A Vision of the Future

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I learned Gene's vision directly from Gene. It wasn't my vision of the future, but it was at the foundation of Star Trek. It was like learning a foreign language. I studied it, and I Know it quite well. We bend it a little bit, but we try not to break it.

Rick Berman

Executive Producer

Star Trek: Voyager

Brad Yacobian slowly walked up the stairs, deliberately lifting the left foot up to the next riser, shifting his weight, pushing his body upwards, lifting the right foot...over and over...repeating the motions, his body on autopilot. Sixteen-hour days were starting to wear on him, and the first season was not even on the air yet. It was almost 2:00 Pm. People would already be gathering, ready to enact a ritual that took place every seven working days. The pattern was always the same. A preproduction meeting one week before an episode shoots, then a production meeting two days prior to shooting.

Brad's body was in the stairwell, making its way up to the second floor, but his mind was still back in the sickbay set, on Stage 9.

It was a small mix-up that should not have escalated, but did. Tempers flared. Phone calls were made. Brad had arrived to play mediator. Some conversation, a misunderstanding explained away. Some pacifying, some emotional hand-holding. No more problem. Just part of the job. The unit production manager wore a lot of hats. Mediator was only one of them.

At the top of the stairs, Yacobian turned left and made his way down the hallway past his office to a smallish meeting room on the top floor of the Gary Cooper Building, on the Paramount Studios lot in Los Angeles, California. The room he walked into was long, narrow, and high-ceilinged, with bare, vaguely green walls that gave the appearance of a cold, military-style briefing room left over from some World War 11 army base.

The austere atmosphere was reinforced by the 1940's-era steel casement windows on the far wall, opposite the entrance. The floor covering was an unrecognizable something, probably carpeting, long since napless and lifeless, trampled flatter than flat by thousands of feet for who knows how many decades. Whatever it once was, it had expired a long time ago.

The room's barren appearance was exaggerated by the Spartan decor. Scarred, worn, and badly abused long wooden folding tables formed a rectangle-within-a-rectangle, conforming to the shape of the room. Around the tables were forlorn-looking brown metal folding chairs, scratched and showing years of heavy use. All looked like refugees from a thrift shop sale. Five armchairs, upholstered in faded maroon something-or-other -- no doubt passing for padded comfort-were at the far end of the room, veritable thrones in contrast to the folding chairs. The arrangement was cramped, leaving barely enough room for people to squeeze by between the chairs and the walls.

Some twenty people began arriving by ones and twos. They did not care about the furniture or the walls or the dead carpeting. More important matters were on their minds.

Most production meetings are lengthy, at times contentious, and almost universally disliked by those required to attend them. Today's meeting would not be much different, except that it would be mercifully short.

As the group crowded into the room they greeted one another, took seats -- not the upholstered ones-and began informally discussing today's episode: "Eye of the Needle." The sixth episode of the new Voyager series, 'Eye of the Needle" was scheduled to startshooting on Wednesday, just two days away. As usual, there were a number of issues remaining to be resolved.

Dick Brownfield, the series' veteran mechanical special effects coordinator, arrived. Special effects are those that take place on the set during filming. (Voyager is shot in 35mm film, then transferred to videotape for all postproduction work and final distribution.) Visual effects are those created later, during postproduction. He dropped wearily into a seat next to big Al Smutko. Al is the only head of construction for any television series who can boast his own fan club. The two men have known each other for decades, and fell into an easy conversation typical of long-time friends.

Dick Brownfield and Al Smutko are rarities in the Star Trek production world; both worked on The Original Series -- Smutko as a young carpenter just starting in the business, Brownfield as an apprentice electrician. Both are graying warriors seasoned by countless feature and television productions, most of whose names, stars, plotlines, and production problems have long since blurred into a kind of untroubled vagueness.

Though few would admit it, Brownfield and Smutko are envied by some of the younger, less experienced crew members. In a mythological sense, they have both been "out there" and returned. They know. just as the Zen Master knows. The way they carry themselves says so: a kind of quiet grace that comes from within, born of the scars and afflictions only the production process can bestow. They do not seem to rattle easily in a notoriously stressful, pressure-cooker business. There are many men and women like them in episodic television production.

Technically speaking, there are approximately three hundred people directly employed by the production group referred to as "the company." It is the company that oversees all production activities from start to finish, on both Star Trek: Deep Space Nine and Voyager. A small core group of thirty-five to forty people work simultaneously on both series. The remaining personnel are divided pretty evenly between the two productionsabout 130 each. In Voyager's case, only forty or so of these are actually on the set during filming. This smaller group, which includes the cast and crew, is collectively known as the shooting company.

Star Trek's employment impact at Paramount Studios is far wider, though, than just the direct production company employees. Scattered among various departments of Paramount Television, United Paramount Network, Paramount Pictures, and Viacom are hundreds more ... all of whom are directly or indirectly involved with some type of Star Trek-related effort. Most of these people rarely-if ever-visit a set during filming.

There are a number of reasons why this is so.

First, the sets are closed. Access is automatically denied anyone without express permission from the producers. Second, those who do have a legitimate reason to visit the sets tend to show up only when they have time-which is not often. As is true in most corporations in any other type of business, at Paramount employees are always scrambling, trying to get too much work done in too little available time. There is not much opportunity for curiosity- seeking on the sets.

And lastly, for most of those who have worked in the business for some period of years, there is no longer a sense of wonder about what goes on during filming-unless something extraordinary is occurring, in which case people show up in droves.

The majority of the production company personnel have worked together for at least the last five years, a factor accounting for the sense of "family" that most experience. Many go back to the final three or four seasons of Star Trek: The Next Generation. Some can even say they were there when that series first began in 1987. Everybody knows everybody very well. The way members of a close-knit family know each other. Even to the outside observer, it shows. There is a relaxed, familiar camaraderie in the room, forged from years of working together through brutally long hours, impossible deadlines, and high creative achievement.

Copyright© 1998 by Paramount Pictures

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Excerpted from A Vision of the Future by Stephen Edward Poe
All rights reserved by the original copyright owners. Excerpts are provided for display purposes only and may not be reproduced, reprinted or distributed without the written permission of the publisher.