On Neil Simon.

Neil Simon wrote the first play I ever appeared in (almost 30 years ago), not to mention one other play that gave me an enormous workout nine years later.

It’s easy to dismiss his writing as comedic fluff, but there’s personal truth in the characters he created. Some broke down before our eyes, others went at each other, hammer and tongs. I played both kinds, and couldn’t help but recognize each as parts of myself. Telling their stories was akin to telling my own.

Hell of a run, Mr. Simon. Well done, sir.

Finest kind.

It’s been a couple of days since my smarter half had the opportunity to briefly interview the incomparable Alan Alda for her employer. I was happy to assist with the nominal tech necessary to capture audio of the conversation. The interview went well, and he graciously gave her double the fifteen minutes she’d been promised.

I could barely contain my glee, skulking in the next room while trying to overhear the back-and-forth. To say I am enormously proud of her ability and erudite charm is to fall short of the reality.

A link to the interview itself will be appended here once it’s up.

UPDATE: And here it is.

Geronimo.

On our second viewing of latter-day Doctor Who, I’m realizing that, the more I watch, the more I realize how much we under-appreciated the remarkable, glittering, lunatic sensitivity of Matt Smith.

And I don’t even have a picture of the guy.

Our document-scanning project (wherein old paperwork is converted to OCR-ed pdfs via a Fujitsu ScanSnap that is working quite well, thank you) is now working its way through a period of time when a certain dear, funny, wonderful, talented man was doing my taxes.

He’d been the musical director for the theater project that probably marks the most important creative moment of my life. He became one of the reasons why being on stage to tell good stories was so important to me. He was a bombastic, hilarious theater maven, something more people should have in their lives. He was killed during a petty burglary of his apartment and left to rot while the perps drove around town in his car.

Consigning his handwriting and handiwork to pdfs and the shredder hurts a bit. I can think of any number of people who deserved his fate far more.

Jeorge Capobianco, you are sorely missed. Wish I could give you a painful hug right now. I’d even let you cop a feel.

Take a pill. It ain’t Hamlet.

Some older Star Trek fans are apparently lamenting having been deserted by the entertainment franchise which has sustained and occupied them for so many years. Because they believe, as non-industry consumers tend to, that this franchise is being run by individuals who have an awareness of anything outside the narrow scope of “it made money this past quarter.” It isn’t, and y’all should know better by now.

In fact, Trek is being run by the same cowardly and unimaginative MBAs in expensive suits that run the company you probably work for… if you’re fortunate enough to still have a job with benefits. These guys infest so many different business categories—having been taught exactly how little they need to know about any of the industry-specific businesses they will ever work for—that their behaviors are remarkably predictable as a group, using generalizations I would personally find offensive were I one of them. Call me a hypocrite if you must, but know that I am not Management.

I could write eight paragraphs about Viacom/CBS/Paramount having greenlit J.J. Abrams’ proposal for a new direction for Star Trek, but three facts obviate the need: (1) Paramount Marketing is a revolving door of suits who apparently need to outsource such complex tasks as unzipping their pants to take a piss, (2) Abrams is a smart guy who pitches good ideas to the aforementioned helpless suits about how to revive struggling franchises they have no creative grasp upon, (3) he executes well, which gives him durability in a business category known for a severe attention deficit disorder.

Abrams has succeeded in creating a Star Trek which—surprise!—appeals to a broad audience that is not over 45 years old and—surprise!—doesn’t bend over backwards to cater to that same dwindling demographic. It is indeed a sad month for Comic Book Guy, because his encyclopedic knowledge of canon-specific facts and figures are now relatively useless. And—surprise!—Comic Book Guy is all over the multitudinous fan forums, spewing vitriol and disdain with his obviously superior knowledge about what would constitute a truly successful revival of a dwindling entertainment franchise, without offending his deeply-held religious beliefs.

Fear not, neglected canon-wankers. Despite the fact that you feel unable to accept your archetypical Jim Kirk as a timeline-screwed troubled child who needs a mentor to kick-start his latent greatness, you now have choices.

Star Trek fandom has been enabled by Moore’s Law in a bunch of directions, not the least of which are the capability to produce watchable fan films which dutifully—if variably—carry the Continuity Tradition. Here’s one group of them.

Hidden Frontier Productions has been laboring in the boonie vineyards since 2000, but they didn’t catch my attention until a chance perusal of definitive Trek fan Web resource Memory Alpha revealed to me that there were such things as fan-made movies which were not full of stormtroopers and lightsabers. (I’m reasonably certain it was Memory Alpha, but it could very easily have been another one of those early herculean resource pages that fans love to correct.)

Hidden Frontier Production’s first eponymous series lasted seven seasons, through 50 episodes, during which the producers of this effort taught themselves how to overcome the physical and financial limitations of shooting unfinanced video. Most of the series is played out in front of a green screen which chroma-keys actors into standing digital sets, which are either static images of existing professional Trek or newly created by HF staff. The group’s dramatic standard has therefore largely been limited to scenes depicting people who enter a statically-shot scene and either sit in chairs or stand in place. But towards the last two seasons of the series, the plots became interesting enough to me that this stricture became secondary, and they got better at minimizing the limitations.

The Hidden Frontier series takes place during what I surmise (without in-depth Trek-nerd research) is the immediately post-Voyager era, and draws heavily upon existing canon in attempts to continue stories based upon issues and events raised by televised and theatrical Trek.

The series deliberately and prominently featured characters of various sexual orientations in its plots, which inevitably paved the way for fan-favorite New Voyages/Phase 2 to feature such previously taboo content in its most recently released episode—to a great deal of debate and discussion over the acknowledgment of gay or bisexual individuals in our collective future.

HF’s treatment of such content was initially what one might expect of a community theater production, with deliberately overstated scenes between romantically involved characters whose performances were directed with far more indication than a Trek fan might expect of their straight equivalents. But the point was made, and over time the series became less obviously didactic about it.

Hidden Fronter‘s storyline ended and spun off many of its characters into different series for this production group to work upon. Odyssey, The Helena Chronicles, and Federation One all take place subsequent to and dependent upon the events depicted in the parent series. I have to say that’s the order in which I rank them.

Odyssey is HFP’s take on Voyager, Paramount’s second-to-last Trek tv series. A cast change (which directly benefited James Cawley’s Phase 2 series) actually improved the believability of this show’s lead character. Odyssey places a Federation starship far from home, marooned by adversity in hostile territory. Lieutenant Commander Ro Nevin (played by Brandon McConnell) is an uncertain naif, thrust into command of a starship by unfortunate circumstance. McConnell’s performance, along with that of a largely solid cast, carries a series of stories which impress me far more than the standard fan effort I’ve come to expect. The ship itself undergoes far more continuous tribulation than Janeway’s Voyager ever did, incurring damage and casualties which don’t magically disappear at the end of an hour, one of many qualities that the Paramount show repeatedly demonstrated to ill effect.

The Helena Chronicles posits a starship whose captain is investigating the disappearance of the above-mentioned Odyssey. Helena‘s Captain Faisal (Sharon Savene) deliberately violates orders to find compatriots on the lost ship. Her status becomes that of a rogue, and she is pursued by the rest of the fleet, despite having discovered valuable truths and having performed actions of worth.

Both Odyssey and Helena feature characters who display deliberately eccentric behavior, but very rarely cross into Mary Sue territory. Helena generally exhibits more space-going action than Odyssey. Odyssey lends itself to far more space-operatic villainy, as did Hidden Frontier. The storylines of the two newer series dovetail into a common tapestry.

Post-production quality has improved remarkably in the two or three years that I’ve been watching this group’s efforts. CG and compositing capability have progressed, but neither could carry the full weight of a good story without the advances in writing and editing that I’ve seen in both. Acting has improved, but anyone who’s itching to compare a volunteer fan effort with a regular commercial tv series should scale down expectations a bit. Given that, some might be surprised by what they see here.

Neither of these series seem weighed-down by HF‘s albatross, which was initially a soap-operatic ordeal, full of interminable scenes of people sitting in chairs and arguing with each other in long takes. Most of that is gone, or handled with much more skill. There is fun to be had here now.

I can’t say the same about the work done by Federation One, a series which follows the United Federation of Planets’ President, her entourage, and the crew of the ship she lives aboard (an equivalent of Air Force One).

The material is mostly simplistic politics and subterfuge, written with observably less attention than Odyssey or Helena. The President herself is portrayed by Rebecca Wood, whom I’ve seen perform capably within the HF universe in other roles and with far more believability. In fact, most of this show’s cast seems to be directed with less discretion and finesse than HFP’s other series. This is unfortunate, considering how much good work some of this cast delivered in the parent show.

Hidden Frontier Productions also produced two team-up segments with the excellent Scottish fan group Starship Intrepid, to very good effect. I’ll write a bit more about them in another post, hopefully before the decade ends.

I find it heartening that at least one fan-based effort is cranking out enough free entertainment for fans that it’s possible to distinguish such variability in their collective work. Production values have improved to the extent that much of the CG work is remarkably similar to the pro stuff when viewed on my iPod touch. The work deserves to be seen; these are good stories, assuming you have the patience to wait for their release.

And none of them shows a starship’s hangar deck with girders that cross a shuttlecraft’s flight path.

The Kids are Alright.

Just got back from Star Trek. I am very pleased. And still dizzy.

1. The franchise is in good hands.

2. The Kids are Alright.

3. I finally like Kirk.

4. Spock’s important childhood moment from “Yesteryear” is performed with living actors. My favorite moment of the film.

5. Rat Girl’s appearance is brief.

6. As Khans go, this one was fairly wrathful.

Remaining conscious.

Too much going on to maintain the regularity of stuff I’d planned here. Day job is crushingly, exhaustingly inefficient and draining. Freelance gig is time-consuming and frustrating (imagine dealing with a talented artist who doesn’t understand the need for categorizing or consistently naming art that’s going into her illustrated memoir).

Next chance I get, I’ll start posting the brief requests for policy focus I sent to change.gov before the inauguration, and maybe write a couple of new ones.

And then, back to worthy fan-film projects and the Year of Living Copelandey, as it proceeds through its mid-life perambulations.

It’s only trivia if you’re not a fan.

Three more-or-less obvious points which form the background of my second song of praise for superlative fan effort. I’ll ask alert readers to excuse my inconsistency with title punctuation.

Fandom has become a curious force in the entertainment marketplace. To nobody’s surprise, the growing aggregate of fans who spend much of their personal time with fantasy entertainment properties has become a collection of subcultures that exhibit an increasingly bizarre, chaotic stew of behavioral categories which range across middle-class entitlement, OCD-level obsession with detail, stark conservatism, slashfic fetishism, and deliberate evangelical misinterpretation.

The relative democracy of personal anonymity on the Internets has given millions of people safe niches where they can settle into each of their own unassailable personal universes, if only to reinforce unshakeable (if undereducated) opinions about any subject, whether historically significant or ephemeral.

Star Trek in particular draws out some precious specimens, having provided more than forty years of content with which fans around the world build little fortresses around personal prejudice, cherished ignorance, or cultural myopia. Battlestar Galactica‘s current creator Ron Moore discovered this when it was first made public that he intended to significantly update 1978’s original sorry excuse for entertainment that bore the show’s name. Die-hard fans were livid and offended, much as they had been when rumors of Spock’s death began circulating before the release of Trek‘s second movie in 1982. Violation of canon is not taken lightly by the faithful.

All of which stokes my admiration for a relatively new project which will probably never see the fulfillment it deserves. Jeremy Grunloh is a fan with a good amount of horse sense and an ability to step back from a subject that few ever bother to consider in any context other than as scripture. He has written a series of stories in teleplay form (and plotted far more) that lift essential ideas from Gene Roddenberry’s crowning 1966 achievement (a success he never recovered from), and remade them for an audience which has far more modern sensibilities and concerns.

Star Trek (Reborn) (or simply “Star Trek” as the script titles read) is a contemporary occupational drama, set in a 23rd century where humans have indeed joined up with an interstellar community of their alien peers, but not as the dominantly moralistic force which Roddenberry posited as his response to Cold War politics. Its “first season” is freely available for download in pdf form, and aside from the absence of a proofreader’s hand, it reads like something we should be seeing on our televisions.

In Mr. Grunloh’s version of the show, Humans are simply one of a handful of races which together strive to deal with messy issues like cultural ambiguity, trade, notional threats from mysterious and distant aliens, and the inevitable real threat from within, as the paranoid and fearful in power seek to create political and tactical advantage by betraying the ideals they have sworn to protect. Grunloh makes no bones about having been influenced by The Manchurian Candidate (the remake of which I have yet to see), and I can only applaud, having been teased—along with every other fan of Star Trek: Deep Space Nine—by subplots involving covert extra-government agencies that have created their own morality in the face of real or imagined threats.

Grunloh, having done away with the credulous idealism of Roddenberry’s weak New Age “beliefs,” has replaced smirky retro embarrassment with contemporary solidity. His stories contain almost no plot-enabling “magical” devices like transporters, replicators or even focused-energy weapons. His Starfleet characters, true individuals with well-defined personal issues and history, have to work harder to accomplish what they do, while patrolling a jurisdiction that effectively makes them the true equivalent of a modern peacekeeping force, maintaining order within known space.

Since this region is somewhat smaller in volume than in the original far-flung exploratory mission, this particular Starship Enterprise (a vessel which more closely resembles a component of a spacegoing navy) returns to Earth fairly often, where the engines of global intrigue and individual fallibility generate the difficulties with which the cast of this show must cope. This tighter architecture also allows the primary cast to mix directly with scattered supporting characters more often.

Yes, the cast. Grunloh has fantasy-footballed this project, assigning his ideal choices of familiar Hollywood talent to every role of consequence. As a young James Kirk (newly promoted after an attack cripples Enterprise‘s Captain Pike): Sean Patrick Flanery. This Kirk isn’t very sure of himself in his new command, but exhibits the qualities that will enable him to overcome such insecurities. Spock is imagined being portrayed by James Marsters, a role that takes the original character’s hybrid origins and adds the stigma of personal tragedy to make things more tasty. McCoy is no less a rocky role, having been assigned to no less a talent than Gary Sinise (who was briefly rumored to have been in J.J. Abrams’ Trek movie cast before actual facts were revealed). This more realistic McCoy is also afflicted with personal issues which threaten to impair his ability to function within Starfleet, his hopeful escape from the demons of civilian life. I would love to see Sinise tackle something this sloppy and distinctly human again.

Season One’s story arc necessarily concerns military action taken against a purported enemy whose apparent actions in the series’ pilot episode have polarized an entire world’s population. It’s what Moore’s Galactica did. It’s what we’re about now, and it needs to be kept visible in popular-entertainment allegory until the least intellectual of our population understands its importance.

Star Trek (Reborn) deserves to be filmed as written. I have a very strong hunch that I won’t feel this strongly about the Abrams movie when it premieres.

Inaugurating a new level of trivia.

Herewith, while postponing two somewhat lengthy items I’ve been meaning to respectively finish and begin, a new category which acknowledges my maddeningly tenacious attachment to fandom. The idea is to publicly acknowledge fan-originated efforts that I feel deserve more attention than they’ve been getting. And by “fan,” I mean that I’ll mostly describe devotees of a popular commercial entertainment property of one sort or another.

First in line, a fine example of the overlap between increasingly affordable consumer computing power and the outskirts of a neglected entertainment franchise: “Star Trek.” A property which I find distinguished more by its failures than its successes, thanks to over four decades of pandering to low expectations. Despite the preponderance of cheese in the series’ canon, I’ve always managed to find more than mere distraction in its very artificial universe.

The original series was of major importance to me in my tweens, and stubbornly persists in my affections as something more than a nostalgic hangover. One reason for this is “Star Trek Aurora,” a home-grown CG-animated series by Tim Vining.

Mr. Vining has created a storyline which takes place just after the original series’ run, but like Joss Whedon’s “Firefly,” features characters and situations who are far removed from the heroic center of this universe’s idealized center of activity. Human Kara Carpenter and her Vulcan first mate T’Ling run a very small cargo ship in a part of known space that’s a long way from civilization, despite its somewhat familiar trappings.

Carpenter is just another small entrepreneur trying to make a living, but she’s not merely an anonymous face in a jumpsuit. A dark moment in her childhood, the focus of enduring interstellar gossip years after the fact, continues to resurface in her adult life. Neither her business nor her downtime are free of ghosts.

Two episodes have thus far been released, and they’re worth seeing. While the characters are physically limited by the stiffness of some of the software used to model them, there is no mistaking the amount of careful, tasteful detail that has gone into every scene of this work. The writing has already delivered more than the depressingly bland stereotypes common to both fan and professional fiction, having already broached one boundary Gene Roddenberry never saw fit to push upon.

I am impatient for Mr. Vining’s completion of episode 3.