L.A. TREK PART 2

When we left off in our Star Trek saga, I had just driven my gold Chrysler Sebring Convertible with the black ragtop through the front gates of Paramount Pictures in Hollywood, there to enter the world of network television for the first time. And now we begin the tale of what awaited me there.

That experience of driving through the front gates of Paramount like Norma Desmond with Max in Sunset Boulevard (which you’ll remember I had seen on Broadway just a couple of days earlier) and parking in the main studio parking lot proved to be a one-time thing. For the rest of my stay, I had a parking permit at the facility on, I believe, Gower Street across from the studio, and I entered through the Lucille Ball Building. As a matter of history, all Trekkers and Zonies (Twilight Zone devotees) owe a debt to Lucille Ball and Desi Arnaz. It’s true. The de facto original pilot for The Twilight Zone was a Rod Serling play called “The Time Element” starring William Bendix (The Life of Riley) which was produced for The Desilu Playhouse. This was what interested CBS in Rod’s pitch for a fantasy anthology program. And anyone who’s watched the closing titles of the 1960s Star Trek knows that Desilu Studios was the original owner of the Star Trek franchise. Lucy herself was known to have been very proud of Trek, and it was she who sold the franchise and all of Desilu’s other holdings to Paramount.

But I digress. Just a few steps inside the studio lot from the Lucy Building was the Hart Building, where the writing and production staff for the Star Trek TV series was housed. That was where I would be spending most of my time. Immediately across the lot was the Gary Cooper Building, where other producers including one who was of particular interest to me worked, and where some of the larger production meetings were held. We’ll get to that in due time. Down the way was the studio commissary, and on the opposite end of the lot were other offices including payroll and Human Resources, and I assume other exectutive-type offices. Also on the far end was the Star Trek Art Department, where I had a very nice visit with the Okudas, Michael and Denise (we’ll talk about them and that visit in due time) and illustrator John Eaves (him too). The far end was also where the Star Trek sets were located, as well as the trailers in which the stars of the shows relaxed when they weren’t shooting.

A perusal of the studio lot would also take you to places like the back lot where they shoot a lot of exterior city scenes, an office building that is sometimes used as the exterior facade for various places of interest (such as, I believe, the high school in Grease--or was it Happy Days?), and a theatre/cinema where previews of new films are sometimes screened. Basically, on any given day at any given time at Paramount Pictures one is liable to run across someone or something of interest. While I was there, the airplane that the Hackett brothers flew in the sitcom Wings was being kept right out in the open in a little alcove next to the Hart Building. (And we’re going to have a story about my encounter with one of those Hackett brothers shortly.) I walked by it and touched it every day. A couple of times I was out on the grounds when Moose, the little dog who played Eddie on Frasier, was being walked by his handler. Every time I watch an episode of Frasier now I remember the times I got to pet little Eddie! (Moose passed away a couple of years ago.)

However, on to the experience of being inside Star Trek itself. I occupied the Interns’ Office on the top floor of the building, where I had the place to myself for about half of the six weeks I was there. They didn’t have a Deep Space Nine intern when I arrived and it took them a little while to get one. Eventually I was joined by a woman named Jennifer, who had been working as a grip and as the person who tapes the microphones to performers on soundstages. (One of the people she had miked was Whoopi Goldberg, as I recall.) Jennifer and I got on fine; one day I brought in one of my sketchbooks, full of character designs and studies of hot-looking guys, to entertain her. I would give her little mini-lessons in Star Trek lore and we would compare story ideas and she’d tell me about some of her Hollywood experiences and some of the people with whom she’d worked. She had a crush on TV star Peter Onorati, who had starred in the drama series Civil Wars by Steven Bochco, among other things. (On The Outer Limits he was Fred Savage’s father in the episode “Last Supper.” Desperate Housewives fans know him as Warren Schilling, the wife-beating nightclub owner from this past season’s episodes.) So one fine day as I’m on Gower Street on my way to the parking facility, who should drive by in his SUV but...yep, Peter Onorati. I called out to him and we exchanged waves. (We’re going to talk about what to do when you meet a movie or TV star shortly. I encountered a number of them, as you can surmise.)

So what does a Screenwriting Intern at a TV series do? The position is essentially that of a paid observer. They’re hoping to recruit writing talent, and the idea is that the intern will observe everything pertinent about how a TV series is written and produced, listen and learn, and prepare to pitch his own story ideas. If all goes well, the producers will at least buy an idea to be developed into a story, and that will give the intern a foot in the door to pitch more ideas and perhaps even work on a script. Star Trek was keenly interested in developing talent for its writing staff; the Holy Grail for an intern was to be invited to join the staff full time. One of the Voyager Executive Producers, Brannon Braga, had started out as an intern on Star Trek: The Next Generation, so it was not impossible. A TV producer, you should be intrigued to know, is basically a writer with power. TV producers start out as writers. Something else you should know: The next time you’re watching a scripted TV series, look at the credits. You see all those Story Editors and Executive Story Editors and Story Consultants and Executive Consultants and so forth? You know who all those people really are? They’re writers. All those fancy job titles that TV series and TV production companies dream up are actually ways to get more writers onto the payroll. All those people, and the people who are actually credited as producers, are responsible for writing the show! It’s true. They do other things too; they actually do have executive decision making powers, and they do supervise people who perform other functions for the show. But trust me: They’re writers, every man and woman Jack of them. TV is run by writers.

So, as an intern, one sits in on a lot of meetings where writers with power make decisions about the show and supervise other people who work on the show. I spent lots of time in the office of one Ms. Jeri Taylor, the Executive Producer who had the most hands-on responsibility for producing Voyager. (It was originally the office of Gene Roddenberry himself, a fact I was to learn from Jeri my last day there. I’m sort of glad I didn’t know where I was sitting until the end. I think I would have been awestruck if I’d known that going in.) Jeri Taylor was the wife of the man who produced the whodunit series Murder, She Wrote starring Angela Lansbury--a fact that properly amused my mother, who has read every word that Agatha Christie ever wrote and was a great fan of that show. I should take this opportunity to tell you a story about Jeri and how she got to be where she was. Jeri Taylor is a woman who came into Star Trek when she was in her 50s, with no background whatsoever in science or in science fiction. She had worked in television since her 30s, writing, producing, and directing crime and murder shows including Quincy starring Jack Klugman and Jake and the Fatman starring William Conrad. (This latter also starred Alan Campbell; remember him from the performance of Sunset Boulevard that I attended?) Somehow she had gotten herself invited to pitch and write for Star Trek: The Next Generation--with no knowledge whatsoever of Trek and with the belief that Trek was in fact a children’s show! What she did to prepare is something that I must warn you never, ever to attempt.

This woman in her 50s got herself videos of the entire 1960s TV series, all of the films that had been produced up to that point, and probably half of Next Generation, as well as the books The Making of Star Trek and The World of Star Trek--and she crammed them like a college student who’d postponed studying for an exam! She crammed the history, universe, characters, and stories of Star Trek. I don’t know in how short a time she learned the entire series, but it was a crash course with an emphasis on the “crashing”. You know how inadvisable I consider this? It’s something I would never attempt; that’s how inadvisable it is! It’s the ultimate in “Don’t Try This At Home!” EVER! By rights, Jeri Taylor should not have been producing Star Trek Voyager. She should have been off in a corner somewhere, in a condition like that in which Phoenix left Mastermind in The X-Men #134. (Look it up.) I’m telling you, if you’re new to Star Trek, regardless of your age, don’t ever do this!

But Jeri Taylor, bless her heart, did it, and she survived, and she became an Executive Producer on Next Generation and an Executive Producer and co-creator of Voyager, and after Rick Berman, the producer to whom Gene himself gave the reins of the Trek universe, Jeri was the person in charge. Her producing posse also included the aforementioned Brannon Braga, another Executive Producer; producers Joe Menosky and Kenneth Biller; and Story Editor Lisa Klink, the person who had invited me aboard. So there I was, in the office of the Great Bird of the Galaxy himself, attending meetings with the people responsible for the odyssey of the Starship Voyager through the unknown Delta Quadrant of the galaxy. And what adventures lay in store for me there, and in Hollywood at large? That will be the subject of the next chapter of our Star Trek odyssey.

TO BE CONTINUED.

BEWARE OF THIS BLOG!

Every year at this time in Pennsylvania there is a festival celebrating one of the formative motion pictures of my childhood. For this post of The Quantum Blog, we're going to look back at that movie with an essay that I wrote for its 50th anniversary on September 12, 2008.

Fifty years ago tonight (September 12, 2008) on movie screens across the country, a meteor fell in the forest outside a small Pennsylvania town. A teenage boy named Steve and his girlfriend Jane--not “Janey Girl,” just Jane--went to investigate and found an old man writhing in pain by the side of the road, with a strange gelatinous mass attached to his hand. A recluse living in a small house in the forest, the old man had found the meteor first and unwisely poked at it with a stick, releasing the shapeless organism inside, which slithered down the stick and turned from transparent to blood red as it began to assimilate his hand. Steve and Jane took the old timer to the town doctor, where the red mass completely consumed not only the recluse, but the nurse and the doctor himself--this latter being witnessed by a horrified Steve. Now it was up to Steve and Jane to warn their unsuspecting friends and neighbors of what was loose in their town, and growing bigger with every new victim it claimed. Only their little town stood between mankind and the menace of the Blob.

Yes, tonight is the fiftieth anniversary, if you can believe it, of the debut of one of the great Hollywood movie monsters. Released in 1958, The Blob starred 35-year-old Steve McQueen as teenaged Steve Andrews and Aneta Corseaut (who went on to play Andy’s girlfriend and eventual wife, Helen, on The Andy Griffith Show) as Jane. It was the first starring role for McQueen, who had been in several films already by this point. He would grow to regret taking only a flat fee for his part in the picture instead of a percentage of a film that grossed $10,000,000 in 1958 money and become a cult classic that would never go away. (Not that McQueen did all that badly after The Blob, of course.)

The Blob is not, by any standard, a masterpiece of filmmaking. Its dialogue ranges from excruciating to laughable, and to say that it was produced on a shoestring budget is generous at the least. But that doesn’t matter; the power of this film has kept it alive and kept it being rediscovered for five decades. The Blob is one of the few movies with an annual festival devoted to it. Shot in Downingtown and Phoenixville, PA, the film is honored every July in Phoenixville with a “Blobfest” that includes screenings at the actual cinema that the creature attacked at the climax of the film. The height of the festival is the annual reenactment of the scene in which the filmgoers come running, screaming, from the cinema to escape the monstrous Blob that has flooded the auditorium (and devoured the projectionist). This being the fiftieth anniversary, I only wish I could have been there for this year’s Blobfest. One of these years I have got to go to this thing.


Why does a film that many people don’t take seriously rate such longevity and such a following? There can be only one reason, and it is a very obvious one that people completely overlook exactly because of the laughable script and the cheesy production. The Blob is simply a deeply, viscerally terrifying idea. Look past the way the picture was made and think of what this thing is and what it does. Think about a nearly liquid life form that can go anywhere that water can flow, and even crawl up and down walls as water can’t do. Moreover, it does not announce its presence; it is completely silent. It can be practically on top of you, or have you surrounded or cornered, before you even realize it’s there. And once it has you; you’re gone, melted into the growing, pulsating mass without a trace. You may not take the Blob seriously, but the American Film Institute does. The Blob is included on AFI’s list of the all-time greatest movie villains. Granted, it ranks only in the 300s, but that is because the Blob is not so much a proper antagonist with a personality as it is a shapeless expression of limitless hunger. It is more a force than a character. But people who look past the production and get the concept, especially if they were introduced to it when they were children, understand what an utter nightmare the Blob truly is.

One such person is a gentleman named Wes Shank, who actually bought the Blob from the director of the film. Somewhere in Pennsylvania there is a man who keeps a mass of killer protoplasm from outer space (actually a barrel full of red-dyed silicone, but still...) in his basement. I’m glad Mr. Shank bought it and has preserved this classic piece of film memorabilia, much like the gentleman in California who bought the actual stop-motion animation maquette of King Kong. I’d like to visit him sometime and see it. But I couldn’t have that thing in my house. Intellectually, I’d know it wasn’t real, but the dreams... I’d never get any sleep.



My own introduction to The Blob was via the theme song. Oh yes, we need to talk about that theme song. It is an early work of Burt Bacharach. Yes, that Burt Bacharach. The Blob opens with a theme song that is, to say the least, unique: a 1950’s finger-popping doo-wop number that is another of the reasons that people think the picture is a lark. But that frivolous-sounding ditty is actually very sinister, in the way that things in Stephen King stories are sinister. You know how King is always turning mundane, innocent things into evil, macabre things. The theme from The Blob is like that, a 50s doo-wop song that is in fact a warning to beware of something both lethal and inescapable. “It creeps and leaps/And slides and glides across the floor/Right through the door and all around the walls/A splotch, a blotch, be careful of the Blob/Beware of the Blob...” When I was little, I heard my brother Jack singing this song one day and asked him where it came from, and he described to me this movie about a shapeless thing from space that consumed people and grew as it went along, and I thought at the time that it was the most horrifying thing I’d ever heard of. I also thought I had to see this picture. Sure enough, it came round on television, and in my little boy way I saw that I was right. It scared me more than Dracula, the Frankenstein Monster, the Wolf Man, and the Creature from the Black Lagoon put together. To this day, in concept alone, I’m with the American Film Institute. Very few things to come out of Hollywood are as purely frightening in concept as the Blob.

The Blob has a sequel, released in 1972 and directed by Larry Hagman. Yes, that Larry Hagman. Son of Blob (or Beware the Blob) stars Robert Walker (Charlie X from Star Trek) as Steve McQueen’s Blob-battling successor. It has all the scares of the original, but was unfortunately written and played too much for laughs. (When Dallas caught on, Son of Blob was re-released as “The Movie J.R. Shot!”) It even has an excerpt from the original film in it. In an early, pivotal scene, Godfrey Cambridge gets up from his recliner chair to adjust the rabbit ears on his TV while The Blob is playing; it’s right at the scene outside the supermarket where Steve is trying to rally the town before it’s too late. A moment later, Godfrey sits himself back down--right in the Blob, which has oozed over the chair. Robert Walker’s girlfriend walks in just in time to see luckless Godfrey disappearing into the creature. The picture also has a remake, released in 1988 (the thirtieth anniversary of the original). In this one, Steve McQueen is a girl--Shawnee Smith, who sees her boyfriend (Donovan Leitch, whom we’ve been set up to think is going to be Steve McQueen) melting into the Blob, and sets out to stop her town from being devoured. The remake is truly disappointing. It turns the Blob from a living mass of Dunkin’ Donuts strawberry filling into an ugly wad of pink mucus, and is full of gruesome scenes of partially consumed victims. It also plays into a post-Watergate, Reagan-era sort of paranoia by changing the concept from an alien life form to a government germ warfare experiment. It’s a shame. A classic monster deserves better treatment.

And who knows, The Blob may get it. Yet another remake has been mentioned, though Paramount Pictures, which owns the property, has missed a sensational marketing opportunity by not having the new version ready in time for the fiftieth anniversary. Still, if they just restore the original concept and give us an update of the original mass of red killer slime (with state-of-the-art CGI, the classic Blob would be more terrifying than ever), and get a screenplay that does justice to the idea, we could get a film that shows the Blob for the right and proper horror that it is. This most original and frightening of Hollywood monsters, in whatever form, should be around for generations to come. The 1958 version will certainly continue to stand the test of time. This month is the fiftieth anniversary of The Blob. Sleep with a CO2 fire extinguisher by your bed; you never know...

LILAPSOPHILIA

I really should remember, or get into the habit of making a note of, where I hear things. I'm pretty sure it must have been on The Weather Channel that I learned the word lilapsophilia, which happens to define a condition I've had since I used to use the public and school libraries as a boy. Lilapsophilia is the love of...tornadoes. The picture below is one that I was actually considering as a title image for The Quantum Blog.

Yes, tornadoes, which European pioneers on the North American continent used to call "the Fingers of God". Tornadoes, twisters, abductors of Dorothy's house: the funnels of whirling air that reach down from the clouds with vortices that can spin at up to 300 miles an hour. Tornadoes. I love 'em. I think they're fascinating and beautiful.

I know, people find them terrifying, and with good reason. Tornadoes are the most powerful and destructive natural events on Earth. They can obliterate towns and annihilate people. But damnit, they're gorgeous. I used to take out weather books from the library just to stare at the drawings and paintings of tornadoes. Even now, if I come across a cable-TV documentary about them, I will watch. I am a dyed-in-the-wool lilapsophile.

I think of the reasons why I love tornadoes as similar to the reasons why I love classical super-hero comic books, especially those of Marvel with their Jack Kirby heritage. There is something about super-hero/villain battles, classically speaking, that I like to compare to the feeling you get from watching forces of nature in collision: a thunderstorm, or waves crashing on the rocks or on the beach. You're watching something violent, but it's nature's violence, not man's. It's more powerful than we are, but it's clean and bloodless. It's power unleashed in its purest form: graceful violence, elegant destruction, beautiful power. I don't get that feeling from a lot of comics that are being done today, especially the ones about ugly, brutal, and bloodthirsty "heroes" like Wolverine and the Punisher who are the exact opposite of the kinds of characters that made me love comics. It's more like the feelings I get from the great battles of the Fantastic Four, and Thor, and the Avengers, and the Silver Surfer, and Kirby's New Gods. Those stories--think of Thor's epic battle with Hercules (The Mighty Thor #126), or the Silver Surfer's rebellion against Galactus (Fantastic Four #50), or the epic smackdown of the Avengers and the Justice League of America (Avengers/JLA), or any of Orion's big battles in the original Kirby New Gods, to name a few--are what I'm talking about. And seeing a film or video of a tornado makes me feel somewhat the same way.

If I were to make a list of the things I'd most like to do before I die, one of them would have to be to go on one of those tornado chasing vacations you see documented on some of the cable TV programs, like on Discovery or The National Geographic Channel. I have always wanted to see tornadoes in person, for real, not just on TV. My brother thinks I'm crazy for this, but I do. I want to see them! I prefer the "pretty" tornadoes, the ones that look like ropes and funnels and columns, not the fat, mean-looking nasty "wedge" tornadoes. I want to see the beautiful ones. Really, one of these days when I'm able to do it, I just have to go for it. They're too awesome and wondrous not to see for real. When I go to New York City, I can't actually see the Human Torch flying overhead, or Thor and Iron Man coming in for a landing at the Frick Museum (which is supposed to be the model for the Avengers Mansion), but there are people who can take you out in the American heartland and actually let you see a tornado.

This post contains a collection of some of the most beautiful tornado images I've found on line. Linger over them. Perhaps you'll understand why I'm a die-hard case of lilapsophilia.

Next on The Quantum Blog: After the 4th of July, it's back to Hollywood for more of the Star Trek saga!

THE PACE IS SET!

We’ll return to our scheduled saga of my time with Star Trek in Hollywood in a couple of posts. For now, there are a couple of other things I want to talk about. One of them is the man I consider the single greatest living artist in comic books: The one and only George Perez!

Here’s the wrap-around cover of the portfolio book Perez: Accent on the First E, which I ordered through the mail in high school. Click on the image to get the full effect! This early rendering of the Fantastic Four, the Silver Surfer, and Galactus demonstrates, even at the dawn of his professional career, everything that George’s work is about. I still have my copy of Accent, signed by George himself. At the time I was heavily into using Prismacolor pencils and I colored some of the drawings in the book, which are mostly black-and-white pencil reproductions. I wish now I hadn’t done that. It’s one of those things you do when you’re very young and not thinking about what you’re doing.

George is one of the last great “classical” comic book artists, the guys who came directly off the influence of the pioneers like Jack Kirby, et al. He names the long-running Superman artist Curt Swan, as well as Kirby, among his major influences. George is also one of the last Marvel artists to have a nickname. In the first generation of Marvel Comics, one of the ways that the company formed bonds and camaraderie with fans was by dubbing its creative talent with nicknames: Stan “The Man” Lee, Jack “King” Kirby, Rascally Roy Thomas, Jazzy John Romita, etc. George was very fittingly dubbed “The Pacesetter” and did his first major work on The Avengers, his favorite Marvel book, with writer Stainless Steve Englehart. (The name “Pacesetter” survives today as the title of the official magazine devoted to George’s work. The only other comic book artist with a regular magazine specifically about him is Jack Kirby himself. A couple of Pacesetter issues contain articles that I wrote about George’s incredible work on the 1979 X-Men Annual and his career breakthrough on the Marvel adaptation of the film Logan’s Run.)

I’m embarrassed to admit that I didn’t think highly of George’s work at first. At the time, I was under the spell of artist Rich Buckler (for whom George had once been an assistant!), who had adapted his style to emulate that of Jack Kirby, frequently to the point of actually swiping Kirby drawings from the past and putting them into new stories. (And if you know the King’s work well enough you can identify which images he took from where!) The inking of such luminaries as my old pal Joe Sinnott and Chic Stone only reinforced the effect. Well, the first book on which I spotted George’s work was The Inhumans, a Fantastic Four spinoff, and I was insulted that a book about FF characters wasn’t being drawn by Buckler! I looked at George’s art and thought, Who is this nobody? I didn’t appreciate it, to say the least, and I ignored Perez--at first.

Except for the early work of Jack Kirby himself, this shot of the inconceivable Inhumans is perhaps the best representation of those characters I’ve ever seen.

Then they put him in a place where I couldn’t ignore him: My longtime third-favorite comic book (after The Fantastic Four and The Amazing Spider-Man), The Avengers. George quickly proved himself to be the ideal Avengers artist. He relished drawing large numbers of characters--the more, the merrier--in a variety of costumes. He took consummate delight in drawing elaborate action sequences with multitudes of combatants--again, the more the merrier. And what’s more, he drew everything in the most excruciating detail. The maxim “Less is more” has never applied to George’s work; with him “Less is boring!” George draws it all; nothing is too trivial to be left out. If someone else goes the extra mile in his work, George goes the extra light-year! Detail, detail, detail--and then more detail on top of that!

And his “camera” is never at a static, fixed point; he’ll take you from a panning wide shot to an upshot to a downshot to a closeup to an over-the-shoulder shot, all in one page. And he’ll pack twice as many panels into a page as any other artist will.

Here are the three most essential Avengers, Thor, Iron Man, and Captain America, captured in their purest and most classic form by the artist who draws them better than anyone else. I colored this one myself.

If that’s not enough, he makes every character look like his or her best, most awesome, and if applicable, most beautiful possible self. His heroes and heroines are more heroic, more handsome, more gorgeous. His villains are more fiendish and dangerous-looking. And he has a knack for capturing the best possible version of everyone’s costume. Oh, and about costumes: When it comes time to design a new character or give an old character a new look, very few people in the business can design ‘em better than the Pacesetter.

This is a design master for Nightwing (that’s Batman's first Robin, Dick Grayson, all grown up) that the character unfortunately never wore in any DC Comics story. It amply demonstrates George’s wondrous design skills. It is truly a masterpiece; you don’t know how I wish I had created this!

Indifference and disdain on my part quickly turned to respect, admiration, and awe. Where I snubbed George at first, now I couldn’t wait to see the next issue of every book he drew. (Which is a lucky thing, because the next book they gave him was The Fantastic Four itself!) And as I had with Kirby before him, I made it my business not just to look at his work, but to study every facet of everything he did, to learn how it all worked. It didn’t take long for George to establish himself as my all-time most important artistic role model in comics, after Kirby himself. It’s a position he holds with me to this very day.

This post of The Quantum Blog, then, is devoted to some of my favorite drawings I’ve found online by the former Mr. Nobody. Immediately below are my old friends, the Fantastic Four, in another shot that I personally colored. This one, showing the FF as I loved them, in their pure Kirby form, used to be one of the rotating images in the upper left hand corner of the FF Plaza Website, which my pal Sean Kleefeld used to run.

George never got a chance to work with my favorite member of the X-Men, Phoenix, besides a few isolated images. Here’s one where he captures her perfectly.

George has a special love of drawing super-heroines. This is a shot of Ms. Marvel, skillfully rendered in line and grey tones.

This shot of the sensational Storm in her original, classic Dave Cockrum design shows why it’s such a shame that X-Men characters have been made over so much. Storm has never looked better.

George’s most magnificent accomplishment was the miniseries Avengers/JLA, the battle between and team-up of the Avengers and the Justice League of America, which ran 4 issues and more than 200 pages--all of them penciled and inked by the Pacesetter. I consider it the all-time, single greatest achievement in comic book art. This drawing from the early 1980s commemorates the first time this story was attempted.

And speaking of the Avengers and the Justice League...

By far my favorite rendition of Wonder Woman was that of George in the mid-1980s. He took a character that I basically liked and a book that I never read, and made her my favorite DC character with a book I couldn’t miss. His work with the Princess of Paradise remains one of the most ingenious things I’ve ever read in comics. Here’s WW battling Marvel’s She-Hulk.

Though fans have the strongest attachment to Hal Jordan in the identity of the Green Lantern, the sexiest of the Green Lanterns and my personal favorite is Hal’s successor (who recently stepped aside as the “official” GL when Jordan was resurrected), Kyle Rayner. This costume that Kyle wore is my favorite of all the Green Lantern ensembles. Sexy character, sexy costume, the world’s best comic artist: It’s a win/win/win combination. I really should color this one...

To finish up, the Silver Surfer (whose book George used to write!) and a smackdown between the mighty Thor in his classic Kirby form and the ever-incredible Hulk! I have one more of these that I colored myself, but I’m saving that one because I’m sending a scan of it to my brother for his birthday in a few weeks and I want it to be a surprise!

Next in The Quantum Blog: Do you know what “Lilapsophilia” is? If not, try not to let your house be swept up over the rainbow until we meet again, and I’ll tell you about one of my secret passions. Then, it’s back to Hollywood and more of my personal Star Trek experience.

L.A. TREK

We left off last time with me making a mad dash upstairs to receive a phone call that was coming in on the answering machine. The young woman calling from California was one Lisa Klink, the Story Editor of the TV series Star Trek Voyager. I had read about her in the Star Trek Communicator magazine in which I had learned of the Writers Guild Internship program that could get you invited inside a TV series as a writing intern with the simple submission of a resume and an appropriate writing sample. And now, here she was. A breathless moment later, Lisa was asking me when we could get me out to the West Coast to spend six (paid) weeks inside Star Trek!

I leave it to you to imagine how keen my sense of disbelief was at this moment. Just like that, “When can we get you out here?” No tedious interview process with witless idiotic questions. No hoops to jump through. No red tape to cut. No horse-and-pony show to put on, the way one has to do for some ordinary job. With one resume, one cover letter, and one spec script that I had written for The Outer Limits, I was being hailed by Star Trek and asked to beam aboard. Just like that: “Come on out and join us in Hollywood,” plain, simple, and direct. How often does a thing like that happen to anyone? As I said, unbelievable--but true.

Remember when we were talking about the relatives in Seattle on whose cable TV I used to watch The Outer Limits when I visited them in the summer? That happened to be the home of my late Uncle George Carroll, who was an engineer for Boeing. George had passed on and remembered me in his will. It was by this means that I was able to take up Star Trek on its invitation. As the will was in probate, it took several months of waiting, and the money came at the eleventh hour. I was set to fly out in the middle of January 1997 to be the final screenwriting intern for the third season of Voyager. The check arrived about a week beforehand and I had that much time to prepare. I thought I had selected a suitable hotel from a gay travel guide, but we'll get to that in a moment. I’ll never forget the snowy day I rented a car and spent an entire day shopping for everything I’d need for my Hollywood odyssey (including a pocket driver’s map of Los Angeles, which I still have); I had to find a deal on a plane ticket and do a whirlwind shopping spree and mall-crawl, but I was under the gun (or the phaser, as the case may be) and I got it done. And you know what? I don’t usually like stress and prefer to avoid a stressful situation, but I remember that day as one of the most fun I’d ever had--snowstorm and all!

In the meantime, I made damn sure that everyone knew what was happening. I had my friend Joe (the guy who was scared by my reading of “Ice”--he doesn’t handle scary suspense well) notify The Gaylactic Network about my pending adventure. (At the time my gay science fiction group, The Alternate Universe, was an affiliate of the greater Gaylactic Network based in Boston, and Joe was our liaison to the Network). Every Gaylaxians group was properly apprised that one of their own had made a breakthrough, and The Niagara Falls Gaylactic Colonizers, some of whom were fans of my art from Gaylaxicon Art Shows, wanted regular updates on what I was doing. And I called the local newspaper and got an interview with the television editor, which made the paper as the time approached. The article caught the attention of my cousin Jaretta, who at the time was a local radio host, and one morning she brought me onto her show. That was fun, being interviewed about my upcoming Trek experience on the air as the greater Hudson/Mohawk Valley listened. And Jaretta, my late Uncle Henry’s daughter--under her pseudonym of Lynn Richarde--was great. She said she got plenty of call-ins that day about her cousin who was going to Star Trek!

Of course, no one was more tickled by all this than Uncle George’s daughter, my cousin Nancy. During our weekly phone calls during my stay in Beverly Hills (from which I would commute to Paramount on Melrose Avenue), she would tell me that every time she mentioned “her cousin Joe” to her friends, they would automatically fill in, “...who’s doing a writing internship at Star Trek Voyager!” (Nancy is also a science fiction fan, and is what you would call an uber-Trekker. This lady has actually gone on Star Trek cruises! As a girl she was so terrified by the Outer Limits episode “Corpus Earthling” that she used to have my Aunt Nancy, her late Mom, check under her bed for the little alien black rocks before she could go to sleep at night.)

Anyway, with all my preparations made--hastily as they were--I was ready as the morning of January 17, 1997 arrived. My Mom and my friend Danny B., whom I’ve mentioned here a number of times, put me on the train to Manhattan, and I was off. I spent that evening in the Big Apple and attended one of the last performances of Sunset Boulevard by Andrew Lloyd Weber on Broadway. (Elaine Page was Norma that night. I was third row center. My only disappointment is that Alan Campbell, who played Joe, for some reason chose to do his poolside theme song fully clad in a suit. Why? WHY?) The next morning, I flew to Los Angeles.

My first weekend in LA, I found that the hotel room that I had had to secure so hastily was not a place where I wanted to stay in a place where I wanted to be. (See if I ever trust that gay travel guide again.) Actually, that whole first weekend was a bit of an adventure, and not in a good way. For the first four weeks I rented a gold Chrysler Sebring ragtop convertible--what, you think I was going to experience L.A. and Hollywood and not drive a convertible?--and for the first evening I drove around looking for my hotel. I discovered at once that 1) I had to adjust my sense of scale to a big city that was designed to spread outward rather than upward, like Manhattan and 2) I was really intimidated by the freeways at first. I got over the fear of the freeways in time, but that first night I somehow found myself in a part of the city that was so thoroughly Asian that I almost couldn’t find any business signage in English or anyone who could speak same! To redirect myself, I ended up pulling over a cop at a filling station, and I actually heard myself think, Thank God he’s white!

As I didn’t like the hotel when I finally found it, I retreated to a Super 8 Hotel until I could come up with something else. I only wish I had known about Extended Stay America back then. Anyway, the next morning I stepped out into the California sunshine and found myself looking up a hill right into the famous HOLLYWOOD sign. It felt like a Steven Spielberg moment; there should have been John Williams music playing. The accommodations problem dogged me the whole weekend; I was so upset that I couldn’t eat. (J.A. FLUDD FACTOID for the week: Being emotionally upset or physically ill effectively kills my appetite until the thing that has upset me is resolved or I get better. Then I eat like a Grizzly bear.) I did manage to get down a croissant at a Starbucks in West Hollywood, where I met my first TV star as I sat outside eating. There was a gentleman sitting at the next table with a notebook on which I noticed the name Scott Plank. I knew that name from various things I’d seen on TV; he’s one of those journeyman actors who goes from show to show and Movie of the Week to Movie of the Week. (Another J.A. FLUDD FACTOID: I take pains to note every attractive-looking MALE actor I see on film or TV. I look them up when necessary.) I asked him, regarding the name on his notebook, “There’s an actor by that name; are you he?” And he was, and we had a nice chat that helped me calm down for a moment. It turns out he had shot several episodes of Melrose Place that were going to be on during my stay, so for a few weeks during my stay in L.A. I watched Melrose, which I wouldn’t otherwise have done, just to see him. One thing about being in Hollywood is that you never know whom you’re going to run into that you recognize from the things you watch. I had a number of such chance encounters in addition to meeting the stars of the two Star Treks that were on at that time, some of which I’ll share with you as this saga goes forth.

To help calm myself further, I went to the Walk of Fame on Hollywood Boulevard and looked up Gene Roddenberry’s star. Though I’m a strictly secular person, as I’ve said, it was a nearly spiritual moment as I sat crouching there on the street of celebrity plaques in the pavement, tracing the letters of Gene’s name as if to commune with the man whose vision of the future had guided me through life and brought me to this place and this moment. For a moment I felt that much closer to one of the most important heroes and role models of my life.

Before the weekend was over, a check through the local alternative newspaper put me in touch with a residential hotel in Beverly Hills--Beverly Hills, yet!--where I was willing to settle down for my six-week stint. I moved in, let my family and friends know where I was, and inhaled a quarter of a rotisserie chicken from the local equivalent of the Boston Market. As I explored my new temporary neighborhood, I was to discover that Rodeo Drive was just a couple of blocks away, the Los Angeles Branch of The Museum of Television and Radio was right down Santa Monica Boulevard, and further down that same Boulevard lay an art supply store and The International Male store! Oh, and in a coincidence that would only happen in my life, a comic book specialty store had just opened on the next block! The folks in Beverly Hills must have gotten the word: Psst, hey, this guy from New York who reads comic books is coming to work on Star Trek; we’d better be ready...

So, bright and early Monday morning, I was calmed, fed, rested, and ready. I found another Starbucks where I had another croissant and had a nice chat with a friendly cop. (Don’t believe for a minute that Beverly Hills is an enclave of snooty rich people; the place felt like home with better weather, fancier stores, and palm trees.) Then I climbed into my rented gold Chrysler convertible and drove from Beverly Hills to the Melrose Avenue complex of Paramount Pictures (avoiding the freeway and using Wilshire Boulevard). I drove up to the front gate in a supremely “Hollywood” moment and Security passed me through. Within Paramount Studios lay the Hart Building, where the writers and producers of the Star Treks worked. And the adventure began.

TO BE CONTINUED.

DAMN THE FONTS!

If you noticed an inconsistency in type fonts and sizes at the end of the last post, I apologize.  For some reason Blogger wouldn't give me consistent type in the last paragraphs, and after more times trying to correct it than I cared to count, I finally just settled on what's there now.  I'm going to try to get this right in further posts.

FROM THE INNER MIND TO THE FINAL FRONTIER

The most interesting and unique chapter of my life started when a TV network fulfilled one of the great dreams of my boyhood. In 1994, Showtime cable announced its revival of the series The Outer Limits.

The Outer Limits is TV’s purest expression of science fiction. It didn’t exist to tell the stories of a particular world or a specific cast of characters. It was a show that you watched for the simple love of science fiction itself. Science fiction was the “star” of The Outer Limits. And I truly did love it. I loved everything about it. I memorized the famous opening takeover of your TV set by the Control Voice (Vic Perrin)--the long version of it! (“There is nothing wrong with your television set. Do not attempt to adjust the picture. WE are controlling transmission...”) I loved it for being a show that lavished its attention on monsters: the most grotesque aliens and nightmarish creatures that could be created for television in 1963. I loved the way it reveled in the stuff that science fiction is about: space travel, time travel, extraterrestrial life, exotic and imaginary technologies, the mysteries of the universe--and their possible consequences in the context of humanity. I didn’t just watch the show; I read and studied everything about it that I could get my hands on. And I dearly wished that someone, sometime, would bring it back with new episodes.

The Outer Limits was never syndicated where I live; you had to go to another, bigger city like New York, or get cable TV, to see it. I remember whenever we would go out to Seattle to visit my aunt and uncle who lived there, they did live in a larger city and they did have cable--and they did get The Outer Limits every weeknight at 10. Fond as I was of my relatives, I had an appointment to keep every evening in Seattle. When my father got cable TV (my mother refused to get it for years and years; when she finally did have it put in after she retired, I started searching the house for the pod), I used to go over to his house on Saturday afternoons to watch the show on the New York station that carried it. I remember how my father--who was not a science fiction fan--used to react to the show. I recall in particular how he viewed the episode “The Chameleon,” in which Robert Duvall plays a spy who must be made over into an alien to infiltrate the crew of a craft from another planet. My Dad spent the whole time remarking on “them weirded-up things...those are the most weirded-up things I ever saw."

When at last I got cable for myself, I finally had the show right where I wanted it--or at least the ability to get it without having to go over to Dad’s. Which was a lucky thing, because eventually the New York station dropped it from its afternoon time slots and started running it sporadically at 3 or 4 AM. I actually used to set my alarm clock for that time when I noted it in TV Guide, get up to watch it, and then go back to bed! Seriously! This was in the days just before the prevalence of VCRs in the home; I think there was even one family holiday, before I had the ability to tape it, I actually didn’t come to dinner until I had seen the show. And you have to understand; this wasn’t a frivolous indulgence in a TV show. I wouldn’t have done such a thing for just something on television. I was getting up at 3 or 4 AM or delaying a holiday meal to watch The Outer Limits.

So anyway, it was in the middle of the 1990s that I at last got my wish. At first I was afraid I’d have to wait years for it because I couldn’t spring for a subscription to Showtime, but the network and production company shrewdly opted to recover their production costs by running the episodes of the all-new Outer Limits first on the premium channel, then selling them directly into first-run syndication, meaning that if the Showtime season started in the spring I would be seeing the episodes immediately in the fall. I didn’t mind waiting that long, though I waited with Zantis on my tongue (baited breath). And if you don’t know what a Zanti is, a) what are you doing reading this Blog, and b) look it up!

Now here’s a funny little aside: I used to have a subscription to Omni magazine, which started publication when I was in high school. One early issue of Omni boasted the first publication of the story “Sandkings” by George R.R. Martin. It was the tale of what happened when a keeper of interplanetary exotic pets bought specimens of alien insects who had religion and made war just like humans--and he was stupid enough to set himself up as their “god” and then abuse them. When I read this, my initial reaction was, This isn’t just a story. It’s an Outer Limits episode in print. Someone ought to revive the show and do this as the first episode. Well, many years later, Showtime revived the series, and the very first episode was...yep. It wasn’t Martin’s story, which they couldn’t have produced on their million-dollar-per-episode budget, but it was the same concept, right down to the name. When the broadcast version of “Sandkings” premiered, I made a big bowl of hot buttered popcorn and a big mug of hot cocoa with cream that I whipped myself, and slipped into two hours of science fiction Nirvana, taping it simultaneously. Then I rewound the tape and watched the two hours again. This may be why “Sandkings” is the only Outer Limits episode ever to give me a bad dream. As I slept, the little buggers grew to the size of small children and came knocking at my door. But one little nightmare was a small price to pay for a dream come true.

I realize we’ve come to the point of this post by the most roundabout route possible, but here we are at last: Once I finally had The Outer Limits back, I decided I wanted to try to do what I couldn’t do the first time, and write for the show! I began to study the new episodes as minutely as I had the old ones, mentally picking them apart to see their structure and learn their thought process. You see, there was something else that I had written a couple of years earlier that I wanted to try to adapt into an episode of the new series. It was an unsold feature film screenplay called The Elemental, which I had based on my intense dislike of winter in the Northeast. In this picture, I imagined winter as a literal monster, a thing that had come in a meteor and could use the cold and snow and ice as actual weapons to hunt its prey. It could even appear as a bank of frozen, slithering mist with fangs and claws. The story played like “Our Town in New England the Year the Thing Came from Space at Christmas”. (One of my favorite scenes even had a doting father in his living room decorating for Christmas Eve when the creature sucks him up the chimney!)

Realizing that I couldn’t possibly submit a two-hour, multi-million dollar production as an episode of The Outer Limits, I set out to do radical surgery on The Elemental to create a prospective Outer Limits episode called “Ice”. I wrote out entire families of characters, switched the college science professor from supporting character to lead and made him an astrophysicist, retained the woman reporter as his romantic interest, created a different story structure based on the five-act structure that the show was using (and setting up radically different plot twists in the process), and reinvented the creature. The Elemental became the Comet Entity, a living superconductor with electrically charged blood, a being that could live and hunt only in the frigid winter of Massachusetts where its frozen cocoon fell from space. I developed this from the way the new Outer Limits used science in its stories. I paid particular attention to “If These Walls Could Talk,” in which a "haunted house" has been permeated with a space enzyme from a meteor, which changes the inanimate matter in the house so that it acts as if it’s alive and devours people; and “Under the Bed,” which reveals that the Bogey Man is a real creature that does snatch and eat children, but can’t live in the daylight because the Sun will polymerize and petrify its skin--both stories of extremely non-human physiology. (The “chandelier grabbing the police officer” scene in “If These Walls Could Talk” is in the same spirit as the “Dad sucked up the chimney” scene in The Elemental, though I wrote mine first!)

Completing the script for “Ice,” I set out to try to get it into the hands of the producers of the show. And here I encountered the great hurdle that looms before everyone who has ever tried to get anyone in Hollywood to read anything they’ve written: The Outer Limits didn’t accept scripts from people not represented by agents. So the gates of my dream show were blocked by two barricades: that of getting an agent to want to read “Ice,” and then getting it from agent to producer. And agents, like everyone else in the world, say they want to give someone a chance and then won’t do it. They talk a good game about being on the lookout for new talent, but when it comes their way it’s “Hit the bricks, Charlie.” My courting of both the show and the people who could get me into it quickly proved futile. So here I was with “The Teleplay Formerly Known as a Screenplay,” but what was I going to do with it?

It’s here that I’m going to present another J.A. FLUDD FACTOID, the first we’ve had in quite a while. Our new Factoid is, I hate standing in lines! Lines at cinemas, lines at the Post Office--and lines at the supermarket, they bore the hell out of me! I will take a book with me, or browse on my iPhone and check my E-mail as I’ve been doing for the last couple of years. Or, at the market, I’ll pick up a magazine for the express purpose to stop myself being bored in the checkout line. So it was that one fateful afternoon at the market, I grabbed a copy of the now-defunct Star Trek Communicator magazine to stave off the tedium. And here was where I found something very interesting.

The Communicator magazine had an article on a Screenwriting Internship Program offered by the Writers Guild of America, by which anyone interested in writing for television could submit a resume and a writing sample appropriate to the show where he wanted to intern. If you wanted to intern on a sitcom, you sent in a half-hour sitcom script. If you wanted to intern on a dramatic series, you submitted an hour-long dramatic script or a two-hour, dramatic feature film or Movie of the Week script. It didn’t have to be a script for exactly the show that the would-be intern was approaching, just a script of the same basic genre and form. If the show liked your sample, you were in for six weeks, paid! You can see the wheels turning now, can’t you?

The article also brought up something that I had forgotten. Star Trek was unique in all of Hollywood as the only institution in the entertainment world that would look at any script that a would-be writer sent them, whether it was agented or not. This was partly because Star Trek has always had a unique relationship with the fans whose letter-writing campaigns saved it from cancellation twice and transformed the show into a de facto religion with conventions as their High Mass. Most of the deluge of scripts came from people who had the proprietary interest in Trek that is typical of fans. It was also partly because Star Trek had a great hunger for material and was so eager to find the next great idea for an episode that it would consider the submissions of just about anyone. It was by far the easiest place in Hollywood to reach to make your “pitch” of a story or script.

I dared to think the thought.  I could easily create a suitable resume from the one that I had at the time.  And I just happened to have an hour-long dramatic script readily at hand, the one I wrote for The Outer Limits.  I rolled the idea around in my head for a while.  I mentioned it to my friend Brian after reading “Ice” to him and some other friends (one of whom was properly scared, so I knew I had done my job), and he said, “Yeah, you should go ahead and do that.”  So I made two copies of a resume and two copies of “Ice”.  I wrote two cover letters.  I stuffed two envelopes.  And I mailed them to Paramount Pictures in Los Angeles, one to the Story Editor of Deep Space Nine and one to the Story Editor of Voyager--the two Trek shows that were then on the air.  And through the spring and the summer, I waited.

Then, one August afternoon, just as I was getting in the door from the temporary job I was doing at the time, I heard the phone ring upstairs.  I heard the machine answer it.  And I heard a voice calling from three thousand miles to the southwest.  

And I made the maddest dash up the stairs I’ve ever made in my life.

TO BE CONTINUED.