Im reading the history of the original series of Star Trek, and I am completely happy with my purchase. Because Im learning all sorts of amazing things about the show, but also lessons in any kind of production. The lesson Ive learned from looking at extraordinary pieces of art, is that they almost always have some extraordinary production behind them. You dont get movies like blade runner, or the thing, from normal every day production cycles. Star Trek looks the way it does because they got the guy who shot Gone With The Wind to come out of retirement, dude had never shot tv before, and be their DP. Also, the real story about what happened with the two different pilot episodes is way more interesting than the bullshit I heard. Roddenberry pitches to the studio, and they are interested. But they have never encountered a pitch like this before, and theyre not sure what a script for this new show would look like. So they ask Roddenberry to pitch them three different scripts. The studio chooses one script, Roddenberry shoots it, the studio watches it and declares this was a mistake. Roddenberry objects! He says but we shot the script you asked for! To which the studio replies yes, we realize that. We now see that we asked for the wrong script. So were going to ask you to shoot one of the other ones. That kind of self-awareness, and ability to see that they have made the wrong decision, is pretty rare in production I find.
Posted on: Mon, 20 Oct 2014 06:43:55 +0000