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Date Posted: 11:02:35 08/07/09 Fri
Author: SWC
Subject: The Rick Berman interview

These are some highlights from the Archive of American Television interview with Rick Berman, the producer of Star Trek: The Next generation, Star trek: Deep Space Nine, Star Trek: Voyager, Star Trek: Enterprise as well as the Star Trek Movies: Generations, Insurrection, First Contact and Nemesis.

- He started out as a documentary film maker. One project was something called “Fly” with John Lennon and Yoko Ono, which was shot in their apartment in three days and three nights when Rick was 22. Listening to Lennon alternately tell stories, philosophize and play his guitar during that time was one of the amazing experiences of his life.
- He went on to documentaries for the UN, things like a story about finding water in the Sahara, and traveled over much of the world, (a fact which endeared him to Gene Roddenberry, who was also quite a traveler). Eventually he got hooked up with a PBS series called “Big Blue Marble”, which showed segments on American children and children in foreign countries.
- That got him noticed in Hollywood and he wound up with a job at Warner Brothers. He worked on Jack Palance’s series, “Ripley’s Believe it or Not”. Shortly, he was appointed Warner’s “Director of Drama Development”, which meant he heard pitches from writers. He soon moved to Paramount’s programming department, where his job was to “put out fires and clam people down”. Eventually he got the title of head of “special projects”, which “meant nothing”.
- Paramount at that time had been trying to convince Gene Roddenberry to do a new Star Trek series but he had always refused. He had the reputation of being a “cranky old bastard” and dealing with him was considered an undesirable assignment. So Rick got it, along with a couple of other guys. Roddenberry noticed that whenever the other two guys pressed their case a bit too much, Rick raised his eyebrows. After the meeting Gene asked Rick to have lunch with him. He found Rick had never seen Star Trek, either the old series or the early movies, and knew nothing about it. Gene liked that and agreed to do the series so long as Rick was involved with it.
- There were three producers at the beginning. Rick was the youngest and the only one who stayed past the first year. Roddenberry was very “hands on” the first year but “held back” the second year and was basically unavailable due to his health after that. He died in an elevator just after visiting his doctor. Thus, the Star Trek legacy was left in Rick Berman’s hands.
- As to the casting of TNG, he said that most of the choices were “slam dunk” but Gene didn’t like the idea of having a bald English actor as the new captain. His idea of the Captain of the Enterprise was “a combination of Horatio Hornblower and Indiana Jones”. But of the 50 or so actors who auditioned for the role, Stewart was easily the best. Paramount didn’t like the fact that he was bald so Stewart “sent a message to London where his toupee lived”, and had it sent to him. He did another audition with the toupee. It was eventually decided he could send the toupee home.
- The character of Riker was in the script before Stewart was hired but the way it worked out, Stewart became a sort of intellectual captain and Riker the second in command who would carry out his orders. Berman’s favorite choice for Riker was Bill Campbell but Roddenberry didn’t find him forceful enough so Frakes got the job, which Berman is glad of because they’ve become very close friends since.
- The head writer, Morris Hurley, didn’t like Gates McFadden for some reason and lobbied to get her replaced. Berman “didn’t feel passionate enough to fix it” so McFadden was let go. Whoopi Goldberg, who was a major star after “The Color Purple”, asked to have lunch with Rick and Gene and said she was a huge Star Trek fan and wanted to play the doctor. Instead, they created the recurring role of “Guinan”, which Berman describes as a “kind of all-knowing ‘Yoda’ like character”. Meanwhile Diana Muldaur, who took over the doctor’s role, “didn’t work out” and McFadden was invited back.
- Denise Crosby and Wil Wheaton were also “hot”, or thought they were and left the show “for new opportunities”. Within a year, both regretted it and both came back in recurring roles.
- Colm Meaney was one of the most in demand character actors in the movies and they had to make his character a recurring one to work around his many movie assignments.
- The “Data” character was conceived as a being a kind of Pinocchio, who wanted to be human. Because of this he was a kind of “half breed”, the way Spock was half human and made him the new show’s Spock equivalent. Star Trek, at Gene Roddenberry’s insistence, stressed ethnically diverse casts. They also had many “half breed” type characters whose internal conflicts made them more interesting.
- But Roddenberry was also insistent that the show depict a time when human conflicts had been resolved, (in the wake of an apocalyptic 21st century war). This limited the writers because drama is about conflict. The conflict thus had to be with other races.
- Berman got a reputation for letting actors direct episodes, which sometimes didn’t work out. But he likes the fact that actors know how to talk to actors whereas directors who come from the technical side of the business sometimes don’t. Some of the people he gave opportunities to have gone onto directing careers.
- They started out using models for special effects, as the old series had. Digital technology existed but was too expensive. As the cost of digital technology came down and the popularity of the new series was established, they started “going digital” and by the end of the show, everything was done by computer. But they had to go over the scenes the writers had written that would involve such effects and estimate the cost of each shot and then decided which ones they could afford to film. The script would have to re-written without the scenes they couldn’t afford to shoot, which miffed the writers.
- Star Trek fans were so particular about the show that they would report any gaffe, such as a phaser beam coming out of a photon torpedo tube. They also had to combine “real science” with “Star Trek science”, the latter being things like the transporter, “warp speed”, the holodeck, etc. that the writers came up with that was not based on science but was needed to tell a story. They found they had to make up rules for Star Trek science for it to make sense, just as there are laws that govern real science.
- All the Star Trek shows were designed to have 7 year runs. “Enterprise” was cancelled before that. Also, Sherry Lansing. Paramount’s production head, wanted the TNG cast to take over the movie franchise. That’s why TNG was brought to an end. It wasn’t Berman’s decision.
- The success of TNG encouraged them to come up with a second series. Somebody came up with the idea of doing a space version of “The Rifleman”: and father and his son travel through space, righting wrongs. It was decided that, instead of a ship traveling through space, the ship should be stationary and a wormhole in space would bring the characters to it. So they made the commander a widower with a son, Captain Sisko. The space station was his ranch and he tried to solve the problems of the people who came through.
- It was felt by some that TNG was too “soft…too white bread” so they made DS9 a “darker” show. The space station was an old model, less glamorous than the Enterprise and all the characters had an undercurrent of bitterness to them.
- When they saw Forrest Gump, they decided to see if they could mix the old show that was filmed with the new show, that was digital. They found they could and made “Trials and Tibble-ations” as a result.
- There was a holodeck on DS9 but Quark used it as a whorehouse, which is why we rarely saw it.
- “Voyager” was created because Paramount liked having two series going at once. They also wanted to use it as a “tent poll” for their new UPN network. They came up with the idea of a ship that, in a disaster, is thrown across the galaxy and has to make its way home. They also decided they wanted a female commander, after giving DS9 a black leader. Genevieve Bujold, who’d been a movie star in the 70’s, tested for it and Paramount was delighted to have such a prominent actress. Berman didn’t feel that she was up to the demands of was weekly series and turned out to be right. He tested her by describing in detail what would be required of her- memorizing 7 pages of script a day, working for 15 hours, dealing with different directors each week, etc. She said she’d consult with her children. They wanted her to do the show so she agreed to it. She lasted until the second day. She shoed away the hair and make-up people, asked how she could possibly work with the director and ran to her trailer, crying. Berman talked to her and she decided she couldn’t do the series.
- She was replaced in short order by Kate Mulgrew. She also had problems with the hair people. Terry McCluggage, (sp?) the head of Paramount TV, was obsessed with hair. “And you could tell it by looking at his family- they all had beautiful heads of hair”. He kept sending memos about the cast’s hair, especially Kate’s. All Kate cared about was acting. She’s do a scene flawlessly and come back to next day to be told that it had to be reshot due to a memo about her hair being wrong.
- Kate became a great symbol for women’s liberation and “hung out with astronauts and Hillary Clinton”. She became the “Queen of Star Trek”. When the ratings started slipping, they decided to “bring a babe” onto the show. That’s what brought Jeri Ryan into the mix. It worked but Mulgrew resented all the attention Ryan was getting, especially when reporters elbowed their way past Kate to get to Jeri. They never got along as a result.
- Robert Picardo was the character closest to Spock and Data. Again, he was a “half breed”. A very human like character who in the end, was just a hologram. Berman at this point, describes Picardo as having a ”sense of sensance”, adding that “it never means what anybody thinks it means”, without telling us what it does mean.
- The got the Holodeck back on this show, which was important for “lost” characters who didn’t know if they would ever make it home. The problem was this was a limited concept for a show. Star Trek is about a journey of discovery- it’s about going forward.
- Paramount wanted a second series when DS9 went off the air and eventually they came up with “Enterprise.” They felt the only direction to go into in was backwards- a prequel, to cover the period after the war of this century and leading to the world that Kirk and Spock live in.
- But there was nothing in the “canon” to cover this and yet they were full of limitations because they couldn’t do anything that contradicted the canon. There could be no Romulans yet. They couldn’t introduce any civilization that wasn’t already known of in the later stories.
- They also had to make the technology “clunkier” because it was still experimental. For example, humans would not get on the transporter because they were afraid of what it would do to them. They were concerned about the effects of warp speed. They had to be shown as being uncertain of what they were doing and yet in awe of it. One of the problems was that some of the things used in “later” series already look clunky: the cell phones we use today look more user friendly than Kirk’s communications device, for example.
- They wanted the ship to look more claustrophobic and less glamorous than the later enterprise- “like a submarine”. The network hated that.
- They also used longer “Story arcs”, one lasting an entire season, inspired to so by modern shows such as “24”, “Prison Break”, “Lost”, etc. because of this, the fourth season seemed the most popular with critics and fans but Star Trek was suffering from “franchise fatigue” by then and it got cancelled.
- Scott Bacula was “a mensch” and so down to earth that he helped the crew put things away after a day’s shooting,
- Berman produced the movies “Generations”, “Insurrection”, “First Contact” and “Nemesis”. He felt “First Contact” was the best of them. “Generations” did very well but he had to learn a lot of lessons from it. “Nemesis” was written by the guy who did “Gladiator”, “The Last Samurai” and “The Aviator”, etc. and he felt it was a good movie, “similar to the ones done by Nicholas Meyer” but that “franchise fatigue had set in” and so it was a failure.
- TNG is his favorite of the series but his second choice was “Enterprise” because he got to do more writing for it than the others. His favorite episodes were “Yesterday’s Enterprise” and “The Best of Both Worlds”.
- He feels that the franchise” needs a bit of a rest” but will be with us for a long time, (the interview was done in 2006).
- “The two things that created the internet are porn and Star Trek…People think we don’t read websites but we do. They think we ignore their wishes and the Star Trek canon but we don’t.” He said he tried to get onto the net to discuss this with the fans but nobody believed it was really him.
- He wants to be remembered as someone “who took Gene Roddenberry’s vision of the future and tried to keep it alive in four TV shows and four movies.”

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Replies:

[> Re: The Rick Berman interview -- Rick, 02:49:50 08/11/09 Tue [1]

Thanks for the narrative, SWC. You did a good job.





Rick

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