Yeah, by all accounts, when Desilu was still its own creature, it was a lot more fun. Once Gulf+Western took over and shmooshed it together with Paramount, it turned all corporate and folks couldn't get out of there fast enough.
Okay, I've had my copy for a whole week now. Is it really not out anywhere else? Edit: Ah! paulablock just mentioned that the Smithsonian gift shop is carrying "Star Trek 365".
Okay, here's a question: Curt and I have all of this rare material that we would like to see published. I've never been the type to just squirrel something away solely for myself and not share it. I know that fans would love to see this material. We never figured to 'get rich' on the project. We thought perhaps a modest, reasonable deal for us after CBS and a book publisher received their cuts. Is there any way we might go about doing this? With absolutely all due respect to Star Trek 365, we really do have a ton more truly rare images. That's not intended as any kind of a boast. It's just a fact.
Curt is the webmaster of startrekhistory.com, and he, Dave and I were fortunate enough to be asked to contribute some of our rare images to Star Trek 365 -- some of which have never appeared on the site. BTW, we had a lot of fun working with Paula and Terry! Regards, Dave
Well...I don't know if they actually have it yet. I just saw something on line that said the Smithsonian would be carrying it. I think you Australians and a few lucky people in Britain are the only ones so far to have seen it. Dang it.
Haha. And to think I almost didn't buy it! I had to travel into an inner city suburb of Sydney to meet a Facebook friend for dinner (first time meeting!) and we organised to rendezvous at a bookshop called Gleebooks (in Glebe). They only had two copies of "365" on display, but I thought I had it pre-ordered at Galaxy Bookshop in the CBD. I couldn't stand to walk away from it, so I bought a copy, then inquired at Galaxy a few days later if there was a problem canceling the other copy. (I'd have had to buy one as a gift for a friend if they weren't able to cancel.) But I hadn't pre-ordered after all, or my email had been lost! So... lucky!
Mmmmm, just received a blog comment on my original post, mentioning concern that the images weren't rare enough. I replied: Gosh, don't be so fast to diss this book. I picked six random images (out of over 365) that seemed fairly unusual to me. I own every licensed ST book ever published and many unlicensed ones. I've only ever seen those Gorn and Tellarite shots once each before, never saw the set sketches I scanned, and that beautiful Khan and Marla shot, while very familiar from the episode iself, is not something I've seen as a production still. I'd say that Paula & Terry have done an extraordinary job digging up some rarities. There's a great interview in the current "Star Trek Magazine" from Titan where they explain that a few golden oldies are included among the pics simply because they are good photos that are fondly remembered, but the book took me a good two hours just to skim through the pics - and I've barely touched the 365 pages of researched trivia in the text!
I thought he was talking about never-before-seen-in-print photos. If you're going to count online digital images, Paula would have had to start rummaging the personal negatives in people's houses for rarer set pics. And, of course, visitors used to have to hand in personal cameras at the Desilu/Paramount gatehouses.
Hey, I know it's a picture book, but I'm curious about the text (this being, after all, the Treklit section). Have you had a chance to peruse the pages with the writing on them? I'm curious as to what the authors wrote to pair with the images. Haven't had any hints about that yet.
Not to be a pain in the ass 'purist' or something, but that was the goal that Curt and I had 6 years ago when we talked about the idea of a book(s) project. We only wanted to do images that had never been published anywhere before. That would keep it completely fresh and new and every single image would be like a Christmas package for the unwrapping. Private cameras on the studio lot? Well, occasionally folks got away with a few. In his files, Curt has a few candids of Dee Kelley that I sent him that someone had taken on the back lot.
Well, for every time I'll say the book contains many, many previously unseen or obscure images, someone always has a rebuttal that they've "seen them all before". Over on my blog, I put up about six, random, seemingly-rare, pic pages and still people were scoffing they were nothing new. It'll be the same with the text. I have everything licensed ST book published, and many unlicensed books and ST magazines and still found lots of new anecdotes, or new angles on old anecdotes. I've flipped open pages, over recent weeks, to find fascinating, brief details on the Nimoy/Spock cameo on "The Carol Burnett Show" (that no one could uncover on TrekBBS a few years ago), a story about Roddenberry having problems getting the balsa and birch Enterprise prototype to hang properly from its string during his pitch to NBC, biographical info on Wah Chang, the birth of the Star Trek fanzine, the hint in "The Deadly Years" (about corbomite) that Chekov was aboard the ship for the events of "Space Seed", etc... ... and at least 360 more little anecdotes. Well, that's hard to prove. Someone will always say they've seen them before, or a slightly different pose. Each of which would probably require signed release forms, from all participants or their estates, and agreements from Paramount over illegally taken pics.
Aren't they blurry old Super 8s? Taken by a Paramount employee? And I'm sure there would have been legal sign-offs to use them on the DVD sets. I remember when Susan Sackett and Ernie Over were preparing "sign off" letters for every person appearing in photos in Sackett's eventually-axed ST coffee table book. Nimoy refused to sign, due to what some people perceived as a rewriting of history in Sackett's text, and the whole deal was off. An anniversary ST book with no pics of Spock or Nimoy? Deal off.
Actually, the quality of Blackburn's movies aren't half bad. They're included as extras on the TOS-R DVD's, as well as featuring fairly prominently in the British (?) special "Star Trek: After They Were Famous".
Paula and Terry are guest bloggers at StarTrek.com, discussing the book, here: http://www.startrek.com/article/guest-bloggers-paula-block-and-terry-erdmann
Thanks for the heads up there, I'm sure you posted this identical same post somewhere else yesterday.