. When asked if Heroes was judged too harshly in its second season, Kring met the question head on with a stroke of sarcasm. “It’s hard to be shiny and new all the time.”
Quinto dropped a bombshell concerning whether or not we’d see Sylar’s mild-mannered side, Gabriel Grey. “… at a certain point we will revisit that character, and the shade of that character as you saw him.” Kring added that we’d see a more human side of Sylar in this season. “Zach has really provided us with the ability to explore this character in really, really, really deep ways. I see Sylar as someone who is on a very deep existential quest to find out the meaning of his own existence.”
- from UGO
Star Trek and Lost Producer Damon Lindelof on Entertaining the Masses
Q: You’ve said the episode of Lost where Desmond travels through time is an homage to Star Trek. Did you approach the upcoming film as a fanboy?
A: I had a real reverence for the material, but more importantly, for the world and how special that world is, and how long it’s persevered. I watched a fair amount of the original and I really watched a lot of Next Generation. The first series of meetings we had were along the lines of: What is the State of the Union of Trek, and has it been brought to a place where people will resent our involvement because we’re coming from the outside? I think it’s like how with Batman, it got to the point where there was more press about the nipples on the Batsuit than there was about the characters, and the franchise needed a reboot.
Q: William Shatner has been very vocal about his displeasure in not having a place in the film. How did you react?
A: Mr. Shatner created Kirk, so I understand and sympathize with his feelings about what his role — or lack of a role — in our movie was. That being said, Kirk died; he fell down a cliff face. That made it incredibly challenging for us to tell the story we wanted to tell and figure out a way for William Shatner, who is now several years older than Kirk was when he died, to be in the movie. It’s an incredibly ambitious movie on a technical scale. I can say with confidence that we achieved what we set out to achieve, and that’s all you can ask for.
Q: When it comes to Lost, you seem very willing to respond to audience demands about what we want to see. Why?
A: We’re writing a television show that’s supposed to be consumed by the masses. In the same way that a gladiator in the Roman arena lived or died based on whether or not he was entertaining, we feel like an instantaneous thumbs up, thumbs down response is huge for us. More importantly, the majority of the writers on Lost are fanboys. There’s a ripple effect that occurs where we say, “Nikki and Paolo are not working. We don’t like them, the audience isn’t going to like them.” By the time the audience starts complaining about Nikki and Paolo, we’ve already written a script where they get buried alive.
- from AMC
J.J. Abrams And ‘Star Trek’ Writers Reveal Film Has ‘All The Gadgets You Could Want’
The writers, directors, and producers behind the “Star Trek” reboot guard the secrets of the upcoming movie like it’s their own Prime Directive. Mention anything that could reveal a plot point — like say, moments with Kirk and Spock’s mothers — and they immediately employ defensive maneuvers.
“The what? What flashbacks?” writer/director J.J. Abrams asked. “I never said flashbacks.”
“We didn’t say there were flashbacks!” teased writer/producer Alex Kurtzman.
But that didn’t mean they aren’t willing to give something up — in the spirit of diplomacy, of course. Plot and character development might be off limits (they all refuse to answer the question, “Where does the movie start” except Abrams, who teased, “In the fu-ture”) — but gadgets aren’t. “We intentionally don’t talk too much about the story,” said producer Bryan Burk, “but there’s all the gadgets you could want. No replicators,” since they originated in “Next Generation,” “but there’s warp speed and transporter beams and tricorders and communicators and everything you could want. All the gadgets.”
“It’s one thing in ‘Star Trek’ to get all excited and freak out about communicators, but to them, it’s like it’s the new iPhone,” Abrams said. “These are just the tool they’re using.”
- from MTV
J.J. Abrams’ Star Trek plot revealed
Roberto Orci and Alex Kurtzman feel like the most omnipresent writers in the industry. Part of it is how many geektastic projects they’re on, but part of it is also their willingness to talk, talk, talk. How long before they’re directing?
The latest place that the duo yap is a Fox Movie Channel show, Life After Film School. They’re on the show to flog the Fox show Fringe, but the preview clip is all about… Paramount’s Star Trek! Fox knows how to get the eyeballs, I guess.
They discuss the Star Trek canon, but first they go out of their way to say that this film, while it features the earliest days of the Enterprise crew from the original series, is not a prequel. And you know what? They’re sort of right. In fact, Star Trek blows through all the paradigms that we have for film franchises. Here’s why:
The movie begins in the Star Trek present - some time in the The Next Generation timeline. Romulans head back in time, either to kill Kirk or his father (or both, just to be safe. This is known as “The Terminator Gambit”) and Spock follows them into the past, back when the Enterprise crew were young. These events change the history of the Trek universe, either creating a parallel timeline that the films will now follow or simply overwriting everything else that we know as Trek history.
Trekkies pay final visits to Las Vegas attraction
After a decade at the final frontier, Star Trek: The Experience is going where no Las Vegas Strip attraction wants to go.
With a decommissioning ceremony - as befits any great vessel - the exhibit and its replica of the starship Enterprise are closing Monday.
Thousands of trekkies are ”beaming up” from across the United Federation of Planets, er, the United States and around the world one last time, according to exhibit spokesman Chad Boutte.
Some seek a final encounter with the Borg, the television show’s race of organic robot aliens who tell everyone ”resistance is futile.” Others just want to share a farewell drink - likely a stiff Warp Core Breach, with 10 ounces of rum - with fellow fans at the attraction’s restaurant.
Employees dressed as aliens discuss the minutiae of their worlds’ mythologies with visitors who learn, in typically circular trekkie logic, that the exhibit is a ”time station” for transporting researchers and equipment between the 21st and 24th centuries.
For $49.99, fans can enjoy two virtual rides and the Museum of the Future, with costumes, ”phasers” and Mr. Spock’s coffin. More than 3 million people have come through since the Experience opened in 1998.
In the end, the frontier the USS Enterprise couldn’t breach was earthly: The attraction’s owner, Cedar Fair Entertainment Co., and the Las VegasHilton, its landlord, couldn’t agree on a new lease. They worked as a typical landlord and retail tenant, with Cedar Fair keeping all revenue from the attraction, said hotel spokesman Ira David Sternberg.
Trekkies are incensed. They’ve scrawled reminiscences about the exhibit on the walls inside, and they’re calling Cedar Fair and the hotel to complain. But their online rumor that the space the exhibit occupies will become a theater for pop star Michael Jackson is unfounded, Sternberg said. He said nothing’s decided.
- from here
First Cut of Star Trek Complete - Paramount Preview Goes Well
Four months after wrapping principal photography JJ Abrams and his editors Mary Jo Markey and Maryann Brandon have finished their first cut for Star Trek. Late last week Abrams screened this cut for studio boss Brad Grey and other big shots at Paramount and according to sources it went very well.
The Paramount buzz on Star Trek went into high gear last week. One source tells TrekMovie that first cut showing was “a hit.” Another old studio hand who isn’t even working on the projects called the cut “very impressive.” And yet another source said that the reaction in the screening room was “far beyond expectations” and as we know expectations have been high at the studio since the powers that be decided to move it from a Christmas 2008 release to their first summer tent pole of 2009.
- from TrekMovie
Star Trek Online Announced
From IGN:
Star Trek is one of the two most enduring and popular sci-fi franchises in history, however when it comes to massively multiplayer games it has been noticeably absent. Star Wars, the other pillar of sci-fi, has its own MMO. The Matrix, another potent sci-fi franchise, has its own MMO as well. Yet despite having millions of fans worldwide, there remains no Star Trek MMO, and the most recent effort by Perpetual Entertainment to make one never materialized beyond a handful of screenshots that trickled out over the years. The Perpetual game died along with the studio’s fortunes earlier this year, and the developer has since shut down. But now Cryptic Studios, the developer of City of Heroes, City of Villains, and the upcoming Champions Online, has picked up the torch for Trekkers. The company announced on Monday that it had secured the global rights to Star Trek Online from CBS Consumer Products, the holder of the license. Moreover, it said it would show the first gameplay video and reveal the first details regarding the game next month, at the Star Trek Convention in Los Angeles on Sunday, August 10.
JJ Abrams’ Star Trek Poster! First look at Spock.
star trek poster