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I sold about three dozen long articles to Cinefex between 1990 and 2000 and have freelanced for a bunch of other mags (CFQ, Markee, American Cinematographer, International Cinematographers Guild in the US, CGI and Hotdog in the UK) since then, but the Pocket experience (which is probably described in nauseating detail in the TREKLIT archives at trekbbs from 2002) was an utter disaster. I went on staff at Cinefex with the assurance that I'd get a couple of the 'making of' books that fall their way, but the editor there took all of that stuff herself, so my pro credits are still just for web (DailyRadar) and magazines.
As for THE ART OF STAR TREK, I did everything I was supposed to do, getting written letters of interest from Paramount PR, from ST VI producer Steven-Charles Jaffe, and from ILM's Steve Gawley, before calling to and getting a verbal expression of interest from Kevin Ryan at Pocket before submitting (he even said he hadn't heard the idea pitched before, which floored me), but then nothing, not an acknowledgement of receipt beyond the registered delivery slip.
Then a couple years later when I heard they were doing ART OF STAR TREK with different writers, I still couldn't get any response or acknowledgement out of them. Ryan had switched offices, so I could only reach John Ordover when I phoned.
Cinefex told me not to sue over a book that would bomb anyway, and that it would bounce back badly on them if I caused trouble (as if Paramount could ignore small press more than they already did -- our coverage on GEN was nearly cancelled 3/4 of the way through because of lack of coop from them!), so I just said 'fuck it' and bought the book that did come out and amused myself by counting errors and noticing how much better my proposal looked (in content, both pics and text) than their finished volume.
Mine was only focused on TOS TV and features, and was organized in a totally different way, looking at how the bridge evolved from pilots to series through features, then looking at other parts of the ship in the same chronological way, and so on, for Starfleet facilities and the Federation and alien stuff and parts of the galaxy. Visually it was great, cuz you'd go from a shot of the TOS Ent to a matching angle shot of the TMP Ent, but off to one side of the page, you'd see the route not taken, with the McQuarrie Enterprise from mid70s PLANET OF THE TITANS. It also let you see how the designers would rework sets from film to film, and didn't waste space by filling pages with movie poster imagery like the published volume did.
EDIT ADD-ON: the main dif was that I wanted my version to be equally text-heavy, with interviews of the artists and designers explaining their choices, so there would be a single-source reference for the work -- something definitive, and back then, there were more of these folks around than there are today. END NEW RANT.
Very bitter over the whole thing, and I guess my existence is an embarassment to Pocket, because at the end of 96 when John Eaves mentioned me for possibly doing more sketchbooks (this was when Pocket planned to do sketchbooks for the TOS movies, before the GEN/FC book only did moderate biz), Pocket still wouldn't talk to me, even though Ryan was long gone by then.
The mockup I kept of my THE ART OF STAR TREK proposal did help me get some other writing assignments, and I still have a very worn mockup that I may wind up scanning and putting up as a writing sample if I do a website sometime ...
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gnarly, man...
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Hey kmart. I've been reading Cinefex for years...what articles did you write or contribute to?
I've had my own funky experience Trek publishing. Waaaay back when my friend, and then editor of Videogames & Computer Entertaint magazine, told me his company was negotiating with Paramount to pick up the Star Trek magazine rights (Starlog's option was running out). We did a pretty neat proposal (I'll have to see if I have it somewhere), which suggested things like doing tech files on all the ships and equipment seen on the shows, and doing much harder interviews than usually appear in such fan-oriented mags...and a lot of other stuff that isn't coming back to me right off hand. Well, Paramount didn't go for it, but when Star Trek: The Magazine showed up, they did a lot of the same stuff we pitched, but more shallowly. Guess we were ahead of our time.
-------------------- "Well, I mean, it's generally understood that, of all of the people in the world, Mike Nelson is the best." -- ULTRA MAGNUS, steadfast in curmudgeon
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I really wish somebody else had done that stuff. Yeah, I don't know WHAT the deal was with STAR TREK THE MAG. I corresponded with that Nemecek guy who did (still does?) the TREK COMMUNICATOR and he said ST THE MAG people kept to themselves and did pretty much everything in-house all by themselves, without freelance input, but I think that kind of inbred approach hurt them, because they'd have all sorts of errors in there and nobody around who was objective to point the stuff out.
A guy I know from some bbs stuff did a super detailed interview with Richard Taylor about Abel and TMP and the guy who hosted this interview wound up getting the thing into ST THE MAG, but I don't think anybody even got paid for it!
I've read a couple places that the UK Trek mag (ST FILES maybe?) was a source for a lot of ST THE MAG's stuff as well, but don't know for sure -- I only know that my inquiries there went unanswered, same as ST TheMag.
As for the CINEFEX history ... I wrote about three dozen articles. That includes their retrospective on the original SW that ran in 96, plus their trek coverage for TUC, GEN, FC and INS. As far as other flicks, lemme remember ... ALWAYS, CAST A DEADLY SPELL, DEATH BECOMES HER, CONTACT, EVENT HORIZON, GODZILLA, DEEP IMPACT, WHAT DREAMS MAY COME, VIRUS, FROM THE EARTH TO THE MOON, TRUMAN SHOW, MATRIX, WILD WILD WEST, a huge hunk of the PHANTOM MENACE issue (plus a whole tech-heavy piece about ILM's R&D on that show which only got published a few years later in the Japanese edition of the magazine), MY FAVORITE MARTIAN, X-MEN, FIGHT CLUB, STUART LITTLE, WING COMMANDER, RED PLANET, MISSION TO MARS, END OF DAYS, and I'm sure I'm missing a few others. I did most of the BATTLEFIELD EARTH article interviews before I managed to get off of that to do THE CELL and CHICKEN RUN.
I was working on a huge version of the 2001 article (about 50,000 words), but that got tossed when I left and they put it together themselves, complete with errors (they mention MOTORIZED landing gear on the ARIES when it was a mechanical rig -- I think it was a penny counterbalancing on a stick, and when it got moved, the ship descended and let the gear go -- and they also got the YEAR wrong for when THE DAWN OF MAN sequence was shot!), which is a bummer. They had long intensive interviews from the 70s and 80s with Wally Veevers and Ivor Powell and Zorin Perisic and Les Novros that they didn't even use, interviews with great stuff nobody knows, and I can't figure out why they didn't use this stuff. The people are mostly dead now, so CINEFEX really blew it on how they handled that. The publisher there seemed to like that Piers Bizony guy who wrote the FILMING THE FUTURE book on 2001, so it could be he got Bizony to proofread the article ... that's the only way I can see the goofs in it slipping by.
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quote:Originally posted by kmart: I really wish somebody else had done that stuff. Yeah, I don't know WHAT the deal was with STAR TREK THE MAG...I think that kind of inbred approach hurt them, because they'd have all sorts of errors in there and nobody around who was objective to point the stuff out.
Amazing what slips by without error checking. Like the published Art of Star Trek, which has dozens of errors, including numerous miscredits of whose artwork was what. If they'd shown galleys to ONE knowledgeable person, most of those errors would have been caught.
quote: A guy I know from some bbs stuff did a super detailed interview with Richard Taylor about Abel and TMP and the guy who hosted this interview wound up getting the thing into ST THE MAG, but I don't think anybody even got paid for it!
Was that the one that for a while was on a site called Cinepixel? Good interview. Sad that it vanished.
It's sad that stuff that doesn't get published. I know a guy who did a HUGE article on the making of 20,000 Leagues Under the Sea, but he couldn't find any magazine that would publish it without hacking it to bits (well, aside from some of those funky ultra low-budget mags).
-------------------- "Well, I mean, it's generally understood that, of all of the people in the world, Mike Nelson is the best." -- ULTRA MAGNUS, steadfast in curmudgeon
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Yeah, I had a phone conversation with Probert right before I moved from Sunnyvale in early 98, and he talked about how he provided very specific captions and ORDER for the illustrations on ART, and how they completely disregarded that info when they printed it. I guess the STARLOG SFX V5 piece is the only one he said there was that had the captions in order and the info accurate at that time.
Yeah, it was the Cinepixel thing. I didn't know it was going away or I'd have printed it, to have a record of the artwork. The guy who did the interview (who is not Cinepixel) has a COMPLETE set of storyboards from the Abel/Taylor era on TMP, and if he ever gets back to where he has them in storage, he promises to xerox off a set for me. I have been DROOLING ever since hearing that.
About 20,000 ... There's a mag called FILMFAX. It pays diddly, but they do lots of retrospectives on older stuff. I have helped an LA-based writer with a piece he did on PHASE II and I guess it'll finally get published sometime this winter. I didn't do much besides advise him and slip him some stuff I had from old unused interviews, but I guess I'm considered a co-author on it. Anyway, if your friend still wants to see the 20,000 thing in print, they'd be one (low-rent) option to consider.
Too bad CFQ already ran one on 20,000 recently, they are definitely open to well-researched retrospectives (their OMEGA MAN piece was great!)
AMERICAN CINEMATOGRAPHER does them too, and pays better, but their retrospectives are usually focused on the camera and sometimes fx end of things. If your friend's piece could work for them, he should email Steve, the editor there, directly (up till recently, the email address was on the editorial page ... if you get a recent back issue, it'll have the contact info.) I'd list it myself, but I have only done one piece for them this year and don't have the email handy.
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quote:Originally posted by kmart: Yeah, I had a phone conversation with Probert right before I moved from Sunnyvale in early 98
He moved from there not long after. Golly, we were all neighbors and coulda done lunch (as Andy and I did).
quote:I guess the STARLOG SFX V5 piece is the only one he said there was that had the captions in order and the info accurate at that time.
Too bad that they never printed the other pieces Andy did. I think that was intended to be the first of three parts.
quote:Yeah, it was the Cinepixel thing. I didn't know it was going away or I'd have printed it, to have a record of the artwork.
I have the text of it, but not the images. I spoke to Andy about that interview. Seems he disagrees with a few of Taylor's assertions about who did what.
quote:The guy who did the interview (who is not Cinepixel) has a COMPLETE set of storyboards from the Abel/Taylor era on TMP
I should ask Andy if he has that...I know he has a ton of TMP stuff.
quote:About 20,000 ...
Thanks for the suggestions. The guy I mentioned didn't want to go the FILMFAX route. I believe he'd gone to CFQ, but they weren't intersted at that time.
Sadly, the email address by which we used to correspond is not longer functional. I'll have to try to track him down and see if he ever did anything with the piece.
-------------------- "Well, I mean, it's generally understood that, of all of the people in the world, Mike Nelson is the best." -- ULTRA MAGNUS, steadfast in curmudgeon
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Does anyone have any pics of the old version of the Challenger class (the Constitution based one), either fan produced or the version from the graphic novels?
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I'll dig up schematics on that monstrosity when I get home and link them. I know ASDB has some images in their "dropped designs" section. Even a pic from a comic. My saying I HATE that design is pretty strong feelings considering I really like most of the DS9 "Frankenstein Fleet".
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i actually made a new version of the pic for an article recently (reuse this puppy all you want, but not without linking to the http://galactopedia.captainmike.org )
the first is the fandom version (with a rear torp launcher ) i kinda like the non-dithered version of it myself, as a design. the second one is the Marco Polo [which was referred to as 'Challenger-class'] from the comic "Thin Ice" (Michael Jan Friedman, Matt Haley, Carlos Garzon), which i am pretty fond of (the ship and the story)..
yes, i do think that even though the fandom Connie-bash is obviously not the BoBW Challenger, it could be the unspecified NCC-2032 from TUC.. (since i'd prefer all those ships not be Excelsiors or Connies
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I'd forgotten that the Marco Polo was quite as different from the fandom version. Personally, I think it's work best with the primary hull of the fandom one and secondary hull of the Marco Polo. But that's probably just me.
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Getting back on topic, here's an extract from the BOBW script that sheds some (but not much) light on which ship the good Admiral rode to Jouret IV
quote:5 EXT. SPACE - THE ENTERPRISE (OPTICAL)
In orbit. Another starship, transport class, has joined them.
PICARD (V.O.) Captain's log, Stardate 43997.6. Admiral Hanson and Lieutenant Commander Shelby of Starfleet Tactical have arrived to review the disappearance of New Providence colony. No sign remains of the nine hundred inhabitants.
From this we can gather that the ship wasn't supposed to be the Melborne, but a Starfleet transport instead. Of course this dosen't prove anything, Hanson could have transfered to another ship at Wolf 359, but I doubt it. For now I'll assume that the Excelsior we saw was either the U.S.S. Roosevelt or some as yet unknown Excelsior-Class Starship which served as Hanson�s flagship before and during the battle.
posted
Ya know what just hit me as bleeding obvious there... the necessities of television production with respect to a really brief scene in an action-packed episode.
Would the stage crew have built a new -- or even altered -- set for a brief, thirty-second conversation? Since the Enterprise-D's battle bridge was already in use in that episode, they just filmed Hanson on it for a little while, too!
Of course it's not absolute proof, but if Hanson's battle bridge can be considered identical to the Enterprise-D's in BOBW, then that would be a strong indication that they're the same class of ship.
I guess that just leaves the question of what practical joker in the ship's Engineering department programmed one of the computer panels to display an old-style alert visual.
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![[Wink]](wink.gif)
Guess we were ahead of our time.
![[Big Grin]](biggrin.gif)
) i kinda like the non-dithered version of it myself, as a design. the second one is the Marco Polo [which was referred to as 'Challenger-class'] from the comic "Thin Ice" (Michael Jan Friedman, Matt Haley, Carlos Garzon), which i am pretty fond of (the ship and the story)..
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