Working on STTNG

You clearly weren't;

 

First of all, I have no real PROOF that Edward grabbed the lenses, and YES, I, also, was kind of freaked out that he was wearing her contacts, which would have been prescribed only for her use, but he said that they fit perfectly well. Majel just assumed that her maid, a Mexican girl who didn't speak English and was later fired when some of Majel's jewelry disappeared, had either thrown away the contacts, or stole them. Edward was never suspect, and by the rules of evidence, he would be innocent!

That said, if we cannot say something constructive about anything I say, how about thinking about what you want to say, and keep the profanity to a really low level, for the sake of the board, and all the people who come here, PLEASE?

Many Thanks, Greg Stone

 

Now, to more PLEASANT things, today's PICTURES:

These are for my friend, interested in the core sample:
















I hate to tell you this, but this core sample, made from foam core and plastic strips was dropped to a concrete floor from about 18-20 up, and was smashed into numerous bits! The good news was that we had actually made THREE of them, and the other good news was that David announced that we got the shot in ONE TAKE!

The saucer section that you can see in the other photo, was placed upside down and hoisted up so we could film the core sample coming out. I wanted to just push it up from below, but Dan Curry wanted it to be super slow motion, so it would look like we had hydraulics pushing it out. So, it was basically just shoved down the tube, and filmed at like 100 frames a second or something like that, I cannot remember.

The bits were thrown in the trash, and one core sample went with Dan Curry to his house, the other went with Kim Bailey to his house (where it sits to this day, I'm told) and the broken one was saved from the trash by ME!!! (I was always fishing stuff out of the dumpster, heheheehe) I took it home, repaired all the damage, as you can see from the closeup shots above, and it was sold to a nice TREK collector, who encased it in a plexiglass display case for his home display of various TREK items, including Data's fake head, and uniform, and an original "Varon-T" disruptor that he also got from me! It's always nice to find good homes for these things. And I had always provided all sorts of paperwork and background on all my stuff that I sold!

One of the STTNG tricorders from the late second, or early third season was sent over for repairs, and Kim basically thru it on my desk to fix. The electronics were totally smashed, as I had been informed that the prop was thrown clear across the soundstage, maybe one of you can tell me which episode that happened in. Anyway, the hinge was damaged, and the electronics were toast, so I decided that it would be better just to make a new one. The original people that were doing the prop work had apparently pissed off someone at the studio, and we were in between shops, so I took the tricorder apart and pulled a mold of it, after fixing some of the damage and smoothing out some of the imperfections on the original casting. About 6 or 7 years later, I discovered this old beatup tricorder in a box, and took it out. I still had all the electronics to go with it, so I put it back together, and sold it to a collector, as an original STTNG tricorder for $500.00. I did NOT give him any paperwork!

About 6 months later, I saw an auction on the east coast, with a few Star Trek items up for sale! The tricorder was among them, with full paperwork from the studio, signed by VIPs and certified original. The fellow that I sold it to, got 1,800.00 for it a WEEK after my sale, and he didn't know anything about the paperwork! The auction sold it for 3,772.00!!! I know that doesn't sound like much for an original today, but that was about 1995 or so, that was a lot of money back then. I was shocked and amazed!

More pictures and stories to come, my friends....


Greg Stone

 

Looking at M's avatar I think we may have found where those contacts ended up.

That core sample was such a memorable scene.

 

Great stuff Greg; please keep them coming really enjoying reading your posts

Kevin

 

Thanks, Kevin. I will. More photos and stories on Monday!

Off for the weekend.

Greg Stone

 

Is that... Sand in one of those rooms? Nice detail. What was the Idea behind it?

 

Actually there is one story that I wanted to share with you all. The only real truth about me "Stealing" from the studios, that got me into a HUGE fight with my girlfriend Bobbie at that time.

On one of our many visits to the sets, Ralph and I kept looking into the dumpsters, looking for stuff thrown away. Since back on the original production, one reel of audio tape was recovered and it had all the daily audio track from the LAST TOS episode, which was then turned into the record "Star Trek Bloopers" by a person that I had known from the conventions, Harry Friedenburg. He and his sons ran a table selling all sorts of records, and since I was also a dealer in the late 70's and a collector of music and sound effects (we will NOT go into that subject, hehehehe) I became good friends with Harry. It was a white cover with a drawing of Spock sucking on a lollipop!

Anyway, on this day, I noticed a bunch of black plastic with white plastic stuck to it, all bunched up and covered with dirt and food bits, etc. I reached down and pulled out this huge tube of plastic, which was all sticky, and found out that it was the back of the LCARS panels from the show!!!!!

I could not believe my LUCK!

I ran the tube directly to my car, which was parked in the "B tank", and threw it in the trunk, went back to join Ralph in our continuing search for the TOS captain's chair. The center chair that they used on the series. Ralph KNEW that it was in the property building somewhere and always insisted on looking for it.

When I got home, after dropping Ralph off, I carefully tried to unroll the plastic rolls. It was difficult, since the backs were covered with spray glue and it was a real mess. I went to the store and bought a dozen bottles of alcohol, and put the tubes in the bathtub, covering with mass amounts of the alcohol, which worked perfectly. I had not only the ops panel, but the conn panel as well, and several other smaller panels. None of the engineering panels, but it was okay. I later realized that these were perhaps the LCARS that were used on the emergency bridge, which was no more by that time!

Everytime we went back into the sets, we checked all of the dumpsters! The studio started locking them up with padlocks about 3 or 4 years later!

On one visit, and this is where the story turns to HORROR, especially for any of you TOS fans out there. (Spoiler below, beware!!!)


On that day, Ralph and I were just heading out to the car and I told him to wait for me, I wanted to check the dumpsters, so he went to one of the lunch carts outside of 8 & 9 to get a hot dog, and I ran down the ally to check the trash. When I looked in the dumpster, I saw just about the worst thing that any TREK fan could see! Lying at the bottom of the dumpster was one of the original TOS blue chairs, with the black leather top still on it, CRUSHED into a heap!!! I had seen that they were using the original chairs on STTNG, I have a picture of two of them on the sets, but what I didn't know was that the production had ripped off the original black "leather", and replaced it with gray fabric! I found some of the pieces of one of the backs in the dumpster as well! It was pretty much in three pieces!

I grabbed the leather backing, and ran off to show Ralph! His eyes were as wide as tea cup plates when he saw the damage, and a look of total horror filled his face. With a determined look, mixed with anger, he told me "Show me this dumpster", which I did!

Now, we had located up on the top floor of the property building, the ORIGINAL bridge chairs, but had no idea that they were destroying them! All the way home, Ralph kept on talking about how we just HAD to save those chairs!

Here are the photos:



This is Ralph up on the platforms that had about 22 blue chairs, and only about 12 or 13 of the leather backs, and one GOLD one!





As you can see, those bastards had not only destroyed the leather back and recovered it, but they painted over the original blue, which by that time, was sort of a blue-green color because it had yellowed over the years. I have seen many "originals" for sale, but none of them were the correct color, I guess you just cannot fake that yellowing effect.




This was the "Brig" set where two Klingons were held, when they wanted Worf to come and join them. Such a shame that they had to destroy those TOS chairs like that.

My Girlfriend Bobbie and I had a huge fight when I told her about the LCARS trash, she believed that the studio doesn't consider it trash until the garbage truck LEAVES the studio lot, and anyone who takes anything out of the dumpsters is STEALING!!! Now you know why she's an EX girlfriend, hehehehehehe


More later.



Greg Stone

 

Photos look more like the crew quarters of the Tsiolkovsky from "The Naked Now".

 

^^ Yes they do, here is the corresponding screencap: http://tng.trekcore.com/hd/albums/1x03/nakednow_hd_045.jpg

I won't exclude it was part of the brig in "Heart of Glory", but that part we didn't see in the episode.

Bob

 

It is amazing that the studio threw this stuff away. They could have raised funds for charity by auctioning this stuff off. Afterall, one mans garbage is another mans treasure...

...I don't think it's stealing - I think it's fair game if it's in the trash.

 

YES!! That was the same room! Good catch, people!

Greg Stone

 

Great photos Greg! keep up with the pictures and posts!

 

Love the stories and the photo's treknician1701. Hope you keep on posting.

 

You would be shocked as to what and how much gets thrown away in Hollywood, especially on rented stages where they have to quickly clear one production to make room for another.

When we were filming Star Trek: Renegades at Laurel Canyon Stages this past October, the stage manager told me stories of how appliance commercials that would filming get rid of the good appliances after the shoot. He told me he had been giving a lot of great stuff because they had to quickly get rid of it. This happens a lot, so if you want free stuff become a stage manager LOL!

 

Well, a old school buddy of mine, married a girl named Kimberly, who was one of the costume girls at STTNG (Yes, you can see her name in the credits!) She told him and me one night at dinner that they had to take all the spare STTNG uniforms, and SLICE them up into bits, and then pour some liquid on them, which they had to do outdoors, as it ate into the uniforms! And then they threw them in the trash!

I told her that I still (at that time) had four ziplock bags of the STTNG communicator badges in storage! When I was ordered to destroy something, I signed the note for Dan Curry and threw the stuff in storage! Hehehehehehe! HEY, I not that much of an idiot! I had a couple of bags of that creature from "Contasion" also! *Sigh* but they are all gone now! *sigh*


Anyway, back to the story. Ralph and I, on our next visit to the studio, went directly up to the top floor of the property department and checked on the beloved TOS chairs. They were untouched and in good order. There was a man and a woman looking over some of the furniture, and placing tags on them, reserving them for some future production, so we cooled our heels in one of the back rooms, and waited for them to leave. While waiting, I took a look at the room we were in. One wall was completely filled, side to side and top to bottom with "steamer trunks", those big suitcase trunks you would see in "Titanic"!

That gave me one HELL of an idea. I remembered an old episode of "Mission: Impossible" where they made a fake wall in front of the real wall, and it allowed about 2 feet of room behind, to hide a spy, and I thought that we could do the same thing here!
After the couple departed, I told Ralph to give me a hand. Now Ralph is built like "Barney Fife" and not very strong. I've always had a muscular body, and I reached behind the bottom trunk on the right side and carefully slid the whole row of trunks forward. Ralph was holding back the upper ones so they didn't fall down and bonk me on the head!

After I pulled the first row out, I told Ralph to do the same thing with the next row, and I went in behind and slid them forward, about 2 feet. We did this until the last row, and we had a perfect little hallway BEHIND the trunks! Pushing the first row carefully back into place, the room looked the way it did before, with nobody none the wiser! Our only goal at that time was to save the chairs, as much as we could. This had only taken us about 10 or 15 minutes of time, so we went to check out the TOS chairs up topside.

Ralph saw that with a Phillips screwdriver, he could remove the chair from the base. Trouble was that neither he nor myself had any tools. No problem, I told him, and went downstairs to the property front office. I asked the old guy there if he had a Phillips screwdriver that I could borrow for a minute, and he was only too happy to give it to me. I smiled at him, and walked away, and he yelled after me "Don't forget where you got it"!

We dismantled the chairs, Ralph doing all the unscrewing and I was stacking them behind the fake wall. Within an hour, we had them all secured and the wall back in place. Ralph found an old straw broom that looked like it was used in a movie from the 1940's and said that he was going to sweep all our footprints out of the dust, and all the areas that were disturbed by our actions. I told him that I was going to take the screwdriver back to the old guy downstairs, who looked like I had left for Mexico with his tools! Hehehehe

Needless to say, the chairs were safe and sound, for the time being.

Greg Stone

 

This is a really entertaining thread. Thanks!

 

Ferengi Goss: Then who gets the chairs?