Tom Paris/Nick Locarno Question

[LutherSloan]

I know that initially the Voyager producers were going to have Locarno on their show instead of Tom Paris, but because of copyright reasons they created a new character (Paris). I mean, in the book Pathways, we find out that Paris was responsible for a training accident virtually identical to the one from 'The First Duty', except that the names and locations are different. Otherwise the story is the same. Like with Locarno, Paris is kicked out of Starfleet.

I thought that at one point I read SOME book or novel where it was revealed that Locarno was just an alias for Tom Paris all along. Maybe this was Shatnerverse, but Memory Beta searches are coming up empty for any reference to this. Am I nuts? Or is this buried somewhere?

 

[Therin of Andor]

Memory Beta searches are coming up empty for any reference to this. Am I nuts? Or is this buried somewhere?

http://memory-beta.wikia.com/wiki/Nicholas_Locarno
mentions that Locarno is referenced in "The Best and the Brightest".

I don't recall Locarno and Paris ever being suggested as one and the same, though.

 

[LightningStorm]

There's a spot for him on Memory Alpha too that mentions this somewhat.

http://memory-alpha.org/en/wiki/Nicholas_Locarno

 

[Therin of Andor]

I thought that at one point I read SOME book or novel where it was revealed that Locarno was just an alias for Tom Paris all along.

Ah! Memory Alpha: "A photo of McNeill as Locarno was later used as a photo of young Tom Paris on Admiral Owen Paris' desk in the episode "Pathfinder"."

 

[JarodRussell]

[...] but because of copyright reasons they created a new character (Paris).

What copyright reason could possibly prevent the creators of Star Trek to reuse one of the characters they created in Star Trek?

 

[Paris]

^AFAIK, they would have to pay the writer(s) of The First Duty royalties every time Locarno showed up on screen, or some crazy shit like that...So Paris was born

 

[Turbo]

It's the same reason T'Pol was created for Enterprise instead of using T'Pau, like they originally intended. They would have had to pay royalties to Theodore Sturgeon's estate for every episode. (Personally, I think it worked out better making them separate characters in the end.)

 

[Mr. Laser Beam]

But doesn't Paramount own all these characters anyway, and can therefore do whatever they want with them?

 

[Allyn Gibson]

But doesn't Paramount own all these characters anyway, and can therefore do whatever they want with them?

Yes, but there are still residuals that have to be paid.

That's the crux of Harlan Ellison's lawsuit over "City on the Edge of Forever," for instance.

Yes, Paramount owns the characters and can use them as they see fit. But they also have to pay the creators of the characters for their use. It's spelled out in the Writers Guild minimum basic agreement.

 

[Therin of Andor]

^AFAIK, they would have to pay the writer(s) of The First Duty royalties every time Locarno showed up on screen, or some crazy shit like that...So Paris was born

Actually, Ronald D Moore and Naren Shankar, creators of Locarno, were staff writers on TNG when they wrote "The First Duty", so it's a bit different to the T'Pau/T'Pol problem, where royalties were owed to the estate of freelance writer, Theodore Sturgeon.

It wasn't so much that the VOY production team didn't want to pay royalties for using Locarno - no one had to pay royalties on O'Brien and Keiko on DS9 either - but it was felt that Nick Locarno wasn't believably redeemable as a Starfleet officer. But they liked the actor and the concept of the Locarno character.

But doesn't Paramount own all these characters anyway, and can therefore do whatever they want with them?

Of course they can, but the freelance writers' contracts specify that royalties are owed if the guest characters are used in future episodes or movies. Up and till now, that didn't include their use in licensed tie-ins, but Harlan Elison has now decided to challenge previous interpretations in the courts.

 

[Christopher]

It can get confusing, but there's a difference between owning a character and being entitled to compensation for a character's use. We're talking about royalties here. I don't own any of the Trek novels I've written, but I still get paid royalties for their sales. So royalties aren't about ownership or creative control.

 

[Therin of Andor]

It can get confusing, but there's a difference between owning a character and being entitled to compensation for a character's use. We're talking about royalties here. I don't own any of the Trek novels I've written, but I still get paid royalties for their sales. So royalties aren't about ownership or creative control.

In the current state of play, if CBS decided to do an episode of a new ST TV series using the alien race you introduced in "The Buried Age", you probably wouldn't score an additional payment (unless they asked you to make the pitch, and you wrote up a script), nor if Pocket Books did a sequel novel with a different writer.

 

[Amy Sisson]

This Locarno/Paris thing has always bugged the crap out of me. But I too have heard that it was about whether Locarno was redeemable -- and he was actually pretty sleazy compared to Tom Paris. With Tom's accident as in Pathways, he was really eaten up about it the whole time, whereas Locarno seemed not to give a damn that he was largely responsible for someone's death.

I wonder if any of this is relevant to why Ensign Sito never showed up on DS9. I did a SNW story that didn't make the cut, in which she shows up in a Cardassian prison camp. I think DS9 missed a real opportunity not to use a great character.

 

[Amy Sisson]

Oops, that would be "missed a real opportunity to use a great character," rather than missing an opportunity NOT to use the character. Sigh.....

Is it Friday yet?

 

[Christopher]

In the current state of play, if CBS decided to do an episode of a new ST TV series using the alien race you introduced in "The Buried Age", you probably wouldn't score an additional payment (unless they asked you to make the pitch, and you wrote up a script), nor if Pocket Books did a sequel novel with a different writer.

That's a given. I wasn't remotely claiming that a Trek novelist (as opposed to a screenwriter) would get royalties for the reuse of a novel character. That's missing the point of my analogy. I was simply using novel royalties as an example to demonstrate that, in general terms, getting paid royalties for something doesn't mean you own it.

 

[LutherSloan]

Does anyone remember if there was a book/short story where Paris turned out to have been Locarno the whole time? I can tell you it wasn't in a SNW book, because I never read any of those.

 

[Admiral Buzzkill]

Actually, Ronald D Moore and Naren Shankar, creators of Locarno, were staff writers on TNG when they wrote "The First Duty", so it's a bit different to the T'Pau/T'Pol problem, where royalties were owed to the estate of freelance writer, Theodore Sturgeon.

I'm not sure that staff writers give up any rights to character royalties because of being on staff - they're certainly due all other residuals from scripts that they write (which is why agents will try to negotiate a certain number of assignments per season).

 

[Therin of Andor]

I'm not sure that staff writers give up any rights to character royalties because of being on staff - they're certainly due all other residuals from scripts that they write (which is why agents will try to negotiate a certain number of assignments per season).

Well, I do recall hearing about how some characters were developed in much the way main characters were developed for the writers bible, then they look for a potential script to drop them into. Sometimes the script comes first, and a good returning character comes out of it. Surely DC Fontana doesn't get royalties on the entire main cast of TNG, whenever they appeared as guest characters in DS9 or VOY?

Imagine the bunfight in the writers' room to be the one to get the assignment that just so happens to introduce a new intended recurring character who was generated by the committee of staff writers a few weeks earlier?

Melora Pazlar was created for the DS9 writers' bible as a regular, then dropped as too expensive to be a regular, then they used her in a one-off episde.

O'Brien started off as a glorified extra, then got a surname, then a first time, then a middle name and a backstory, then a wife, then crossed over to a spin-off series. Which writer would be owed payment for him? If anything, Colm Meaney helped create that character, since his acting was strong enough to make the writers start using him more.

Similarly with Rom, who started off in the premiere as an unnamed dabo attendant and became a regular character and given a name.

Does anyone remember if there was a book/short story where Paris turned out to have been Locarno the whole time?

I think you dreamed it.

 

[Christopher]

Well, I do recall hearing about how some characters were developed in much the way main characters were developed for the writers bible, then they look for a potential script to drop them into. Sometimes the script comes first, and a good returning character comes out of it. Surely DC Fontana doesn't get royalties on the entire main cast of TNG, whenever they appeared as guest characters in DS9 or VOY?

By Writers' Guild rules, she would get royalties on any character introduced in a script credited to her, regardless of how many others were actually involved in the creation. So yes, since "Encounter at Farpoint" was credited to Fontana and Roddenberry, I think she would be entitled to a half-share of the royalties for a guest appearance by a TNG regular in another show.

To return to an example I've used before, this is why the Stargate SG-1 characters who originated in the movie (Jack O'Neill and Daniel Jackson) never appeared in the same Stargate Atlantis episodes as the SG-1 regulars who originated in the series (Samantha Carter and Teal'c) -- because the former were created by Dean Devlin and Roland Emmerich while the latter were created by Jonathan Glassner and Brad Wright, so using, say, both Jack and Sam at the same time would've required paying royalties to two sets of creators instead of just one. (Although we did see O'Neill and Robert Picardo's character Woolsey in the same SGA episode; maybe the royalties for Woolsey are less because he was originally a guest character, or something.)

I don't know this for certain, though. I'm just making a semi-educated guess.

O'Brien started off as a glorified extra, then got a surname, then a first time, then a middle name and a backstory, then a wife, then crossed over to a spin-off series. Which writer would be owed payment for him?

Probably whoever was credited as the author of the script that first gave him a character name. Before then, it would've just been Meaney playing various nameless extras as the script demanded. When Meaney became a unique character named O'Brien, his earlier roles were retroactively assumed to be the same person, but since they weren't specifically identified as that character, they don't count in technical terms. I'm not sure whether his earlier appearances credited as "Transporter Chief" would count, though.

 

[JD]

Similarly with Rom, who started off in the premiere as an unnamed dabo attendant and became a regular character and given a name.

I don't know if it makes a difference, but Rom never became an official regular, even though he was in pretty much every episode of the last 2 or 3 seasons, same goes for Nog.