New Projects From Trek Producers – Past and Present

This week there is a lot of new project news coming from producers who have worked on Trek. Star Trek director/producer JJ Abrams has bought the rights to make a movie about a ‘mysterious’ apartment. Voyager writer/producer Kenneth Biller has signed on to be the showrunner on a new fantasy TV series with Enterprise writer/producer Mike Sussman in talks to help out. And TNG/DS9 writer/producer Hans Beimler’s new show premiered last night.

Abrams Mystery on Fifth Avenue
In what may be one of the fastest deals in Hollywood, JJ Abrams and Paramount (through Abrams production company Bad Robot) have purchased a New York Times article, “Mystery on Fifth Avenue,” from last Thursday and plan on turning ut into a feature film. The article tells the real-life story about an Upper East Side luxury apartment on Fifth Avenue that the occupants had redesigned to include hidden compartments, messages, puzzles, poems, codes and games for their four preteen kids. Abrams, who keeps a “mystery box” and is an aficionado of magic, seems taken with the concept. It looks like he is taking a comedic angle as he has brought on board Maya Forbes (The Larry Sanders Show) and Wally Wolodarsky (The Simpsons) to pen the script.

From the apartment: Millwork panels in a hallway were designed to look like Le Corbusier’s Modular Man and da Vinci’s Vitruvian Man. Puzzle pieces hidden in one fit together to make a key that opens the other.

Biller (and Sussman) joining Wizards
Kenneth Biller (who was a producer and writer with 35 screen credits for Star Trek Voyager) has joined Sam Raimi’s upcoming syndicated series “Wizard’s First Rule” as showrunner. The show is based on Terry Goodkind’s book “Wizard’s First Rule” and the fantasy series “The Sword of Truth.” “Wizard’s” stars Craig Horner as woodsman Richard Cypher, who transforms into a magical leader and joins with a mysterious woman named Kahlan (Bridget Regan) to stop a bloodthirsty, sinister tyrant. After Voyager, Biller has worked on Dark Angel, Smallville, North Shore, E-Ring, and JJ Abrams Six Degrees. In addition, Mike Sussman is in negotiations to come aboard “Wizard’s” as a supervising producer. Sussman has 35 writing credits split between Voyager and Enteprise and rose from a Story Editor on Voyager (under Biller who was show runner at the time) to producer for Enterprise in the last two seasons. After Enterprise Sussman worked on Brannon Braga’s Threshold.

Poster for Wizards First Rule coming this fall.

Beimler’s Middleman premieres
Last night a new off-beat superhero-themed show The Middleman premiered on ABC Family. The show about a struggling artist who is recruited by a secret organization to fight evil was created by Javier Grillo-Marxuach and has Hans Beimler as co-executive producer. Beimler was an writer, editor and producer on both Next Generation and Deep Space Nine with a total of 34 Trek writing credits (mostly DS9). Since his time with Trek, Beimler has worked as a producer on Profiler, The District and The Dresden Files. The Middleman is getting pretty good reviews, check out these faux promotional PSAs.

Support your local Trek writers and producers and check out these shows.

[Source: THR & THR]