Ross should be giving you a holler about the Povill material real soon.

It is just that with most studios, there isn’t any consistency … I had an excruciating time on the first H Potter flick with warner, but that is practically the only bad experience I had with them (45 singlespaced pages of email as I recall.)

It seems odd that regardless of who owns or operates Paramount, that there is more often than not a huge block in the way of a lot of publications. I helped Ross Plessett prep a piece on the transition from Phase II through IN THY IMAGE to TMP for FILMFAX magazine a few years ago. Now FILMFAX pays something like 3cents a word, it is about equivalent to what children get paid for making shoes in unregulated countries, just horrible, so you gotta know the guy is writing this because he wants to, not because he was getting rich. While a lot of his material was okay to very good, he had one golden nugget — actual pages of Jon Povill correspondence to Katzenberg that had never been published anywhere (don’t bother looking for the back issue — the publisher didn’t think it was important and cut it.)

But Paramount wouldn’t give up any photos to illustrate the article until they had read the manuscript (and even after reading it, they simply replied that they had no images of the kind requested in their files, which is like Richard Avedon saying, “I have no film in my camera.”) And I believe we’re talking almost two years between the interviews being done and the mag giving up on images and just running the stock stuff they had inherited from FANTASTIC FILMS. It was a shitty way to treat a dedicated researcher, somebody who wasn’t muckraking (Ross did some great stuff for CFQ as well, though not on Paramount shows.)

Someday I hope Povill gives somebody else the okay to publish that memo of his … I think it does a lot to illuminate the dubious intellectual prowess of those to whom TMP was entrusted at the highest executive level (and Povill’s own committment to trying to keep TMP on the up and up, even though I strongly disagree with his view about Robert Collins’ unused ending for IN THY IMAGE.)

I interviewed Chambliss too, just a few weeks ago.

Right after the mag I was doing it for, HD VIDEO PRO, gave up on Paramount PR cooperation and cancelled the piece, I had an email conversation with you or your mag about the Chambliss part, which was the only interview that took place.

In that interview, he admitted to near-total unfamiliarity with science fiction and space movies, then said he went for lots of reflective surfaces because they hadn’t done that in space pictures (guess he didn’t see 2001 or 2010 or any number of other pics in his research.)

He gave high marks to the guy who redid the props and to his set dresser, and yet those areas seem to be among the most dubious to my eyes.

As for your earlier post — #71 — about Paramount PR and cooperation …. gotta say, it looks a LOT different on the outside looking in. Paramount has shown very little regard for genre and tech mags in my experience, and that is probably most true with respect to TREK.

I had horrendous times covering TUC, GEN and FC, not just in terms of getting interviews and images, but just getting calls returned within a month. INS was better, as was EVENT HORIZON (on the latter, because we bypassed the PR dept entirely), and TOMB RAIDER was okay because they had me sign Non-Disclosures, but this TREK has been tons worse than BENJAMIN BUTTON, another problem Par show where they forgot to mention vfx folks couldn’t be interviewed.

ILM has been surprisingly uncooperative as well, something I have never before experienced (and I’ve covered LOTS of their shows … I did 43 interviews in three days at ILM for PHANTOM MENACE, which is a record I hope I never again approach.) In addition to stalling, ILM also wouldn’t discuss scheduling interviews without Paramount PR okays, and the lady there held us up for a whole month (basically the time I was supposed to have to write the piece) before telling ILM it was okay. ILM then stalled another week before saying (within hours of when my piece was DUE) that they wouldn’t be doing interviews till after the Oscars.

This recalls the 90s mindset of Paramount PR, which seemed to be unless you were a magazine flack for the franchise or Entertainment Tonight, that you were just a second class citizen. Hardly inviting.

It is not as simple as that. Perhaps you have not read the reviews of the 20-minute preview.

(spoiler alert)

Pike has to leave the ship, and before doing so, names Kirk as second-in-command to Spock in his absence.

If Kirk, as suspected, is to benefit from the rare (but certainly not unheard of) “battlefield promotion”, it is of significant note that such commissions are usually temporary and almost always mission specific.

If Kirk has proven (as suggested in the preview) that he has something unique to offer with regard to this particular threat—then it is not all that ridiculous. The chain of command succession would then be a result of the crew following Pike’s orders.

And given the time travel nature of this story, by the first time we see Kirk in actual Captain’s insignia aboard the Enterprise, there may have been significant passage of time at that point.

Actually, the fictional 5 year mission begins about 256 years from now, and the film’s story takes place even before that.

He said 200—you said 300.

He’s no more wrong than you are.