Today was a script session with new script consultant Bill Hunt. I love working with Bill. In two weeks he has more effectively revised the script than all the work done in the past 9 months. And that is because he is not only a good writer, but he understands you simply have to do a lot of hard work. He has probably put in 40 hours of work the past week on the script. And we are only through Act Two!
The changes are not major, but they make the story more effective and Rob Burnett is really happy about them, and he has to direct the film!
Bill starts by re-writing everything. He puts it all in his voice, massaging dialogue and adding to the story where he feels he needs to. I then go in and decide what re-written parts I like and what I don’t. Sometimes I simply copy and paste his re-writes into the Master Script, and sometimes I don’t. If I don’t, I will tell Bill why, and he explains what he was trying to accomplish, and we talk it out. I am not married to anything I wrote and totally open to changing the script if it improves it. What you find is by talking things out, you often come to something that is better than either version. We have made some major improvements to scenes, and we have added parts that we didn’t even realize we needed.
And Bill does his homework on Star Trek. He looks up planets on the Star Trek Star Charts, he uses Memory Alpha for historical information, and he is a Star Trek fan, so it works.
We hope to have the entire script polished off by the end of this weekend. I am pretty confident we will. And then it is Comic Con! Make sure if you are going to attend, you come to our panels. You can find all the info here.
Alec
Go Bill!
See you at the library!
Then of course once the actors get the script, you’ll hear about how things sounded great in your head but not so good when they go to deliver the lines – along with alternative suggestions.
It may have been listed as a possible perk for the next fundraiser — just ca’t recall — but having a signed script by all the actors involved in the production would be a sweet one!
I’m hopeful that in the future Star Trek Axanar : The Endless Streaming Series, there will be a tech/nerd/engineer type with a fascination with old V8 style Diesel engines in addition to his day job. All of the TOS Starships seemed to have a very hard core locomotive if not automotive side to them.. from the V-Shaped Nacelle Struts to Scotty’s poor “Bearins” to the Transmission shaped Planet killer. Really smart in a way.. whether conscious or sub-conscious Gene seemed to favor designs that “related” in some way to everyday objects of the time. Even McCoy’s salt shaker shaped Medical Scanners were something we might come across in a diner and not even realize that we felt they looked familar.. realistic.. very psychologically reaffirming that Star Trek wasn’t so far out there that it was unfamilar and simply fantasy. Steve Jobs did the same thing for computers.. basing their designs on blenders and kitchen applicances with a European flair.. and updating the colors available to whatever was in season.
The worst designs are usually the ones that try to conceive of what something should look like based on science and engineering principles of “that era” or “today”.. it dates them rapidly and they instantly look fake or non-functional. Commodity design always trys to make something look like something already on the market so as not to alienate the consumer. The modern computer with a keyboard and monitor are a riff track off the old IBM selectric and TV screen.