Cut-and-dried, so far... waiting for him to get to
Discovery... Nick Meyer should consider becoming a professor (I'm actually being serious here, not sarcastic, he
should)...
Talking about
Time After Time, talking about
The Wrath of Khan -- yup, he rewrote the script in 12 days -- and now he's talking about TVH. Nick Meyer's favorite joke in TVH off the top of his head is Kirk saying, "Everybody remember where we parked." Talking about TUC now. We're over 16 minutes in, so far.
Oh. The Juicy Stuff.
Star Trek Into Darkness at the 17:35-mark.
Up until now, ME stayed neutral. "What can you tell us about TWOK?" "What can you tell us about what this was like?" "What can you tell us about what that's like?" As soon as we get to
Star Trek Into Darkness, the question is phrased...
Midnight's Edge: "How did you feel about
Star Trek Into Darkness basically ripping off
Wrath of Khan or remaking it, however you want to put it, and, in the eyes of most fans, not well?"
End of quote.
... So, instead of a neutral question, he's injecting his opinion. Just so we're
totally 100% clear, I don't like
Into Darkness at all. I was trying not to laugh all through the second half. If my brother posted here, he'd vouch for that. I'm not a fan of the film.
BUT I would
never inject my own opinion into a question that's
supposed to be neutral. I would've phrased it, "What did you think of
Star Trek Into Darkness' use of Khan?" Open-ended. No reveal of my opinion whatsoever, the question would've been open-ended, and the answer would've been
totally in Nick Meyer's court.
Instead, Nick Meyer has to respond to a question that's been spun a certain way to get a desired answer. Continuing on...
Nick Meyer: "Well, it is, on the one hand, so nice to be successful, or beloved, or however you want to describe it, that somebody wants to do an homage to what you did, and I was flattered and touched, but in my sort of artistic world view, if you're going to do an homage, you have to add something, you have to put another layer on, and they didn't, just by putting the same words in different character's mouths didn't add up to anything, and if you have someone dying in one scene and sort of being resurrected right after, there's no real drama going on, it just becomes a gimmick, or gimmicky, and that's what I found it to be, ultimately. Just one person's opinion. Mine. Other people may [disagree]. I found it more clever than satisfying."
End of quote.
... Okay. So now we finally get up to
Star Trek: Discovery. Which, I presume Midnight's Edge is going to try to spin their questions for as much as they did
Star Trek Into Darkness or worse. Let's see if I'm right...
Midnight's Edge: "In February 2016, we got word from
The Hollywood Reporter that you were going to be a part of
Star Trek: Discovery, the new Star Trek series on CBS All Access. Tell us how you get involved with that."
End of quote.
... Sounds neutral so far.
Nick Meyer: "Well, I was brought on to it by Bryan Fuller, who was the original show-runner. I had never worked on a television series before, so I thought that would be an interesting thing to do, as indeed it was. What my contributions to it were are hard to determine because television is really a group effort and there's so much overlap that I can't either claim or refute credit for the end result because the difference between what is written and gets filmed, and what was talked about in conference, or before things are written, is very, very hard to determine with what you would call meaningful or objective precision."
End of quote.
... So Nick Meyer gave a carefully calibrated response that explains how he became involved but doesn't go into any details about the nitty-gritty of pre-production or actual production. But Midnight's Edge wanted to bring out the Bryan Fuller angle.
Midnight's Edge: "Now you said you were brought on by Bryan Fuller. Now is there anything you can tell us about why he left, or was fired, or if that affected your contribution at all when he was gone?"
Nick Meyer: "Well, I'm not privy to what went on. So, I don't know. I do know that Bryan was running another show at the same time,
American Gods. I don't know what part that played and
I also think it is not particularly appropriate for me to peddle unsubstantiated gossip [about] things I wasn't privy to, so I will not."
End quote.
... Continuing on.
Midnight's Edge: "Now, this is a question that kind of hearkens back to
Star Trek IV. It's kind of a difficult question, but I know you said you don't care too much about smaller details as far as in other interviews when it comes to like Star Trek and certain things like that, you don't really think about the fans' reaction too much ahead of time
BUT with somebody who's invested in characters as you are, such with like the Holmes novels and
Time After Time, did it bother you at all that they decided to use quote-unquote "color metaphors" in
Star Trek: Discovery when they make such a big deal about color meatphors in
Star Trek IV obviously not being part of the vernacular anymore?"
Nick Meyer: "Well, that's a very interesting question. That's a huge question. That's the most interesting question in my opinion that you asked and the most difficult to answer. All art is ineluctably a production of the time in which it was created. Mozart doesn't just sound like Mozart, he sounds like mid-European, mid-18th Century music. Renior doesn't just look like Renior, it looks like 19th Century French impressionist painting, and you could look at movies created in 1923 or 1947 or 1986 and they could all be taking place in the year 1776, for example, but you'd know within five years or five minutes of watching each of those movies what time it was that they were made in. The fact that a streaming service doesn't have to conform to the same censor limitations that a network broadcast has to adhere to, the fact that we are in an age in which cuss words are proliferating and part of normal speech increasingly, leaves very little room for the notion that a new Star Trek created in these conditions is not going to also have colorful metaphors running around. But that just seems to come with the territory.
I'm trying to remember if at some point, when we were creating it, we were using that language or did that come later. My best recollection, and it's entirely fallible, is that it didn't occur to me or trouble me at the time, and I didn't think about
Star Trek IV, it just, it didn't occur to me, but it's a very interesting point."
End quote.
... Why do I get the feeling that's not the answer Midnight's Edge was hoping for?
Stopping there for now.
)
