^Has Gerrold written anything in the past quarter-century that didn't contain swipes at Roddenberry's lawyer?
Sure! Worlds of Wonder, his book on writing science-fiction, published about fifteen years ago, contained zero swipes at Maizlich.
Neat but hackneyed. He's just mad at TNG for snubbing him. I believe Rick Berman's exact words to him when he called was 'What do you want?' It's as warm as lovely as the greeting you'd get from any mafioso member. So I don't blame him for wanting revenge on Berman, GR's lawyer and GR himself for getting rid of him when TNG premiered and in the process trying to be another GR and eclipse his fame which is never gonna happen.
I don't doubt it, but the video is supposed to sell the TV version to me and instead it turned me off. And, quality notwithstanding, I don't want to contribute to a war story. I've only got so much money and I just gave most of my discretionary budget to OneFund.
I backed the project because I like Gerrold & Fontana and I want to see more space opera shows, but I don't really think this particular kickstarter is going to make it. $650K is A LOT of money for something that looks and feels this old-fashioned. I mean, the logo looks like it's from a bad 80s video game and the costume designs look like they were rejected from Space Balls for being too silly. Even Space Command "only" made $221K, and that had some pretty big names attached to it and already seemed a lot more polished when their campaign started.
A pretty good, comprehensive, and accurate overview of the convoluted history of Gerrold's Star Wolf and its antecedents, as well as an endorsement of the Kickstarter project, has been posted on Comic Book Resources' "Comics Should Be Good" site: http://goodcomics.comicbookresources.com/2013/05/03/friday-aboard-the-star-wolf/
I'd give it a shot if it ever gets made but it's only raised 4% of it's goal so it still has a very long way to go!
Fascinating watching these Kickstarter things. To make $650K in the 33 days they've allotted means the target average per day needs to be 3.03% of the total (3.03030303030303 actually). By day 5 (today) to be on target you'd want to have 15.15% of the total, but Star Wolf's only reached 4.77%, which is -10.38% low. None of this is to say it can't happen, as the right exposure could quickly put them back on track or over, assuming there is sufficient interest.
There's no other way to find a rich backer in hollywood. I guess Bill Gates doesn't like science fiction yet you'ld think he'd be the first geek guy to like it along with his other billionaire friends including the people who made billions reverse engineering all his ideas. Gerrold needs to write a letter to the sultan of Brunaii or one of those kings over there and give him a cameo or his own starship and at least one main character of his race represented, and make sure his novels are in afghani book stores and sell well in the middle east and in some of the axis of evil countries but make sure not to bill himself as the great satanic infidel or g.o.d.. etc.
Plenty can go wrong with that rich foreign backer approach, which is why nearly 40 years later we don't have Orson Welles' final film, THE OTHER SIDE OF THE WIND. The Shah of Iran helped finance it ... things sort of went bad for him if you recall ... serious legal quagmire results ...and Welles' surviving associates spend decades trying to untangle these issues.
Gerrold is a gifted writer, and I read and enjoyed pretty much all of the SW material over the years. I do wonder whether the time to bring SW to the screen has passed - the "anti-TNG" styled space opera, which is what SW was really meant to be, has already been done, by B5, nuBSG and even, to a lesser extent, DS9. It wouldn't be nearly as fresh today as it might have been if it were done, say, in the '90s. That said, there's so little space opera on screen today that I'd still love to see it.
Gerrold, Melinda Snodgrass and Fontana have all expressed their interest at separate times in doing stuff in what I guess you'd now call the FIREFLY mode (for myself I thought of it as AntiTrek, though Snodgrass' Hans Solo meets the Nostromo line really fits well) ... that's really what I'd prefer to see rather than another military-based show. but hey, beggars can't be choosers ...
^^^ Well even though Star Wolf is a military vessel, the crew is largely a bunch of misfits that probably wouldn't make-it on a spit-shined ship like the Enterprise or the like.
At 24% of the way through their funding period (8 days out of 33) and they've raised 6.1% of their goal. They're going to have to do something to raise interest and drive traffic to Kickstarter because the average of contributions per day to date is <1% (.76% per day average). If that remains constant they're only going to get to 25% of their goal (~$169,615K) before time runs out.
Maybe they should get Kristen Bell to commit to being in the cast. Then they'd raise the necessary money!
I wonder if the controversy surrounding Star Command has made people leery-- or maybe Star Command just used up most of the available money that the audience had to commit.
The star Command people want their money back so they can give it to Star Wolf which is a better name, don't you think? Plus they got rid of doug Drexler (Mr. star Trek) so they breached their bargain and agreement thus boiling them in hot oil is not out of the question. Gerrold should ask Drexler to join his team but I think he is even more full of himself than zicree was and that is saying something. Berman's ego is starting to look tame.