Also, would you agree that we actually are entitled to be silent on the issue if we so choose?
Not if you are willing to keep people informed on the Forum.
If you ask a simple question like is James working at Lake George this summer it gets deleted, why?
YOU even stated that Part II of Blood & Fire has been shown at several conventions. Why not show it on the internet in the same state that you are showing it at conventions and then replace it when it is finished. You did that with "To Serve All My Days".
Finally I came to the Kitumba set to see JG Hertzler as a Klingon because for months you had an article posted about JG returning to his Klingon roots. When are you going to let people know that did not happen?
Also you better check about me posting on TrekBBS before you make statements that are untrue.
If you ask
Elvis questions on our
Phase II board, they will get deleted. James maintains his sanity (well, as sane as he ever really gets) by compartmentalizing the two big aspects of his very complicated life pretty dramatically--his
Star Trek life and his Elvis impersantor life. As someone who knows him well, I can tell you that it messes him up when you try to get him to task-switch between his two worlds. He doesn’t like (and doesn’t really allow) Elvis discussions on his
Phase II forum. And if you go up to him backstage after one of his Elvis concerts and ask him about his really cool
Enterprise bridge set, he gets similarly perturbed. As you can see from our
Phase II forum and its thousands and thousands of archived posts, simple questions are not, in fact, deleted—but
Elvis questions almost always are. We’ve all learned that’s just the way it is with James. But there are probably Elvis impersonator forums out there in Internet-land. (Just don't ask
Star Trek questions on those Elvis forums.)
The reason we don’t pass out works in progress on the Internet even though we show them at conventions is that showing them at conventions doesn’t create a permanent record that people keep and copy. As an example, to this day there are copies of early versions of “To Serve All My Days” that continue to circulate on the Internet like vampires or zombies, even though the improved "night in 1969" version was released. It turns out, of course, that there’s no way to recall all the old obsolete copies that people have once a later version of an episode is released. We can't really "replace" it as you suggest on everyone's computers all over the world. So, we learned our lesson the hard way: no permanent copies should be released on the Internet until the episode is ready since they will be out there forever. We’ll probably still show works in progress at conventions because we value the input and make editing changes based on feedback and it doesn’t generate a permanent copy. But if people start videotaping our convention screenings from under their coats to make bootleg copies, we would probably stop doing that, too.
It’s unfortunate that J.G. Hertzler couldn’t attend the shoot-especially if that was your primary motivation for your participation in our shoot. (We announced on our
Phase II forum on June 17, 2009--shortly after we wrapped—that J.G. ended up being unavailable.) We announced back in January that J.G. would have the significant role of “K’Sia” in our “Kitumba” episode but after J.G. tore his rotator cuff, he knew he would have to have a substantially reduced role. He wasn’t sure where our shooting would fall in relation to his surgical repair of the tear. (We were fortunate that our director could do double duty and step in as “K’Sia”—not an ideal solution but it worked out well.) J.G. was still slated to make a very small cameo appearance as a visiting Starfleet admiral, and those scenes were delayed until the last day of the shoot to try and accommodate J.G.’s schedule. In the end, it just wasn’t in the cards for J.G. and he couldn’t show up. (It’s hard for us to complain too loudly when he’s nice enough to volunteer his time just like any other crew member.) But fortunately, Gil Gerard and Andy Probert were in the studio visiting that day, and we hastily constructed costumes for them and they graciously stepped in as the visiting Starfleet brass.
Although we announced on our
Phase II forum that J.G. wasn’t able to attend (the same day that we did announce Gil’s and Andy’s cameo appearances), it’s always hard for us to know exactly how loudly to announce when our shoots don’t go according to plan. “Announcement from the
Phase II Team!
Phase II announces that J.G. Hertzler tears rotator cuff and
doesn’t ultimately appear in ‘Kitumba’ as planned!” (Is that the type of announcement you were thinking we should post on our web site?)
Your Trek BBS profile indicates that you became a member on June 28, 2009 and your first post was that same day. As of my last post at 6:04 yesterday morning, you had indeed posted only five messages--all in this one thread. If anyone were even remotely interested for some unfathomable reason, they can check you profile and posting history themselves to see if I’m representing it accurately. But I apologize in advance if there is something that I’m not understanding.
Getting back to the subject of this thread, did you get a satisfactory answer to your questions regarding the inaccessible "Kitumba" footage on our crashed hard drive?
There isn't a single person who has attended a shoot in the last few years who does not know me. But that aside, I dont see why you posted that - I put my title (well that one anyway) in my sig to that post. Contacting me regarding any concern is a simple click away on our website (the "Contact Us" link at the top). 
