CBS/Paramount v Axanar? Some broad thoughts

So, everyone has been buzzing about the joint CBS/Paramount lawsuit filed Dec. 29 against Alec Peters and the "Axanar Works" "fan film" crowdfunded movie. There's been no similar action made against any other fan film that we have heard of—not Star Trek Continues, Farragut, Renegades or New Voyages/Phase II, at least. All of whom, and several more, I've been happy to help promote in the name of a passion fix for fans over this decade-long fallow time for pro Trek—ever since the "gray area" for them to exist as no-income projects was hashed out by New Voyages back in 2004.

But no, this legal action is specific. 

I'm not going to wade into the mushrooming detail points or the back-and-forth here—that's been all over the Interwebs and, five days on, cooler heads are starting to prevail...at least in public comments and posts. Still, there are issues: Some point to the lawsuit as the answer to a threat perceived by the corporate rightsholders re: the scope or quality of Axanar as crossing the line (at least as has been promised)—but the legal issues, if that broad, would point to shutting down everyone. Some guess this is merely the first salvo against the biggest budget of fan films, and that either the owners enforce their property or they lose it—no middle ground. I hope there's no later, broader action—but, as I have always suspected, this is definitely not a typical mass Cease & Desist or broad-brush campaign (this legal action with outside attorneys is reportedly a second step from the owners after sending Axanar an earlier C&D, despite some direct contact). This is a step up: We've already seen the post-"Viacom divorce" split franchise parents actually act together for once in the lawsuit filing, making the "series or movie?" question moot on this. We'll just have to see where this goes.

I hope it goes quickly.... but as corporations, CBS and Paramount will be notoriously slow to offer any more details that would amount to "fighting it in the press"—although there have been follow-up statements. So we are going to be reduced to reading between the lines, and retconning for past clues and quotes, and a mostly one-sided "he said/they didn't" ... so far. The Intertubes were pretty hot the first day... and there are obviously a *ton* of Axanar donors and supporters out there who are not taking kindly to the action. But I have to know this is not 1996, and the big boxes are not blind to that blowback and the potential impact on fandom—and mainstream PR buzz— with a film and series enroute (especially the latter). Thus, the stakes go higher.  There were quick catcalls against big bad CBS, and hoots over the modern nature of franchise ownership vs. fans served after 50 years ... but within a couple days even some online observers started to look at both sides: the immediate hashtag #IStandWithAxanar has now been met with #IStandWithCBS a couple days later... and a host of memes that do not see the production as a martyr, in part in reaction to varied takes on Axanar's public business plan online. And beyond all that, don't make the mistake of thinking that all the world—even all fandom—hangs out on Facebook and blogs 24/7.


As observers, it's also a time to be mindful of who's words we are reading: Who are legitimate journalists versus wannabe bloggers on this, as the "media reports" come out. But it sure has gotten fandom talking—even the mainstream and trade media. And as my buddy John Champion has Facebooked after New Year's Day:  "Congratulations to the 87% of people I follow who have all become experts in the intricacies of federal copyright law in the last four days!"


There's a maxim I learned real early in Hollywood and the Trek business for whenever you try to push the envelope: Just don't do anything to make anyone say "no." A second would be: Don't make anyone ask their lawyer. The fan films exist at all due to the tangle of the legal "divorce" agreements, Paramount and CBS as Hollywood union/guild signatories, etc. … and yet simultaneously their acknowledged obvious value in the pop-culture conversation, especially in a fallow, non-series time. (FREE PROMO! How many tentpole-wannabes would kill for that?)

This is the last way anyone wanted to kick off the big 50th Trek anniversary year, with a movie and streaming series both on the way for summer and then spring—no matter what you may think of them now, sight unseen. So let's hope this gets settled quickly, quietly, and with as little damage to either fandom creativity or the corporate brand as possible.

I've said for a long time that the coming of new Trek weekly adventures, especially, may be what takes a lot of the air out of the fan-film balloon of the last decade, just from the lack of newly diverted attention and dollars among the masses—without "CBS & Para" having done a thing. It's just human nature... even by fans.

I do know one thing. That filing and the frou-frou sure put me behind on my writing during the mid-holiday "dead week."

And you can bet this will be a deep-dive topic at our Portal 47 Ask Dr. Trek Roundtable in January!

Listen: I deep-dive the Trek 2017 news on NPR & Trek.fm

For those of you who prefer your Trek 2017 info and discussion audio-style as well as deep,
I took part in two great discussions this week that are now downloadable for a listen at your leisure.

Many are familiar with The Ready Room, the flagship program of Chris Jones' Trek.fm network of podcasts—and for the third time this year he invited me on for a breaking-news special edition. This time, rather than the deaths of Leonard Nimoy and Harve Bennett, we had a much more upbeat time talking about the future: the news, business angle and still many questions surrounding "Star Trek 2017"—as well as the stupifying and varied fan reaction to the CBS All Access streaming platform it would pioneer. It's 90 minutes and quite a deep dive, by the times we plumb the angles and implications...and as usual I hope I brought some historical and production context many fans might not have thought of yet.

Also this week, NPR radio host Tom Ashbrook in Boston invited me on his On Point call-in talk show Friday to join two TV critics and bring the hot-news Trek perspective to the topic—the current so-called TV  "reboot" wave. Of course I made the point that Star Trek has already passed through its initial "regeneration" not once but twice, 1986 and 2009—and that to fans this represents not a TV fad but just the latest volume in the series FINALLY coming out, dammit. I had the last half-hour of the hour-long show, but it's all great fun with X-Files and Gilmore Girls getting the secondary attention from the other guests, as well as Trek. You can listen or download it as well at the link.

And if you are not in the download audio habit—that's simply what a podcast is!—they make a great on-demand companion for your long commute, your long jog or workout, or whenever meaningful (and specialized) audio can come in handy. 

Here's as good a time as any to try them out!  I've been a guest on 30+ shows all across Chris's Trek.fm network for years now and he even has a special page made up for them in Trek.fm's coveted "featured iTunes" status section...although you can get to them in a zillion ways—including just direct audio play off the website.

Of course, this was also the topic of this month's "Ask Dr. Trek" Roundtable telebriefing in my Portal 47 group of backstage deep-divers (that's the session where they pepper me, instead of a wonderful guest Trek voice you've likely never heard from—which is the second one of the month). And true to my archive opening feature in P47, I shared both Bob Justman's 1986 memos and Interstat fan letters that year to show how much things are still the same between 1986 and 2015.
 If you're diggin' these type of second-level info, past or future, you really should come through the Portal with us each month for the whole package!

STV: Meet Star Trek's '60s-style poster artist, Juan Ortiz

This one has been in the can for a while, but hey—people still love Juan Ortiz' funky
60's-style Star Trek poster looks, and very few folks have got to meet this incredible artist who's started a mini-franchise all his own with these iconic, widely-diverse graphics: posters for all 80 original Trek episodes, and now the animated series, too, on everything from T-shirts to trading cards.

CBS helped collect them all into a "coffee table" style book, STAR TREK: The Art of Juan Ortiz —it still makes a great self-gift if you didn't get enough Trek in your stocking!—and during the 2013 holiday season sponsored a gala signing event for author and book, opening a gallery show of the posters at the West Coast venue of the Paley Center for Media in Beverly Hills. The event was reported, but here's how it looked and sounded, along with Juan and his fans:

Single episode posters (and in the U.K. too) and spin-off goodies like shot glasses, and trading cards from Rittenhouse Archives, are available, too.

New Bye Bye Robot 'Voyager' art: it's my bud, at last

It's taken 20-some years, but I finally feel I've done right by one of my oldest friends—or at least that's me personal reaction to Friday's news announcement at startrek.com of a new five-piece, four-artist original print offering from Bye Bye Robot.

Actually, here's the full frame:

I met art studio Bye Bye Robot founders Charity and Chris Wood in 2010, before they were BBR, and was happy to help how I could as they worked to get their official CBS license for Star Trek fine art prints and graphics in 2012. 

But even further back: Many of you know my logos for Trekland, The Con of Wrath, the Trekland Trunk, and most of all Mystar Media; some of you even remember the incredible black-and-white line art in my old, original annual "TNG" concordances.  THAT was all my bud Kevin Hopkins—met up the first week of sophomore college year as I hosted aTrek/sci-fi club organizer, then oft-roomates and mutual best men… and, since my days with pro Star Trek, my perennial candidate for breaking in to the licensed art world. 

Like many others whose Trek work you've seen before, he has a great style that includes portraits, heroic fantasy, and photorealistic biology/botany—in both "analog" pigment and now digitally.

Charity tells me she's excited for this set, each one repping a different series, and to work with two new artists among the four—Thomas Ziffer, who's been involved with the gallery, as well as Kevin.

"Kevin has been on our radar for a long time," Charity says, when I asked her for some thoughts for TREKLAND. "I first met him while he was accompanying Larry at the Dallas Comic Con, back in 2010. We chatted about his penchant for fossil digs, and then I found out about his art career and talent. Well, it took us nearly four years to capture one of his paintings, but we’ve finally done it. Now (besides more awesome artwork) all that’s left is to weasel my way onto one of his paleontological digs so I can fulfill my dream of finding my very own fossilized megalodon tooth!"

My getting Kevin and Charity introduced was a happy serendipity that finally led to this "official Trek" opportunity: but instead of Kevin's faces of actors, it's ships—as in, the fourth print just released by BBR and their first-ever Voyager subject. Take a close gander, up top—and I'm proud to say I lent a couple eyeballs and notes for it, too. 

"Being able to work on this Voyager poster project and doing the art for "The Long Way Home"  is a very special thing for me because it lets me give back a little bit to an idea and a an ongoing project that has given me so much," Kevin says. "And doing an officially licensed piece of Star Trek related art (for Bye Bye Robot) is a special milestone in my career."

Kevin reminded me that he grew up in an even more rural area of Oklahoma than I did, where the sparse TV offerings like The Twilight Zone, The Outer Limits, Lost in Space, and "the annual Saturday afternoon showing of This Island Earth " was enough to tease but not satisfy the sci-fi craving they awakened. 

"There was a bookmobile that stopped in the community sporadically, and one summer I managed to read the entire science and science fiction sections that it contained," he says. "I would save up for visits to larger towns where I could find cheap science fiction paperbacks.  Still, the scifi sections were small in even the best of book stores.  I still remember the first year that science fiction novels outsold westerns nationally."

And that was about the time Star Trek hit, Kevin recalls: "The first season of the original airing was like a breath of fresh air for me—it supplied something that my mind was aching for; it allowed me to see that world as something larger and more diverse than the little town where I lived. My affinity for Star Trek continues on through the present; it has brought me friends, experiences and life lessons I would never have encountered otherwise, and I am very grateful for them all."

And me…I'm just grateful to have finally helped play a part in getting that talent out to the "official" Star Trek world. Yay, Charity… and yay, Kevin.

Hold your horses—there's no Netflix-CBS "talks" *

Before I get to a look back at FedCon, or Phoenix Comicon…. or a deadline reminder to you about the coming LA2Vega Trek tour and the one-day special we threw in... before all my backlogged videos patiently waiting… I need to address this today.

There's a story up on "Plus.Google" by an unnamed writer—yes, a story without a byline—that quotes me from a Phoenix Comicon panel Saturday saying Netflix and CBS are "in talks" to do a new Star Trek series. "Lucrative" ones, no less.

And that's not true.

I know Trek fans are hungry for new material and hoping that someone "gets it" and gets on with doing one. That's why everything from the continuing novels to fan fiction, to Star Trek Online and other games, to the fan films, to  cosplayers and prop and shipbuilders are all still going strong: People are desperate for new Star Trek—including the new fans driven by JJ or the Bluray remasters and, yes, mass Netlfix availability. And, said desperate fans pounce on every crumb that's out there — as good fans would. Or they even do more, like organizing a Facebook "petition" campaign to get Netflix to produce a "fifth season" of Enterprise.

But this non-bylined writer known only as "Starfleet Intelligence" is too wrapped up in tossing around jazzy phrases of TheBizSpeak in this post, and has the situation blown up way too big —though it makes a nice screaming headline. I wish he or she had talked to me afterward for some real context to the tiny bit I DID mention. (or even got my bio right.) 

So, HERE's some context.

As we know by now, Netflix has changed the TV/media landscape yet again by becoming a platform of clout with original shows like House of Cards and Orange Is the New Black—popular not only with fans, but critics...and now the award shows. It's in Netflix's interest to be casting about for new shows—including those from known franchises. I understand Star Trek is one of them—especially as Trek's 737 hours of "reruns" performs as a top draw ON Netflix. As I understand it, there have been overtures.  But none taken. So far.

That's it, guys. I appreciate the pedestal, of sorts, but this excitable blogger makes it sound as if show budgets and writer's guides for a done-deal Trek series are already floating around in CBS offices. Maybe they are—but not to my knowledge. We all know plenty of people in private and public have pitched show concepts and formats—and on a "channel" that makes financial and distributional sense. And, we do know that one good way to help get Star Trek back is to keep those Netflix viewer "ratings" tickers clicking right along marathon-style, as a barometer, to reveal any and all Trek shows being watched. But inertia and the unanswered questions of who, what, when, where, and how much have, so far, won out. Sadly.

Oh—and someone also needs to tell this "reporter" that Star Trek Communicator is not a current thing. 

Sadly. *sniff*



*Again: That *I* know of.