The recycled footage of BOP exploding in Generations

[Dream]

It's a bit sad that they couldn't squeeze that other 100,000 dollars for a new explosion out of the production.

Reminds me of why I hate Paramount so much. Freaking cheapskates!

You would think they would at least be a little generous with the budget after killing the TNG series on television while is was still quite popular.

 

[Maurice]

As has been reported before, they "killed" TNG for business reasons. The show was getting increasingly expensive to produce and adding more episodes to a series that had run 7 years wasn't going to add significantly to its value especially given those rising costs.

 

[Dream]

Was it Gene? It's been stated many times that Bob Justman was the one who basically had to push hard to convince Gene to have a Klingon (Worf) on the bridge in TNG. Where is it that Gene went out of his way to make the Klingon's an ally?

I never said Gene had anything to do with Worf.

Only said as showrunner he would've been involved with making the Klingon Empire allies to the Federation, which was established in "Heart of Glory".

 

[Lance]

That's a good point actually. Was the Klingon/Federation alliance ever established as being pre-Worf (ie, was it thought up during the early pitch meetings), which subsequently urged Justman towards suggesting a regular Klingon cast member?

 

[Dream]

As has been reported before, they "killed" TNG for business reasons. The show was getting increasingly expensive to produce and adding more episodes to a series that had run 7 years wasn't going to add significantly to its value especially given those rising costs.

Paramount not only killed TNG, they also damaged the last season of the show. They moved all the best writers over to DS9. They had Moore and Braga distracted with the Generations script instead of having them focusing on TNG S7 like they should have. S7 suffers so much because they rushed Generations. That garbage movie wasn't even worth it.

Very glad CBS now controls Trek on television.

 

[Captain Crow]

How come no one has bitched about the two shots* reused from the TV series?



* Fly by just before the bit in stellar cartography and the neck shot of the Enterprise duing the saucer separation.

 

[trevanian]

How come no one has bitched about the two shots* reused from the TV series?



* Fly by just before the bit in stellar cartography and the neck shot of the Enterprise duing the saucer separation.

Topic was probably used up more than most other played-out topics, in dozens of old threads in the past 12 years or so.

An awful lot of work went into salvaging that slow flyaway for GEN (one of the only optical as opposed to digital comps in the show), and even so it looked so 'off' from the rest as seen in-cinema that it was disconcerting. Hard to believe then & now that mo-con stage miniature work would be so expensive as to make spending ANY dollars trying to salvage that worthwhile.

 

[DonIago]

How come no one has bitched about the two shots* reused from the TV series?



* Fly by just before the bit in stellar cartography and the neck shot of the Enterprise duing the saucer separation.

Probably because in general that sort of reuse isn't uncommon, and neither one constituted a "climax" shot.

 

[R. Star]

Effect shots like that are the frosting on the cake. All the best frosting in the world is still gonna be bleh if there's no substance underneath it. Effects are there to enhance a plot, not define it. Generations was doomed long before that bird of prey blew up.

 

[Phily B]

It's a bit sad that they couldn't squeeze that other 100,000 dollars for a new explosion out of the production. That all went into the redesigned uniforms they never used.

"Generations" is a funny fish. It doesn't really look like one of the cheap Trek movies, certainly it had a modest budget but it wasn't exactly a tightening of the belt. But it did face some major budgetary problems, because mistakes were made along the way in where exactly they spent all that money. Bafflingly, most of it seemed to be elementary mistakes. Things like (as you say) spending all that money on stitching together uniforms that were scraped after filming began, or having to go back and reshoot the ending because the original version stank, or shooting elaborate stunt sequences (orbital skydiving) which didn't even make it into the picture... these are mistakes that somebody with a bit more experience in movie production might not have made. They could have nipped it in the bud during script conferences, but for some reason a lot of these problems ended up being fixed during production, while the cameras were actually rolling. Maybe it was because they didn't get a whole lot of lead-in time from finishing up the TNG series? Who knows.

I always got the feeling that Berman, Moore, Braga and co had the training wheels on during "Generations". They were really feeling their way through the process of making a feature movie, and that they took a lot of lessons they learnt from the experience of making it into the next one. Hence why "First Contact" hit all the right beats straight outta the gate...

While I'm no fan of FC at all, I agree with you about how screwed-up GEN was on the production side. To me, blowing 20% of your original shooting schedule on the nautical E was just plain insanity.

I think the director and cinematographer worked wonders on the film visually, but the compromises forced on the production by the line producer (the guy who supposedly knew how to make movies on schedule, and he should have known everything after having worked on THE PRISONER and for Stanley Kubrick) didn't do the movie any favors creatively.

I think Carson lost a lot of ground career-wise for this one and it is a shame, he was one of the only directors in ModernTrek who really brought something (the season 5 opener had some really creative framing that worked with depth on the 4:3 image the way a widescreen shooter would work with the bigger aspect ratio to maximize image interest); he should have a career closer to Rob Bowman's, at the very least.

I think a lot of mistakes were made, in particular it feels like they handed a movie franchise over to a bunch of TV guys. FC came out really well, but Insurrection and then Nemesis suffered.

 

[JarodRussell]

To be fair, Star Trek 2009 had whole expensive sequences deleted (Rura Penthe, for example). And who knows what scenes landed on the cutting room floor in STD. So it hasn't changed.

 

[Dream]

I think a lot of mistakes were made, in particular it feels like they handed a movie franchise over to a bunch of TV guys. FC came out really well, but Insurrection and then Nemesis suffered.

To be fair, they also handed the TOS movies over to a bunch tv guys. Most of those movies turned out pretty good.

More and more I consider FC to be a lucky fluke for Berman and company.

I still don't understand in what universe they thought Picard saving a bunch of Space Amish, and Picard fighting his clone were worth doing movies about. Those entire scripts should have been dumped and the writers should have come up with something more interesting.

 

[Lee Enfield]

STD.

Gotto say: I love the initials for the new movie
They should've called it Star Trek: Darkness.

 

[Jonesy]

I think a lot of mistakes were made, in particular it feels like they handed a movie franchise over to a bunch of TV guys. FC came out really well, but Insurrection and then Nemesis suffered.

It would have been a great mix to hand "Generations" over to an experienced director with at least a moderate degree of success with feature films, while keeping the Trek writers.

 

[trevanian]

I think a lot of mistakes were made, in particular it feels like they handed a movie franchise over to a bunch of TV guys. FC came out really well, but Insurrection and then Nemesis suffered.

To be fair, they also handed the TOS movies over to a bunch tv guys. Most of those movies turned out pretty good.

More and more I consider FC to be a lucky fluke for Berman and company.

I still don't understand in what universe they thought Picard saving a bunch of Space Amish, and Picard fighting his clone were worth doing movies about. Those entire scripts should have been dumped and the writers should have come up with something more interesting.

If you haven't done so, you should find the unpublished book Piller did about the script (d)evolution on INSURRECTION. There was a core good idea or two, but the development process really pissed all over things (Stewart and Berman seem to be deserving of the most blame IMO) ... once Trek starts doing HATFIELDS & MCCOYS on the big screen, it stops being just played-out TV formula and becomes infuriating waste of resources.

 

[Hober Mallow]

If you haven't done so, you should find the unpublished book Piller did about the script (d)evolution on INSURRECTION. There was a core good idea or two, but the development process really pissed all over things (Stewart and Berman seem to be deserving of the most blame IMO) ...

Many of Stewart's objections and criticisms seemed perfectly reasonable:

I think there is real danger in the mindset that “there are certain things that our audience come to expect...” We have
seen Worf defend his honor so many times and exactly in the way your story plays out. Worf’s ‘honor’ is in his every thought
and gesture. He is anyway by now too big a man to rise to a jerk like Joss. But to see Worf telling his Captain he is wrong and threatening to tear him apart, there is his honor.

I have reread the story several times since your last communication and - with some exceptions - my feelings
remain unchanged. The story seems bogged down in details, dialogue and back story. For me it plods along until Act 3 (on
page 20 of your 25 page story) when the Guerilla training begins. Before, the ‘events’ have been a hand to hand fight, two ship conflicts and the delusions sequence. The first three are very familiar territory but the latter I have come to like more and more.
It is dangerous, I believe, these days to rely on tech stuff for excitement but I can see how there could be a lot of fun and
danger in this sequence but it all goes very flat again after that.

I just cannot get excited about the sarium krellide story line. It is, again, a series-style concept that is too technical and
remote to be the basis of our story. Isn’t is going to be hard for our audience to get involved with or care about some
medically significant rock. It’s not exciting. Nor, I am sorry to say, (though this is a science fiction adventure movie) is the
moral/political story line of uprooting a people and transplanting them. It’s not exciting. Yes, all that worked in the series but not, I think, here.

My concerns about Data remain. Am I mistaken to believe that we do not see Data as fully himself until the middle of Act
3? Given that he is our most ‘popular’ character can we afford to lose his Data-ness for so long? I am also uneasy about
another ‘Data malfunctioning’ story. By surprises I meant the truly unexpected and unpredictable. It would seem that Picard has no choice but to kill Data and Picard taking off his uniforms seems, at the moment, to be inappropriate rather than surprising

http://theologica.verydewarsontherocks.com/documents/FadeIn.pdf

 

[JarodRussell]

Yeah, Stewart makes the basic nuTrek arguments: it works for the show, it worked in the past, but it won't work on the big screen.

 

[Hober Mallow]

Yeah, Stewart makes the basic nuTrek arguments: it works for the show, it worked in the past, but it won't work on the big screen.

No, he makes some very specific points about the weaknesses and unoriginality of Piller's original script, i.e. Data not functioning right for the third movie in row.

 

[Belz...]

In "Yesterday's Enterprise," three Birds of Prey are able to mount an effective battle against the fully-powered and fully-shielded Enterprise-D, to the point where had the battle continued for about 30 more seconds, the Enterprise would have been destroyed. Why, then, is it unreasonable to think that a single Bird of Prey would be an effective match for the Enterprise if the advantage of its shields had been neutralized?

I'm a bit late to the discussion, here, but those BoPs in Yesterday's Enterprise were clearly meant to be much larger and more powerful, but they hadn't made the Vor'Cha model yet. If they had, you can bet they would have used them instead.