So Justin Lin is a Star Trek fan.....

[Firebird]

That's the better foot to start out on than JJ's repeated statement of "I was never a Star Trek fan, but..." during all the press tours for ST09.

I still don't get why Abrams stating he wasn't a fan is such an issue? Would you rather he lied to you?

I think the issue, for me anyways, was that he kept bringing it up at EVERY opportunity, almost as if he was putting in a disclaimer for the critics and fans just in case something went wrong. You know the old saying, "the [director] doth protest too much." For what it's worth, I liked ST09 (except for the idiotic plot contrivance that was red matter), it was the repeated line of JJ's lack of fandom that got tiresome for me.

 

[Morpheus 02]

I think if you look at this way, Star Wars and Star Trek have had such a HUGE impact on popular culture the vast majority of people are going to fall into one side or the other. So people who make films, almost all them would be able, I think I could say with some confidence, admit to being a fan of one or the other. As being film makers they would have looked at these universes and marveled. Plus the fact that they where released many years ago, a lot of people have seen Trek / Wars at an early age and could not help but fall in love with one or the other. I would summise that if Lin was not a trek fan, they would not have mentioned it in any capacity. Much the same way that it was JJ himself who declared his Star Wars preference.

i'm multicutural -- i like both!

 

[martok2112]

Although I am no longer a fan of anything, my love for Star Trek/Star Wars/sci-fi stuff still remains, and I love doing occasional tribute fiction or films for them.

That said: If someone told me "This project feels less like Trek and more like a Tom Clancy story", I'd take it as an extreme compliment, but then I would try to find a couple of minor, yet meaningful (without pandering) ways to try and make it just a little more Trek-y.

 

[johnjm22]

I didn't say the people involved didn't care. I said it felt that way, and gave off that impression. I have no doubt that Orci cared. (Although I'm not a fan of his work).

I understand what you're saying Chris about things not being so straightforward. I've worked many creative projects. Sometimes a project comes out great, and sometimes things don't work, but in the end you don't necessarily know why.

Still, I stand by my statement that the movie excessively, and needlessly pandered. Which it absolutely did.

If my project got panned as "not Star Trek enough" I would probably pander too.

It's hard not to be insulted by that.

If Meyer had listened to fans/critics when making TWOK, then one of the most classic scenes in all of Trek would have never been made, and the movie would have suffered dearly for it.

We need a filmmaker with a vision. Someone with balls.

If you can't take criticism, then get out of the game. It comes with the territory.

 

[Christopher]

Was Khan actually slavish homage, or trying to exploit a known moneymaker?

I don't think using Khan per se was slavish at all. I think this film used the character better than either "Space Seed" or TWOK used him -- fleshed him out better and gave him a better interaction with Kirk. This is actually my favorite Khan story. But where the film faltered was in its gratuitous homage to Spock's death scene, the way that whole section of the film was contrived to set up a coincidental replay with the roles reversed. That just totally pulled me out of the film, and was such a bad idea that it's overshadowed people's perceptions of the rest of the film and damaged its reputation overall. Take that one sequence out and the film wouldn't seem nearly as derivative.

And back to the OP, I've actually thought that the Abrams' "I wasn't really a Star Trek fan" bit was probably encouraged/exaggerated by Paramount's marketing folks as part of the "not your father's Star Trek" campaign.

Quite possibly. As I said, what Paramount needed these films to do was to draw in a new, larger audience, people who weren't already Trek fans. And they succeeded at that. The constant griping about them on the Trek fan sites tends to obscure the fact that they're among the most financially and critically successful Trek films ever made. The general public mostly loves them. (And a lot of us Trek fans like them too. They have imperfections, sure, but so do all the other Trek movies and series.)

To say "It doesn't matter who's a fan and who isn't. It's a nonsense standard." to me is really off...

Really, being someone who is known as a great director or actor doesn't guarantee a good film either. Spielberg has messed up a few things in his day. And Bryan Singer, who made a solid success with a comic book-based Movie (X-Men), somehow messed up Superman Returns.

Exactly. As I see it, he messed it up because he was a fan. Instead of trying to create his own original vision of Superman, which is something I would've loved to see, he made a really expensive Richard Donner fan film -- a movie so mired in reverence for a dated interpretation of Superman that it failed to bring anything really fresh. Sometimes, being a fan gets in the way. When I talked about having the perspective to kill your darlings, Superman Returns is exactly what I was thinking about. Singer's reverence for Donner's Superman kept him from having the perspective he needed to realize that his self-indulgent exercise in nostalgia wasn't the ideal way to go.

What a "fanboy" can also add is hype. That's especially important in this world of social media, and short attention spans.

True, but that's hardly relevant to the quality of the film itself. And there are other ways to get hype. There is a world outside the echo chamber of online fandom. To your average moviegoing American citizen, the name J.J. Abrams has enormous hype value. Alias! Lost! Mission: Impossible! Most people who see movies are not part of fandom, so they don't care whether he is. Yes, fan hype can help, but it's hardly the only thing that matters. It's a bonus.

Oh, and not being a fan can also make you blind to things that made that property popular in the first place, and help you frame the movie correctly.

I disagree. That ignores the basic fact that there is such a thing as research. If someone's assigned to write or produce or direct a project based on an unfamiliar topic, they don't just go into it blind; they research it. They learn their subject matter. When Harve Bennett and Nicholas Meyer were hired to do Star Trek II, they watched the series straight through, learned about it, got to know it and drew on it for ideas. That's how they got the idea for bringing back Khan -- not because they were already fans, but because they did what writers and filmmakers do, researching the material to lay the groundwork.

For myself, when I was hired to do a Spider-Man novel, I didn't have much familiarity beyond the '90s cartoon, the movies, and the then-recent J. Michael Straczynski run, so I got the DVD-ROM of the entire run of Amazing Spider-Man and borrowed every other Spidey comic I could find at the library and read online summaries of the comics I couldn't find. I studied the material as best I could. And several reviewers felt my novel was one of the most continuity-savvy Spider-Man stories they'd ever read. Sure, I was a fan of the character going in, but that by itself wouldn't have given me the deep understanding I needed, the understanding I could only gain through dedicated study and work. Even if I hadn't been a fan beforehand, I would've done the same kind of research, because that's just what you do. It's just basic professionalism.

Get this straight: Fandom is a hobby. It's something you do for recreation. You don't work any harder at it than you feel like. Writing and filmmaking are professions. They're things people do to make a living, things they dedicate years of their life to getting good at. And that means there is a hell of a lot more hard work and commitment involved than there is in mere fandom. It's professionalism, not fandom, that makes the difference in how well a project is done.

 

[martok2112]

Fandom is a hobby. It's something you do for recreation. You don't work any harder at it than you feel like. Writing and filmmaking are professions. They're things people do to make a living, things they dedicate years of their life to getting good at. And that means there is a hell of a lot more hard work and commitment involved than there is in mere fandom. It's professionalism, not fandom, that makes the difference in how well a project is done.

Quoted for TRUTH!

 

[Greg Cox]

True story: An editor asked me once, "Are you a fan of [CULT TV SHOW]?"

"No," I answered honestly, "but I can be."

And, sure enough, I spent a week or two binge-watching the boxed DVD sets and reading up on the show on the internet and, by the end of that process, I knew the show inside and out and thought I had a pretty good idea of what made it tick.

Again, you don''t have to be a lifelong fan of SPACE VIXENS to make a good SPACE VIXENS movie or novel. You just have to do your homework and take pride in your work.

 

[Mudd]

We need a filmmaker with a vision. Someone with balls.

If you can't take criticism, then get out of the game. It comes with the territory.

Yeah, but you see...the problem is that almost all fannish criticism is useless, worthless crap.

If one out of five hundred complainers ever moved beyond "This doesn't taste like Mom's macaroni and cheese" it would be an improvement.

 

[johnjm22]

We need a filmmaker with a vision. Someone with balls.

If you can't take criticism, then get out of the game. It comes with the territory.

Yeah, but you see...the problem is that almost all fannish criticism is useless, worthless crap.

If one out of five hundred complainers ever moved beyond "This doesn't taste like Mom's macaroni and cheese" it would be an improvement.

So what's the point of listening to it? or worrying about it?

 

[BillJ]

We need a filmmaker with a vision. Someone with balls.

If you can't take criticism, then get out of the game. It comes with the territory.

Yeah, but you see...the problem is that almost all fannish criticism is useless, worthless crap.

If one out of five hundred complainers ever moved beyond "This doesn't taste like Mom's macaroni and cheese" it would be an improvement.

So what's the point of listening to it? or worrying about it?

Because you have a large, obnoxious minority who are probably driving away some fence sitters. Beyond that, it is tedious to see the same complaints for months and years on end. I guess it's a sport for some people.

 

[Mudd]

We need a filmmaker with a vision. Someone with balls.

If you can't take criticism, then get out of the game. It comes with the territory.

Yeah, but you see...the problem is that almost all fannish criticism is useless, worthless crap.

If one out of five hundred complainers ever moved beyond "This doesn't taste like Mom's macaroni and cheese" it would be an improvement.

So what's the point of listening to it? or worrying about it?

None, as far as I can see.

It's tedious to see repeated ad nauseam, though.

 

[Christopher]

Again, you don''t have to be a lifelong fan of SPACE VIXENS to make a good SPACE VIXENS movie or novel. You just have to do your homework and take pride in your work.

Heck, when I was hired to take over writing the Star Trek: Enterprise novels, it was my least favorite Trek series and the one I was least familiar with (having watched it all in first run but not revisited it since). But to prepare for writing it, I watched it straight through twice to get to know it better (well, nearly twice -- there were a few episodes I skipped over the second time around), and I gained a renewed appreciation for it.

 

[HIjol]

(((((((The Password is - ding - "tedious"...)))))))

I wonder, sometimes, if that "...months and years on end..." phan-nomena, in some cases, could be a mantra or habit? I am guilty myself of constantly bringing up "anti-time" as a negative, to the point of being almost pathological, but it really did hit me that hard when I heard it.

 

[eyeresist]

I remember some fans being very critical about JJ not being a Trek fan, but a Star Wars fan. And now the new director turns out to be a Trekkie.

And part of me just can't help but wonder if that's some kind of PR stunt

If it's a stunt, it's a pretty weak one. I admit that my personal interest in the film has increased recently, first with Pegg's involvement and now with Lin's background, but the studio doesn't care what I think. The great majority of people buying tickets don't give a crap if Lin's a fan or not.

It felt like the filmakers had a long check list of items they wanted to include in the movie. The script was connecting the dots between check list items. It seemed very lazy and formulaic to me. That's why I got the impression JJ didn't care much about it.

I wouldn't say JJ didn't care, but he relied on the Trek people around him perhaps a little too much to fill in for the gaps in his knowledge. I'm pretty sure he was simply unaware of a number of fan-service references in the script. When he read about magic blood or rageful Spock, he probably thought, "Well, I guess they know what they're doing."

 

[Christopher]

I wouldn't say JJ didn't care, but he relied on the Trek people around him perhaps a little too much to fill in for the gaps in his knowledge. I'm pretty sure he was simply unaware of a number of fan-service references in the script. When he read about magic blood or rageful Spock, he probably thought, "Well, I guess they know what they're doing."

I think that's underestimating the attention to detail that directors put into their work. Every last element of every line and every shot needs the director's approval. And, as I said, creators do research. Odds are that any director hired to do a film based on a series would watch the series as the very first step of the development process. I mean, come on, it takes years to make a movie. He would've had plenty of time to catch up. So this assumption that a director who wasn't previously an expert in a series would do no research to increase his knowledge once hired to adapt it makes no sense.

Anyway, neither of the things you mention is the sort of thing that Abrams would have a problem with. He's always been big on magical McGuffins, going back to the Rambaldi artifacts in Alias. And he's always embraced big emotion.

 

[Jedi_Master]

Justin Lin telling people he is a Star Trek fan is most certainly a PR stunt, but no more of a stunt than any other director interview. Part of public relations is appealing to a subset of fans, for example the ones that will care enough to watch a director interview. Another part of public relations is to grab a few headlines and generate a little "buzz" that hopefully will put a few more butts in the seats.
The Lin interview worked fairly well on both counts.

 

[Christopher]

I really don't see why it would be a "stunt." It's not exactly rare to be a Star Trek fan. The President of the United States is a Star Trek fan. So is the Dalai Lama. It's not some big shocking revelation that any given person is a fan of one of the most enduringly popular media franchises around.

 

[Jedi_Master]

You missed the second half of that sentence - no more a stunt than any other (major franchise) director interview. Director interviews are, by design, a PR tool. That's not a bad thing, its just a thing.
The Lin interview got a minor amount of attention, smoothed a few ruffled feathers, got a few fans excited, etc. It was what it was meant to be.

 

[Greg Cox]

I really don't see why it would be a "stunt." It's not exactly rare to be a Star Trek fan. The President of the United States is a Star Trek fan. So is the Dalai Lama. It's not some big shocking revelation that any given person is a fan of one of the most enduringly popular media franchises around.

And, just to belabor the point, everyone has their own definition of "fan."

Somebody who watched one of the shows religiously as a teen and has seen and enjoyed some of the movies over the years is certainly entitled to call themselves a fan, even if they they're not as deeply into it as some of us are.

One of my oldest friends is a lifelong comic book reader, who nonetheless has absolutely no interest in conventions, fandom, fan-fiction, comic-book message boards, etc. She just likes reading the comics.

 

[Morpheus 02]

Fandom is a hobby. It's something you do for recreation. You don't work any harder at it than you feel like. Writing and filmmaking are professions. They're things people do to make a living, things they dedicate years of their life to getting good at. And that means there is a hell of a lot more hard work and commitment involved than there is in mere fandom. It's professionalism, not fandom, that makes the difference in how well a project is done.

Quoted for TRUTH!

But can't one be a BOTH a fan and a professional? Christopher & Greg Cox seem to be examples of this.

True story: An editor asked me once, "Are you a fan of [CULT TV SHOW]?"

"No," I answered honestly, "but I can be."

And, sure enough, I spent a week or two binge-watching the boxed DVD sets and reading up on the show on the internet and, by the end of that process, I knew the show inside and out and thought I had a pretty good idea of what made it tick.

Again, you don''t have to be a lifelong fan of SPACE VIXENS to make a good SPACE VIXENS movie or novel. You just have to do your homework and take pride in your work.

(This is next part is more addressed to Christopher, but you concur with him as a fellow professional on the process). With something like Star Trek, you have a 50 year history that a professional could have been exposed to previously. At the initial time, it might not have been serious. But it could save you a lot of research time (i.e. instead binge watching ALL episodes of Trek, you can go back to specific episodes & scenes, to make sure you've "got it right"


The thing i seem to get out of this discussion is that people are assuming all fans are "nonprofessionals".


As a "nonprofessional", i get excited hearing if a actual professional is a fan, because for me, it makes me feel like

Fandom is a hobby. It's something you do for recreation. You don't work any harder at it than you feel like. Writing and filmmaking are professions. They're things people do to make a living, things they dedicate years of their life to getting good at. And that means there is a hell of a lot more hard work and commitment involved than there is in mere fandom. It's professionalism, not fandom, that makes the difference in how well a project is done.

Quoted for TRUTH!

True story: An editor asked me once, "Are you a fan of [CULT TV SHOW]?"

"No," I answered honestly, "but I can be."

And, sure enough, I spent a week or two binge-watching the boxed DVD sets and reading up on the show on the internet and, by the end of that process, I knew the show inside and out and thought I had a pretty good idea of what made it tick.

Again, you don''t have to be a lifelong fan of SPACE VIXENS to make a good SPACE VIXENS movie or novel. You just have to do your homework and take pride in your work.

I think one "problem" that could happen is that despite the homework, if someone's heart isn't in it...in a creative work (more than a school report, or even career), that can really show up. Even if something is technically good, the emotion could be missing.

Why it's heartening to me when I hear a hired professional says he's a fan, it gives me the impression that they actually love what they are going to work on.

And my experience has been fans who are the professionals working on the project will throw in things that might go over the general public's head (though not distract them), but for other fans , will get them excited & geeked out, and more enthusiastic about telling others to watch it.

I really don't see why it would be a "stunt." It's not exactly rare to be a Star Trek fan. The President of the United States is a Star Trek fan. So is the Dalai Lama. It's not some big shocking revelation that any given person is a fan of one of the most enduringly popular media franchises around.

And, just to belabor the point, everyone has their own definition of "fan."

Somebody who watched one of the shows religiously as a teen and has seen and enjoyed some of the movies over the years is certainly entitled to call themselves a fan, even if they they're not as deeply into it as some of us are.

One of my oldest friends is a lifelong comic book reader, who nonetheless has absolutely no interest in conventions, fandom, fan-fiction, comic-book message boards, etc. She just likes reading the comics.

I don;t think it's belaboring rather than clarifying...kind of like how "racism" might mean purely the systematic problem, while while exclusively use that for individual relations, while others look for context in how it's used.

Fandom, for some, just means the obsessed individual whose opinion is passionate but illogical.

I would broaden it to include those who are intelligent and/or have a vested interest (and a significant factor in the financial success).

So here in Chicago the Blackhawks just won the Stanley Cup. Many of the fans might be superficial (there just for the final success), some are die hards with strong opinions (which could be right or wrong in "real life")...and there are a few young fans who will be inspired to become true professionals (players or coaches) that could indeed help the franchise the future.

The casual fans definitely are important, but "fandom" drives popularity, and the cause of free positive publicity (which "the management" likes)