It was certainly an interesting image to have while reading that description of his story!
Unsold episode ideas that became books
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It was certainly an interesting image to have while reading that description of his story!But a verbal pitch doesn't get buried under a pile of papers--e-mails on a screen. They may look at that as a bit of performance itself.
If your good enough to sell a pitch--your story must be good enough to film.
Not always so of course. We all know glad handing dandies. A little of them goes a long way.
I would have loved to see the Garek hoax story myself.
Haven't there been times when two folks walk into a patent office within minutes of each other--with the same invention--and neither knows who the hell the other is?
I love talking storey ideas--I know it is frowned upon here.
I really couldn't care less if someone ran with them. Ideas do want to be free.
Now my employer on the other hand--THAT skinflint...
As I said, on Trek, the producers heard dozens or hundreds of pitches each day that they devoted to hearing them. I'd say it's pretty easy to get "buried" in that.
Doesn't work that way. Even veteran writers would often come in, rattle off a half-dozen ideas, and still not hit one that was (a) better than the other suggestions that week, (b) practical to film, and (c) not too similar to something they were already doing. Being good enough to sell stories doesn't guarantee that every story will sell.
In retrospect, I think it was too clever and complicated for its own good, especially since it didn't become evident what was going on until the end.
Back when I was reading the slush at Arbor House, I once got two different Appalachian family sagas, from two different authors, on the very same day.
It happens.
There was another time when two different publishers put out a fantasy novel titled The White Raven--within weeks of each other.
I remember being in a pitch meeting for Enterprise and describing this neat idea I had for an Apollo 13-style story about Tucker and Reed trapped together inside a shuttlepod. In fact, it was so good an idea that they were already a few days into shooting it over on the soundstage...
There's a phrase that gets thrown around sometimes for this sort of thing - "the climate of ideas" - the concept that people exposed to the same kind of cultural influences will generate similar ideas to others, despite having no direct contact with one another. Limit that to coming up with stories for a particular set of characters in a particular genre, place and time, and it's inevitable (one might even say, logical...
) that coincidences arise.
There's a phrase that gets thrown around sometimes for this sort of thing - "the climate of ideas" - the concept that people exposed to the same kind of cultural influences will generate similar ideas to others, despite having no direct contact with one another. Limit that to coming up with stories for a particular set of characters in a particular genre, place and time, and it's inevitable (one might even say, logical...
) that coincidences arise.
When I was in college, I submitted an outline to Marvel Comics on spec. Not long after, a similar story saw print. Not for a moment do I think Marvel ripped me off; we both just picked up on the same obscure bit of Marvel continuity and ran with it, as it was just sort of there waiting to used . . . .
I'm pretty sure one of my first Voyager pitches was rejected because it was too similar to "The Gift," but Joe Menosky couldn't tell me that was the reason, because it would've been a spoiler for what was going to happen to Kes. (In my version, she was going through a sort of Ocampa puberty that caused her telekinesis to go out of control -- but it ended with her still a member of the crew, of course, because I didn't know she was leaving.)
I remember being in a pitch meeting for Enterprise and describing this neat idea I had for an Apollo 13-style story about Tucker and Reed trapped together inside a shuttlepod. In fact, it was so good an idea that they were already a few days into shooting it over on the soundstage...
There's a phrase that gets thrown around sometimes for this sort of thing - "the climate of ideas" - the concept that people exposed to the same kind of cultural influences will generate similar ideas to others, despite having no direct contact with one another. Limit that to coming up with stories for a particular set of characters in a particular genre, place and time, and it's inevitable (one might even say, logical...
Bono used to say that he believed the songs were already 'out there' and were just waiting for someone to catch them and write them down. Not exactly the same idea but similar enough.
I've also come across a ton of books, movies, and TV show titled Defiance.Heck, it's not like THE AVENGERS (Steed and Emma) deliberately stole the title from THE AVENGERS (Marvel Comics) back in the sixties, or vise versa. Chances are, both projects just thought THE AVENGERS sounded like a cool name.
Nor were any of them likely thinking of the old pulp hero, THE AVENGER.
True story: one season Tor Books published a sci-fi novel titled PURGATORY at the same time that our sister company, St. Martin's Press, published a crime novel titled (you guessed it) PURGATORY. 'Caused some confusion, shipping-wise, but was entirely unintentional. Just a case of the right hand not knowing what the left hand was doing--at the very same time.
And I'm sure there are plenty of other books and movies titled PURGATORY as well.
I forgot about Robert Sawyer's "Armada". While not an episode pitch, but an oft-rejected/stymied Trek novel pitch, began in 1984 (and featured Arex, Kor, Koloth, Fox, Sarek, and New Humans) that eventually became several non-Trek chapters in his other SF books. He notes that some of it resembles Shatner's later ST V.
http://sfwriter.com/armada.htm
http://sfwriter.com/armada.htm#outline
In 2014, Sawyer uploaded a fifth sample chapter (and never sent to Pocket).
Attentive readers... will recognize in Armada the seeds for the Waldahudin from... Starplex; some of the themes that ultimately ended up in... Calculating God; and an early version of Chapter 6 ("Afsan at the Hunter's Shrine") of... Far-Seer.
http://sfwriter.com/armada.htm
http://sfwriter.com/armada.htm#outline
In 2014, Sawyer uploaded a fifth sample chapter (and never sent to Pocket).
Attentive readers... will recognize in Armada the seeds for the Waldahudin from... Starplex; some of the themes that ultimately ended up in... Calculating God; and an early version of Chapter 6 ("Afsan at the Hunter's Shrine") of... Far-Seer.
There's a phrase that gets thrown around sometimes for this sort of thing - "the climate of ideas" - the concept that people exposed to the same kind of cultural influences will generate similar ideas to others, despite having no direct contact with one another. Limit that to coming up with stories for a particular set of characters in a particular genre, place and time, and it's inevitable (one might even say, logical...
I totally believe that's true. It's like how if you were making a movie about, say, a Venezuelan soccer player, more often than not you'd be racing to release your movie before that other, competing Venezuelan soccer player project across town.
A few examples I can think of off the top of my head:
In comics, DC & Marvel introducing Swamp Thing & Man-Thing within a month or two of each other. Ditto the Doom Patrol and the X-Men, and Red Tornado and the Vision. Heck, at one point in the 80s, both Green Lantern and Iron Man were replaced by black men who were long-time supporting characters in the books.
We got about 4-5 body-switching movies in 1988 before Big came around. There were competing Christopher Columbus movies in 1992, the 500th anniversary of him sailing to the Americas. Deep Impact and Armageddon, both about killer asteroids, were released in the same year. Heck, there were even competing biopics about Steve Prefontaine!
I'm a stand-up comedian, and earlier this year I wrote some jokes about dealing with the aftermath of my father's death. I went to one of my local open mics to try them out, and there was another comedian there who'd just lost his father, and was telling jokes about the same topic! And his jokes were better than mine, dammit.
Sometimes an idea is just in the air and multiple people hit on it at the same time.
Well, this one's a little more questionable. Conway and Wein were actually roommates at the time, and there might've been some actual overlap as a result, that might not be a "pulled similar ideas out of the ether purely out of nowhere" thing. Not that either necessarily outright copied the other, but they might've tossed ideas back and forth and one hooked on something similar to what the other was doing without realizing it.
Sounds perfectly plausible to me. Conway and Wein could have been sitting around one night, sharing a pizza and some beers, when the subject of swamp monsters came up.
"Hey, remember The Heap, that old swamp-monster comic from the fifties?"
"Oh yeah, he was great. Somebody should do a modern-day take on that."
"Absolutely."
Nobody "stole" anybody's idea as much as they both kinda came up with it while shooting the breeze one night.
I suspect that's how a lot of these rival movie projects happen, too. A director, a star, a producer, and a screen writer are having lunch or schmoozing at a party when somebody comments "You know, there hasn't been a good samurai vampire movie in years."
Everybody else chimes in and starts brainstorming about how you could make a really kick-ass samurai vampire movie, but maybe have different visions as to how proceed.
They all come away from the party with the idea lodged in their heads and, six months later, we have three competing "samurai vampire" movies in development . . ..
What exactly do you mean by "should"?
Oh yeah, I could definitely believe that. I just thought we were talking more about Newton/Leibniz-esque things, where two relatively disconnected people just happen to come up with a similar idea at around the same time without there being any shared source.
Heck it happens in music all the time. The best example I can think of from my own collection is David Bowie's The Jean Genie and The Sweet's Blockbuster. The Jean Genie was recorded in New York, Blockbuster in England and both were released with a month of each other (Dec. 72 and Jan. 73) and both have almost the exact same riffs. Yet both parties were completely unaware of what the other was doing.
Oh, it already did; you should check out the Destiny trilogy if you haven't yet.
Thanks... I didn't know there was a fifth chapter released!
I'm a fan of Robert J. Sawyer's stuff, so it would have been interesting if that had actually happened.
I wonder, though... OK, *if* Paramount had been OK with the religious themes, and with life on Earth being created by the Being, and the novel went ahead,
do you think they would have let Koloth be eaten alive in a "cannibalistic funeral ritual", or would that part have had to be excised?
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