I always thought that one needed more explanation.Kurgan wrote:the Return of the Archons (that scene where the villagers, under the influence of Landru, pause, zombie-like to pick up blunt instruments and makeshift weapons to use against Kirk & Co. gives me shivers!)
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Moderator: Vympel
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Darth Servo
- Emperor's Hand
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"everytime a person is born the Earth weighs just a little more."--DMJ on StarTrek.com
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"Watching Sarli argue with Vympel, Stas, Schatten and the others is as bizarre as the idea of the 40-year-old Virgin telling Hugh Hefner that Hef knows nothing about pussy, and that he is the expert."--Elfdart
"You see now you are using your thinking and that is not a good thing!" DMJay on StarTrek.com
"Watching Sarli argue with Vympel, Stas, Schatten and the others is as bizarre as the idea of the 40-year-old Virgin telling Hugh Hefner that Hef knows nothing about pussy, and that he is the expert."--Elfdart
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Uraniun235
- Emperor's Hand
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Trek stopped accepting unagented submissions when Little Enterprise got going a couple years back, I guess because there was too much legal action from folks, or because Braga (who has never been that hot on the idea anyway, which was something Piller pushed through in yr3nextgen) didn't want to be bothered.
The way it happened with me was that as soon as I heard they were taking spec teleplays (which was early 1990), I dusted off the treatments I'd written up in 87 before NextGen premiered, and expanded 3 of them into teleplays, submitting them a couple months apart.
The first one, called THE CONUNDRUM OF DEFENSE, was not my best effort, too talky and political, and bounced back w/o comment.
The second one, CHRYSALIS, which I still think is dynamite 13 years later, was my TMP meets DOOMSDAY MACHINE, with action PLUS some decent literate sf content, about a CONSCIOUS black hole. That one got rejected too, and page 17 was turned down in one corner, which makes me think they baled on reading it.
The third one, THE INQUIRY, the cheapest story I could write, the one that took the most liberties with the Trek universe, they didn't buy (my guess is that it was too much like THE DRUMHEAD, which at that time was not Jeri Taylor's but was instead a Ron Moore story called IT CAN'T HAPPEN HERE, according to the packet of info they sent me shortly thereafter), but they liked it enough to ask me to fly in and pitch other stories.
I had another four stories in various stages at that point, but that wasn't enough for me to pitch with, so I started smoking again, which for whatever reason gave me the best burst of creativity in my life. I wrote up about a dozen more pitch ideas, was all set to pitch to Piller, but then he got a call from GR, who happened to be in that day (12/7/90, as I recall), and so he fobbed me off on Jeri Taylor. This was at around 4pm.
ALL of the pitches bombed. One of them, CROSSES TO BEAR, which had to due with a kind of emotional domino effect when Picard is shaken after a child dies aboardship, was something I was particularly proud of, and Ron Moore really liked it, but Jeri Taylor started in with the "Picard wouldn't do that" stuff, and once she said that for the fourth or fifth time, Moore just settled back and stopped talking.
Taylor did like one aspect of one story, the C-plot/runner aspect, which was this feeble bit that Picard always manages to be off the ship when his birthday comes round, to avoid the party, and how the crew is trying to circumvent this. But they needed more than that to buy anything, and she didn't go for the others.
There was a broadcast censorship story, with a reporter discovering something while aboard, an environmental space garbage story, a replication is bad for space-time one, a few military stories, a Barclay story, the Dilithium Fever comedy, and a Crusher Prime Directive vs Hippocratic Oath story, which was kind of Henry IV pt 2 in a lot of ways, with Beverly torn between Picard and her old mentor, who is very Falstaffian (I presented a similar story as a Wesley tale as well, with Wesley -- who is found drunk and unshaven when the E visits his summer school -- having to choose between a Brian Blessed rowdy type and Picard, and they didn't bite for that either.)
I even repitched CHRYSALIS, the second script idea mentioned above, but Taylor cut me off with, "We don't do fantasy." That was the only time in the whole session when I got angry. I went in knowing odds against and all that, but I at least understood her point of view on most of her turn downs (even if I didn't agree with them.) The idea that she would dismiss this idea, which I had researched the Hell out of to justify it from a few scientific standpoints (including stuff about plasmodes and other aspects of stars that seem similar to aspects that constitute life), as FANTASY really pissed me off. When Greg Benford, a writer of serious HARDCORE science fiction, won all sorts of awards for his novel about a thinking black hole a few years later (something I probably ought to read, now that I think of it), I really wanted to mail that info to Taylor, saying, TELL ME ABOUT HOW THIS IS FANTASY, HUH?!
Obviously, I still get pissed about this when I think back on it. My main memory is that I had new shoes, and they cut so badly into my ankles that they were bleeding when I left Paramount. My feet were hurting so bad that I didn't even try sneaking around the lot, I just limped out to the lot and left.
The way it happened with me was that as soon as I heard they were taking spec teleplays (which was early 1990), I dusted off the treatments I'd written up in 87 before NextGen premiered, and expanded 3 of them into teleplays, submitting them a couple months apart.
The first one, called THE CONUNDRUM OF DEFENSE, was not my best effort, too talky and political, and bounced back w/o comment.
The second one, CHRYSALIS, which I still think is dynamite 13 years later, was my TMP meets DOOMSDAY MACHINE, with action PLUS some decent literate sf content, about a CONSCIOUS black hole. That one got rejected too, and page 17 was turned down in one corner, which makes me think they baled on reading it.
The third one, THE INQUIRY, the cheapest story I could write, the one that took the most liberties with the Trek universe, they didn't buy (my guess is that it was too much like THE DRUMHEAD, which at that time was not Jeri Taylor's but was instead a Ron Moore story called IT CAN'T HAPPEN HERE, according to the packet of info they sent me shortly thereafter), but they liked it enough to ask me to fly in and pitch other stories.
I had another four stories in various stages at that point, but that wasn't enough for me to pitch with, so I started smoking again, which for whatever reason gave me the best burst of creativity in my life. I wrote up about a dozen more pitch ideas, was all set to pitch to Piller, but then he got a call from GR, who happened to be in that day (12/7/90, as I recall), and so he fobbed me off on Jeri Taylor. This was at around 4pm.
ALL of the pitches bombed. One of them, CROSSES TO BEAR, which had to due with a kind of emotional domino effect when Picard is shaken after a child dies aboardship, was something I was particularly proud of, and Ron Moore really liked it, but Jeri Taylor started in with the "Picard wouldn't do that" stuff, and once she said that for the fourth or fifth time, Moore just settled back and stopped talking.
Taylor did like one aspect of one story, the C-plot/runner aspect, which was this feeble bit that Picard always manages to be off the ship when his birthday comes round, to avoid the party, and how the crew is trying to circumvent this. But they needed more than that to buy anything, and she didn't go for the others.
There was a broadcast censorship story, with a reporter discovering something while aboard, an environmental space garbage story, a replication is bad for space-time one, a few military stories, a Barclay story, the Dilithium Fever comedy, and a Crusher Prime Directive vs Hippocratic Oath story, which was kind of Henry IV pt 2 in a lot of ways, with Beverly torn between Picard and her old mentor, who is very Falstaffian (I presented a similar story as a Wesley tale as well, with Wesley -- who is found drunk and unshaven when the E visits his summer school -- having to choose between a Brian Blessed rowdy type and Picard, and they didn't bite for that either.)
I even repitched CHRYSALIS, the second script idea mentioned above, but Taylor cut me off with, "We don't do fantasy." That was the only time in the whole session when I got angry. I went in knowing odds against and all that, but I at least understood her point of view on most of her turn downs (even if I didn't agree with them.) The idea that she would dismiss this idea, which I had researched the Hell out of to justify it from a few scientific standpoints (including stuff about plasmodes and other aspects of stars that seem similar to aspects that constitute life), as FANTASY really pissed me off. When Greg Benford, a writer of serious HARDCORE science fiction, won all sorts of awards for his novel about a thinking black hole a few years later (something I probably ought to read, now that I think of it), I really wanted to mail that info to Taylor, saying, TELL ME ABOUT HOW THIS IS FANTASY, HUH?!
Obviously, I still get pissed about this when I think back on it. My main memory is that I had new shoes, and they cut so badly into my ankles that they were bleeding when I left Paramount. My feet were hurting so bad that I didn't even try sneaking around the lot, I just limped out to the lot and left.