How Axanar Needs to End
By Lukas Kendall
I feel compelled to explain the truth behind the Axanar lawsuit. People get swept up in the colorful legal motions being filed by both sides. Those are just theater. What is important is behind the scenes. This conflict, far from possibly facilitating the official licensing of
Star Trek fan films, is holding them up—badly, wasting everybody’s time and hurting regular people.
Ideally, not-for-profit
Star Trek fan films would be simple for fans to register and legally distribute. It’s not far-fetched: Lucasfilm has official rules for
Star Wars fan films and even offers awards and makes available downloads of sounds and music (
http://www.starwars.com/star-wars-fan-film-awards). However,
Star Wars is an easier property to administer than
Star Trek: it has a shorter history, a sole owner (although acquired by Disney, Lucasfilm is administratively intact) and a younger audience that seems interested in making a different kind of fan film—shorts (limited by the rules to five minutes) rather than the hour-long episodes of
Star Trek.
For
Star Trek fan films to be legitimized, it will take an enormous amount of work and risk for sympathetic CBS executives. (CBS owns the
Star Trek intellectual property and television rights, while Paramount Pictures owns the movie rights. For purposes of this article, I will refer solely to CBS as they administer
Star Trek licensing.) First and most importantly, CBS cannot do anything that even remotely sets a legal precedent of compromising its rights to
Star Trek. That’s how people get fired. Executives would have to convince their colleagues and lawyers at multiple levels to help devise this…why? There’s no money in it—it’s good P.R. and that’s about it. It actually
loses money, because of the time they have to spend supervising it. There is every reason for bosses and lawyers to say no and almost no reason to say yes. This is why, prior to CBS suing Axanar, CBS officially pretended like the fan films did not exist—it was legally and bureaucratically the only way to
let them exist.
Secondly, you have to figure out how to make sure nobody profits off of the fan films. But “non-profit” is not the standard that should apply. The real standard should be “non-commercial.”
Fan films are produced by amateurs on a volunteer basis. (Sounds reasonable, right?) But films are expensive—there’s no way around that. Even if people contribute volunteer labor, there are production needs that cost hard money: from locations and equipment to food. “Mission creep” inspires the producers to seek better talent behind and in front of the cameras, and raise money to pay for it. They go from family and friends pitching in, to soliciting private donations, to using crowdsourcing (on Kickstarter, Indiegogo, et al.) to raise six and even seven figures. (That’s not hypothetical, that’s what happened.)
So let’s say CBS establishes official fan film rules. I am truly at a loss as to how they would police them. It’s like they’d have to become the NCAA. Do you limit donations to…what? An arbitrary number? Do you ban the use of crowdsourcing platforms (tilting the playing field towards the independently wealthy)? Audit people to ensure compliance? Who pays for that?
There has to be some financial definition of non-commercial but I’m not sure you can put a number on it. No matter the rules you devise to keep the fan films amateur and non-commercial, some (not all) will find loopholes. Make a limit of $50,000 per fan film and you will see them produced in 15-minute segments. Make it $50,000 per hour and you will push money underground. Allow appeals for exceptions and you will be deluged in appeals. Fans are motivated enough to make their own
Star Trek episodes—of course they will be determined and clever enough to find ways to raise more money and make better films.
Which brings us to Axanar.
If there was any way to abuse CBS’ goodwill in looking the other way on the fan films, Axanar did—and then some. This is something they and their followers will dispute…but please. They raised over a million dollars in multiple efforts. They used their donor funds to lease a warehouse in Castaic (an hour north of Los Angeles) and turn it into a soundstage which they bragged would be a base for ongoing
commercial ventures. They attempted to cast their film through the Hollywood agencies with professional talent. They shamelessly ran a store for bootleg
Star Trek merchandise under the guise of “perks” for “donors” (like Axanar coffee—not making that up). They fostered an atmosphere—or at least did not discourage it—that Axanar was true
Star Trek and the J.J. Abrams films were dogshit. They got in fights with other fan films. They built a cult of personality around the principal (what could go wrong?). Lately, they’ve taken to censoring negative comments on their official website and forums like a bad parody of a communist state.
Personality matters, and the personality of the Axanar principal has rubbed people the wrong way. By his own admission, he paid himself a salary because Axanar is his full-time job. Sorry, but this is the opposite of what making a fan film is supposed to be. Axanar is not a hobby, it is a profession, allowing him to enjoy the lifestyle of a film producer and specifically a
Star Trek film producer: adulation, creative fulfillment, travel, glamour and attention, paid for by
Star Trek fans. Sure, it’s hard work, and relatively low-pay, but it’s exactly what he wants to do—be the captain of his own
Star Trek ship. (He even cast himself as Captain Garth until his team threatened to revolt over the obvious problem that he can’t act.)
This is why Axanar has developed a legion of “hate watchers” in addition to supporters—because the principal has made himself into a reality-show character. Some people love him, most love to hate him.
So let’s discuss the Axanar lawsuit. Having obtained
pro bono counsel, Axanar is vigorously fighting back. There are three things they can achieve by doing this: 1) They can drag this out for months, if not years. 2) They can embarrass and annoy CBS through bad press. 3) They can, possibly, use the legal proceedings to turn up unflattering facts about CBS and Paramount’s finances, business deals and ownership of
Star Trek.
If you think any of that (particularly no. 3) gives Axanar leverage, think again. All they are doing is making CBS dig in their heels. Legally, politically and in every possible way, CBS
will never agree to a settlement that allows Axanar to be made. It would be a massive humiliation and an admission that they can be abused and bullied by people they perceive to be thieves. There is no way a corporation of that size (two corporations, actually) gets everybody to sign off on such a capitulation. Better to lose money than lose face.
It’s also impossible for Axanar to
win their lawsuit. I won’t bother to dissect the court motions. If Axanar were to somehow prevail, it would basically means there’s no such thing as copyright. I would be shocked if they got as far as depositions, let alone trial. Just watch the principal’s web appearances (or don’t): what lawyer would allow him to be deposed?
So why is Axanar fighting the lawsuit? To some degree, because the principal is delusional—and he found a law firm that loves the publicity and is egging him on. But mostly, it’s because he has
no idea how to get out of this mess. He just wants to postpone the disgrace of admitting he has failed his donors.
This is not a victimless crime. That $1.3 million Axanar raised came from
real people, who love
Star Trek and gave Axanar their precious cash to make more of it. And the principal behaved in such a reckless, egregious and self-aggrandizing way that he was bound to be sued. It’s shameful.
If Axanar wanted, they could end this lawsuit by the time you finished reading this article. All the principal has to do is call the CBS executives (he knows them) and offer this: 1) We will wind down operations completely and 2) refund as much donor money as we can on a
pro-rata basis.
The problem is that CBS would say yes but add a third item: that the principal accepts a lifetime ban from any commercial involvement with
Star Trek. We’re talking
Pete Rose-banned-from baseball. He does not go on to make a documentary about Axanar, write the memoirs of Captain Garth, sell props and sign autographs at conventions. They want him to vanish off the face of the earth. That’s how much they loathe and distrust him.
Number three would probably prevent the principal from agreeing to this proposal. Because he likes being a big shot, and more importantly, he knows he will need the money that comes from being a minor
Star Trek celebrity. And he’ll have nothing better to do.
The best way to help donors get over their disappointment that they will never see Axanar is to give them the script. I’ve read it (the final draft) and sorry…it’s not very good. It’s basically a fan film, servicing fan ideas, repetitive and shallow on any real level. But that’s beside the point. Axanar successfully made their donors think they were getting the best thing since sliced bread. When they eventually read the script, some people will still believe that. But most will go, “Oh…Okay.”
A thorny issue remains of what to do with the warehouse which Axanar spent donor money to lease and renovate into a shooting stage. In the short term, that stage has a significant “burn rate” that will exhaust the donor money and get Axanar evicted—unless Axanar leases it for commercial use. Both options are problematic. The stage cannot be liquidated (dismantled) in order to repay the donors, but clearly somebody—be it the landlord or the next tenant—is going to benefit from the donors’ largesse. CBS obviously would not want the Axanar principal, or John Does, to continue to operate the stage, because they cannot be allowed to benefit from their bad actions. Ideally there would be some kind of trustee who operates it commercially to make back the donors’ money and get them whole—perhaps a public auction of those rights…yuck, what a can of worms.
You may be saying, won’t CBS want damages? $150,000 per infringement or whatever it says in the lawsuit? Of course not. Does CBS want an article in
The Hollywood Reporter that they are collecting
donor money from a fan film in a legal settlement? No! Talk about the most odious press imaginable. I’ll bet Axanar could even get out of having to pay CBS’ court costs.
So this is the best-case scenario: Axanar shuts down, permanently, refunds as much money to donors as possible, and tries to help CBS with the P.R. mess. Eventually, CBS finds a way to authorize the fan films…minus Axanar,
which will never be made.
I would bet anything that CBS would accept this—but CBS cannot propose it legally. Axanar needs to propose it and have CBS accept. Which they can do. It only takes a phone call.
Will Axanar do that? No. Not right now. It’s too painful for the principal. But eventually he’ll have to. And for the good of everybody, it needs to be sooner rather than later.
Why am I writing this?
Because as much as I love hate-watching Axanar, I empathize with all the people being hurt by this fiasco: Primarily, the
Star Trek fans who gave their money. But there are also the makers of the other fan films (now in jeopardy), the CBS executives dealing with this shit (better people than anybody realizes), and even the John Does at Axanar who just wanted to make a
Star Trek film.
This needs to end. And for it to end, public pressure needs to mount on Axanar to throw in the towel, refund the donor money and accept humiliation and punishment. If CBS can get out from under this madness, I have no doubt they will make a good-faith effort to license the fan films. They just can’t do that in a climate of people raising hundreds of thousands of dollars in Kickstarter money and using
Star Trek as a license to print money. That’s
their job.
I’m joking, but not really. Ordinarily I’d stand for the little guy against the giant corporations—but this is different. The Axanar principal is stealing something that doesn’t belong to him to make money and have fun, and that’s offensive to all of us who live our lives not stealing things, even though we may want to. It’s that simple.
The Axanar principal needs to see that his public support from
Star Trek fans is crumbling. He has to get to the point where he sees there is no way out, because only then will he fall on his sword and martyr himself to help all the future
Star Trek fan films (if not his).
Forward this essay to all
Star Trek fans.
Now you know…and knowing is half the battle!
Long, but worth it.
