We last talked with The Nacelle Company’s Brian Volk-Weiss back in 2018 as he was about to launch The Toys That Made Us for Netflix, a behind-the-scenes documentary series about favorite toy lines of generations past — including Star Trek.
Now, he’s back with extensive Star Trek docuseries The Center Seat, which debuted on The History Channel back on November 5, with several more episodes ahead — two more to be broadcast on the cable network, and additional episodes available now on its streaming service, History Vault.
TREKCORE: How did you get into Star Trek in the first place?
BRIAN VOLK-WEISS: It’s funny — my first memory of Star Trek is my mom telling me on a chairlift in Massachusetts about watching Star Trek II: The Wrath of Khan and I couldn’t see it because of what I would eventually learn was called “the Ceti Eel scene.”
But something about how she described it to me really intrigued me, and so I convinced her to take me to see it and that I would be okay.
I was not okay. I would honestly say within reason it is the most horrified I have been at the movies. It’s actually a very violent movie! But Star Trek has been part of my life in such a big way. It’s literally in my will that on my tombstone, it will say Kirk’s famous line from Wrath of Khan, “I don’t believe in the no win scenario.”
TREKCORE: What made you want to make a Star Trek documentary?
VOLK-WEISS: We do two shows on Netflix; The Toys That Made Us and The Movies That Made Us. I hate saying stuff like this because it sounds egotistical, but the truth of the matter is these shows don’t keep getting renewed if people don’t like them, and apparently people like them. I always thought it would be great to do something similar to what we do in those two shows for Star Trek. That was 49% of the reason why.
The other 51% was that we had made a previous documentary for The History Channel for the 50th anniversary of Star Trek, The 50 Years of Star Trek. In that documentary, we were confined to two hours, which is not a lot of time for a subject so large.
And that documentary was made before The Toys That Made Us was even greenlit…and if you’re familiar with Quantum Leap, you know the great line, “trying to put right what once went wrong.”
I knew we could do a better job than what we had done five years ago.
TREKCORE: What are some of the things that fans can expect from The Center Seat?
VOLK-WEISS: It’s 10 episodes, and every episode covers a very specific part of the canon. It starts with I Love Lucy, and it goes through Star Trek being disassembled after Enterprise was canceled.
I think at least a third of the episodes are on subjects that have never been examined in a documentary before. We have the first documentary on The Animated Series, we’re the first documentary, I think, to really cover Star Trek V: The Final Frontier and Star Trek VI: The Undiscovered Country.
I think we have the second ever documentary – after Ira Steven Behr’s What We Left Behind – examining Deep Space Nine, the first documentary about Voyager and the first documentary about Enterprise. And because we were able to make 10 documentaries simultaneously, we were able to create story arcs that cover all 10 episodes.
For example, we talked about Rick Berman’s role in the franchise in the first episode, and we’re talking about Lucille Ball’s influence on the franchise in the tenth episode. Everything is interconnected. In that, we took inspiration from the works of Ken Burns.
He makes these documentaries that are just these real deep dives. He was not the first person to do a documentary about the Civil War — but he was the first guy to do documentary about the Civil War that lasted 30 episodes and could give the topic so much depth.
Once we got the green light on The Center Seat, I wanted to do the deepest dive ever into Star Trek, but still have it be accessible to a general audience. We very deliberate wanted to make the show for people like me whose lives were changed by Star Trek and people like my wife, whose connection to the franchise is nowhere near that deep.
TREKCORE: Are there any common themes or stories from your exploration of the Star Trek franchise that you really wanted to include in the show?
VOLK-WEISS: The first six Star Trek movies are my all-time favorites. My passion – the majority of my gigantic Star Trek collection – focuses on the Kirk movies. That’s what I was crazy passionate to talk about.
We had an interview with Kirstie Alley that – out of the over a thousand people I’ve interviewed – that was one of my favorite interviews of all time. When I interviewed Nicholas Meyer, at the end of the interview, I told him about my will. I said, “Hey, I just want to let you know that line of dialogue, ‘I don’t believe in the no win scenario?’ That changed my life. This company does not exist without that line. My marriage would not exist without that line.”
And I literally started crying. I’m literally talking to the guy who wrote the words that changed my life. I looked down, I’m like wiping my tears and I like embarrassingly look up, and he’s crying too! If there’s any story that I can tell you to make you understand the Star Trek that I’m passionate about, I think that would be it.
TREKCORE: The narrator for The Center Seat is Gates McFadden. Tell me a little bit about how that came to be and what Gates brings to the project.
VOLK-WESS: The story of my career is that one random thing goes to another random thing and goes to another random thing. One of my best friends in the world, who’s actually an executive producer on Center Seat, is Ian Roumain, I met him 22 years ago. He used to be an agent, and he signed Gates McFadden. For years, every time we would talk every now and then, he’d mention Gates frequently. But we had never met.
Then we decided to launch a podcast network. I’m a Star Trek fan. I’d like to do a podcast about Star Trek. So I said to Ian, “would you mind introducing me to Gates?” So I spoke to her. She had never done a podcast. She thought about it. All I said to her was, “You can do whatever you want.” And Gates McFadden InvestiGates: Who Do You Think You Are? was born.
It was her idea. She edits it. Her son wrote the theme song. She did everything. That went really well. As The Center Seat was getting going, I thought it would be cool to have an executive producer who was there for a part of it. So we did a deal with her that did not include the narration to be an executive producer. I just wanted her to watch the cuts and give us her feedback because she’s so smart and she was there for a lot of it.
She was also instrumental in securing the participation of a number of important figures, which she also had no legal or moral obligation to do. We interviewed Brent Spiner, Kate Mulgrew, Rick Berman because Gates convinced them to participate. She had no obligation to do it.
One of my least favorite jobs in documentaries is casting for the voiceover. We never make everybody happy. We’re getting closer and closer to needing to start recording it, and I started to wonder: what about Gates? She’s got a great voice. There’s only really two episodes that overlap with her, so it’s not that much of a “conflict of interest.”
TREKCORE: How do you approach trying to find a new and interesting way to tell the parts of the story of the Star Trek franchise that have been covered in other ways and other mediums?
VOLK-WEISS: It’s a great question, and in our work, we deal with that a lot. I think I watched every single documentary ever made about Star Trek – within reason. I knew what’s out there, so we made a very deliberate choice to do two things.
One, if a story has been covered to death — but you still need it to tell your story — we will include it, but minimize it drastically to the bare bones. Two, if we don’t absolutely need it, we don’t put it in to the documentary, because I think the value this project can bring to a fan is to bring them new information.
The first episode of Center Seat is about the conception of Star Trek and the three-year run of The Original Series. That story has been told a lot of times already; and it’s easy to do a documentary on The Animated Series, because no one’s done it before.
But the launch of Star Trek has been done, conservatively, two to three dozen times. So what we try to do is find a new angle on the story, and in this episode, we spent a lot of time focused on the role of Lucille Ball in the creation of Star Trek.
Star Trek documentaries always overlook Lucille Ball and her role. She is as much the mother of Star Trek, as Gene is the father of Star Trek. There’s no Star Trek without her, it’s that simple. She had the confidence to greenlight the show not just once, but twice! It’s always bothered me how that often gets overlooked.
And there’s plenty of new material in the later episodes; for example, Rick Berman sat for us for a two-hour interview — and I would say I heard him say a minimum of 50 to 60 things that I had never heard before.
TREKCORE: What are some of the lessons that you’ve taken from your previous projects – The Toys That Made Us and The Movies That Made Us – to apply to The Center Seat?
VOLK-WEISS: I love taking things that have been staring the fans in the face for decades or half a century and saying, “You never thought about it, but did you know?”
We make a lot of lists. We try to figure out: what does everybody know? What does everybody not know? Who are the people we need to interview? Who are the people that have been interviewed too much? Where are the places that have historic relevancy to this episode?
I’ll give you a great example. I read my whole life about how the brilliant thing Douglas Trumbull came up with for Star Trek: The Motion Picture was to have the Enterprise light itself, to be self-lit.
I’ve been reading that in books and magazines for 40 years. Only while interviewing John Dykstra for another show that has nothing to do with Star Trek, I got the chance to ask him, “I’ve been reading for 40 years, self-lit Enterprise, self-lit Enterprise, but I don’t understand. What does that mean? Because I can tell, it’s not self-lit.”
He’s like, “Oh, well, we just use dental mirrors.” I’m like, “Dental mirrors?” And so we actually have a diagram in the show to explain this to people. If the Enterprise is moving left to right, and the camera is moving right to left, in sync with the Enterprise model is a wooden block with dozens of dental mirrors on it.
There’s a light source above the Enterprise, pointing at the mirrors, and these dental mirrors are shooting tiny beams of light onto the model and traveling at the same time, in sync, with the model. That’s how they lit the Enterprise!
Well, I never understood that. If I had to guess, most people didn’t because it’s crazy that that’s what they did. That’s something that every Trekkie has probably read about but likely doesn’t understand it.
TREKCORE: With The Center Seat about to come out, do you have anything else Star Trek related on the horizon?
VOLK-WEISS: Yes! I cannot say what, yet… but yes, we do.
The Center Seat continues on The History Channel with two more episodes coming November 19 and November 26, with more episodes more exclusively on History Vault.