#Leonard Maizlish

[eruscreaminginthedistance]

@deepspaceclawstation yeah royal vizier Leonard Maizlish has actually been the most entertaining part of the book so far; literally the obviously evil adviser to the ailing king, what kind of succession bullshit...?

And yeah some of the things Gene did made me physically gasp and this book hasn't even been covering his affairs and its still hard to read

And I'm reading backwards because I'm a 90s trek girlie but The Next 25 Years makes an amazing case for reading the first book covering TOS because I need backstory context for Gene destroying all these decade-spanning friendships in the span of like, a year

Gene Roddenberry better be glad he's dead because I would cyberbully him to an early grave if he were alive rn

[quasi-normalcy]

The people saying that Alex Kurtzman is ruining Star Trek would have said that Abrams was ruining Star Trek 10 years ago and that Berman and Braga were ruining Star Trek 10 years before that and that Leonard Maizlish was ruining Star Trek 10 years before that Nicholas Meyer was ruining Star Trek 10 years before that and Fred Freiberger was ruining Star Trek ten years before that. Sometimes they might even have a point, but I guarantee you that Star Trek, having already survived the episode where alien women stole Spock's brain, will be just fine.

[deepspaceclawstation]

I can't believe people think rabid fans are a recent phenomenon when Leonard Maizlish existed

[scientific-tricorder]

Arrgh, I feel bad for having to squash some of this, and it is admittedly somewhat obscure stuff, but there was more push for gayness behind the scenes than mentioned here. The shows are also just super gay.

It was obviously much harder to do anything regarding queer rep in the 1960's when TOS was being made (and goodness knows it was stepping on enough toes), but author Theodore Sturgeon, who wrote "Shore Leave" and "Amok Time" (AKA The defining Kirk/Spock episode), was known to intentionally put in gay subtext in his work, including specifically "Shore Leave". Writer David Gerrold, who wrote "The Trouble with Tribbles" and was one of the writers invited back for TAS and TNG, was also gay. To my knowledge, he never intentionally put in or really pushed for any gay stuff into TOS. Gay actor George Takei also asked Roddenberry to include a gay character, which Roddenberry supported, but was disinclined to do over concerns about the networks (which, given the era, is understandable).

When TNG rolled around, only a month after the show was announced, Gene Roddenberry explicitly promised fans a gay character on the upcoming show, although this never came to fruition. On their list of current topics and issues to address was AIDs. David Gerrold wrote a "Blood and Fire" to address this, including a couple confirmed as gay with the lines "How long have you been together?" "Since the Academy." This became a whole hot mess involving rewrites and ended up never being part of the show (although it has since been made into a fanmade work directed by Gerrold) and the work of two noted homophobes who were quite set against any gay stuff showing up. The first, and thankfully short-lived as working on the show, was Leonard Maizlish, Roddenberry's lawyer and just awful. Along with manipulating an ill Roddenberry and being exceedingly antagonistic towards the writers, he was also known to illegally enter the writers' offices and rewrite their scripts. And, to quote Gerrold, he was a "raging homophobe".

The second is a man we all know well: Rick Berman. His efforts to quash queerness are well known, so I won't elaborate. For those not in the know of why everyone hates Berman, this video does a good job of covering it. "The Outcast" was produced under his watch, and he considered a very explicit gay metaphor to placate queer fans, a one and done. "Rejoined" was also made when Berman was officially in charge of the franchise, but he had significantly less control over DS9 (thank you, Ira Stephen Behr) and the writers there were known to sneak things in, including the whole Dominion War arc. As others have mentioned, DS9 also had actors very explicitly pushing for and shoving in their own queer content.

On another topic, there were various groups and organizations pushing for gay characters on Star Trek, including the Gaylaxians and the Voyager Visibility Project, who produced rather significant letter writing campaigns.

Multiple actors also spoke out for queer representation. I don't have the time to track down all the references and could be misremembering, but as I recall, they included Patrick Stewart, Jonathan Frakes, Kate Mulgrew, Jeri Ryan, Scott Bakula, Alexander Siddig, Andrew Robinson, and the afore-mentioned George Takei.

I'm guessing that the queer writer in the '90s that you mentioned is Bryan Fuller, who is openly gay. He was a writer on DS9 before moving over to Voyager, where he became co-producer in the seventh season. He's also given credit for Paul Stamets and Hugh Culber. I'm sure that there are other queer writers, but I can't remember others off the top of my head.

The whole franchise is just exceedingly gay though, some of it unintentional (got to love it when they do a no-homo and it only comes out more gay), and some of it very much intentional. All this despite Rick Berman's attempts to keep it super straight.

Sometimes I think about how there was no reason for the Star Trek Franchise to be as gay as it is. Like there was what one queer writer I'm aware of on the team back in the 90s and he wasn't a showrunner or anything. There was not to my knowledge queer people fighting tooth and nail to get their subtext implanted in the show. Gene Roddenberry really wasn't trying to start anything with Kirk and Spock. Rick Berman wanted to squash all gay shit. The franchise didn't have. Representation (TM) until 2017. And yet Spirk was like. A groundbreaking way to consume media. Yet DS9 is inhabited solely by queer people. Yet one show after another is fruity. Like. That was God. That was divine intervention. God said this franchise will be gay whether or not the content creators intend it.

[aion-rsa]

How Star Trek: The Next Generation’s Killing of Tasha Yar Became an Awkward Mistake

https://ift.tt/32BBsEk

“[I] died a senseless death in the other timeline. I didn’t like the sound of that, Captain. I’ve always known the risks that come with a Starfleet uniform. If I am to die in one, I’d like my death to count for something.”

Denise Crosby’s Lt. Tasha Yar, Star Trek: The Next Generation’s inaugural chief of security, managed—due to some alternate timeline trickery—to take that legendary meta-minded dig at her own death from two years earlier in the Season 1 episode, “Skin of Evil.” With that episode having originally aired on April 25, 1988, the anniversary is a good occasion to look back on the controversial behind-the-scenes circumstances that resulted in poor Tasha’s unspectacular, abrupt, red-shirt-like fatal encounter with an alien tar monster on a cheap-looking set.

“Skin of Evil” was the 22nd episode of Star Trek: The Next Generation’s inauspicious inaugural season—just three episodes away from the season finale. Consequently, with audiences at this point having stuck with the show for seven months since its September 26 premiere, the death of a main cast member certainly felt like a stakes-redefining kick against procedural complacency. However, those who had been following industry trades, and read the then-fresh, spoiler-teasing cover story exposé in Starlog magazine, titled “The Security Chief Who Got Away,” pretty much already knew that Crosby was on the outs with the series. Thus, the prevalent question going into Season 1’s final few episodes was not if Tasha Yar was leaving the Enterprise D, but how. Well, said how would prove to be one of the most controversial, lamentable moments in Star Trek history.

While Crosby denied the growing rumors of her impending exit during contemporaneous interviews published before “Skin of Evil” aired, she had indeed quit the series, mostly due to the lack of character development given to Tasha Yar. While she was given a backstory of a rough upbringing on the lawless abandoned Earth colony, Turkana IV, Yar’s only real moment in the spotlight (besides her famous seduction of android Data in “The Naked Now” while under alien viral influence,) had been Episode 3, “Code of Honor,” in which she became the amorous focus of an authoritarian alien leader, and would be forced to participate in a campy fight to the death with the leader’s outraged first wife. Thus, dealing with the show’s notoriously demanding schedule, and faced with the believed prospect of spending years soullessly saying “hailing frequencies open,” Crosby put in a request to be released from her contract, which creator Gene Roddenberry granted.

Unfortunately for Tasha Yar, Roddenberry’s acquiescence would come with a shocking caveat: a sudden and underwhelming onscreen death. “Skin of Evil,” directed by Joseph Scanlan, written by Joseph Stefano and Hannah Louise Shearer, set things up with a rescue mission after an Enterprise shuttlecraft containing Counselor Deanna Troi and pilot Lt. Ben Prieto crashed on the barren planet, Vagra II. Accordingly, Yar joins an away team consisting of Cmdr. William Riker, Lt. Cmdr. Data, Dr. Beverly Crusher to the planet surface, on which they encounter a powerful, tar-like creature that calls itself Armus. There, Yar quickly loses patience as the creature continues to block their rescue effort, and tries to move past it, resulting in an attack that sends her flying backwards, leaving her tar-marked face lifeless on the ground as the essence drains from her body; a condition even beyond the help of subsequent emergency efforts back on the Enterprise. Thus, Yar’s arc, for what it was, had come to an anti-climactic conclusion; a fate attributed to the dangerous nature of Starfleet service, especially for someone in security. However, said fate allegedly wasn’t inspired by any artful motivations.

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So, why did Yar’s exit down this way? Crosby recounted in 1993 behind-the-scenes book, Trek: The Next Generation Crew Book that “Gene [Roddenberry] really felt that the strongest way to go would be to have me killed. That would be so shocking and dramatic that he wanted to go with that.” However, another anecdote-touting tome, 1992’s Trek: The Unauthorized Behind-The-Scenes Story of The Next Generation, alleges that the “Skin of Evil” script—as with other Season 1 episodes—was secretly tweaked and/or rewritten by Roddenberry’s lawyer, Leonard Maizlish, who held an ambiguously-defined full-time staff position on the series. The purported rewrite, which would have been illegal in the Writer’s Guild, was believed to have been designed to deny any dramatic or sentimental value to Crosby’s character. With Roddenberry having recently lost creative control of the Star Trek movie franchise from Paramount Pictures, Maizlish may have been there to protect his bottom line, in this case ensuring that a dead-and-forgotten Tasha would leave no incentive for a potentially-costly new contract for Crosby down the line.

Nevertheless, “Skin of Evil” concluded with an emotional sendoff for Yar, with a memorial service—consisting of only the main cast member characters—set on the holodeck, where the late security chief posthumously delivers well wishes to her colleagues, notably a weeping, possibly guilt-ridden rescuee, Troi (actress Marina Sirtis was reacting to Crosby’s set presence off-camera). Yet, Crosby still had to endure the show’s apparent power plays, even after said memorial, since the show’s out-of-sequence production schedule resulted in her having to shoot one last appearance for her death episode’s immediate predecessor, Episode 21, “Symbiosis,” which also provided another famous Tasha Yar moment, in which she delivers a ham-fisted, Just-Say-No-era anti-drug speech to Wesley Crusher when addressing the episode’s alien drug pushers. It’s a bit of trivia that Crosby famously used in 2019 in a now-famous Twitter dunk on controversial executive producer Rick Berman.

Oh friend, my final scene on @StarTrek was not in SKIN OF EVIL but SYMBIOSIS which was filmed out of order. You came to the set to thank me and brought a cake, then ceremoniously ripped off my Communicator badge saying “you won’t be needing this anymore.” Don’t remember?

— Denise Crosby (@TheDeniseCrosby) February 4, 2019

While Crosby’s post-Star Trek aspirations wouldn’t quite pan out the way she had likely envisioned, save for a co-starring role in 1989 movie Pet Sematary, (she’s recently banked an impressive amount of TV appearances, notably on shows like The Walking Dead and Ray Donovan,) her apparent status as persona non grata on the Enterprise wouldn’t last long, and she would make a monumental return as Tasha in 1990 Season 3 episode “Yesterday’s Enterprise,” in which a temporal anomaly alters the timeline of the Enterprise D, creating a reality in which the Enterprise D is fighting a war with the Klingon Empire, and an anachronistic Season 3-era Yar is very much alive. Pertinent to the episode’s time-bending meeting with predecessor vessel the Enterprise C, Yar—after learning of her main timeline death from Guinan—would transfer to the embattled historical ship (after the earlier-quoted speech,) to ensure that it fulfills a sacrificial destiny to prevent a war that wasn’t supposed to take place, finally giving meaning to her death.

“Yesterday’s Enterprise” was so well-received that it facilitated more Yar-adjacent material, first with the 1990 Season 4 episode, “Legacy,” in which the Enterprise crew go to Tasha’s home, Turkana IV, and become embroiled in a scheme concocted by her bitter estranged sister, Ishara (Beth Toussaint). However, a prominent Crosby comeback would dominate Seasons 4-5’s two-part cliffhanger storyline, “Redemption,” when she played Commander Sela, the daughter of the “Yesterday’s Enterprise” alt-timeline Tasha Yar and a Romulan general to whom she was forced to become a concubine after the Enterprise C’s war-preventing act. In a twist of fate, Crosby, once an underutilized outcast crew member, had been positioned to play one the show’s most memorable villains, since Sela is a ruthless, unwaveringly loyal servant of the bellicose Romulan Empire, and displays her own heartlessness when revealing that her mother, alt-Tasha, was killed while trying to escape with her as a child. Additionally, Crosby reprised the role of prime-Tasha in Picard’s Q-conjured pilot-era flashbacks of 1994 two-part series finale “All Good Things.”

Paramount Television

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Historically, it seems clear that a series of myopic mistakes rendered Denise Crosby’s Star Trek journey more circuitous than necessary. However, the result was a character arc that stands the test of time. Plus, not for nothing, the fantastical nature of current spinoff series Star Trek: Picard could easily facilitate a contemporary Crosby comeback—either as Commander Sela (who eventually became a Romulan empress in the non-canon story of video game Star Trek Online,) or even as alt-Tasha, whose alleged death was never confirmed onscreen. To put it in the parlance of the late security chief, such a comeback would be a jewel for fans.

The post How Star Trek: The Next Generation’s Killing of Tasha Yar Became an Awkward Mistake appeared first on Den of Geek.

from Den of Geek https://ift.tt/2Pbbdl5

[startrekucast]

Sad news today, December 3rd. Yesterday, we lost Star Trek giant D.C. Fontana. She passed away peacefully at the age of 80, reportedly after a short illness.

As a young girl of 11, Dorothy Catherine Fontana decided she wanted to become a novelist. After getting an Associate Degree as an Executive Secretarial major at Fairleigh Dickinson University, she worked her way up through the typing pool to quickly become the secretary to Samuel Peeples of Screen Gems, then to producer Del Reisman of the Lieutenant where she met and became secretary to that show’s creator Gene Roddenberry.

Roddenberry encouraged her writing, and in 1964, she published her first novel, a western Brazos River.

After The Lieutenant was canceled, Roddenberry started work on Star Trek, and Fontana came with him. She worked on it since the beginning of development. Associate producer Robert H. Justman encouraged Roddenberry to give her more writing tasks, and Roddenberry assigned her the job of writing the teleplay for an idea he had called "The Day Charlie Became God"—the premise of which she wrote into her reworked script for the episode that became "Charlie X". Other Original Series episodes she had a hand in writing or re-writing:

"Tomorrow is Yesterday", "This Side of Paradise", "Friday’s Child", "Journey to Babel", "By Any Other Name", "The Ultimate Computer", "The Enterprise Incident", "That Which Survives", and "The Way to Eden" among others…

When Steve Carabatsos, the story editor, left the production midway through the first season, she became the new story editor. At the age of 27, Fontana was the youngest story editor in Hollywood at the time, and also one of the few female staff writers.

She left the story editor position before the third season went into production: "I had told Gene Roddenberry that I did not wish to continue on Star Trek as story editor because I wanted to freelance and write for other series. I did, however, want to continue to do scripts for Star Trek. Gene was agreeable to this, and I was given a contract in February of 1968 which called for a guarantee of three scripts, with an option for three more. Whenever anyone has asked why I chose to leave Star Trek's story editorship, I have always given this reply."

However, Fontana was very unhappy with the rewrites done on her third season scripts, including "The Enterprise Incident" and "The Way to Eden" (originally submitted as "Joanna" by Fontana, featuring Doctor McCoy's daughter). She was unhappy with the way Roddenberry re-wrote the episodes they wrote together. She used the pseudonym "J. Michael Bingham" for "The Naked Now", as she was especially unhappy with the episode.

Another of Fontana's contributions to The Original Series was her discovery and introduction to Gene Roddenberry of costume designer William Ware Theiss. She was an active contributor to the officially endorsed fanzine Inside Star Trek, for which she conducted interviews with several key production staffers, most notably the one with Theiss, the only published one on record.

Over the years, she maintained a working relationship with Roddenberry, serving as his assistant on The Questor Tapes, Genesis II, and was hired as story editor and associate producer on Star Trek: The Animated Series. "Yesteryear".

She would also work on The Fantastic Journey, Logan’s Run, Six Million Dollar Man, Buck Rogers of the 25th Century, The Waltons, and finally back to Star Trek where she worked up the initial concept for the first episode of Star Trek: The Next Generation: “Encounter at Farpoint” earning a Hugo Award nomination, co-invented the "LCARS" concept, and wrote four other episodes of the season, “The Naked Now”, “Lonely Among Us”, “Too Short a Season”, and “Heart of Glory”, before departing (along with all the Original Series production staff) due to the meddlings of Roddenberry's lawyer, Leonard Maizlish.

She also returned to write DS9: "Dax", her last “canon” involvement with Star Trek, in which a great deal of Jadzia Dax' backstory was fleshed out.

She would also go on to write for Babylon 5, Earth: Final Conflict, and then wrote the stories of the video games Star Trek: Secret of Vulcan Fury (unreleased), Star Trek: Bridge Commander, Star Trek: Legacy and Star Trek: Tactical Assault all with Derek Chester, and an episode of the fan production Star Trek: New Voyages, the episode "To Serve All My Days" in 2006, on which she worked alongside Jack Treviño and Ethan H. Calk. Fiction

She wrote the Star Trek novel “Vulcan's Glory” (1989) and the IDW comic series “Star Trek: Year Four - The Enterprise Experiment”.

Leonard Nimoy credited her for expanding Vulcan culture within Star Trek. As Star Trek fans, we owe a tremendous debt to D.C. Fontana. Without her, Star Trek might never have been as successful as it ultimately has been. If you doubt, realize that gene Roddenberry understood it himself. It’s why he kept asking her back and making her story editor and associate producer. She got it.  She got it enough to craft integral backstories for, time-tested fictional characters and cultures. She was a badass and a trailblazer for other women. Most recently, she worked as a senior lecturer at the American Film Institute, where she mentored aspiring screenwriters, producers, and directors.  She is survived by her husband, Oscar-winning visual effects cinematographer Dennis Skotak, and her family asks for memorial donations to be made to the Humane Society, the Best Friends Animal Society, or to the American Film Institute. Until next time, go watch or read something D.C. Fontana had a hand in, and do like Dorothy: Live long. Prosper.

Sources: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/D._C._Fontana https://memory-alpha.fandom.com/wiki/D.C._Fontana https://www.imdb.com/name/nm0284894/

Music from https://filmmusic.io "Canon in D Major" by Kevin MacLeod (https://incompetech.com) License: CC BY (http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/4.0/)

[itsgoodtobeming]

Here’s the thing about that, though: that was really just the first two seasons or so of TNG, and almost entirely the work of Gene Roddenberry (and of his attorney, Leonard Maizlish, who, despite not officially being part of the show, had an office at Paramount and would do crazy and illegal things like rewrite people’s scripts without their knowledge or permission) when he was on his big tear about humans being perfect in every way by the 24th century. Patrick Stewart hated the cerebral, hands-off Picard, so much so that some of the more absurd Action Captain stuff that Picard does later on in the show and movies (like the dune buggy in Nemesis) are pretty much Stewart wanting to do more fun stuff, and the cliff-hanger that the first installment of “The Best of Both Worlds” reflects the idea that Stewart might not have even come back after the end of the third season if changes hadn’t been made, which they were, most notably Roddenberry getting nudged out. 

I feel like if a high concept captain versus captain fight thing actually happened Picard would get up on his high horse and make a speech about how they are starfleet and they have moved beyond such petty squabbles and licherally every other captain would say "okay I am going to beat you to death now" and then proceed to beat him to death

[itsgoodtobeming]

Pretty much, yeah. Also, to the person in the notes who said that Gene Roddenberry vetoed LGBT representation: no. That was Leonard Maizlish, Roddenberry’s lawyer, who made a lot of decisions for Gene after he had a stroke. 

Why were we denied this?!?!!!

Whatever. This practically makes it canon.

Hey guys, Daforge is real!!!