The Fifty Year Mission: A new making of book for all series and movies

[JD]

I just saw this on Io9. It's a new behind the scenes book that covers all of the Trek series and movie. It's co-written by Mark A. Altman, the writer/producer of Free Enterprise.
In the press release it says it has interviews with "250 television and film executives, programmers, creators and stars (including every Star Trek captain) who were all a part of Star Trek's ongoing 50 year voyage...".
Sounds like it could be pretty cool to me. I hope they come out with a e-book version.

 

[Paris]

Re: The Fifty Year Mission: A new making of book for all series and mo

I just posted the exact same thread. Did I do it wrong?

 

[JD]

Re: The Fifty Year Mission: A new making of book for all series and mo

No. I just didn't see it. I was probably still writing mine when you posted yours.

 

[Christopher]

Re: The Fifty Year Mission: A new making of book for all series and mo

Not just Altman (who was a Cinefantastique correspondent as well as the author of several Malibu DS9 comics), but Edward Gross, who was a Starlog correspondent. So basically it's veterans of the two top genre mags of days gone by joining forces. Perhaps they're compiling a lot of interview material they accumulated over the past few decades.

I wonder -- if this is a thorough oral history of the entire franchise, does it overlap much with the just-published Return to Tomorrow book, which I gather is an oral history of ST:TMP based largely on unpublished CFQ interviews?

 

[JD]

Re: The Fifty Year Mission: A new making of book for all series and mo

That's a good point actually. I don't think the press release said if the interviews were new, old, or a combination of the two. No matter which is I'm still interested, because I didn't really start reading interviews and following production stuff until the last season or two of ENT.

 

[Christopher]

Re: The Fifty Year Mission: A new making of book for all series and mo

^Well, my thinking is that in order to be a comprehensive set of interviews from the 50 years of Trek's existence, it would have to include older interviews from people who aren't around anymore -- not to mention that contemporary or near-contemporary interviews would be more likely to contain accurate recollections than ones conducted decades after the fact. So I hope it includes older interviews in the mix, though of course I'm hoping for some new insights as well.

 

[Tommunist]

Re: The Fifty Year Mission: A new making of book for all series and mo

With 600 page books just on single seasons of TOS and another huge book solely on TMP, one wonders how this could stand up when it purports to cover all of Trek!

I'm all for it though; it's almost as if Robert Caro decided to cover Star Trek!

 

[Leto_II]

Re: The Fifty Year Mission: A new making of book for all series and mo

Wonder if they're going to mine their earlier Captain's Logs: The Complete, Unauthorized Trek Voyages books for interview material, especially from cast and crew who are no longer around? Those volumes came out in the mid-'90s, but there was lots of good stuff in them (much of it taken from Gross's reporting and Altman's CFQ work over the years).

 

[trevanian]

Re: The Fifty Year Mission: A new making of book for all series and mo

Wonder if they're going to mine their earlier Captain's Logs: The Complete, Unauthorized Trek Voyages books for interview material, especially from cast and crew who are no longer around? Those volumes came out in the mid-'90s, but there was lots of good stuff in them (much of it taken from Gross's reporting and Altman's CFQ work over the years).

Love your signature quote from Mr Milo above; LAST BOY SCOUT has got an awful lot of great lines for such a seriously-maligned movie (Hallenbeck, along with the lead in 12 MONKEYS and the boxer in PULP FICTION are my favorite Willis creations, but Hallenbeck has got an edge that seems real. All of that with him looking at his reflection and telling himself he is going to lose ... 'now smile you fuck.' Good stuff.

On topic, I hope they have lots of unpublished bits from the interviews they did in the 90s (though I guess given how thorough the LOG books are, that's probably not likely.) It'd be nice if they leveraged a lot of interviews from CFQ done by others as well -- the 30th anniversary CFQ has got lots of stuff I haven't seen anywhere else, but the mag keep shredding so I have to keep re-buying it.

 

[Steve Roby]

Re: The Fifty Year Mission: A new making of book for all series and mo

Gross and Altman published some good Trek books many years back. They recycled their content a lot, though. If there's new material in this it'll be worth a look, but I expect half of it at least will be stuff I've read two or three times already in different books.