Star Trek a popularity contest?

[horatio83]

If he just served his audience how come that people in other places and other times read, stage and watch his plays?
Shakespeare's greatness lies in his unviversality. If he merely gave the crowd what the crowd wanted today's crowds who want totally different things wouldn't still be mesmerized by the Bard. Great art is never a result of merely catering to the audience and desiring large paychecks. Guys like Kafka and van Gogh had no audience to speak of while they were alive.

 

[Chuckling]

If he just served his audience how come that people in other places and other times read, stage and watch his plays?
Shakespeare's greatness lies in his unviversality. If he merely gave the crowd what the crowd wanted today's crowds who want totally different things wouldn't still be mesmerized by the Bard. Great art is never a result of merely catering to the audience and desiring large paychecks. Guys like Kafka and van Gogh had no audience to speak of while they were alive.

Nobody is suggesting it is only about paychecks but somebody has to pay for all those special effects and CGI! And if an artist or creative person doesn't eat, they can't create.

Or would you suggest *Star Trek* should survive on charity in order to prove it's artistic integrity?

As to whether *Star Trek* should be considered "great art" or should aspire to be, that is a whole other question.

However, back to what you were saying. On the contrary, Shakespeare did write what his audience wanted because if he didn't, his plays would not be performed. The fact that he wrote to the humanity and commonality in all of us at the same time as highlighting universal truths is part of the brilliance! But it is the fact that audience members were able to relate to what he wrote that brought in the ticket sales and still do so today. Ticket sales meant his company was then able to buy supplies and food/shelter etc., so they could put on the next play. That's the way the system works and always has!

But we are actually talking *Star Trek*, not Shakespeare here. And while the Bard was paying for sets, costumes and props, *Star Trek* incurs far more costs that must be paid in order to bring it to the screen.

I know this may come as a shock to you but both Kafka and Van Gogh had to eat as well! Paper, inks, paints and canvas don't come for free then either and they don't now.

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Vincent_van_Gogh

When Van Gogh couldn't/wouldn't support himself, he turned to others to pay for him and his work.

"...Van Gogh's uncle Cornelis, an art dealer, commissioned 12 ink drawings of views of the city, which van Gogh completed soon after arriving in The Hague, along with a further seven drawings that May...."

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Franz_Kafka

"...His father often referred to his son's job as insurance officer as a "Brotberuf", literally "bread job", a job done only to pay the bills. While Kafka often claimed that he despised the job, he was a diligent and capable employee. He was also given the task of compiling and composing the annual report and was reportedly quite proud of the results, sending copies to friends and family. In parallel, Kafka was also committed to his literary work. ..."


Reality is that *Star Trek* is a commercial product. Unless it makes the finances to pay for its creation, it will not be able to sustain itself or grow. I doubt anybody would claim it is fine art or that it should be.

Maybe you believe it should be horatio83 but to require it to fulfill that role or force it into that mould would require altering it's basic nature. It would no longer be *Star Trek* but something else.

Possibly there should be a science fictions genre based fine art or theater piece. Shakespeare certainly wrote in various genres; comedies, dramas, historical documentaries and romances, often combining more than one genre at a time.

There are those who would claim some science fiction has achieved the realms of fine art, such as "Metropolis". But to attempt to force all Art to be created as such is to deny the individual creator the right of choice as to the nature of his/her creation. It is to restrict the artist to an imposed formulaic restriction foreign to the very basis of Art at its source and foundations.

The key to a production such as *Star Trek*, is for the Creatives involved to rise above the basic needs for investment and funding sources to create something that takes the audience beyond the special effects.

But they can do they best if they also have a roof over their heads, food in their stomachs and clothes on their backs. And the money to provide for the costumes, special effects, actors etc., etc., etc.,

Creativity being supported by the appropriate level of resources: The two go hand in hand.


Chuckling

 

[Chuckling]

Oops! Sorry. Double post. Not sure how that happened. *blush*

Chuckling

 

[horatio83]

It might come as a shock to you but neither van Gogh nor Kafka earned the discounted value of their "product" during their lifetime, they actually only earned a tiny fraction of it or in the case of Kafka virtually nothing as he only published some short prose.

The same happened with TOS in a slightly different fashion, the studio executives did not expect that TOS will be popular for decades so they underfunded and cancelled the show. In other words, they horribly misjudged how profitable their product is.

My point is that viewing art merely as a product is a narrow view. As an economist I am the first one to prioritize economic thinking ... but not when it comes to art, be it worldclass literature or movies. Couldn't imagine a worse travesty than watching a Bergman movie with somebody who afterwards merely wonders how much money it made. I could imagine though to watch one of these braindead Hollywood action blockbusters with overblown budgets and wonder afterwards how many decent movies one could have financed with all this money. Gotta talk about something and in the case of a braindead movie it can't be the movie in and of itself.

Oops! Sorry. Double post. Not sure how that happened. *blush*

Chuckling

Must be tribbles in the machines. Hire to some Klingons to smoke 'em out.

 

[xortex]

Van Goegh's solution was to eat his paint. So there you are.

Trek needs a very unique Twilight zone-esk premise twisty spin set up like the Captain finds out he's exploring a holographic universe but can't get out sort of thing.

 

[Chuckling]

It might come as a shock to you but neither van Gogh nor Kafka earned the discounted value of their "product" during their lifetime, they actually only earned a tiny fraction of it or in the case of Kafka virtually nothing as he only published some short prose.

The same happened with TOS in a slightly different fashion, the studio executives did not expect that TOS will be popular for decades so they underfunded and cancelled the show. In other words, they horribly misjudged how profitable their product is.

My point is that viewing art merely as a product is a narrow view. As an economist I am the first one to prioritize economic thinking ... but not when it comes to art, be it worldclass literature or movies. Couldn't imagine a worse travesty than watching a Bergman movie with somebody who afterwards merely wonders how much money it made. I could imagine though to watch one of these braindead Hollywood action blockbusters with overblown budgets and wonder afterwards how many decent movies one could have financed with all this money. Gotta talk about something and in the case of a braindead movie it can't be the movie in and of itself.

Oops! Sorry. Double post. Not sure how that happened. *blush*

Chuckling

Must be tribbles in the machines. Hire to some Klingons to smoke 'em out.

Tribbles? Not unless they are inhabiting the "edit" button when I tried to change my poor grammar!

I understand your point. But what Van Gogh or Kafka earned (or did not) from their art during their lifetime is completely irrelevant to what we are discussing. And hopefully *Star Trek's* creative personnel aren't considered to be "mentally unstable" as in the two people you've chosen as your examples!

Getting back to what we started with. If you read my original post I wasn't talking about *Star Trek* as a mere economic product. I was saying that CBS/Paramount Pictures own *Star Trek* and as such they get to do what they want with it.

All the fan campaigns in the world are not going to tell the studios how to spend their money but it doesn't mean the fans can't make suggestions!

Given that it's CBS/Paramount Picture's baby and their money they'd be spending, I am wondering if there might be a more effective way the fans can let the show's owners know what they want and how it can survive and thrive?

That way everyone gets what they want from the franchise!

Certainly the letter campaigns etc., aren't being effective (if you go by what is written on-line) and it looks to me as if the fans feel as if they aren't being heard.


Chuckling

 

[horatio83]

Jonas Grumby has already pointed out the aggregation problem. There are millions of fans with millions of different opinions which cannot be aggregated into anything unless you run polls.
I fail to see the point of catering to our needs. While I have strong opinions about Trek I wouldn't respect a Trek writer who cared about them. Take Meyer, he did not care about Roddenberry or Trek fandom, he just did his thing. Orci and Kurtzman on the other hand with all their fanwank ...

My point is that great art is not a result of caring about the people who will "consume" it. That's the central flaw of a narrow economic perspective upon art, art is not an on-demand product like as stupid yoghurt.
The studio executives in the sixties thought that the audience merely wants Westerns, Roddenberry did his thing and in the end millions of people loved it. Which pilot is better, the purely Roddenberryian "The Cage" or the 'Westernized' "Where No Man Has Gone Before"?
Take Kafka, he wrote only for himself and produced sublime literature. Doesn't matter that he had psychological issues, his name is infinitely larger than that of a number-crunching studio executive.

As I showed above via the example of the two pilots Trek has been captured in the tension between 'to thine ownself be true' and 'make money' since its very beginning. I prefer if it leans towards the former because when it leans towards the latter Trek the result was a bad second pilot, a premature cancellation of TOS, Trek overload and franchise fatigue in the late nineties and stupidification&blockbusterification right now.

 

[Temis the Vorta]

If he just served his audience how come that people in other places and other times read, stage and watch his plays?

If he didn't write plays that were popular enough for people to pay to see, his career would have been over with very fast and we'd never have heard of him at all.

And nobody expects Star Trek to survive for centuries (although I wouldn't be surprised if it did). The point is, how do we get it back on TV. If you think "being good" is good enough, you don't know much about the TV business.

I fail to see the point of catering to our needs.

Same here. Nobody should cater to our needs (meaning the TrekBBS audience). But any show must cater to the audience of the channel is is appearing on. If it's on CBS, it will be advertised to current CBS viewers, so whatever it is, it needs to appeal to them. Ditto for CW, Showtime or anywhere else it might appear. And those three audiences are very different from each other, with very different tastes. A Star Trek series for one of those three would not appeal to the other two.

I was saying that CBS/Paramount Pictures own *Star Trek* and as such they get to do what they want with it.

What they want to do with it is very simple: make money. Paramount has figured out how to make money with movies (which is what they have the rights for). CBS either hasn't figured out how to make money on TV, or doesn't think it's even worth investing effort in thinking about.

My point is that viewing art merely as a product is a narrow view.

Not when the discussion is "how to get Star Trek back on TV," because the people with the power to do that do think of Star Trek as a product, just as if they were selling dog food or toothpaste.

They would laugh until they fall down at the notion that they should think of their business as "producing art." Maybe Showtime might take that stance to some degree, but that's part of their strategy - their audience being people who demand a certain degree of artistry in return for their subscription.

I defy you to find anything on CBS or the CW that even remotely qualifies as art. At best, you can admire their lineup for being so masterful and calculated at serving up exactly the kind of sludge their respective audiences demands.

 

[horatio83]

The very history of Trek proves that viewing art merely as a product does not create the most bucks. Just take The Cage or TWOK, very popular, selling very well and not produced with the intention to satisfy anybody's needs.

That's the paradox I am aiming at, if you wanna create something decent that also sells well and merely think about $ you won't make any. I am not saying artsy-fartsy for the sake of artsy-fartsy but for the sake of quality that sells.
This paradox is appearing not merely in art/entertainment. Take great inventions, nobody set up a research budget for the internet, it was a by-product created in a space where people had liberties to come up with such a by-product. If the military had controllers on their butts they would never have come up with the internet.

To come up with something great people need spaces of freedom.

 

[Temis the Vorta]

I don't know why you're talking about Shakespeare, van Gogh, Bergman and Kafka anyway. None of them were creating entertainment as employees of a corporation whose overriding concern is to increase their share prices. That's always how Star Trek has been produced. Stick to relevant examples.

In movies, Star Trek is solidly in the category of brainless summer entertainments whose budgets you claim would better be spent on indy films. It's less brainless than, say, Transformers, but it's the same type of thing, made for the same purpose, with the same underlying philosophy: sell tickets to teenage boys because they buy the most popcorn.

In the TV realm, the best we can hope for from Star Trek is to attain the level of artistry set by, say, The Sopranos or The Wire. (Which means that there's more potential for quality on TV than we'll ever see in movies.) And that would be a level of artistry and seriousness that Star Trek has never yet attained. If it stepped up to that level, it would be great. Whether or not that would actually qualify as "Art" would still be open to debate, and it would still need to meet ratings expectations in order to survive.

The very history of Trek proves that viewing art merely as a product does not create the most bucks. Just take The Cage or TWOK, very popular, selling very well and not produced with the intention to satisfy anybody's needs.

Of course they were produced as popular entertainment, with the goal of making money. If you consider such things "art," then you don't actually know what art is. TWOK is an example of summer popcorn entertainment that you claim shouldn't exist, and would better be spent on indie films. The idea that it qualifies as "art" in the same category as Bergman or van Gogh is farcical.

That's the paradox I am aiming at, if you wanna create something decent that also sells well and merely think about $ you won't make any.

What you need to think about is the audience you're trying to appeal to. That's how CSI gets produced and that's also how The Sopranos got produced. The audience on cable has expectations of a higher level of artistry than Star Trek has ever achieved. If Star Trek were on Showtime, it would have to move closer to being art than it's ever been, or else it would be rejected by that audience, and would be a financial failure. But it's all part of an overall financial calculation. As long as it's produced by a corporation, it won't be made any other way.

Take great inventions, nobody set up a research budget for the internet, it was a by-product created in a space where people had liberties to come up with such a by-product.

It was funded by the Pentagon and American tax dollars. So is the US government supposed to take over production of Star Trek now? This analogy is even further off-base than Shakespeare.

 

[horatio83]

You obviously did not understand my paradox. Let's go over it again via the two pilots. The NBC folks though that "The Cage" is too intellectual so they wanted a more 'Westernized' version, "Where No Man Has Gone Before".
The first pilot is more popular and if single episodes would be sold and not whole seasons it would also make far more money than the second one.

In other words, the lunatic wasteful dreamer produced a more valuable product when he had more freedom. Mind that I don't advocate unlimited freedom, TMP is definitely a project where Roddenberry had too much liberty.

I understand that this paradox, you can only make money respectively create something socially valuable if you don't focus too much on it, is not very intuitive but if you actually think about it for some time you will discover many other examples besides The Cage, The Castle, Macbeth and the internet.

If the Bard had merely thought about money we would not read him today anymore. If Kurosawa had merely thought about money we would not watch him today anymore. Hell, screw Kurosawa, you can even take a Hollywood director like Spielberg. There is a surplus in his movie, something that goes beyond "I gotta do X and then I will get Y" accounting logic and this very surplus which transcends economic logic is paradoxically the reason his movies sell so well.

You cannot make a great movie that also sells well if you think otherwise. You can make a crappy movie that sells well via merely thinking economically but I fail to see why we should discuss something you normally flush.

 

[horatio83]

Take great inventions, nobody set up a research budget for the internet, it was a by-product created in a space where people had liberties to come up with such a by-product.

It was funded by the Pentagon and American tax dollars. So is the US government supposed to take over production of Star Trek now? This analogy is even further off-base than Shakespeare.

On the contrary, it is spot on and there is even a political implication in it. If private business does not create these spaces of freedom because they are obsessed by standardization (some decades ago originality and creativity was valued, nowadays at least large companies try to standardize jobs in order to make firing people less costly in terms of firm-specific human capital for them) you gotta create these very spaces in public institutions. It worked in case of the internet and academics would be another obvious example. Of course most people go through higher education to become more productive but every academic system also needs humanities who have little obvious benefit in the working world.
Being a non-native speaker I learned decent English as teenager via obsessively reading English literature. It served no point but a few years later it payed off when I needed to be fluent in English. It's again the same pattern, you do something without an economic motivation and it pays off more than if you merely have narrow economic motivations.

 

[xortex]

I have an idea. Why doesn't CBS bring it's case to the people and start a forum site like JJ did with the movie? The worst thing they can do is make a hasty decision because they can or are pressured into it by writers with clout. Else they'll be working on the 'untitled' Star Trek project like poor RH Wolfe is. He doesn't even know the title yet. There's a reason to tell a space story that needs to be told. That's how anxious they are to get a space show up and running. This way they can get feednack on what theyr'e up to and thinking about developing. It is easy for them to get delusional and over value what they have. Look at Berman's 'Nemieis'. It's great because it came from those in office. It's all about glory. I could never understand why Bush avoided unilateral conversations with the leaders of other countries. It just made no sense to me or Janet Reno's decision to 'send in the tanks' at Waco. Everybody loves their own shit.

 

[Temis the Vorta]

"The Cage" and "Where No Man Has Gone Before" were both examples of products created by a corporation for profit. Roddenberry would have not been able to make either if he hadn't had corporate interest and corporate money.

There is no example of Star Trek in TV or movies that is anything besides a product created by a corporation for profit. There are examples of non-corporate Star Trek of course. They are called fanfilms and fanfic. You can decide for yourself whether they represent captial-A "Art." I've slogged through mountains of garbage to find a few good fanfics before giving up entirely, and I've never see any fanfilm or fanfic that qualifies as art. It's unusual to even see anything that's as good as the products produced by a corporation for profit.

If private business does not create these spaces of freedom because they are obsessed by standardization

They're not obsessed with standardization. The trend in TV is towards serving niche tastes via cable (and as YouTube, Netflix etc enter the fray, this trend will only increase). I'd be overjoyed to see a Star Trek series that hit the same marks as, say, Breaking Bad or The Wire or Sons of Anarchy or The Walking Dead. That alone would be an improvement over anything that's been done before.

The trend in movies is towards brainless action. Well that's fine for the movie biz, I think Star Trek belongs on TV anyway.

It's pointless to complain that financial motives underlie all of this, because that's never going to change. Leaving aside fan productions, if Star Trek is going to be produced, it will be produced under financial constraints. All the examples of great TV I've cited above were produced by profit-minded corporations with the ultimate goal of making a buck. They also get strong ratings, which proves that making a buck can also be perfectly consistent with good TV (even if it'll never be captial-A "Art").

And if it bothers you that Star Trek is a corporate product, there's a whole universe of fan productions to "enjoy." Have fun wading through all of that.