At this point, I doubt I will ever see a response that opens my eyes and makes me understand this stance. I admit the 2009 effort was darn entertaining as a mere movie can be and Bob Orci is such a personable and good barker for his own product that he may get me to check out his next effort. But against the vast sea of STAR TREK stories ever told in any media since its inception in the 1960s, “brilliant”?

I mean even as early as 2006 Dauman declared the goal was:

http://www.fool.com/investing/general/2006/12/11/fool-on-the-street-viacom-plants-the-flag.aspx

“Dauman was speaking about the company’s overseas strategy — where he sees margin expansion in the range of 10 to 15 percentage points over the next few years — but it was interesting all the same for him to bring up an image of the company’s past in taking his own company to task. Simply landing on the moon isn’t enough for Dauman. Apparently, he wants to colonize” – Rick Aristotle Munarriz, THE MOTLEY FOOL, December 11, 2006

And most reasonable people admit that the 2009 effort contributed little to this strategy of exceeding merely an impressive moon landing by significantly improving the overseas take.

I happen to have that tome (6th printing) right here, and I suggest that, even though the cover clearly proclaims that its orientation is organized around the more general concept of being THE BOOK ON HOW TO WRITE FOR TV!, if that’s all you got from reading it that you need to read it again.

Specifically starting with page 323:

“At the bottom of page 13, we establish the fact that Sulu shoots a police revolver 6 times. Later on in the script you will discover that Kirk, using the same pistol, fires at a mounted knight in armor 5 times. This would make the revolver an 11-shooter…
Please have this discrepancy mended.” – Excerpt from script comment.

“A former producer from STAR TREK often used to say that in order to write for this series you have take a post-graduate course in the techniques of operating a starship.” – Stephen E. Whitfield, THE MAKING OF STAR TREK

In science-fiction writing when you mention some preexisting concept such as a revolver, you don’t have to take it apart and explain the mechanism but if you claim that a police revolver is an immediate threat to the entire galaxy then you better damn well credibly mend the discrepancy.

There are two things that are Infinite, The Universe and human stupidity, and I’m not so sure about the Universe – Albert Einstein

So far he seems to be right about Human Stupidity, which is why I watch so little TV, as it just gets dumber every year w/ “Reality” TV shows.

Yet the drooling masses keep watching that stuff like it was high art.

It’s just workaday showbiz chatter …. in pretty much every corner of the entertainment industry, on every scale, coworkers refer to each other as geniuses. It’s basically a form of punctuation in their language, and doesn’t mean the same thing it does in English.

I think Ron Moore and Brannon Braga, Michael Pillar, and Nick Meyer are all better writers but never called them ‘Einsteins’

matthias w.