Star Trek: Warp Speed to $300 Million and Beyond

Apparently Star Trek is a big deal. The original series of 1966 paved the way for four additional live action series, an animated series, several movies, video games, comics, books, a new language, and I’m sure there’s more. Trekkies will have to forgive me. My exposure to the Star Trek universe is limited to fragments of the various series, and one prolonged exposure to Star Trek Voyager during a nine month stint where I was stranded on my brother’s couch with nothing but Spike TV to watch. I’m a fan of science-fiction, but I never was completely sold on Star Trek, so I approached J. J. Abrams' latest film with skepticism. Could it really be as great as all these reviews claim? After seeing the movie I think most critics are being a little too rewarding, but nonetheless, Star Trek is definitely a fun addition to the summer movie season. The film moves at brisk pace with lots of exciting sci-fi action, a beautiful presentation, and the gags you’d associate with a summer blockbuster.

Star Trek presents the origin story of the original crew of the starship Enterprise. There are seven crewmembers we follow, but the film stays closest to James T. Kirk (Chris Pine) and Spock (Zachary Quinto). The film moves at warp speed pretty much from the first scene, where we witness the dramatic conditions surrounding Kirk’s birth in space. The next few scenes parallelize the lives of Kirk and Spock as we see the development of a spontaneous and brash Kirk compared to the more subdued and logical entity that is Spock. It’s impossible for me to gauge how well Pine and Quinto’s characters stack up to the originals, but most of the Star Trek fans I know feel they did a good job. But from a story standpoint, Abrams’ ultimate goal is not to appease trekkies, but establish the polarity, rivalry, and eventual friendship between the two main characters. In that regard you have to acknowledge that they did a fine job, but the film ultimately serves the relationship of these two characters more than it does its story and conflict.


Eric Bana plays Nero, an alien obsessed with destroying The United Federation of Planets (this includes Earth) and seeking revenge against Spock for his failure to save his home planet. The circumstances surrounding this failure are unfortunate, but in my opinion don’t add up to match Nero’s hatred and motivation. Even if I were entirely comfortable with Nero’s desire for revenge against Spock, his desire to go on a planet destroying rampage is somewhat forceful. But hey, it’s a sci-fi movie, villains are allowed to be unreasonable. Sci-fi movie or not, a great antagonist will always feel locked to the protagonist emotionally and physically. There’s something about Nero that feels separate from James Kirk, even though Kirk was born in the wake of Nero’s destruction. The two characters weren’t even both aware of one another until the climax. For much of the movie Nero is fixated on Spock, and Kirk seems to inherit Nero as his greatest obstacle.

Star Trek is fortunate that its quick pace takes us from one action scene to the next before audiences can really get hung up on some logic problems and big coincidences in the story. Going into some of the coincidences could venture into spoiler territory, but from a screenwriting standpoint it’s the kind of stuff that every league member would have gotten called out for if we tried it in class. It’s hard to determine if screenwriters Roberto Orci and Alex Kurtzman were lazy. I have a hunch that the film has a ton of extras that didn’t make the final cut, some of which might have ironed out a few kinks. If I’m wrong then I would say that the screenwriters are guilty of writing what they needed to get from A to B, and not what the story needed.

The supporting characters aboard the Enterprise are introduced and come to their posts aboard the starship quickly. Treating it any differently would have involved slowing down the movie and cluttering it with more dialogue. To Abrams’ credit, Star Trek stuck with its desired pace over the course of a comfortable running time of just over two hours. Of the supporting characters I need to mention Nyota Uhura (Zoe Saldana), the character that gets the fourth most development of the seven. She’s probably the only thing more pleasing to the eye other than the great visual effects the movie has to offer. Women are underrepresented in the film, and if Uhura is an indication of what women will be like in the future, unfortunately the best description would be intelligent harlots. Uhura shows promise in the early going. She’s smart, motivated, and one of the more qualified members aboard the Enterprise. All of my respect for her as a character went out the window with the way she throws herself at Spock. It made no sense to me. It was as if suddenly Abrams had to throw a bone to the thirteen year old boys in the audience who wanted to see her rub up on somebody. Where’s a Captain Janeway when you need one?

One could look at Star Trek as a two hour introduction that sets up the adventures to come. Abrams puts his pieces in place well and manages to mask most shortcomings by whisking us quickly from joke, to great visual, to action scene. We can expect the sequels to be equally entertaining, but viewers should demand a more rewarding story that has the capacity to engage the characters more thoroughly. A menacing and ever-present antagonist would be a great step in this direction. I wish I could comment more on how the film stacks up in the minds of true Star Trek finds, but I know you guys are out there. Chime in and let me know what you thought about the movie.

The Writing Week (Vol. 2) part 71 – Delaying the Inevitable

What’s your favorite part of writing a screenplay? Developing characters? Outlining? Dialogue? Personally, I love writing fast paced first acts and killer third acts. The problem is, I don’t tend to enjoy everything in between, i.e. act two. Luckily, I just realized one of the biggest problems that I tend to have with it.

With my Roman-army spec, the League kept telling me, “We get to page 35 and then nothing happens until act three. They just keep talking about what they’re gonna do, but no one does anything.” Of course, I denied that. “It’s all about character in there. Any they do move the story forward. See all these scenes? This is what that scene does. This one does this other thing.” And so on and so forth. Well, I realized I have been wrong. My problem with writing Act Two is in delaying the inevitable.

I’m rereading a comic book style action spec I wrote about two years ago. It was relatively smooth sailing for about 50 pages. Then I hit the midpoint of the script, which felt more like a brick wall. At 100 pages, the script is already pretty trim. The problem is, a lot of the second half of the script is fluff. I build toward a climactic sequence that eventually does come. But before that, I have at least 20 ages in which a lot happens, yet hardly anything happens. The characters all spend a lot of time talking about the big battle scene that we know is coming, talking about who they can trust and who they can’t, talking about how they feel going into the battle. Talking. Talking. Talking. However, they do very little doing.

I find that it’s a difficult balance in keeping the story moving forward while not overwriting everything that the film is working toward. Too often I duplicate a scene to ensure that the reader (and, hopefully, viewer) knows exactly what everyone is feeling going into the climax. To that effect, I have many unnecessary scenes that push the big reveals and action back, but do nothing to further the story. These scenes just sit there, take up space, and, if I was really off my game, reiterate what I’ve already said. They delay unnecessarily. For page count? Because I’m not confident I’ve clarified what I’ve needed to? I’m not sure. All I know is that they have to go. And seeing them in this old script will help me be on the alert in them in all future scripts I write.

Stop delaying. Get to the good stuff already.

Trailer Trash XLVI: The Giant Gila Monster (1959)

"It all started like an ordinary record hop... had the only known the black monster waiting outside..."

Oh, do I love me a good ol' record hop!

Back in the days before CGI, if you wanted to stick Nicolas Cage's head into a basket full of bees, you either had to get creative or find yourself a basket of bees. If you needed a giant monster, however, you just needed to find a regular-sized critter and drop it onto a pile of Hot Wheels. Splice that into some footage of people standing next to cars, pointing at the sky and screaming, and boom! You've got yourself a movie.



Oh, no! Mighty Max, look out!

Not the Micro Machines! Anything but the Microooo Machiiiiiiines!!!!


"Devouring people... like they were flies!"

Trailer Trash is a weekly tribute to oddball, cheesy and often just plain terrible movie trailers. Writers: These movies got made... so can yours! You can read through our archive by clicking here.

NYAFF 2009!!!

It's back!!

New York Asian Film Festival
June 19 - July 5
IFC Center and Japan Society

If you live in New York City, you know that at any given day there're at least 10 events going on, but the one I look the most forward to every summer is the New York Asian Film Festival. Despite NYC being an international metropolis, it is still hard to catch the latest asian films. NYAFF is the time when I go on asian film beige. Again this year there's an amazing line up with films for everyone. Here's just a few:

Let's start with a few films I'm personally excited about: OLD FISH, where members of Harbin’s bomb squad take on a mad bomber who’s leaving homemade explosives all over the city. What's different about this movie (which Onyx will appreciate) is it's acted mostly by actual cops and bomb squad officers. Then there's romantic comedy from China IF YOU ARE THE ONE, which is the second-highest grossing movie EVER released in China. The original film name is actually "Do Not Disturb If Not Sincere", about a man determined to end his bachelorhood and posts an advertisement, and a heart-broken stewardess who ended an affair with a married man. More than one review says this film goes back to the golden age of romantic films.

For those manga followers, 2008 NYAFF brought Death Note 1 and 2. This year, they have 20 CENTURY BOYS and 20 CENTURY BOYS: CHAPTER TWO- THE LAST HOPE. This award winning manga series is about an ordinary man who realizes that someone is drawing from a book he and his friends created as kids about the end of the world, and making it come true. Will they be able to stop the conspiracy in time? What excites me the most is that rather than trying to stuff the series into one 2 hr film, it's a three part series, and according to wiki, the movie is a faithful adaptation to the manga. I have not read 20 Century Boys, but I'm a big fan of Naoki Urasawa's other series Monster, which you can find them in any major bookstore. There is also ANTIQUE (TRAILER), based off the wildly popular (and I'm not joking about this) shojo manga series Antique Bakery about gorgeous gay men who make even more gorgeous cakes.



On the more serious front is CHILDREN OF THE DARK (TRAILER), a Japense drama that's set (and now banned) in Thailand about child trafficking, both for sex and for their spare organs. Also CLIMBER'S HIGH (TRAILER), about a group of newspapermen covering the real-life tragedy of a 1985 plane crash in the mountains of central Japan.

For martial art addicts, you will not be disappointed: there's Hong Kong historic action complete with battle scenes AN EMPRESS AND THE WARRIORS (TRAILER); there's sexy ridiculous action with a hot girl who is actually a samurai who is actually a cyborg, SAMURAI PRINCESS; there's based off of Bruce Lee's master IP MAN action; there's award winning brutal bloody action BREATHLESS (TRAILER); there's 70's Korea's anti-communist hysteria satire spy comedy action DACHIMAWA LEE; retrospective screening of iconic old school (1978) action flick FIVE DEADLY VENOMS; and just pure comedy action whose plot can be explained with its title: BE A MAN! SAMURAI SCHOOL (TRAILER)

Then there are the beautiful, sensitive dramas: ALL AROUND US, which follows 8 years of marriage of a courtroom sketch artist. Actress Tae Kimura won “Best Actress” for her performance as the wife at the Japanese Academy Awards. CAPE NO. 7 (TRAILER), the highest grossing movie ever released in Taiwan, is a crowd pleasing film about in a tiny seaside town and its civic booster mayor who vows to form a local band to be the opening act for a pop star's concert. How does this have anything to do with 7 love letters that were lost in the war? I have no clue and am excited to find out. Then there's the brutal VACATION, which builds to a powerful punch in the guts as a guard volunteers to holds down the legs of a condemned prisoner when he’s hung in order to get extra vacation time. ROUGH CUT (TRAILER), a high concept action film about a spoiled actor known for playing gangsters who stars in his latest movie with a real life gangster.

I'm personally a sucker for surreal films, so I'm pretty psyched about DREAM, where two people find that their dreams are connected. To make matters worse, one of them is a sleepwalker that acts upon what the other dreams. Also THE CLONE RETURNS HOME (TRAILER), which debuted at the Sundance Film Festival about an astronaut's wife who recieves a clone of her husband when he dies in an accident in orbit. But life can be hard when you’re the clone of a dead man, and soon this photocopied human is lost in the labyrinth of his own artificial memories.

And what would an Asian Film Fes be without its above and beyond over the top ridiculous movies? Samurai zombies! Need I say more? Samurai zombies chasing a happy family on vacation and some mentally unbalanced guys with guns! That's YOROI SAMURAI ZOMBIE (TRAILER). Also the return of hideous space chicken, Guilala, who attacks the G8 Summit and the world leaders must fight back! MONSTER X STRIKES BACK: ATTACK THE G8 SUMMIT (TRAILER). From Malaysia is WHEN THE FULL MOON RISES, a “lost” black-and-white thriller from the 60’s with secret communist cults, werewolves, were-tigers, ghosts, private eyes, midgets and eerie secrets,

Check out Subway Cinema for more films and events (including Tokyo Gore Night and Pink Power)! http://subwaycinemanews.com/archives/317

The films are playing June 19 - July 2 at the IFC Center (323 Sixth Avenue, at West 4th Street) and July 1 - 5 at Japan Society (333 East 47th Street between 1st and 2nd Avenues).

What, When, Where this Weekend - Star Trek, Rudo y Cursi, Adoration

What, When, Where is a weekly guide to select screenings, discussions and events in the NYC-area of interest to screenwriters. Have an event you'd like to see listed here? Give us a heads-up at info@screenwritersleague.com.

Opening this week...

STAR TREK, written by Roberto Orci and Alex Kurtzman, dir. by J.J. Abrams


PREMISE: The origin story of Captain James T. Kirk, Spock and the crew of the USS Enterprise before they had boldly gone where no man had gone before.

PLAYING: Everywhere

A lot of excitement has built up around this one, and early reviews are saying it pretty much kicks ass. It's technically an odd-numbered Star Trek movie, though, so you have to be wary... I'll let you know what I think.

RUDO Y CURSI, written and directed by Carlos Cuaron


PREMISE: A chance encounter with a talent scout affords half-brothers Tato and Beto the opportunity to play professional soccer in Mexico City. The catch: the scout can only bring one of the boys, which kickstarts an intense sibling rivalry, though fate will not keep the brothers apart for long.

PLAYING: Landmark Sunshine

This movie is getting a lot of buzz around re-uniting the stars of Y Tu Mama Tambien. This'll eventually hit my Netflix queue.

ADORATION, written and directed by Atom Egoyan


PREMISE: For his French-class assignment, a high school student weaves his family history in a news story involving terrorism, and goes on to invite an Internet audience in on the resulting controversy.

PLAYING: Clearview Chelsea

I've been a fan of Egoyan's Exotica and Sweet Hereafter. I'll give this one a rent.

What are you doing/seeing this weekend?

Roundabout Puts the GO in Godot

Zombie and I recently had the pleasure of attending Roundabout Theatre Company's opening night performance of Waiting for Godot. And Roundabout got it RIGHT. (Allow me this break from film, if you will, since NYC is, after all, the theatre capital of the world. Nowadays, the number of artists who cross over between screen and stage is also greater than those who stick solely to one, so I feel like it is just as suitable to devote time and effort to live theatre as it is to film.)

Normally, I'm not a huge Godot fan. A poor production of it is really quite difficult to sit through, and a filmed stage production loses most if not all of its magic. But Roundabout Theatre's latest revival of the play hits the nail on the head. I haven't had as enjoyable a night at the theater in a long time. Perhaps its the stellar cast - Bil Irwin, Nathan Lane, John Goodman, and John Glover (who just secured a Tony Nomination for his performance). Perhaps it's that the show is played for laughs at all the right moments. Whatever the combination of things done right, this is a ticket to hunt for.

As soon as the lights went down at the final curtain (and after the 10 minute standing ovation), I turned to Zombie and said, "This is going to review well. Really well." I wasn't quite able to put my finger on all the things that I enjoyed so much about the show (I'm still not able to here). Sometimes you just know when something is working, and that was the case for me with Waiting for Godot. I strongly encourage anyone in NYC with cash to spare to go to Waiting for Godot.

The Writing Week (Vol. 2) part 70 – In Talks to Option

Last Tuesday I had breakfast with a woman whose parents bought my grandmother’s house from my family. More importantly to me, she is also a producer with multiple projects in development at the moment. She read my post-Apocalyptic spec. And she liked it. She wants it.

As with most things in the film industry – at least for those of us trying to break into it – there was waiting involved. I was growing more and more disenchanted with the job that my then manager was doing, so, with the help of my aunt, I sent my script to the producer’s father. He is also a writer and was one of the first people to read one of my screenplays – he read the second feature length script I ever wrote back when I was in high school. So, he read and, once he did, recommended it to his busy daughter. Cut to a few weeks later, I’ve dropped my representation, and my phone rings. It’s the producer (whose name, you can tell, I’m withholding for the time being), and she wants to option the script. She’s based in LA, but is heading to the City in a few weeks for the Tribeca Film Festival. We set a breakfast meeting for Tuesday, April 28.

At that point, I still had potential interest in my script at a prod co that has a first look deal with WB. I didn’t want to lost the great opportunity of an option – this producer had optioned another basically unknown writer’s material, got him an agent, got him a $500K sale, and got his movie made. However, I also had a major potential opportunity that could lead to Warner Brothers. Luckily, my contact there is also a friend, so I was able to email her my updates and ask semi-indirectly if anything was going to happen with my script on her end. She advised me to go with the option, since it just wasn’t the right time to take my scrip to WB.

So, with all that resolved, I went to the breakfast meeting last week. Mind you, even though this producer is a family friend, this was the first such meeting I’ve had and I wanted to treat it as I would any other. We met at a café for breakfast – nothing simple, bagel for me, eggs for her – and did the brief “how are you, what have you been up to” chat before jumping into a pretty frank discussion on the script and what we would do to move forward with it.

She liked the script, but, as I found with everyone else who had read it, had some notes that would need to be addressed before she went forward with it. Her manager had also read the script, and if I was willing to do some rewrites, he would send me his notes. (He would also become my manager at that point.) The manager had already made a call to one of the companies the script was submitted to earlier, just to get a feel for how it was received.

In order to resubmit to certain companies – companies that liked the script but thought it needed some work before they would really consider picking it up – I would also have to change the title, since no one will read something that their records show they already passed on. The big question of the morning, then, was three-fold: would I do rewrites, would I change the title, at least for the time being, and did I have a follow-up script I could send ASAP? My answer was an immediate and honest triple yes.

There’s some debate in “how-to” books and websites on whether a writer should pursue an option. Some of the reasoning against it seems to go, “if someone wants your material, they should just buy it; otherwise, you risk winding up with a script that everyone has read and no one wants, i.e. a dead script.” I don’t subscribe to this belief. Why pass up an opportunity to work with someone who not only likes your material, but thinks that they can get a picture made out of it? Especially as a young writer, that is second only to actually making a sale – and hopefully that will come in the next year, before the option expires. I’ll keep you all informed.