"The Making of Star Trek" by Stephen Whitfield & Gene Roddenberry (1968)
- Thread starter Damian
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CBS is worth billions. Unless Ballantine is pricing a 50 year old book right out of their market, they could have made it work. They couldn't be bothered.
Not necessarily. CBS may be worth billions, but the publishing rights to a 50-year-old book may not be worth much to them at all.
Ballantine is now part of the Bertelsmann publishing empire. And a publishing empire has zero incentive to hand over rights to something they own -- something related to one of the major entertainment franchises, a franchise owned by an entertainment conglomerate that owns a competing publishing company. I can very much see Bertelsmann playing hardball and asking for a bunch of money for those "worthless" rights. Because they can.
And obtaining the rights is only step one. Then the text has to be digitized and edited. The additional chapters have to be written and edited. Illustrations have to be prepared, and possibly rights cleared. Plus, the Roddenberry and "Whitfield" estates have to be paid (because it's unlikely those entities will forget the provisions of the original 1968 publishing contract that granted them royalties.)
All in all, I have to side with KRAD here. It may seem like an easy slam-dunk, but it's far more complicated that it looks. It would probably be easier to go to Roddenberry's estate, obtain rights to quote from the show bible and memos, and write an entirely new book.
Which, no matter how shoddy and riddled with errors the result, is exactly what Mark Cushman did.
A great book. I kinda love that it has an incomplete listing of episodes, from being published while the show was still on air. I still have my silver-covered paperback that was one of the first Trek books I ever got, and another reading copy. Deserves a re-read, as I still think the definitive behind the scenes book about TOS awaits writing.
Well worth a read. I'm not as into the behind the scenes stuff, I'm more story immersed. But it was an excellent look into how they made the show and gave me a new found respect for what Roddenberry and his team hoped to accomplish. And just how much work went into it.
It was also interesting to read some of the things they hoped to tackle in the then upcoming 3rd season and never got around too--like a version of what would later be the holodeck.
I doubt we're going to get the "definitive" book about TOS at this late date, when so many of the main players are dead. I think TMOST and Solow and Justman's Inside Star Trek: The Real Story give us a pretty good portrait of the behind-the-scenes of TOS.
There’s a pretty rich archival record for the show, only the surface of which has been scratched. I’m hopeful someone will use it for a more expansive history of the series someday. The audience for such a book is certainly aging, though.
Who knows!?
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