Another TOS origin story?

[Captain Robert April]

^ Yes, but it's the Internet that's made such things true art.

It's the almost instant feedback that adds the real spice to the game.

 

[Allyn Gibson]

I loved reading about the old Starfleet Academy film and Star Trek: The Beginning at AICN a couple of years ago. I'd love to see the two almost-films novelized as standalone "what might have been" stories (told as they were- with no "fixes" to comply with current canon) with forwards giving a little info on the circumstances of the scripts' inception and the movies' cancellation.

There was some talk in the early 90s of Bennett novelizing the Academy screenplay, but it never materialized.

When Pocket published scriptbooks in the late-90s, I thought that instead of publishing teleplays of what we've seen, they should have published a collection of the unfilmed screenplays, like Maurice Hurley's "Star Trek VII" or the Meerson/Krikes "Star Trek IV." Sorting out the rights to do so, though, would have made such a project infeasible; more work than it was ultimately worth, basically. And then the bottom fell out of the non-fic Star Trek market. *shrug*

 

[Dayton Ward]

Kevin developed a nice relationship with Harve Bennett (and his assistant) during his days writing for the Star Trek Communicator. One summer a few years back, we got the goofy idea to approach him about possibly assisting him with novelizing his screenplay. He was very flattered by the notion, and considered it for a bit before declining, saying that he might "try to do something with it one of these days."

Oh, well.

 

[Allyn Gibson]

Sadly, Harve is getting up there in the years; he was downright frail at Farpoint in '09, the last time he was there.

I'd love for him to get his autobiography published. He either had a deal or he was close to a deal (I can't remember his exact words, unfortunately), and it fell through/apart because of O.J. Simpson and If I Did It. (Bennett had the same editor as Simpson; when the firestorm around Simpson's book resulted in the editor's hari kari, Bennett's book became orphaned.)

I got to shake Bennett's hand, and I got to tell him I wouldn't be a Star Trek fan were it not for him. We all owe him a lot.