"Chaos on the Bridge" Now on Netflix streaming in the US

Why do I get a sense that most of the writers on the series came across as spoiled children? Was Roddenberry's edict a little too extreme? Yeah probably, but he was still the boss and through interviews, it seemed like the writers came across as kicking and screaming saying they couldn't follow that edict. That's one of the reasons I loved Braga's response in the documentary about it being a challenge. I've always respected Braga for the reason of his bluntness, but here he's basically saying yes it was hard to write a series with no internal conflect, but that made us challenge ourselves to be better. Hurley was basically saying this can't be done and kind of showed he wasn't entirely a good leader in the writers room.

Thank god for Mike Piller coming in and literally saving the show. TNG is a great show, and Season 1 and 2 did have quality moments, but the ship seemed rutterless and Piller came in and started pointing it in the right direction.

 

I just finished watching the movie and wow. Those first two years were MESS. :P Also, the second season isn't all that bad, so Moore was definitely exaggerating, though he is entitled to his opinion of course.

What comes to music and animation, I liked it.

 

Wonder if someone will do something similar for the other shows?

 

I would love to get more behind the scenes stuff for DS9 and VOY. Voyager might be interesting considering all the fighting between the casts I've heard throughout the years, but we barely have anything on DS9 other than the special features and the Companion. I thought I remember hearing when the show was ending that the cast didn't really like each other.

 

The only 'infighting' I ever heard of on Voyager was between Mulgrew and Ryan. As far as I know...everyone else got along just fine.

The thing I heard about DS9 was that the cast got along but were more professional in their attitudes toward each other and not really 'friends'. I could be wrong of course.

 

That's interesting and probably true. I don't think I've heard much about the DS9 cast getting together after the show. I know the TNG and Voyager casts are still very close.

As far as I know Avery Brooks and Cirroc Lofton, Colm Meaney and Rosalind Chao and Armin Shimerman and Rene Auberjonois remained friends after the show but I don't know about the rest. Siddig and Nana got divorced. I know that

 

I just finished watching the doc. Overall I liked it for the information that was imparted, but the directing and editing were rather frantic. With the animation, the added movement to the still photographs, and all the camera tricks in the interview segments, it seems like Shatner (or his editor) was terrified to ever have a moment where the camera was just STILL.

It's okay to just have some simple talking heads once in a while, guys. We don't need to see something whizzing by onscreen every second if what the people are saying is interesting, and for the most part, it was.

I'd ordinarily give it 4 out of 5 stars, but all the bells and whistles were so distracting for me that it knocked it down to 3 stars. It's probably more enjoyable if you just LISTEN to it and only occasionally glance at the screen.

 

I normally balk big time at unnecessary cutaways to a B camera during interviews, but it didn't seem to bother me this time. Mind you, when answers are cut and pasted together, you have to hide the join somehow.

Enjoyed the doc. Liked the illustrations.

As for the utopia thing: one mistake a lot of writers and production folks make when objecting, is insisting that it isn't going to be that way. Well, no it won't, but that's not the point. This is a fictional story about a mankind that DID achieve these things. Fictional. Story. It's the backbone premise of the friggin' show. It's like someone saying "But Abraham Lincoln didn't fight vampires!" Right, but what if he did?

I liked Ron Moore's take on it, that he found it a fresh challenge. It kept writers from falling back on tired old human melodramatic tropes. You could still have conflict, but it just wasn't supposed to be based on things like pettiness or greed or hate, etc. Still room for characters to disagree on positive approaches to problems.

 

Well, in a documentary produced and directed by Shatner, of course there are going to be cutaways to Shatner.

That was Braga's take on it, actually. As Moore's later work showed, he preferred to fall back on the tired tropes of pettiness, greed, hate, etc.


But like you, I'm on Braga's side of the issue. I don't find it interesting to see people come into easily avoidable conflicts because they're petty or mean-spirited or make stupid mistakes. Then it's clear that the whole conflict is just manufactured for the sake of conflict, and it isn't really meaningful. I'm far more interested in the conflicts that arise when reasonable, well-meaning people who like each other find themselves in a situation where there are no easy answers and have a sincere difference of belief -- where both are trying to do the right thing, but they nonetheless come into conflict over what that is. Those conflicts are more interesting because they're much harder to solve. It's something I've aspired to in my own writing.

 

Watched it this morning.

Really enjoyed the sections with Maurice Hurley and John Pike, as well as Braga. Found it odd that they really didn't discuss the failed attempt to bring Trek back in the 70's, which was part of the TMP evolution.

Oh, yeah... fuck Ron Moore. Guy made a hell of a living off of other people's work on those two first seasons.

 

Looking at the TNG season 1 credits, it probably was Greg Strangis, who was credited as a staff writer for a few episodes mid-season 1 the same time Tracey Torme was around and also had an unproduced script listed in unofficial reference books called "The Neutral Zone".

Other option could be Johnny Dawkins, who was the story editor for 4 episodes at the beginning.

 

Torme didn't leave until after the second season. As I recall, he was not pleased with the rewrites done (by Hurley) on his scripts for "The Royale" and "Manhunt."

Further info:

 

I love those people that chafe when they have a boss. The head writer is the head writer for a reason. Michael Piller was constantly rewriting scripts as well.

 

There's being rewritten for the better and there's being rewritten for the worse. If you feel your work is not valued and being diminished, do you just suck it up when you don't have to? Especially if there are greener pastures?

 

But who makes the determination of a rewrite being for the better or the worse? For all the non-sense from Ellison about "City..." over the years, I feel the filmed version is superior to the script I've read.

I didn't get the feeling (from the documentary) that the work wasn't valued. Just rewritten by whomever the showrunner was to better reflect their view of the series.

 

We'll have to disagree about the filmed version of "City". I find both Ellison's script and the finished episode flawed, but the former at least has a point other than "gotta let your love die for the greater good".

Anyway, the person who makes the determination for what the show will MAKE is the one higher up the food chain. That's doesn't necessarily mean he/she is correct about what's "better". If Torme felt Hurley's decisions damaged his stories to the point that he didn't want his name/reputation on them, I totally get that.

 

I agree there.

But that doesn't mean Torme's version of the script is objectively better. Just that he disagreed with the changes made.

From everything I've read/seen on the subject, being rewritten is pretty much standard operating procedure in Hollywood. Very few scripts get made without a hundred folks wanting changes/revisions.

 

Exactly, I know from my own personal history that it feels really rotten when your creative contributions are not valued, or when you're subjected to rewritting by someone whose opinion you don't respect.

From 1998-2005, I worked for a small video game developer. One of my duties would be to think up & storyboard gags for scenes where the player won or lost. My immediate supervisor would get ultra-picky with them & typically ask for revisions that made the gags worse, while at the same time telling me and my partner that these segments didn't matter much, as most players would just skip past them. Raising the natural question, "Why are you being so picky about them, then?"

And then, when it came time to mo-cap the gags for computer animation, the guy above my supervisor would just quickly glance at our storyboards, not bothering to read the descriptions, and just direct the session based on his (often faulty) perception of the gags.

So yeah, disheartening place to work.

 

This reminds me of Dorothy Fontana in Rod Roddenberry's doc, where she said she and Gene did not part well because he rewrote her.

I'm still scratching my head on that one. She was there during TOS, she saw him rewrite people all the time. SHE rewrote people. Did she think she was immune?

And she knew the Paramount brass wanted her one-hour pilot expanded to two hours, and she wouldn't do it. What did she think was going to happen?

 

^I figure it's more a matter of how it was done than the mere fact that it was done. Roddenberry didn't just rewrite her script, he put his name on it as an equal collaborator and got half the royalties. And her script wasn't an hour long, it was 90 minutes. The Q material Roddenberry added only adds up to about a quarter of the whole, and yet he got half the money. In the past, Roddenberry wouldn't put his name on the scripts he rewrote. Heck, Roddenberry, Fontana, and one or two other people rewrote "City on the Edge of Forever," but they still let Ellison get all the credit and money for it.

There's also the fact that, as the writer or co-writer of the pilot script, Fontana was entitled to creator credit for TNG, but Roddenberry somehow convinced the Writer's Guild to give him exclusive credit on the grounds that TNG was merely an extension of TOS -- which doesn't hold up, because every other Trek sequel series gave creator credit to its pilot writers.