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EXCLUSIVE: Robert Meyer Burnett Interview, Part VI

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EXCLUSIVE: Robert Meyer Burnett Interview, Part VI

TrekCore talks to Robert Meyer Burnett, one-half of the talented duo responsible for the creation of the new bonus features on Star Trek: The Next Generation‘s remastered Blu-Ray releases. Normally to be found beavering away in his edit bay, Rob generously took several hours out of his busy schedule to talk to me about all things Star Trek, answering questions about his work and dropping several juicy hints about the exciting things he and Roger Lay Jr. have planned for future Star Trek Blu-Ray releases.

Robert Meyer Burnett

Robert Meyer Burnett: Who Interviews the Interviewer? Part 6

Interviewed by Adam Walker for TrekCore.com

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TrekCore: Sadly, neither you nor Roger were involved with the features on the Original Series Blu-rays. Had you had the chance to manage their production, where would you have gone with the project?

Robert Meyer Burnett: Well, The Original Series is the thing that I’m a most life-long fan of. The Original Series is hard… so much has been written, so much has been covered, and we’ve lost many of the original people that made it. Even if you had them around, it was forty-five years ago – so I don’t know if you could do, if it would even be possible, to go back and look at The Original Series the way we’ve been looking at The Next Generation or the way Roger’s delving into Enterprise. I don’t know. I really don’t know.

What I would have done, had I been able to work on The Original Series… I would have loved to have gotten myself into a consulting position about the new visual effects. I would have loved to have been an overseer. I think Dave Rossi and the Okudas and everybody did as good a job as they could do, but I think what you needed was a director – a filmmaker making certain decisions about, for instance, how the Enterprise moved. Since you’re asking me, what I would have done is: ILM so beautifully, in Star Trek II: The Wrath of Khan, showed us capital ships in starship combat. Even though it has no bearing on physics, or what would really happen when two ships the size of the Enterprise and the Reliant were fighting against each other – it wouldn’t really look like that at all – but in our imaginations, it’s two capital ships fighting the way ships would fight on the high seas, but in three dimensions with an X, Y, and Z axis. The ships were lumbering behemoths, pounding on one another, and they seemed HUGE.

One of the things that I did not like in the remastering of The Original Series was how fast the Enterprise moved in an episode such as “The Doomsday Machine”. The sense of scale of the Enterprise, and the sense of weight of the Enterprise was just not there, because the Enterprise moves so fast. While the argument can be made that yes, that ships can see each other at all when they’re 200,000 kilometers apart is ridiculous anyway, but apparently they can – but I would have taken a different tactic regarding all of the visual effects and slowed it all up. Made it HEAVY.

My favorite effects on the redone, remastered Original Series – the show looks great by the way – on episodes like “Court Martial”, when you just see the Enterprise in orbit around the starbase, but you see where the storm damage was done – I love that! That geography was never understood before. Or whenever they actually added to the universe itself, like you’d see a starbase and see shuttlecraft floating around, or in “Amok Time” when you got to see that bit from The Animated Series [the view of ShiKahr on Vulcan, first seen in “Yesteryear”], then you got to see the mountain from Star Trek III… I love that stuff! That stuff was amazing! But some of the starship stuff could’ve been better… but again, they were learning. And they were hampered by time constraints and budget. But still, I wouldn’t have made some of the changes they made, like to the Tholian ships.

TrekCore: Rob, you’re a huge, self-confessed ‘Niner’. With so many fans eyeing Deep Space Nine in high definition – the next logical step for CBS – have you given any thought on how you would go about profiling the series, should you be asked to produce features for it?

Robert Meyer Burnett: I think our approach would be similar to our Next Generation approach – you still have one of the executive producers of the show, who created it, Rick Berman, still around – there would be a lot of interesting questions to ask. Again, that show struggled in the ratings. What I love about the show that it took Star Trek and upgraded it more to the serialized nature of modern television storytelling and it has so many great guest stars and ongoing plotlines… it would just be really interesting to cover it from that perspective. And when Ira Behr took over and just blew it all out of the water.


Rob hopes to take a similar approach with DEEP SPACE NINE as he has with THE NEXT GENERATION should CBS green light the show, albeit with an extra dose of fanboyish admiration.

I think on Deep Space Nine we’d probably be much more of slavish fanboys – for Roger and I both, I think Deep Space Nine is our favorite of the modern Star Trek shows – we’d come at it with less historical reverence, because it’s more of a scrappy show, you know, more of a down-and-dirty show. I would love to approach it that way – and the fact that you can go interview Frank Langella [‘Jaro Essa’ from the Season Two three-part premiere], and you can go interview Louise Fletcher [‘Kai Winn Adami’], and go find all of these people and talk to them about this show would be a lot of fun. The people who worked on Deep Space Nine really loved the show – not that they didn’t love The Next Generation – but it was never the show… Star Trek: Deep Space Nine is the Rodney Dangerfield of Star Trek shows: it doesn’t get any respect, even from the fans – there are a lot of fervent fans that love it – but there’s a lot that don’t. I would like to delve into that.

TrekCore: Let’s hear some candid talk from you about Star Trek: Voyager. It’s often the bastard stepchild of Star Trek, even more so than Enterprise, because it kind of gets forgotten in between all of the other shows. What are your thoughts on it now, looking back? Would you ever want to write VAM for that?

Robert Meyer Burnett:  I’ll admit, I liked the first season of Voyager – but here’s what I don’t like about Voyager.

Voyager, to me, is just an amalgamation of Star Trek tropes that are being put through Star Trek stories that we’ve already seen before. Then, in a shameless bid to grab ratings, they co-opted things like the Borg, and ruined them. They added Jeri [Ryan], who turned out to be a great character, but they added her and she was clearly, at least at first, eye candy. Brannon Braga’s obsession with time loops and all that; to me, what Voyager should have been – and maybe you should never criticize something for what it wasn’t, but what it actually was – but I do think that with Voyager, you have a half-alien, half-human in Roxann Dawson’s character (‘B’Elanna Torres’) who is Spock, who is Data, now a cliché. It was just an amalgamation of everything we’d ever seen before on Star Trek, and it didn’t offer much in the way of something being new. That is what I never liked about it.

But it had a great idea – that a starship has been flung to the other side of the galaxy, cut off from its supply line, cut off from any help – but the idea that they were trying to get home, to me, was dumb. Because, theoretically, the only way they’re going to get home is to cheat. They’re going to find some way to cheat, because they’re going to need some propulsion system or some transwarp conduit… Played straight, it would be impossible for them to get home, so that show should have been about Columbus going to the New World, or something, where they were going to take the ideals of the Federation – the idea of the Prime Directive – and try and build a coalition in a part of the galaxy that was full of strife and full of problems and full of conflict; try and world-build  how do you build a Federation beachhead in an area of space that isn’t interested while you’re cut off from any other supplies or aid from your homebase. That would have been the show that I would have liked to have seen – it would have been a much different show than we’d ever seen before, and I think it would have been fascinating to watch.


Rob views Star Trek VOYAGER as more of an “amalgamation” of ideas from previous Star Trek series. Episodes like “Year of Hell” stick out to him as particularly gimmicky.

But they didn’t go that way; they just started telling standard Star Trek stories that were, most of the time, rehashes and variations of what we’d already seen on the previous three series. There was nothing new, whereas Deep Space Nine was full of new ideas all the time, and it did really interesting stuff. That’s not to say that when I catch random episodes of Voyager, I don’t catch episodes that I like. I’ll watch individual episodes, and now I’m not so vehemently against it the way I used to be… but it just seems to me that it was the copycat Star Trek show. I know that there’s a lot… again, if Voyager was the very first Star Trek show you came to and you started watching it when you were young – also, I know that there’s a lot of women like Mary Czerwinski, who’s done a lot of work for Creation and Roddenberry.com, who adore the show. So I know – if you were female and came to Star Trek because of Voyager, there are a lot of – beginning with Kathryn Janeway – a lot of really strong female characters. Kes, Seven of Nine, all these characters… there’s a lot of strong female characters on that show, and I can see… and Roxann Dawson became a director! She started directing because of that show. I don’t begrudge people who came to Star Trek for the first time because of Voyager, but I think that Voyager is just so gimmicky, like, let’s do “Year of Hell”, let’s go back to Earth in the 20th Century [“Future’s End”], but then hit the reset button, so nothing which happened really mattered; I hated that. Also, everything, to me, was just shamelessly gimmicky all the time. Plus, the Kazon were lame, the Phage was stupid… I didn’t like it. And Janeway’s command decisions were usually incredibly suspect.

TrekCore: You could, arguably, describe another gimmick, in the form of Star Trek: The Animated Series, which is probably one of the most forgotten chapters of Star Trek. Many fans just accuse it of being a poor imitation of The Original Series; an attempt to cash in on the glory of it. What are your views on The Animated Series?

Robert Meyer Burnett: I love The Animated Series, because to me – despite the very limited animation and some of the lethargy on display from some of the voice acting, and James Doohan doing every other alien voice – there are some great episodes of The Animated Series. Episodes that I really like written by Original Series writers, whether it’s “Yesteryear” being case in point; “Albatross” and “Bem”, “How Sharper than a Serpent’s Tooth” and “The Counter-Clock Incident” and “Jihad” – there are a lot of really interesting stories there that I think are really legitimate. There are plans afoot to bring The Animated Series to Blu-ray, and I have an idea that would be crazy to pull off, but if we could it would be really interesting – I like The Animated Series a great deal, despite its shortcomings. Again, I think there are some great storylines; “Slaver Weapon” with the Kzinti…

I hated that Gene Roddenberry said it wasn’t canon when you had David Gerrold, Dorothy Fontana, and Gene and a lot of other writers from the original show; so why would you say that? It was done as an animated show; it won two Daytime Emmys, didn’t it? It was great! The final two years of the five year mission!


Burnett looks on the ANIMATED SERIES as an extension of the ORIGINAL SERIES and reveals that plans are afoot at CBS for a Blu-Ray release of the series.

TrekCore: You are probably one of the more outspoken critics on J.J. Abrams’ version ofStar Trek. Where do you think that departs from the Star Trek you know and loved from Gene Roddenberry’s spark, and how would you put it back on track?

Robert Meyer Burnett: Well, here’s the thing that I try to explain to people. As a life-long Star Trek fan, when Star Trek: The Motion Picture came out, one of the revelatory things for me – as a twelve-year-old who watched the show for almost a decade, who’d poured all over the blueprints, read all the novels; I lived and breathed in my imagination the Star Trek universe – when Star Trek: The Motion Picture came out and I saw the design of the new Enterprise, which you could tell was bad-ass, it was souped up, but it all made sense. When you looked at it, you were all like, “Oh, okay, that’s an extrapolation of the design, it looks cooler. Faster. More powerful. And very, very sexy…”

But when you saw the interior – this is what blew my mind the most – when you saw the interior of the refit Enterprise, with the blue-and-red impulse dome, and the impulse engines you knew so well, and how they related to the rest of the Engineering section, how the intermix chamber came down from that impulse dome, went into the Engineering deck that was below the impulse engines, and how you saw that same intermix chamber snake back through the length of the secondary hull to where it went into the different warp nacelle struts… when you saw that, you realized that the entire internal makeup, the internal design of the Enterprise had been incredibly well thought out. You looked and that and just thought, “Oh my god!”  One could never understand the relationship between the warp drive and the impulse engines in The Original Series, because the Engineering set in The Original Series was located behind the impulse engines. So…how did that work with the warp drive? It never made sense to me; you never really got it. But with Star Trek: The Motion Picture, you finally saw how everything related, and the Star Trek universe was extrapolated upon in such a gorgeous way across the board – from Starfleet Headquarters to the Epsilon IX station to the Klingon battle cruisers; That first glimpse inside of the [Klingon] bridge, with the moving tactical displays, I nearly lost my mind. We’d never seen that before, other than the brief glimpse behind Subcommander Tal in “The Enterprise Incident.”  But we finally saw this with The Motion Picture. For me, as a Star Trek fan, the imagination and the thought that was on display in that movie – of the Star Trek universe itself – was wondrous.

One of the things about the Abrams Star Trek that irked me to no end is how they just haphazardly put into that movie whatever they particularly wanted. Like, J.J. Abrams wanted the image of a young James Kirk driving up on the ground, seeing the Starfleet shipyards as the Enterprise was being built, and then seeing his future. He wanted that image, and you know what? As a director myself, I get that. I think that’s great, J.J. – however, the actual design of the Starship Enterprise, from its very inception back into the Sixties, came from the very real scientific idea a ship the size of the Enterprise COULD ONLY BE BUILT IN ORBIT, because of its sheer size. That’s a very scientific, real world concept based on the laws of physics. Components would be built on Earth, then assembled in orbit. You would not build a starship that looked like the Enterprise, with that configuration, with small struts holding up massive warp nacelles, if you had to build it on the ground and figure out a way to put it in orbit. You wouldn’t do it! The energy expenditure it would take to lift up something like a starship from the surface of the Earth and put it in orbit, into space, you couldn’t do it. It wouldn’t make sense, even if you had the technology to do it, because the ship would not be configured that way – so when they put the Enterprise on the Earth simply for that “classic” image, to me, what it said was the filmmakers were throwing out 45 years of all of the imaginative Star Trek design work for one single image. In the theater, I felt I was seeing someone say to me personally, “Fuck all that. I want an image of this starship on Earth so somebody can ride up on a motorcycle and see it and look at his future.”


One of the scenes which Robert Meyer Burnett takes particular exception to in J.J. Abrams’ new Star Trek movie shows Kirk approaching the Enterprise on his motorbike to see it being constructed.

I’m sorry, but the Starship Enterprise was simply not built on a planet. It just wasn’t. One of the constraints of the Star Trek universe is the Enterprise was built in space. That’s the design of that ship. It just was! Now, you can sit there and go, “Well, I didn’t want it to be that way.”  But that’s always been the design of that ship; it’s as much as Spock having pointed ears. By putting it on the planet Earth… I was just like, okay, the thought behind the design work – it was just people saying, “Well, the practicality of all this, we’re going to throw it out the window.”  My thinking would be…the screenwriters and Mr. Abrams should’ve figured out a really interesting 23rd CENTURY way to show that same image of Kirk seeing the ship for the first time. Riding up on a motorcycle and looking off into the future is just not very interesting.

To me, that same thinking permeated the rest of the film. They used narrative shortcuts and previously established cinematic imagery to convey information. So, why, exactly, is James Kirk a troubled young man in the J.J. Abrams movie? We never see a scene with the young James Kirk having something that happens to him directly that turns him into a troubled young man – sure, we’re given this shorthand scene where he steals a car, drives off a cliff, and that, inexplicably to me, the audience goes “Oh, he’s a rebel.” Well, is he? We don’t know; why is he a rebel? His father’s not around because he sacrificed his life so Kirk could live. That shouldn’t make you troubled. Then you have an obligatory scene inside a bar where the townies get into a fight with the Starfleet Academy boys. That is a generic scene from a hundred other movies. “But let’s put it in a Star Trek movie where it will be in the 23rd century!” There was nothing in that scene that was clever or had a 23rd Century twist; it was a bar fight scene that we’ve seen in movies back to the dawn of cinema. It is not a great Star Trek scene; it is not an interesting variation on the bar fight scene; it turns Starfleet Academy members, or young cadets, into ogres and oafs… “You’re talkin’ to my girl? Well, let’s get into a fight!” I mean, we’ve seen that scene in a hundred other movies; it is the most uncreative, shorthand bullshit storytelling method ever.

Throughout that entire movie… I will say this, to give them credit; I did enjoy the young Spock stuff on Vulcan, I thought that was great. The rest of the storytelling, to me, was – while the filmmaking was fine, there was some brilliant filmmaking on display; the acting was great, I love the characters and I thought the casting was impeccable – but to me, the storytelling was just generic and subpar. It did not create a believable ‘reality’ to me. The universe of J.J. Abrams’ Star Trek movie is not ‘real’ the way the original Star Trek and The Next Generation and Deep Space Nine and Voyager – and even Enterprise – were ‘real’. You cannot give a third-year cadet on academic probation the captaincy of a starship. In what universe would you ever do that? He’s had one mission – admittedly, he saved the Earth; of course, Vulcan was destroyed – I mean, what does he know about first contact missions? What does he know about interacting with an entire starship crew – I mean, the original Star Trek, when you met Captain Kirk, you got through various episode back stories he’d served for years and years before he became captain.

I understand what they were doing, and the movie made a lot of money, but to me, it did not create a believable universe – the way Star Wars created a believable universe, the way Alien created a believable universe – that new Star Trek movie was generic pablum that appealed to the masses. But, to be fair, that was exactly what it was designed to do. The greatest thing about it – I will say this – it made a lot of money, it brought the franchise back from the dead, and now new Star Trek is viable and lucrative; people are going back and rediscovering the original show, which is really the most important thing. I just wish it were a lot more intelligent.

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ROBERT MEYER BURNETT wrote and directed FREE ENTERPRISE and produced Warner Premiere and Dark Castle’s THE HILLS RUN RED.

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EXCLUSIVE: Robert Meyer Burnett Interview, Part V

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EXCLUSIVE: Robert Meyer Burnett Interview, Part V

TrekCore talks to Robert Meyer Burnett, one-half of the talented duo responsible for the creation of the new bonus features on Star Trek: The Next Generation‘s remastered Blu-Ray releases. Normally to be found beavering away in his edit bay, Rob generously took several hours out of his busy schedule to talk to me about all things Star Trek, answering questions about his work and dropping several juicy hints about the exciting things he and Roger Lay Jr. have planned for future Star Trek Blu-Ray releases.

Robert Meyer Burnett

Robert Meyer Burnett: Who Interviews the Interviewer? Part 5

Interviewed by Adam Walker for TrekCore.com

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TrekCore: The inclusion of LeVar Burton’s Reading Rainbow special on the second season was a real nice slice of history. Are there any videos or features that you wish could have been included in the sets but you weren’t able to for some reason? I know a lot of fans were curious why the documentary “From One Generation to the Next”, the pre-Season Two special, wasn’t included.

Robert Meyer Burnett: Well, we looked at that – “From One Generation to the Next” was created because of the writers’ strike, and the season was delayed. A lot of The Original Series is in that piece, and there are problems when you include The Original Series with payments and clip license fees – you have to pay license fees, even though Star Trek is all owned by CBS – and the material from The Next Generation just wasn’t that compelling. Whenever we put something on the discs – Roger and I, really, it’s our call whether we put something on the discs or not – if it doesn’t have anything new, or any particular thing that hasn’t been seen before, we’re like “Why bother?” That special has nothing new, and really nothing to offer, so we decided not to use it, even the Next Generation parts.

The Reading Rainbow piece, however, was, we thought, essential – it has some of the best behind-the-scenes material ever for the show. Having Rob Legato – we haven’t been able to get him yet for an interview – he’s on there, and the editorial process… sure, it’s obviously aimed at children, but it’s still got some of the best behind-the-scenes material ever. Seeing the motion control rig and the Enterprise… we thought it was essential – and what was great is that LeVar Burton is bringing back Reading Rainbow as an application for iPhones and iPads. Synergistically, it worked out well, and he was tickled to death that we were able to include it along with that little ad for his app. He asked if we would do that, and we thought why not? That was cool of CBS to allow that. When we’re doing things like that, it’s really important to us to get what we can.

TrekCore: I don’t know if you’re aware, but a few people have been floating a list around the Internet of their ideal compilation of behind-the-scenes features that have appeared on television that they hope will make it onto the Blu-rays. Could you comment on each one of these – if you think it’s worthy of being included, whether you know about it or don’t know about it, and whether there may be plans to include it. First, in the 1990s, there was a documentary called “To Boldly Go”, from the ABC network’s Primetime Live featuring DeForest Kelley touring the TNG sets.

Robert Meyer Burnett: Oh, yes – we’re very aware of that! (Laughs)

TrekCore: Any plans?

Robert Meyer Burnett: You guys should know that we’re looking into all of these things, in terms of the rights, if we can show them… as a matter of fact, on the first season of Enterprise, there’s a show called On The Set, which was completed but never aired, which Brannon Braga mentioned to us, dealing with the production of season one. It was going to be shown, but never was; at Roger’s behest, CBS acquired it, and it will appear on the Season One blu. We absolutely look into all of those things. [note – we’ll have a lot more about ‘On the Set’ soon in a future special!]

TrekCore: Let’s just go through some more quickly – there was a VCR board game starring Robert O’Reilly as Gowron, where you see him on the TNG sets.

Robert Meyer Burnett: Again, that becomes an ownership issue – that’s not necessarily owned by CBS – but yeah, those things… I’ve got this bit that Q did with his son, John de Lancie did it for some game in the late late ‘90s. It doesn’t really belong, but we might stick it in… we absolutely would want to use that stuff. Even if we couldn’t use all of it; that footage of Robert O’Reilly on the TNG sets is absolutely something that we would want to use.

TrekCore: There was a famous parody done for Comic Relief USA in 1994 where we saw the TNG cast in character…

Robert Meyer Burnett: Oh yeah, we have that. Whoopi Goldberg was never a fan of that – she did not like being called “Whoo-pye” [when Data mispronounces her name]. But yes, we would love to include that. We think that’s so great – but again, can we find a decent master of it? But we’d love to have that in.

TrekCore: Of course, when the show ended, there was a special done called “Journey’s End”, hosted by Jonathan Frakes. Do you think that could make it?

Robert Meyer Burnett: We’d love to use that as well. Again, I think that would be something essential.

TrekCore: Another curiosity – there was a lot of publicity in 1991 when former President Ronald Reagan visited the set. Photos exist, we’ve seen those on the DVDs; do you know if there was any video coverage done?

Robert Meyer Burnett: No… we have those photos; another great, unsung hero of this is John Wentworth, who was actually in our Season One documentary. John Wentworth is one of the higher-up executives; he’s been with Paramount and then CBS publicity for the better part of thirty years. Not only is he a tremendously nice guy, but he also has gone above and beyond, out of his way, to make sure that Roger and I have been given full access. He had his assistant pull all of the boxes of photographs, anything that existed, of Star Trek. He basically said, “You guys can look through this and take anything you want. It’s yours.” To have that kind of cooperation at that level has just been astonishing.

He was also instrumental – he called up Rick Berman for us and said, “Look, these guys are legit; they’re not some yo-yos that are going to ask you dumb questions.” – it was Wentworth that got us to go to Rick Berman’s house do to an interview.

We got photographs of the visits to the sets – all of them – every single photo that exists. It’s amazing – there are a lot of photos in the Season One documentary from when they screened the pilot for the cast, and the party afterwards… a lot of those photos had never been seen before,ever. That was all because of John Wentworth.


President Reagan’s visit to the sets of Star Trek THE NEXT GENERATION was well documented in a large number of never-before-seen photographs that Robert and Roger hope to use in upcoming documentaries on the Blu-Rays.

TrekCore: That brings up an interesting question. If material is discovered in the course of this process, which relates to earlier seasons – like the Season One wrap party – what’s your position on building them into your VAM? Can it be put onto later seasons?

Robert Meyer Burnett: Oh, yeah. It can, when we find it. I’m a real stickler for keeping things season-centric, but you’ll notice that there are stories in the Season Two documentary that happened in Season One – but I thought they were worth telling. But I only use music from whatever season… like Season Two will only have Season Two music. I’ll never go and use the Borg theme from “The Best of Both Worlds” for like, “Descent, Part II” – I’m not going to do that. If it’s relevant, then I will go back and use it. If there are stories to tell, I’ll use it, but I’ll try and identify it as such.

You know, Roger and I are trying to make a historical document – we’re purists in that sense, trying to keep everything season-centric, so to speak.

TrekCore: We talked about the music of Star Trek briefly, and it’s undergoing a huge renaissance at the moment with all these releases from La-La-Land and Film Score Monthly. Would you consider profiling the music in future documentaries, with composers Ron Jones, Dennis McCarthy, and Jay Chattaway?

Robert Meyer Burnett: Oh, yeah! Ron Jones is a huge part of the Season Three documentary; we haven’t interviewed Dennis McCarthy or Jay Chattaway yet, but we fully plan on doing so. The Ron Jones interview is great – we actually went and interviewed him on the Fox stage. It wasn’t where they first started recording Next Generation music, but it was where they recorded subsequent seasons; we interviewed him on that stage. He gave us great stuff – we got footage of him conducting the orchestra back then, and photographs of all that, so we’ve got great Ron Jones material.

One of the roundtables I would love to do is a composer roundtable, with all the people who worked on Star Trek.

TrekCore: To approach their different styles and approaches to scoring?

Robert Meyer Burnett: Absolutely. But as with everyone else, wrangling these extremely busy people is never easy.


Star Trek THE NEXT GENERATION composer Ron Jones at the Fox Stage where he was interviewed by Robert Meyer Burnett and Roger Lay Jr. for the upcoming Season 3 set.

TrekCore: Who are your must-have actors and creative talents – for interviews in the future seasons – who we may not have heard from so far?

Robert Meyer Burnett: I would have loved to get Maurice Hurley and Ricky Manning and Hans Beimler – but they don’t really like to talk about Star Trek anymore, so I don’t think that I’ll be able to get them. Obviously, I would really like to talk to Leonard Nimoy about coming back and doing “Unification” if he would agree and be amenable to that; I don’t know if he would be. There’s [the late] Richard Lynch from “Gambit”… (Laughs) …but all the great character actors – obviously Robert O’Reilly (‘Gowron’) and Lursa and B’Etor (actresses Barbara March and Gwynyth Walsh), I love those two ladies; I still want to talk to Suzie Plakson (‘K’Ehlyr’, ‘Selar’, ‘Female Q’) – basically, every major Star Trek guest star that ever existed. A friend of mine just gave me Elizabeth Dennehy’s (‘Commander Shelby’) home phone number; I’ve got to talk to Dwight Schultz (‘Reg Barclay’); we have to talk to Colm Meaney (‘Miles O’Brien’)…

TrekCore: Michelle Forbes (‘Ro Laren’)?

Robert Meyer Burnett: Oh, yeah, we have to. You know, I used to live across the street from her, so I know where she lives – I’ll knock on her door if I have to! With the principal actors, I get to sit down with them twice; two sessions, usually two hours apiece. I’ve done both my sessions with Jonathan Frakes and Michael Dorn, and I’m going to sit down with the other actors… once I have those four hours, I use that as a pool to draw from for all the docs in the seven seasons. In addition, to augment those things, we can always add the behind the scenes players; the various guest stars from each season, so we’ll have new faces showing up every year, which I think is important.

TrekCore: Talk to us about “The Best of Both Worlds”. Is this going to dominate the Season Three features? Do you have any special tributes or retrospectives planned for it?

Robert Meyer Burnett: Um… uh…. (Laughs) Yeeesssss, we do!

There’s something very interesting going on with “The Best of Both Worlds” that I can’t talk about yet. But yes, the answer is yes!

TrekCore: Moving swiftly on! (Laughs) What differences have you discovered working on the different Star Trek shows – does the direction you take dealing with Enterprise and those special features differ from the approach you’re taking with The Next Generation?

Robert Meyer Burnett: Yeah. For The Next Generation, you have twenty-five years of history, but you also have the sense that The Next Generation is, arguably – with the public at large – the most beloved Star Trek show. There’s such a great camaraderie and good will towards that show; it was groundbreaking television at the time – not just from a historical perspective – it allowed and proved the viability of an hour-long, syndicated drama. There’s a lot of great will going into Star Trek: The Next Generation. There’s a certain reverence about it.

With Enterprise, it’s considered, for the lack of a better word, a failure – in that it didn’t run for seven seasons the way the other shows did; it changed its premise; it never had the ratings it wanted to have; even its creators are critical of it. Knowing that – Roger has really taken the reigns and spearheaded that documentary – his Enterprise documentary is unbelievable. You talk about candor; you talk about people talking about what went wrong – and what went right – with the show… the Enterprise documentary is really, really insightful in terms of what went right and what went wrong. I mean, I watched it and was like, “Whoa, dude – that was awesome.”


Roger’s documentary on the ENTERPRISE Season 1 Blu-Rays is an unbelievable watch according to Burnett. The first season hits shelves in late March 2013.

TrekCore: Is it more difficult with a show like Enterprise to present a more positive view, to celebrate the show, when it’s maligned – perhaps unfairly – by so many?

Robert Meyer Burnett: No, I don’t think so, because look – it is still a Star Trek show. There’s some really interesting stuff… but for me, the way approach these things is not just as slaving Trek fanboys. Here was a TV show – a copy of a copy of a copy, in a way – one of the reasons I’m not the biggest fan of Voyager is because Star Trek suddenly became only about Star Trek. It became so insular and incestuous in terms of a TV and outside of the fanbase… what happened with the Borg for instance, wouldn’t be understood by the casual viewer. And it wasn’t so much allegory any more, it was really just about the Star Trek universe. I think that was a real problem, and I think Enterprise was never even the show the creators intended for it to be – Brannon [Braga] talks about how he wanted the first season of the show set on Earth, and they would never leave Earth; the end of the first season would be launching the Enterprise for the first time. That would have been incredible! That would have been an amazing show – but the network was like, “You can’t do that. That’s not Star Trek, you have to have a spaceship in space!”

What’s interesting about Enterprise is that they had to put up with a network [the now-defunct UPN], which, up until then, they never had to do. They had to deal with executives whose concerns were not exactly jiving with the creative entities behind the show, which is unfortunate. I think the Enterprise show that they wanted to make might have been a much more successful show, but because they were hampered by what people think Star Trek is… One of the great things about the Enterprise documentary is that it also delves into the problems with making a television show in the 2000’s, which I think is very, very cool – again, everybody has been very candid and open; they talk about what did work and what didn’t work.

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ROBERT MEYER BURNETT wrote and directed FREE ENTERPRISE and produced Warner Premiere and Dark Castle’s THE HILLS RUN RED.

Order Star Trek: The Next Generation Season 1 Blu-Ray today!



Order Star Trek: The Next Generation Season 2 Blu-Ray today!

EXCLUSIVE: Robert Meyer Burnett Interview, Part IV

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EXCLUSIVE: Robert Meyer Burnett Interview, Part IV

TrekCore talks to Robert Meyer Burnett, one-half of the talented duo responsible for the creation of the new bonus features on Star Trek: The Next Generation‘s remastered Blu-Ray releases. Normally to be found beavering away in his edit bay, Rob generously took several hours out of his busy schedule to talk to me about all things Star Trek, answering questions about his work and dropping several juicy hints about the exciting things he and Roger Lay Jr. have planned for future Star Trek Blu-Ray releases.

Robert Meyer Burnett

Robert Meyer Burnett: Who Interviews the Interviewer? Part 4

Interviewed by Adam Walker for TrekCore.com

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TrekCore: Moving on to the other features on the set – the reunion format proves to be incredibly successful for a show like The Next Generation. The cast reunion, as I mentioned in the review, I absolutely loved it. Every single second. I could watch it over and over again and pick out new bits every time. I understand you’ve already filmed a writer’s room reunion and an art department reunion for future sets… how do you go about styling those features and putting them together?

Robert Meyer Burnett: The cast reunion was an idea Roger was talking about even before he was officially hired on – and then when we started the project, I knew that the cast was going to be brought together for the first time, including Denise Crosby, in Calgary in April 2012. I said,“Since they’re already there, if there’s a way we can get up there and do that…” It was something we talked about for months. When they finally decided to do it, it was kind of at the last minute – Roger was adamant that we had to shoot it like a network special, like it could be on CBS Television in prime time.


Robert Meyer Burnett sits down with the entire cast of Star Trek THE NEXT GENERATION at the a convention in Calgary for the special Cast Reunion feature on Season 2.

We actually enlisted Gary Khammar, another terrific VAM producer – he’s a great field producer – and CBS felt comfortable with him. We brought him on board to do the actual field production, to find out who the camera people were in Calgary; Phil Bishop from CBS Home Entertainment came up to head our team and sort of spearheaded for us because it was way out of our VAM budget to do it – but again, Ken Ross at CBS made sure we had the equipment to do it right.
We went up, and we were able to wrangle the cast and get them to agree to do this thing. I was thinking that we should get some kind of celebrity to host, and everyone was like, “No Rob. You’re hosting!” I’m not exactly svelte, I’m not exactly an on-camera personality! (Laughs) They said, “No, no, no – you’re personable and you know what to do, you’ll be great.” I thought that was cool… and when we got up there and I did it, it was like a dream come true for me.


Robert Meyer Burnett (left), Gary Khammar (VAM Producer and co-founder of Light Source & Imagery) and Phil Bishop (Vice President of Worldwide DVD Mastering for CBS) at the Calgary convention preparing for the epic Star Trek THE NEXT GENERATION Cast Reunion

TrekCore: That was probably the right choice, Rob, because I know they had the Star Trek Captain’s Reunion at ‘Star Trek: London’, and it was hosted by a celebrity – John Barrowman, from Torchwood – and it was good, but his personality kind of brought in a sixth element to it, which brought us away from getting to know the people we were there to see.

Robert Meyer Burnett: Right – and you’ll notice that I don’t do a lot of talking in there. My job was, again, I started out by asking what Rick Berman had said about the “three strikes” against the show – and I knew that once you got these people talking, stay out of their way! I would push the conversation when it would lull, and ask questions that I thought would generate the most discussion, but they would carry it. That was sort of my philosophy; to ask the question and get out of the way – but I also knew that I didn’t want to ask the typical questions. “Tell me about your character.” Who cares? What you want to do is see their personalities and their interaction. That’s what we were most interested in doing, and it worked out really well.

For Season Three, focusing on the writing of the show – we’ve done a piece we call “Inside the Writer’s Room” – we knew that Ted writer-director Seth MacFarlane was a fan; we’d had him in for a single interview for Season Two. He, to me, represents the fans, all of us – even though he’s a celebrity. But at the time TNG aired, he wasn’t. But he’s both a huge industry success and an uber-fan, so he was perfect to host the piece. And he’s certainly far more handsome than I am!


For the Season 3 Blu-Rays, Burnett and Lay produced the ultimate feature on the writers of the show, “Inside the Writer’s Room” is hosted by Seth MacFarlane (center) and features (from left to right:) Ronald D. Moore, Brannon Braga, Naren Shankar and René Echevarria.

We figured that because he already had a relationship with Brannon Braga, and he’s a writer for television himself, what better way to do the writers’ reunion than with him? So we asked, not thinking he would do it, and he did! He absolutely agreed to do it. Not only did he agree to do it, but we shot that reunion in the conference room here at our office, and then he left the reunion and got on a plane to go host Saturday Night Live! You know, you meet people in Hollywood – Seth MacFarlane is one of the greatest people that I’ve met. His intelligence, his energy, his wit; he’s one of those guys that walks into a room and lights it up. Plus, the fact that he’s resurrecting Carl Sagan’s Cosmos… he’s a guy that puts his money where his mouth is and I can’t imagine having anybody better to host this reunion. Of course, it makes us look great, because he’s been announced as the host of the Academy Awards – so CBS could not be happier with us! I’ll be extremely curious to hear the fan reaction to the Writer’s Room piece.

TrekCore: With the art department reunion – we saw some lovely photos of them all gathered together at Doug Drexler’s house – how did that come about?

Robert Meyer Burnett: That was, again, something that we had talked about from the very beginning. It’s unique in the world of motion pictures and television that you have guys like Mike Okuda, who worked on Star Trek for eighteen years – longer, if you count his work on Star Trek IV; a guy like Rick Sternbach who worked on The Motion Picture; Herman Zimmerman, who was only on the first season of The Next Generation, but from Deep Space Nine on; Doug Drexler… how many times do you have an art department that worked for so many years doing this? Herman Zimmerman is just so beloved, and to have them all come together and just shoot the shit, it was great. The stories that come out, and the camaraderie… these are things that don’t normally come out in interviews and to see that kind of thing is really tremendous.


The Art Department Reunion. From left: Robert Meyer Burnett, Roger Lay Jr., Darren Barnett, Rick Sternbach, Doug Drexler, Dan Curry, Herman Zimmerman, Denise Okuda, Mike Okuda and Kris Edwards.

In hindsight, we probably should have saved the cast reunion for the end – to us, the writers’ reunion and the technical reunion are both just as interesting – the cast reunion is just so good; it has the star power, but for the true fans, getting the writers’ reunion… I mean, Ron Moore has just become such a genre luminary in his own right, having created Battlestar Galactica, and Brannon’s worked on everything from 24 to [the NBC series] Threshold, and Naren [Shankar] has been on CSI for so long – getting these guys together, the writers’ reunion, in terms of knowledge of the series and Star Trek storylines, why decisions were made, is almost more interesting to the fan than the cast reunion.

TrekCore: Where do you think you can go with this reunion format? Do you think you can take it further?

Robert Meyer Burnett: What I’d like to do, what Roger and I are talking about, is for Season Seven – I’d like to have the cast and crew get together. Like, I want to see Rick Berman sit down with the cast. I would like Rick Berman to host and moderate a discussion. I’d love to see that – have the writers, have a big blowout… if that could be done.

One of the great things I thought we were able to do for Season Two was to get Cosmo Genovese to come in – the cast just loved Cosmo. When we told the cast that that we were interviewing Cosmo, they couldn’t believe it. As you can see in the Season Two documentary – and not many people have mentioned this – when you see Cosmo reading the off-camera dialogue, it’s hilarious! Like that scene where he does Lwaxana Troi, and everyone busts up on the bridge… I mean, imagine – he was with that cast every day reading thousands of different characters and they interacted with him. The fact that we went and got him… the cast couldn’t believe it. They were like, “That is amazing!”

TrekCore: If you ask fans for their favorite VAM on Blu-rays, it’s normally outtakes, deleted scenes, and commentaries – and with Season Two, we got a couple of commentaries on two of the most popular episodes of the season, “Q Who” and “The Measure of a Man”. How do you go about choosing the participants for the commentaries, and the episodes themselves?

Robert Meyer Burnett: We would want to do commentaries on every episode, but it’s just not practical. Those two episodes, because they’re kind of special, cornerstone episodes, both picked for the Fathom events – to decide who is going to participate… the problem with the actors, and I hate to say it, is that it was twenty-five years ago. When you watch the bloopers and the outtakes, for the actors, the scenes set on the Enterprise in every episode just become a blur. The actors do not have the experience with Star Trek that we do as viewers. For them, one episode is no more significant than another. They don’t know. They show up on the bridge; every scene on the bridge seems the same to them.

They say the dialogue, and that’s it – even though we might think it’s a key episode, the beginning of such-and-such, or Sela’s back, or whatever. But the actors, they don’t know, so there’s not a lot of insight you can get from them, especially after the show’s been on for twenty-five years. Unless you’re doing it for a recent movie they’ve finished, when it’s just come out and they’ve seen it – like when we did Lord of the Rings or something – that’s different. But with these, you want to get the technical people, and you want to get the people who actually have something to say – the writers especially always have the most insightful things to say about the episodes because they wrote them!

The Okudas’ approach to commentaries is different than mine, in the sense that they really do research and they come up with great questions and great anecdotes; they tend to steer the commentaries in a certain direction. They’re not trying to have people say what they want to have said; they’re trying to provide the best information for the fans. I like to have commentaries done off the cuff – I think they both have their place – or you have people riff on the commentary, like a director and an actor, and it becomes a lot of fun. I know that Roger is off doing Enterprise commentaries – he’s got Brannon Braga and James Conway and Dan Curry; people with different perspectives.

We’d like to continue to do more commentaries. I know that Ron Moore – who did such great commentary work on Battlestar Galactica – has offered to come in and do commentaries on every one of his episodes! And, like, I can’t wait to do a commentary on “Sub Rosa”, which is an episode I learned from the writers’ reunion that everybody has very strong feelings for! (Laughs) So I’d love to do an episode where things went wrong; a commentary for an episode that isn’t the greatest.

TrekCore: You recently went to the Fathom screening of “Q Who” and “The Measure of a Man”. Tell us about it, and how you felt about your own work being put up on the big screen for thousands to see?

Robert Meyer Burnett: It was crazy seeing myself on the big screen, and it’s crazy thinking that VAM is being shown, but it’s nice to know that the documentaries, which Roger and I shoot ourselves with our own equipment – neither of us are professional videographers, but I think we do a good job with the star field composites behind everybody – but I think it looks great, and it’s really gratifying to see people laugh at the VAM, and having an emotional response. It might be strange to say, but when I’m cutting this stuff together, I’m trying to convey a story that should have an emotional response from people. It’s like when Stephen Macht shows up at the end of the Season One documentary. I have an emotional response to hearing his story, and when you can see that happen – especially during the blooper reel – it makes me feel good, you know, that our material can be put on a big screen and it is compelling. I mean, there’s not better true test of the work we’re doing than that.


The NCM Fathom Season 2 Event showcased some of the VAM produced by Robert and Roger on the big-screen.

And I love seeing the episodes on the big screen – sure, there are people who complain about the projection and all that – the screen we watch it on in Century City is huge! It’s a massive screen! Seeing the episodes, it’s great. What’s interesting is seeing how they play that big, because even if you have a home theater system, seeing them projected that big and how well they work – I mean, “Measure of a Man”, which is essentially a bottle show, just people talking to each other, worked really, really well on the big screen. It was great.

TrekCore: Looking forward to Season Three, what are your plans for celebrating The Next Generation’s most popular season with VAM?

Robert Meyer Burnett: What I really like is the idea that for us, it’s the most successful season, it’s my favorite season of Star Trek – but for the people making it, it was a nightmare. I love the fact that Ira Behr, who later took Deep Space Nine to such heights, he worked on The Next Generation for only the third season – and boy, Ira Behr does not pull any punches. He’s got great stories to tell. But one of the things we also want to do in Season Three is a celebration of Michael Piller – who changed the writing staff forever and had his mandate that all the stories should be about the characters first, as opposed to external threats – he really changed the shape of The Next Generation. So we’ve got that coming; we’ve got the “Inside the Writer’s Room” piece… it’s really, I think for Season Three, the writers’ VAM. You have Ron Moore and Rene Echevarria selling their very first scripts to television; of course, you have the cliffhanger of “The Best of Both Worlds”… so that’s what I’m looking forward to; concentrating on the writing of that season and the changes that the show went through.

TrekCore: Looking at the bonus features so far, and what you’ve got planned for Season Three, I can’t help but thinking that as the seasons progress towards Season Seven, it’s going to become harder and harder for you guys to come up with original ideas for bonus content. Are you worried about that? Do you already have ideas for each season already?

Robert Meyer Burnett: Yeah, I do worry about that – because once you’re into the fourth season, Star Trek was pretty much a well-oiled machine. There weren’t problems. Once the show was working, every day was status quo. There are interesting ideas; Ira Behr tells this great story in Season Three about how they would not let him mention Spock in the episode “Sarek”. They wouldn’t allow it. By Season Three – especially Rick Berman – they didn’t want to mention anything to do with the old show. Ira Behr was like, “You had Doctor McCoy in the pilot!” Of course, you later had Leonard Nimoy and James Doohan come back and those things changed… They brought in family members; they brought in Sela to bring back Denise Crosby again; the Klingon Civil War, having recurring characters like Gowron and the ongoing Klingon arcs – thinks like that are what we’re going to have to basically concentrate on, because once you get into the later seasons, it all went off without a hitch. So, I’m a little worried… but we’ll come up with something!

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ROBERT MEYER BURNETT wrote and directed FREE ENTERPRISE and produced Warner Premiere and Dark Castle’s THE HILLS RUN RED.

Order Star Trek: The Next Generation Season 1 Blu-Ray today!



Order Star Trek: The Next Generation Season 2 Blu-Ray today!

EXCLUSIVE: Robert Meyer Burnett Interview, Part III

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EXCLUSIVE: Robert Meyer Burnett Interview, Part III

TrekCore talks to Robert Meyer Burnett, one-half of the talented duo responsible for the creation of the new bonus features on Star Trek: The Next Generation‘s remastered Blu-Ray releases. Normally to be found beavering away in his edit bay, Rob generously took several hours out of his busy schedule to talk to me about all things Star Trek, answering questions about his work and dropping several juicy hints about the exciting things he and Roger Lay Jr. have planned for future Star Trek Blu-Ray releases.

Robert Meyer Burnett

Robert Meyer Burnett: Who Interviews the Interviewer? Part 3

Interviewed by Adam Walker for TrekCore.com

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TrekCore: In the second season of The Next Generation, you guys have really raised the bar to crazy heights with the quality of the features. Let’s break them down a bit – what approach for the “Making it So” documentary did you take? Was there anything you wanted to differently, in hindsight, from Season One?

Robert Meyer Burnett: Well, I wanted to let people talk a little bit more. You’ll notice that a lot of time with these documentaries, you intercut people reiterating the points. I wanted to slow it down a bit. Rob Bowman was one of the key directors on The Next Generation in the first two years – he directed “Where No One Has Gone Before”, “Datalore”, “Elementary, Dear Data”, “Q Who” – he really brought a visual flair to the show. We weren’t able to get him for the first season because he’s an executive producer and director on Castle and he’s really busy, but he’s such a great interview that I just wanted to let him talk. I wanted to let him, and Melinda [Snodgrass], and John de Lancie just talk! I wanted to just slow it down and let these people talk a little longer.

And then, of course, having Gates McFadden tell the story about how she left – I wanted to see how much I could get away with; how much candor. Having Diana Muldaur talk as well; there was more of the idea that we’re answering… the inception of the show had been covered, but the other things, about how people felt about various things that went on – did Diana Muldaur feel she was replacing Gates McFadden? I wanted her to say if she felt that way, and she says in the documentary, “No.” So, for the second season, I really wanted to get people’s feelings out there instead of just conveying information.


Gates McFadden’s leaving story has long since been speculated over by fans. Robert Meyer Burnett felt it was an important part of the show’s history to be included in the documentary.

TrekCore: We should talk a bit about Diana Muldaur, because she was one of the biggest challenges for you guys in the second season. These documentaries are notable for featuring a lot of interviews with people we rarely hear from, but Diana Muldaur was a real coup – I know that you were questioned on Twitter almost daily whether or not she would be coming on for Season Two. Tell us about some of the challenges you faced getting her.

Robert Meyer Burnett: First of all, she lives on Martha’s Vineyard on the East Coast – that’s her permanent residence. We’re going through her agent, and her manager, and they always want to make sure they’re protecting their clients, so you can’t blame them – but they always want to know “Is there money involved? Are my clients going to get any money; am I going to get any money?” They’re very protective, but we don’t have a lot of money. We don’t have any money to give people, really! At least, Roger and I don’t have any money – we’re just trying to get people to do it because we really wanted them to. I think what ultimately ended up happening is that we went to Diana directly, after we weren’t getting anywhere and CBS wasn’t getting anywhere with her management.

After the [2012 Creation Star Trek Convention in Las Vegas], Roger contacted Diana directly and opened a dialogue at the behest of CBS, because they couldn’t get her. It went on and on – she wasn’t in the best of health – but we relentlessly pursued her, and I think because Roger’s got this great half-Puerto Rican, half-Cuban accent, he used the dulcet tones of his voice and seduced Diana into doing it! (Laughs) It worked out well. I think that once she knew how much… we really, really wanted Diana, and we couldn’t do the second season without her. She really hasn’t spoken a lot about Star Trek – I know she’s been to a few conventions and she’s gone on a Trek cruise – once she knew… like, when she came down and I interviewed her, we took good care of her. We sent a car to pick her up… I mean, she just got out of the hospital, and in literally just a couple of days, she agreed to do the interview. It was great.

We were all set to interview Whoopi Goldberg –

TrekCore: I was about to mention that. We mentioned in our review that you weren’t able to get Whoopi in time for this set; when you have a deadline to meet, how flexible is CBS when it comes to accommodating these last-minute interviews?

RMB: Oh my god, CBS has held things until the last minute. CBS has been ready to throw us out the door. But that’s when big daddy Ken Ross steps in and says “No.” We have had more support from them… like, when they want to master the discs, they’re like, “Where the hell’s the VAM?”Ken Ross, man… he’ll say, “If you guys think it’s important…” He will hold up the discs. This kind of support is just incredible.

Now, we knew we couldn’t get Whoopi for Season Two, because it was the summer and she was on vacation, but we had set up an interview for Season Three. We figured, that’s fine, because John de Lancie wasn’t on Season One – we knew we couldn’t get him then, but we were going to get him later. The great thing is that we have seven seasons, so as long as we can get new people every season… but we had scheduled our Whoopi Goldberg interview for late October, and I was flying back from London, and then Hurricane Sandy hit. I got stuck in Heathrow in London, Roger got stuck in LA, and now we’re trying to get back with Whoopi’s people and go interview her. She’s completely down for it. That’s the best part – we’ve got seven seasons to get Whoopi, and just like we only got John de Lancie for Season Two, but I thought that was a great interview. Just let him talk and tell his story.


Scheduling interviews can sometimes be fraught with problems. Robert’s interview with Whoopi Goldberg was postponed due to travel problems but he aims to schedule her for inclusion in a future season.

TrekCore: Your choice of clips and music cues used to accompany the documentaries have kind of molded them into a unique style which have really gone down well with the fans. You’re clearly a massive Ron Jones fan, using music from his boxed set; how do you decide on the edits to make, and which clips and music tracks to use?

Robert Meyer Burnett:  I really appreciate you saying that, because I really spend a lot of time…I try and choose clips and music that best illustrate the points that are being made by the interview subjects, but the connections that I’m drawing are very fan-oriented. People that really know the show will totally understand what I’m trying to do. The layman may not. It’s like what you said about the end of the first part of the Season Two documentary, using that Klingon Tea Ceremony music which I think is one of the most moving pieces of music written for The Next Generation.

TrekCore: Oh, without a doubt.

Robert Meyer Burnett: What I’m given is “approved music”. CBS has a blanket clearance to use music – so far it’s only been Ron Jones’ music, which is great because I just love his music, not that Dennis McCarthy and Jay Chattaway didn’t do great work – so I get to use every cue that Jones has ever written for the show. So I try to find the best music that underscores – again, I approach it like a feature film – I try to use music that is emotional, that will reiterate the points that are being made by the interview subjects. And the clips that I pick – it’s the same as when I worked on the Star Trek Experience, I knew which clips to pick – but if you look at the end of the documentary when Diana Muldaur and Rick Berman are talking, I decided, “You know what I’m going to do? I’m going to cut a montage and use a shot from every single episode of Season Two.”

Now, I don’t know if people noticed – I thought it was pretty apparent – but when I’m doing that, I’m like, which shot best exemplifies the episode? If you get one shot where a fan could know… what happens is, if you put that many iconic shots up against each other, it creates an emotional response in the viewer.

TrekCore: I don’t think it was just the combination of shots, but I think it was almost a ‘perfect storm’ – you’ve got the Klingon Tea Ceremony music…

Robert Meyer Burnett: It’s what’s being said, it’s the music, and it’s the imagery. All those things together, working in tandem. It’s funny, though – there’s one shot where I think I missed the boat, I used Mick Fleetwood’s character, where he plays that crazy fish creature [in “Manhunt”] – I used that shot in the montage. It’s a humorous. You laugh at it. But I was trying to create this really emotional montage, and Roger said, “That ruins your tone!” I fought him on it, and I left it in, stupidly – but he was right. In the Fathom version [for the Season Two theatrical event], I swapped out that shot for the shot of Lwaxana Troi and Picard having dinner together and they toast each other. It’s a much more moving shot, and it much better exemplifies the episode. I was wrong with that shot, but every other shot… I love the shot when the light comes out of Deanna’s hands at the end of “The Child” – that sets it off – you see Data from “Pen Pals” taking [Sarjenka]’s body and laying it down on the bed…

Picking a shot from “The Icarus Factor” was interesting. Do you use Kyle Riker? To me – while that was good – what was so awesome about that episode was the crew doing [the Age of Ascension ceremony] for Worf. He walks in and sees the Klingon warriors and he realizes what’s going on; that, to me, was the emotional center of that episode. That was the killer image. The only humorous part of the montage should’ve been Brian Thompson [as Klag] and Riker laughing on the Klingon ship. That was the moment in [“A Matter of Honor”] that was so great, watching those two cultures come together, meeting on common ground. It’s whatever I think is important about those episodes, that’s what I use.


The blooper reel cut for Season 2 was an amazing discovery for Burnett. He edited down a total of SIX HOURS of outtakes to the 10 minute reel presented.

TrekCore: The brand new blooper reel on Season Two is such a fantastic addition to the set. How was that material initially presented to you? How did you go about editing it down to just ten minutes?

Robert Meyer Burnett: Blooper reels are traditionally all done the same way – you know, the humor is augmented. A lot of the time, it’s just pratfalls. Here’s the thing: when the editors had originally cut the show, they put aside footage that could be used in blooper reels, because it was asked for, originally – but it was never used. So when we went back into these boxes of negatives, there were these outtakes and things that were put aside. Again, god love CBS Home Entertainment, this is not something they had to do, but Dave and Ryan felt it was important – they transferred this footage, into HD, which is amazing; I got six hours of outtakes. Now, most of that, truth be told, is just blown takes. But what I wanted, what was important to me… the outtakes had to convey part of the actors. You had to get a sense of who they were, their sense of humor; you had to know something about them.

There’s a bit when Jonathan Frakes cannot say this technobabble [‘marker beacons’, from “Unnatural Selection”], and I used every cut of it – even when he does off-camera dialog and the camera was on Michael Dorn, he still can’t say it! And then Michael Dorn laughed at Jonathan Frakes for not being able to say it! To me, I cut that together specifically to create a moment where you totally learn something about Jonathan Frakes. It’s not only funny because you see the humor in it, but you also see the camaraderie and the good-humor and the human nature that all of those actors had with one another; just how much fun they were having.

Patrick Stewart, when he first heard we were doing this, was a little concerned – he talked about how the season-ending blooper reel they would cut for the cast and crew became more and more mean-spirited as the years went by. It bothered him, and when I mentioned that we were doing these blooper reels, I explained to him, “These are celebrations.” On one hand, I was worried about breaking the fourth wall of the show, but on the other, I wanted it to be uplifting. I could watch those blooper reels over and over and over again because I feel that they’re so warm and it shows how much fun they had making the show, and I hope it conveys that. When I was watching the cut-down version of it at the Fathom event, all I needed to hear was the laughter from people in the theater to realize that I had done my job. I’ve already cut the Season Three blooper reel and there’s a lot of really, really funny stuff.

Go to Part: 1 2 3 4 5 6 7

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ROBERT MEYER BURNETT wrote and directed FREE ENTERPRISE and produced Warner Premiere and Dark Castle’s THE HILLS RUN RED.

Order Star Trek: The Next Generation Season 1 Blu-Ray today!



Order Star Trek: The Next Generation Season 2 Blu-Ray today!

EXCLUSIVE: Robert Meyer Burnett Interview, Part II

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EXCLUSIVE: Robert Meyer Burnett Interview, Part II

TrekCore talks to Robert Meyer Burnett, one-half of the talented duo responsible for the creation of the new bonus features on Star Trek: The Next Generation‘s remastered Blu-Ray releases. Normally to be found beavering away in his edit bay, Rob generously took several hours out of his busy schedule to talk to me about all things Star Trek, answering questions about his work and dropping several juicy hints about the exciting things he and Roger Lay Jr. have planned for future Star Trek Blu-Ray releases.

Robert Meyer Burnett

Robert Meyer Burnett: Who Interviews the Interviewer? Part 2

Interviewed by Adam Walker for TrekCore.com

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TrekCore: From a special features perspective, the DVD release of The Next Generation – which was 10 years ago now – at the time was fantastic, it was our first real look behind-the-scenes of the series. However looking back and rewatching those documentaries and comparing to the material we’re seeing on the Blu-Rays, so much of it comes across as superficial fluff. What were your reactions to the DVD Bonus features when you saw them?

Robert Meyer Burnett: I’ve always felt that Star Trek, across the board, has been very underserved by the VAM that’s been produced. A lot of that was because of the studio itself – they were always worried about things, and the actors, and people being compensated, and getting upset… there’s been a lot of tumult over the years – but also, the people that were doing Star Trek [DVDs], they did the best they could, but they didn’t KNOW Star Trek. They knew it from a superficial level, like they knew what shots had the most bang for their buck… everyone knew that, okay, you can get battle scenes from “The Best of Both Worlds” and you can go to “Yesterday’s Enterprise” or whatever. The problem was, they didn’t have – we’re filmmakers. Both Roger and I have made films, and we’re coming at it from – and I’ve been doing DVD special features for a long time, and I always approach them as a movie itself. Like, I’m trying to tell a story – the real story – of something. I already know Star Trek so well – it’s been a lifelong obsession of mine – I’m not interested in doing some kind of a fluff piece, because you don’t learn anything. What I’m trying to do, ultimately, is trying to find something that’s new and unusual, that I don’t know. Or, at least, be able to convey emotion.

One of the things that I’m very proud of is that – because I conduct all the interviews with everyone myself – I’m able to get much more candor from them because I’m not asking them questions like… I asked Patrick Stewart right before I interviewed him, “Patrick, what do you really know about ‘Star Trek’?” He said, “What do you mean?”

I said, “What do you KNOW about it? If I were to ask you about the geopolitical situation that exists between the Klingons and the Romulans, what did the Duras sisters do during the Klingon civil war between ‘Redemption I’ and ‘Redemption II’ or whatever, what would you know?” He was like, “I don’t even know what you just said.” (Laughs) I said, “Exactly! Nobody cares about that! The fan base already knows way more about ‘Star Trek’ from that perspective then you ever will – what people want to know about is who YOU are. What was it like for you, Patrick Stewart as an actor, to come over and the very first time you stepped foot on a Hollywood soundstage was when you did ‘Star Trek’? How did you feel about that? What was that like for you?”

That’s what people want to know. I think that when people see celebrity interviews, they don’t want to hear “Tell me about your character.” We already know about their character. We watched the show; we get it. You don’t have to tell me who Captain Picard is. I know Captain Picard as I watched for seven years and I’ve seen four feature films. I get it, man. I want to know what was it like for Patrick Stewart, as an actor from the RSC, what was it like to play this part on these wacky sets with this costume on, and suddenly go to conventions… how did YOU feel about that? That’s how I approach all of the VAM. What’s it like for you, as a person? I think that’s what I’m most proud of; the work Roger and I do. I mean, wait ‘til you see what Roger’s been doing on Enterprise! I mean, oh my god! The candor there has been ASTONISHING.


When interviewing Patrick Stewart, Robert Meyer Burnett avoided clichéd questions about Stewart’s character which the actor has answered a dozen times and instead discussed Stewart’s personal experiences shooting the show.

TrekCore: Sometimes I assume you have to tread a very fine line between celebrating Star Trek – which this project is supposed to be doing – and producing an honest retelling of the show from behind-the-scenes. Like a lot of shows, Star Trek‘s production has periods of its history which are troubled and full of strife. How do you go about covering those and getting a balance?

Robert Meyer Burnett: Well, it’s tough, you know, for any creative endeavor there’s always strife. With Star Trek, you have people like David Gerrold and Dorothy Fontana who hold Star Trek up as sacrosanct and almost holy, in a way. They were thrown into a situation where they thought they were going to recreate this show… the problem is, it’s one thing to have the best intentions, but when you’re dealing with a show and you’ve got an executive like Rick Berman coming in – and Rick Berman’s position at Paramount was tenuous at best, I mean, he was getting phased out, and he was on this show that was never going to work, you know, his career depended on whether Star Trek was going to work – and then you had Gene Roddenberry, who was not exactly the most fiscally responsible of executives, wanting to protect his legacy. There was so many things going on, and so many forces at work that were not conducive to one another – I mean, yes, everybody wanted to make a TV show, but there’s a reason why fans have such a difficult time breaking into the professional area of the business, because it’s a very different thing. If you’re a fan, it’s hard for you to be a professional because you think as a fan thinks, and you’re not thinking with the realities of what it takes to make a show on a daily basis.

There are many writers, especially on the first three seasons – as Ira Behr talks about it in the third season documentary, the third season was a fucking nightmare. He says, “Boy, I wish somebody told me then that the third season was going to be looked as this great watershed moment, because when we were doing it, it was a NIGHTMARE.” That’s part of what the third season documentary is all about.

A lot of people vilified Rick Berman at the time – fans, and also the writers, because he would just kill things out of hand. But from his perspective, he was trying to keep this new TV show on the air. Any talk of this old throwback to the 1960’s… the last thing you wanted to do was like, come on, that was on in the ‘60’s and it got cancelled after three seasons, that’s not what we should be doing! Therein does not lie success!

While Star Trek became a big hit, the last time Roddenberry was allowed to control it, he made Star Trek: The Motion Picture, and it was at the time the most expensive movie ever made. So I understand, as a twenty-four-year veteran of the industry, how difficult these things can be, and I can bring that perspective to it, and sort of draw out the stories people tell – but also, when I’m going back in an cutting these documentaries, I can be at least bringing some objectivity to it.
You can tell these stories without muckraking; without dragging people through the mud. There is no villain – I mean, Star Trek, because of The Next Generation, was on the air for eighteen years! Twenty-five seasons of Star Trek came out of that, out of Rick Berman’s stewardship. Without him keeping the ship on the right course, so to speak, there never would have been eighteen years of Star Trek. Whether it was great or not, that’s another debate – but we got eighteen years of Star Trek and four feature films.


Despite being vilified by many fans, Robert Meyer Burnett looks on Rick Berman as the steward who successfully guided Star Trek through twenty-five seasons and eighteen years of continuous production.

TrekCore: Talk to us a little bit about the structure of your documentaries. I read one review which perhaps unfairly stated that the documentaries are arbitrarily divided into their individual parts. Do you have limits put on you for how long each “feature” can be?

Robert Meyer Burnett: No, not really, and I’m sorry to hear that, because I thought that the structure of the documentary… especially in Season One, you know the first thirty minutes deals with the inception of the show, and we have literally everybody that was alive and would talk to us that was there from the beginning, leading up all the way to the casting of Captain Picard. Then we have the actors join us in Part Two; then in Part Three we brought in even more people to talk about the visual effects and the actual production of the show. I think that’s sort of an unfair assessment. I mean, we spent a long time thinking about the structure of these documentaries.

The Season Two documentary – I really thought, once we started cutting it, we needed perspective. We needed somebody to comment on, ‘What was Season One like?’, and that’s why we brought in Larry Nemecek and Mark Altman and Dan Madsen who, arguably, at the time, were the three guys – as journalists, and as authors, covered Star Trek from the fans’ perspective, and from a documentarian’s perspective. Mark Altman’s articles for Cinefantasique were definitive; Larry wrote the Star Trek: The Next Generation Companion; Dan covered the show as the president and publisher of the Fan Club magazine. To me, to have those three guys was essential – and then to hear other people’s perspectives, such as Patrick Stewart and Rick Berman…essential.

Angelo Dante at CBS found that clip from Entertainment Tonight which begins the doc, and just coincidentally happens to have both Denise Crosby and Gates McFadden, two women who didn’t come back! I was thinking, from a storytelling standpoint, “That’s golden!” You have the two of them that Entertainment Tonight chose to put in their story about the wrap party of the show at the Griffith Park Observatory, not realizing not only had Denise already left, but Gates was to be let go the following day.

The problem is this: the fan community is always coming at it with what they want; what they think should happen. They never look at things as they are. It was the same thing that happened with Free Enterprise. A lot of people wanted the “Get a Life!” speech – the Shatner speech from Saturday Night Live – turned into a feature film. They rejected Free Enterprise because of the sexual content and because of what it wasn’t, as opposed to what it was. There’s nothing arbitrary at all about our documentaries. Roger and I discuss the content extensively before we even begin.

People would say, like, “Okay, then, why do you get one guest star, the guy who played Klag – Brian Thompson – why would you get him to be in your documentary and not any other guest star?” Well, we were able to get him! At the time, we were able to schedule him! It’s not like we’re not trying! I mean, we tried to get Suzie Plakson; we’re trying to get other people; we’re thinking about this. For Enterprise Season One I called Jeffrey Combs and said “We can’t do it without you!” and he’s like, “Great!” You know, we’re trying to cover all of our bases. It’s just a question of time and scheduling. Jeffrey came in a did a terrific interview for season two.


For Season 2, Robert Meyer Burnett was able to interview guest star Brian Thompson. On the outset it may seem like a random choice, but as Burnett explains – both he and Roger Lay are doing their best to schedule as many guest stars as possible.

TrekCore: Your style of documentary filmmaking, I think, fits The Next Generation especially well. The stories behind the camera are very often as interesting as the episodes themselves, but there’s a huge challenge of documenting a show in such detail over a period as long as seven years. It must have been daunting to you, to say the least – how do you even start to formulate a structure for something like that?

Robert Meyer Burnett: I think that’s where Roger and I, our working relationship, is so synergistic in that our documentary styles are the same – we don’t like using a narrator, we like telling a story by intercutting interviews to create a narrative structure, and to reiterate points that are being made. We usually have two or three people making the same point to bring it on home.

We’ll sit down and decide – what is it about this season? What are the things we want to talk about first? With Season One, it was the inception of the show, but it was also the tumultuous nature of the writer’s room, how Gene was rewriting scripts, and things like that; with Season Two, we had to touch on the writer’s strike, the still tumultuous nature of making the show, yet managing to pull through the truncated season.

He and I come up with a basic idea of the outline of the documentaries; then, based on what we do with our interviews, we try – I do not use questions when I do my interviews. At all. We know so much already… I can speak extemporaneously about any aspect of Star Trek because I’ve read every reference book as it’s come out; I own virtually every piece of reference material – official and unofficial – that’s ever been published; if I could have a PhD in anything, it would be Star Trek. So I don’t want to limit myself based on whatever our outline is going to be – I just have conversations with people, and most interviews are two hours long, at least. I just touch on anything; I allow the interviews to be guided by what my interview subject has to say. Sometimes, when they tell certain stories, we know we’re going to use those in the documentaries – like Diana [Muldaur] saying she hated her uniform, and there’s that great bit from “Where Silence Has Lease” where her body is controlled and she does that little crazy dance up against the wall of the bridge. I know that I’m going to use that shot to reiterate that point in the documentary.

TrekCore: With a lot of the actors, though, they must vary in their receptiveness to your questioning. With Star Trek, more than any other franchise, there’s often a huge amount of fatigue that’s hard to break through with these guys; sometimes they’ve been doing it for forty years. How do you make that connection with them?

Robert Meyer Burnett: Well, I learned a secret in my previous DVD documentary work – I’ll tell everybody the secret of celebrity interviews. You need to show a celebrity that when they’re sitting down to be interviewed for a particular subject, you have to show them immediately that you know something about them beyond what you’ve come to discuss. You need to make an immediate, personal connection with them that shows that you’re not just going to ask some canned questions. They’ve all gone on press junkets; when they go on press junkets they have to sit in a room all day long, answering different reporters’ questions… the reporters think they’re clever, asking a question for the first time, but the celebrity sits there and answers the same question over and over and over.

What I try and do is disarm a celebrity by asking them a question about something they’ve done that I particularly love – they have to hear the enthusiasm in my voice. It has to be genuine. The very first time I interviewed Patrick Stewart was on the set of X-Men 2, for that DVD. I knew that he might be cantankerous, it could be a good interview or a bad interview – but one of my favorite things that’s ever been on television was the BBC’s version of I, Claudius that he was in. So, before I started asking about X-Men, I said to him, “Mr. Stewart, I have to tell you,” – and even though I’m a fanatical Star Trek fan, I knew I wasn’t going to bring that up – “One of my favorite things ever was I, Claudius. You got to play Sejanus, you got to kill John Rhys-Davies; how awesome was that!?” He just lit up – it showed that I didn’t just look him up on IMDB, but that I could talk about it with the enthusiasm of a fan, and it was something that he did thirty years ago and was particularly proud of. That disarmed him, and once he knew that I wasn’t just some idiot reporter reading notes, he wanted to talk to me.

That’s how I try and talk to everybody. I don’t want to ask Frakes “Tell me about Commander Riker. Tell me about that story.” I mean, Jonathan Frakes is a really smart, very funny, articulate guy who now has an incredible television directing career. The last thing in the world I’m going to ask him is “Tell me about Riker.” Come on. When you have somebody who is that smart and who has had that interesting of a career, I want to know about that. I want to have that kind of a conversation. One of the great things you’ll see in later seasons is how the actors went to “Star Trek University”, LeVar and Jonathan. Rick Berman made Jonathan go through the motions for a year before he was allowed to direct. Berman would always say to him, “Have you given up your dream of directing yet?” and it was Jonathan’s wife, Genie Francis, who said, “Don’t give up – [Berman] wants to see how committed you are.” Those are the great stories, and that’s how you approach these interviews.


Burnett takes a disarming approach when interviewing the likes of Jonathan Frakes which often results in some wonderful previously untold stories coming to light. Frakes’ recollection of going to “Star Trek University” to study directing was one of many gems to come out in the bonus features.

I saw something a long time ago, at the premiere of the first Tom Cruise Mission: Impossible film, I remember seeing the MTV VJ ‘Kennedy’ interviewing Martin Landau on the red carpet. She asked him “What brings you here to this premiere?” Of course, Martin Landau was IN the original Mission: Impossible television series! He looked at her, contempt in his eyes, and said something to the effect of, “If you have to ask me that, you shouldn’t be here.” (Laughs) I never wanted to be that dude.

I remember interviewing actor Gabriel Byrne for The Usual Suspects, and the first thing I said to him was, “Dude, you were Uther Pendragon in Excalibur! You rode the dragon in a full suit of armor and got to have sex with John Boorman’s daughter who played Igrayn! How cool was that?!”He just laughed! After I said that, we were off to the races again.

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ROBERT MEYER BURNETT wrote and directed FREE ENTERPRISE and produced Warner Premiere and Dark Castle’s THE HILLS RUN RED.

Order Star Trek: The Next Generation Season 1 Blu-Ray today!



Order Star Trek: The Next Generation Season 2 Blu-Ray today!

EXCLUSIVE: Robert Meyer Burnett Interview, Part I

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EXCLUSIVE: Robert Meyer Burnett Interview, Part I

In the first of a series of special updates, TrekCore talks to Robert Meyer Burnett, one-half of the talented duo responsible for the creation of the new bonus features on Star Trek: The Next Generation‘s remastered Blu-Ray releases. Normally to be found beavering away in his edit bay, Rob generously took several hours out of his busy schedule to talk to me about all things Star Trek, answering questions about his work and dropping several juicy hints about the exciting things he and Roger Lay Jr. have planned for future Star Trek Blu-Ray releases.

Robert Meyer Burnett

Robert Meyer Burnett: Who Interviews the Interviewer? Part 1

Interviewed by Adam Walker for TrekCore.com

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TrekCore: Rob it’s great to talk to you again, thanks for taking the time out to talk to TrekCore. A lot of fans obviously know you for your work producing and editing the new bonus features on the Star Trek: The Next Generation Blu-Rays. It’s probably the area of the industry you’re most focused on at the moment, but you’ve also worked on other Star Trek bonus features in the past including Star Trek V: The Final Frontier for Paramount Pictures. Tell us a little bit about that, how did you find working on one of the original Star Trek movies?

Robert Meyer Burnett: Well, to be quite honest, I fucked up my job on [the DVD release of] Star Trek V. Badly.  (Laughs)

When I was hired, I was also working on Lord of the Rings, and I was back and forth from New Zealand. I was there a long period of time and I was not working within the timeframe Paramount wanted, and unfortunately, I wasn’t able to devote all of my efforts the way that I wanted to – but, on Star Trek V, I was able to do what I think was the definitive interview ever done with William Shatner. That’s on the disc; I just wish they used a lot more of it. I also recorded the audio commentary for Star Trek V, and ran in to difficulty with that audio commentary because there’s a lot of missing material – I sort of went head-to-head with [Paramount’s legal division] because at the time, on the commentary, Shatner made mention of the fact that his idea for Sybok – his conception of Spock’s half-brother – was that Sybok was [psychologist and writer] Timothy Leary.

Timothy Leary was a great counter-culture figure in the 1960’s who advocated drug use and expanding your mind via LSD. I would get legal notes back from Paramount legal saying “You cannot equate ‘Star Trek’ and drug use! We just don’t do that.” I, of course, was totally annoyed by that, because that is bullshit. That was studio legal bullshit that had no bearing on any reality.Star Trek dealt with drugs all the way back to the first season of The Original Series, and “Mudd’s Women” with the Venus drug. The first season of The Next Generation has a great –

TrekCore: Yes, “Symbiosis”!

Robert Meyer Burnett: Yeah – and by the way, “Symbiosis” plays better now than it played back then. The drug allegory, and the fact that pharmaceutical companies today would rather have you hooked on Zoloft or Percocet… you watch that now and it’s like, wow! “Symbiosis”, which at the time – a lot of people don’t consider that maybe a great episode – to me, just watching the remastered version, not only is it a Star Trek II reunion with Merritt Butrick and Judson Scott, but it really works well as a drug allegory, even now – more so now than ever.

I’d always wanted to do a Director’s Cut of Star Trek V just as Paramount had done earlier with Star Trek: The Motion Picture, and I really wanted to go in and rebuild – or at least have CGI versions of – the rock men, and really redo the ending of Star Trek V and fix things. There’s a lot of really sloppy, bad work. The famous ‘rocket boots up the corridors of the Enterprise’ that are backwards, and there are way too many decks on the Enterprise; you’re at like Deck 75, then you’re at Deck 50, then you’re back up to Deck 75 again, or whatever the numbers are… it’s like, come on, man! We all know that Deck 1 is the bridge, and it goes down from there!


Star Trek V: The Final Frontier contained a lot of “sloppy, bad work” which Robert Meyer Burnett had always hoped to rectify in a more polished Director’s Cut on DVD.

I wanted to fix all that, because I think the great problem with Star Trek V is the tone. I think there’s a much better – you could go in there and recut and restructure that movie and get rid of all the really dumb humor. Once those really horrible tonal inconsistencies were fixed, there’s a really emotional, really touching movie in there. But what it needed… now that we’ve got time, and in hindsight you can look at that and say look, the studio – because Star Trek IV was the biggest-grossing Trek film at that time – the studio said “Okay, you have this very serious, thoughtful movie, but you have to inject humor into it.”

William Shatner, as far as humor is concerned, he tends to go very broad. He likes broad humor. One of the things I said to him when we were making Free Enterprise, knowing that, was “You know, Bill, this film would not work with a lot of broad humor. The only way ‘Free Enterprise’ is going to work is if the audience at any one time has to wonder – is your character serious, or are you insane?” Shatner was like “Oh, I totally get that. I get that. You’re exactly right.”

He played it that way, and I think that if Star Trek V… if they made the ‘Row, Row, Row Your Boat’ humor – if they played it the same way, but not as broadly – it would have been even funnier! “I don’t think you know the gravity of the situation!” and Spock, you know, swoops down like Superman and saves Kirk… come on, dude. That’s just really goofy. The fan dance, Scotty hitting his head on the bulkhead, “Don’t you know a jailbreak when you see one!”… it’s like, could we tone this stupid humor down?

I think Star Trek V has great moments in it, and I think that if you had somebody come in… also, the problem is – from an economic standpoint – of all the original films, it’s the least-selling. It has the least amount of box office [revenues], so you’re not going to get the people to invest any money into it because the sales figures don’t bear that out.

TrekCore: So fast-forwarding a few years, tell us a little bit about how CBS brought you and Roger Lay together to work on the bonus features for the Blu-Rays for Star Trek: The Next Generation.

Robert Meyer Burnett: Well, it’s really interesting. There’s an executive at CBS named Ana Barretto – Ana is a filmmaker in her own right – she was working on a documentary called The Table, about Marc Scott Zicree and his merry band of ne’er-do-wells, how he has this weekly meeting for people that live in Hollywood as a support system. It’s almost like Alcoholics Anonymous, but for people that want to get involved with the movie business; it’s sort of a way to network and help people out. Ana was in our office – I was editing a feature film called My Eleventh, the first feature from Gary and Edmund Entin, who were actors, I had known them for years and had worked with them on other DVDs – we were both in the offices of Gary Goddard, who created the [Las Vegas-based] Star Trek Experience.

So I was cutting this feature film, and Roger was working on this documentary – and unbeknownst to me, Ana was an executive at CBS Home Entertainment and she was talking to Roger about the fact that they were going to start this Blu-ray project. They were actually going to pull the trigger on the Star Trek restoration, they decided to –

TrekCore: Ah! So was that the first time you heard about TNG being remastered?

Robert Meyer Burnett: That was the first time ever. I remember having a conversation with them… I would walk by Roger’s cubicle every day and say hello, but I didn’t really know him – we’d see each other working, because I was always ensconced in my edit bay, cutting – one day we stopped and I realized that Roger’s a huge Star Trek fan, like he knows his shit! Then I started talking to Ana about what would go on – like, wouldn’t it be great if we could work on the special features?


Robert Meyer Burnett and his Trek VAM partner Roger Lay Jr.

So, Roger started consulting for CBS with Ana. He’d go in and talk to them – at first, they weren’t going to do any new VAM [Value Added Material, aka Special Features] at all. I think it was Roger’s persistence, and really getting in the trenches and saying “No, you can’t do a ‘Star Trek’ restoration and not do new VAM. You can’t do that.” So he’d been working… he’d actually been shooting footage – he wasn’t even hired – but the stuff that’s in the ENERGIZED! documentary, when he interviewed Dave [Grant] and Ryan [Adams] in the vault where they were keeping all the negatives… Roger, just hoping they’d pull the trigger, spent almost six months just shooting footage. Whenever he could, he would go to the turnover sessions when the Okudas started looking at the new visual effects at CBS Digital. He was there with his camera, shooting things in the hope that they would pull the trigger and want to make new VAM.

It’s kind of like what I did with Superman Returns. I was shooting material on Superman Returns six months before I was even hired, which is why I was there the day Brandon Routh had his screen test for the studio. I had that priceless footage of him getting his hair cut, and getting the glasses, and things like that – you know, it was only because of Roger’s love of Star Trek that he was doing it for free, because he had better things to do, but that’s the way we roll here! (Laughs)

So then they finally pulled the trigger, and CBS Home Entertainment with Ken Ross and Phil Bishop and Angelo Dante and Ana Barretto, they basically said “Go ahead!” and the first thing Roger did was hire me. It was decided… Roger has been very gracious. We both produced – he said to me, “Your track record as a DVD producer is exemplary, so you’ll produce it with me.”Roger takes the directing credit, which is fine, it’s his gig; I edit; we both produce. I’ve never had a more fruitful or satisfying working relationship with any colleague in the entertainment business – ever – than I’ve had with Roger. We both don’t have any ego between us. We have an ego when it comes to the fact that we want to be good, but he and I are both on the same page in terms of what we want.

We’re relentless in our pursuit of getting as many people as we can – like, we were not going to stop with not getting Diana Muldaur. I mean, Roger was on the phone with Diana, sending her e-mails… we were basically saying, “We can’t not have you.” She wasn’t in the best of health, and she’d been in the hospital… right after she came out of the hospital she agreed to do the interview for us, and she was just the sweetest, most delightful woman. The fact that we were so persistent – that Roger was so persistent – was totally endearing to her, and she had so much fun and was so sweet. We were really lucky.


The new interview with Diana Muldaur almost didn’t happen, but it’s a testament to the dogged determination of all involved that we’re able to hear Diana’s views.

CBS Home Entertainment has been, I think, astonished by what we’ve accomplished. To their credit, once we started doing this, Ken Ross was like – if we had a problem securing the cast – Ken was like, “I’m going to do whatever it takes.” Ken Ross has really shepherded this project and made sure… I mean, I’ve never had an executive EVER show as much interest or as much care, and give us as much support as Ken Ross has. Ken will call us in the edit bay on a weekend – he’ll know that we’re going to be here – it’ll be two o’clock in the morning and he’ll be like, “Guys! How’s it going? What’re you doing? You got anything new to show me? What’s going on?”

He really has been amazing. He watches all of our cuts – and I have to tell you, at first I thought “Oh god, we’re going to have a network executive riding roughshod over us…” – but not being a total Next Generation fan, every time we get notes from him… I’m not just blowing smoke up his ass, he has questions about the stories that we’re telling. He asks us logic questions – because we already know so much that we sometimes forget that we have to make sure our documentaries are clear for the layman that’s coming at these things for the first time. There’s been no better gauge of that then Ken Ross. Every time he’s ever given us notes, I can say he’s only ever made our pieces better and more concise, which has been great. Just the fact that he gets excited about what we’re doing is really, really nice.

Also, the support we get from Phil and Angelo and Ana… I wrote Angelo a letter yesterday. I mean, Angelo is always relentlessly finding things. He might not know what they are, but he’ll call up and he’ll say, “Roger, Rob, I found this box full of tapes – I don’t know what it is!” He’ll get it for us – no one has looked in this box for twenty-five years – and we’ll find like three-quarter-inch tapes of Nagilum tests, you know, that are on the Season Two documentary. It’s like “Where do these come from?!” No one has ever seen them before, but because we have the support it’s been great to find things.


The early test footage of Nagilum, played by actor Earl Boen, was included on the TNG Season 2 Blu-Rays. Robert Meyer Burnett describes how he was shocked and excited to see the footage for the first time.

I’ll tell you one of the things we’ve found that is pretty exciting – we haven’t used it yet – when The Next Generation was first talked about, they had to figure out how they were going to do the visual effects. There was talk at the time – this was just a couple of years after The Last Starfighter, when they did all those space visual effects – that there was talk about going all-CG. In 1987.

Various effects houses did a sort of bake-off, where they were given some footage from Star Trek III to do transporters and phaser fire… then they were asked to do CG models of the Enterprise. So we have these tests that these various effects companies did of visual effects – what the visual effects would have looked like had they been all CG. Ultimately, they were a little, uh, crude – to say the least – so they opted not to go that route, and they opted to go with models and motion control, THANK GOD, but we have this footage, and we’re going to use it on one of the subsequent releases. We don’t know when, because it’s not season-specific, but it’s crazy to have! It’s just something that was on a tape, Angelo found a box with tapes in it, we looked at the tapes, and there was this footage.

Roger and I… one of the great, fun things about this project is that we get these tapes, and we just look at each other like “Oh my god, no one’s ever looked at this stuff! Ever!” It might just be snippets, but even if we’ve got one shot of a Nagilum test… we try and use shots of everything we’ve got, but the Nagilum test, to me – having [actor] Earl Boen and all that – just being able to see, is great! Because it’s never shown up in books anywhere, and just to have it all…

In the Season Two documentary, I used every bit of footage from the Star Trek Phase II footage that existed. All of it. Everything. There is no more! (Laughs) There was some of it, in the Star Trek: The Motion Picture Director’s Cut DVD, but I used all of it that existed that I could squeeze in.

Go to Part: 1 2 3 4 5 6 7

***

ROBERT MEYER BURNETT wrote and directed FREE ENTERPRISE and produced Warner Premiere and Dark Castle’s THE HILLS RUN RED.

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ENT S1 Blu-Ray: Full Press-Release + Pre-Order Link

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ENT S1 Blu-Ray: Full Press-Release + Pre-Order Link

Yesterday we reported that Star Trek: Enterprise‘s first season makes its way on to Blu-Ray on March 26, 2013 and posted the finished cover art for the set. Today CBS has sent TrekCore the full press release for the first season including a disc-by-disc breakdown of the bonus features. Here’s the press release reproduced in its entirety:

EMBARK ON THE MAIDEN VOYAGE OF THE ENTERPRISE NX-01 IN
SPARKLING HIGH DEFINITION

STAR TREK ENTERPRISE

THE COMPLETE FIRST SEASON BLU-RAY™

Six-Disc Set Boasts New Special Features Including
Multi-Part Documentary With New Cast And Crew Interviews And
An Intimate Conversation With The Creators

Available March 26, 2013

HOLLYWOOD, Calif.(January 7, 2013) – Experience the historic voyage of the starship Enterprise NX-01 like never before when STAR TREK®: ENTERPRISE—THE COMPLETE FIRST SEASON makes its Blu-ray debut on March 26 from CBS Home Entertainment and Paramount Home Media Distribution.

enterprise-season-1-transparentThe STAR TREK: ENTERPRISE—THE COMPLETE FIRST SEASON Blu-ray boasts brand new bonus features including a multi-part, retrospective documentary called “To Boldly Go: Launching Enterprise” that gives fans an inside look at the development and production of the series and is exclusive to this collection. The documentary features interviews with the show’s cast and crew, some of which were shot as recently as December 2012, as well as archival footage and behind-the-scenes clips. The documentary includes:

Part One: Countdown – Chronicles the challenges faced by the producers and creative staff as they attempt to launch a new chapter in the Star Trek® saga by making the then-radical decision to create a prequel to the beloved original series. Features all new interviews with key personnel including creators Rick Berman and Brannon Braga, production designer Herman Zimmerman, technical consultants Michael and Denise Okuda, writers Andre Bormanis, Phyllis Strong and more.

Part Two: Boarding the NX-01 – Follows the team as they begin the casting process and production on the series 2-hour pilot “Broken Bow.” Features all-new interviews with key cast and crew including series pilot director James L. Conway and series leads Scott Bakula (“Jonathan Archer”), Connor Trinneer (“Trip Tucker”), and Dominic Keating (“Malcolm Reed”).

Part Three: First Flight – Charts the course for the rest of the series’ first season including all-new interviews with key production and post-production personnel.

The six-disc set also includes a candid conversation with the series’ creators, Rick Berman and Brannon Braga, offering a glimpse into their creative process. In addition, the Blu-ray features brand new commentaries on select episodes from the season, along with a host of previously released special features such as deleted scenes and outtakes.

STAR TREK: ENTERPRISE recounts the adventures of the pioneers of space travel who ventured into the universe 100 years before James T. Kirk helmed the starship of the same name. Set in the 22nd century, ENTERPRISE takes place in an era when interstellar travel is still in its infancy. Captain Jonathan Archer (Scott Bakula) has assembled a crew of brave explorers to chart the galaxy on a revolutionary spacecraft: Enterprise NX-01. As the first human beings to venture into deep space, these men and women will experience the wonder and mystery of the final frontier as they seek out new life and new civilizations.

The STAR TREK: ENTERPRISE – THE COMPLETE FIRST SEASON Blu-ray includes all 25 episodes from the inaugural season and will be available in 1080p with English 5.1 DTS-HD Master Audio, German and Italian 5.1 (Dolby Digital), and French, Castilian and Japanese Stereo Surround (Dolby Digital). The discs also include English SDH, French, German, Castilian, Italian, Japanese, Danish, Dutch, Finnish, Norwegian and Swedish subtitles. The Blu-ray is not rated in the U.S. and rated PG in Canada, and it will be available for the suggested retail price of $130.00 U.S. and $150.00 Canada.

The disc breakdown is as follows:

DISC ONE

Episodes

Special Features

  • Audio Commentary with co-creator/executive producer Brannon Braga, director James L. Conway, visual effects producer Dan Curry and cast members Connor Trinneer (Trip Tucker) and Dominic Keating (Malcolm Reed) on “Broken Bow”—NEW!
  • Audio Commentary with Brannon Braga and Rick Berman on “Broken Bow”
  • Text Commentary by Michael and Denise Okuda on “Broken Bow”
  • Deleted Scenes from “Broken Bow” (SD)
  • Deleted Scenes from “Fight or Flight” (SD)
  • In Conversation: Rick Berman and Brannon Braga—NEW! (HD)
  • Archival Mission Log: Creating Enterprise (SD)
  • Archival Mission Log: O Captain! My Captain! A Profile of Scott Bakula (SD)
  • Archival Mission Log: NX-01 File 02 (SD)
  • Cast Introduction—NEW (SD)
  • Network Presentation—NEW (SD)
  • Syndication Presentation—NEW (SD)

DISC TWO

Episodes

Special Features

  • Deleted Scene from “Unexpected” (SD)
  • Text Commentary by Michael and Denise Okuda on “The Andorian Incident”
  • Archival Mission Log: Cast Impressions: Season 1 (SD)
  • Archival Mission Log: Enterprise Secrets (SD)

DISC THREE

Episodes

Special Features

  • Audio commentary with writer/story editor André Bormanis and visual effects producer Dan Curry on “Silent Enemy”—NEW!
  • Deleted Scene from “Sleeping Dogs” (SD)
  • Archival Mission Log: Star Trek Time Travel: Temporal Cold Wars and Beyond (SD)
  • Archival Mission Log: Admiral Forrest Takes Center Stage (SD)

DISC FOUR

Episodes

Special Features

  • Audio Commentary with writers/executive story editors Mike Sussman and Phyllis Strong on “Shadows of P’Jem”—NEW!
  • Audio Commentary with co-creator/executive producer Brannon Braga, director David Livingston and cast members Connor Trinneer (Trip Tucker) and Dominic Keating (Malcolm Reed) on “Shuttlepod One”—NEW!
  • Deleted Scene from “Shuttlepod One” (SD)
  • Archival Mission Log: Inside Shuttlepod One (SD)
  • Archival Mission Log: NX-01 File 01 (SD)
  • Archival Mission Log: NX-01 File 03 (SD)

DISC FIVE

Episodes

Special Features

  • Deleted Scenes from “Oasis” (SD)
  • Deleted Scenes from “Fallen Hero” (SD)
  • Text Commentary by Michael and Denise Okuda on “Vox Sola”
  • Archival Mission Log: Enterprise Outtakes (SD)
  • On The Set —NEW (SD)

DISC SIX

Episodes

Special Features

  • Deleted Scene from “Two Days and Two Nights” (SD)
  • Deleted Scenes from “Shockwave, Part 1” (SD)
  • Documentary: “To Boldly Go: Launching Enterprise”—NEW! (HD)
    • Part 1: Countdown
    • Part 2: Boarding the NX-01
    • Part 3: First Flight
  • Archival Mission Log: Celebrating Star Trek® (SD)

Fans worldwide can lock in a pre-order for Season 1 of Star Trek: Enterprise below.

Order Star Trek: Enterprise Season 1 Blu-Ray today!



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ENT S1 Blu: Cover Art, Release Date, Preview Video

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ENT S1 Blu: Cover Art, Release Date, Preview Video

In our previous article, we previewed the raft of new bonus features which will be included on the first season release of Star Trek: Enterprise on Blu-Ray.

Today we can bring you the cover art for Season 1 and confirm that the release date for the United States & Canada has been set at March 26, 2013 (as always, we should point out cover art and release date are subject to change). Interestingly, the cover art is completely different from the three choices fans were asked to vote on back in November (see below for an explanation from CBS). Be sure to let us know what you think about it in the comments section!

Eagle-eyed viewers will notice that the title is referred to as “Star Trek: Enterprise Season One” in the cover-art. As we’re all aware, the show was titled simply “Enterprise” during the first two seasons. We’re told that CBS will be referring to the show as “Star Trek: Enterprise” for all merchandising and branding, however the title card of “Enterprise” will remain unchanged on the finished Blu-Rays.

CBS have also released a special video preview of the 3-part documentary “To Boldly Go: Launching Enterprise” which will be one of the main attractions on the Season 1 set. The clip is posted over at Yahoo TV and features Enterprise Executive Producer Brannon Braga and star Scott Bakula discussing the origins of the Captain Archer character.

Unfortunately the video at Yahoo TV is only playable in the U.S., hopefully CBS will address this problem as soon as possible. [EDIT: We now have the clip available internationally in 720p HD]

As we mentioned, Enterprise‘s first season documentary will be broken down into three parts. The first part, “Countdown” explores the challenges of creating a Trek prequel series (and includes interviews with Rick Berman, Brannon Braga, Herman Zimmerman, Michael and Denise Okuda, etc). “Part Two: Boarding the NX-01” chronicles the casting process and keys in on the production of the “Broken Bow” pilot (with Scott Bakula, director James Conway, Trinneer and Keating among the interviewees). “Part Three: First Flight” examines the rest of season one and offers interviews with production and post-production personnel. Also included in The Complete First Season are previously released special features, among them outtakes, deleted scenes and Archival Mission Logs.

Talking to StarTrek.com, CBS Home Entertainment Executive Vice President & General Manager Ken Ross explained that he didn’t feel any of the proposed covers that fans were asked to vote on in November really “nailed it” for him:

I didn’t feel that any of the three proposed covers really nailed it and represented that, so we listened to the fans and changed course. We dug deeper and found an old UPN promo poster utilized during the launch campaign for the series which introduces the cast in a strong, heroic pose in their EVA suits as the pioneers of space exploration in the Star Trek universe. It harkens back to that sense of discovery, heroism and exploration that served as the basis for the Star Trek concept. The image conveys the same spirit of adventure as The Right Stuff and other iconic stories of pioneers exploring a new frontier. We felt there was no better way to show who those characters really were and their significant role in the Trek mythos. That art became the basis for the new Blu-ray cover design. And for those lovers of the ship, we’re going to feature it on the back cover. We also read that many fans thought images representative of key scenes/episodes from the respective seasons should be used, and we are going to include such images on the backs as well.

One last piece of news… according to the article containing comments from Ken Ross, Star Trek: Enterprise Season One on Blu-Ray is set to retail at $130, the same price point as the Star Trek: The Next Generation Blu-Rays. This seems rather excessive (even after the obligatory discounts applied at stores such as Amazon) given that the series has not had to undergo the remastering necessary for TNG.

We’re told that a press release for the set is imminent as well as further previews of the new bonus material produced by Roger Lay Jr. and Robert Meyer Burnett. We’ll bring you news of the full press release and pre-order availability as soon as we get it, so be sure to stay tuned to TrekCore!

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CBS Go Borg Crazy with Special BOBW Blu-Ray + S3 Release Date

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CBS Go Borg Crazy with Special BOBW Blu-Ray + S3 Release Date

CBS are pulling out all the stops in 2013 as we hurtle toward the release of Star Trek: The Next Generation Season 3 on Blu-Ray in April. Firstly, Paramount in Australia have confirmed that their street-date for Season 3 is set to April 10, 2013. Fans should expect North American and European dates to be very similar, but we’ll of course post exact details as soon as CBS release them.

Of far greater interest is that Paramount Australia have also revealed that a second Star Trek Blu-Ray title will be released the same day. TrekCore can confirm that this title is in fact a feature-length full edit of “The Best of Both Worlds” (Parts 1 and 2). The episode consistently ranks as Number 1 in polls of the best episodes from Star Trek:The Next Generation, and CBS is giving it the royal treatment with a unique one-disc release, filled with specially made bonus features focusing on Star Trek‘s finest two-parter.

Be sure to check back regularly for more information on this special release, as well as full information on Star Trek: The Next Generation Season 3, coming soon.

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EXCLUSIVE: Denise Crosby Interview

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EXCLUSIVE: Denise Crosby Interview

I recently sat down with Star Trek: The Next Generation‘s very own Denise Crosby, known to fans the world over as Lieutenant Tasha Yar. Denise was very generous with her time and invited TrekCore to join her in the green-room at the recent Destination: Star Trek London convention. Enjoy the interview!

Denise Crosby Interview

Interviewed by Adam Walker for TrekCore.com

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TrekCore: It’s great to meet you Denise… I understand you’ve just come from Spain, was it or business or pleasure?

Denise Crosby: I was on a film jury for Sitges – the film festival.

TrekCore: What types of films were you evaluating?

Denise Crosby: It’s considered a fantastica festival, so science fiction, horror, genre, fantasy – all international. Twelve days.

TrekCore: Did you have fun? Did you have time to enjoy the Spanish weather?

Denise Crosby: Oh my god, it was beautiful. It’s divine. I mean when I could get out of the cinema, but I had to watch 36 films in 9 days.

TrekCore: Wow…

Denise Crosby: Crazy…

TrekCore: A lot of fans love the Trekkies movies that you produced about these types of conventions. What inspired you to take a frank look at that scene and would you ever do a Trekkies 3?

Denise Crosby: I would love to do Trekkies 3, and I think there’s one in us to do and we’re just putting some ideas together and finding the best time and place to do it. What inspired making a documentary about Trekkies was just – you know it hadn’t been done. There was no real look into this world of fandom and Star Trek fandom is so unique and the television show has the most unusual relationship with fans I have ever seen. You know, it’s a sort of symbiotic relationship. And I also felt that they weren’t getting their kind of just due, the people had been sort of…

TrekCore: … had been ridiculed somewhat…

Denise Crosby: Yes, exactly. And laughed at and the assumptions were not correct. So I thought, let’s… I had an entree into this world and so I just picked up a camera and just started filming.

TrekCore: Do you have a secret fandom of your own, which matches the passion of Trekkies… that you want to share with the world?!

<laughter>

Denise Crosby: I collect plastic mushrooms! <laughter> I’m not going to tell you that!! No, there’s nothing that I have that even comes close… You know I get passionate about certain sports at a certain level, but always in the playoffs and always in the final days and I’m kind of a crazy sports fanatic. But nothing like Star Trek.

TrekCore: So, it’s been 25 years now since Farpoint was on TV. Has your opinion of that really uneven first season when you appeared changed over these 25 years? Do you look back at it more fondly now?

Denise Crosby: Oh, I think always from a distance you can look at things a little bit easier and with humor and with compassion. It’s really incredible to see the Blu-ray.

TrekCore: I know, it looks fantastic!

Denise Crosby: It’s unbelievable! It’s just glistening…

TrekCore: <laughs> every hair, every wrinkle…

Denise Crosby: <laughs> Thank god I did it when I was so young you know because yeah, it’s an amazing look. But you know I have only fondness for the whole experience. It was just incredible.

TrekCore: So you’ve said in many interviews before that when you were actually filming the first season that you were not in a happy place… you were a bit miserable on the set, you didn’t feel like you belonged in that atmosphere. If you were the executive producer or the writer would you have done anything differently for your role to make you feel more comfortable in hindsight?

Denise Crosby: Well you know, the problem I always had with Star Trek… and what Gene Roddenberry made very clear to me… which was sort of the final push for me to make a decision to leave was that weren’t many multiple story lines ever going to be written in the show – where when you have other series with a number of cast members, you usually have like 2 or 3 story lines interwoven into this episode – and they didn’t want that with Star Trek. They wanted a very defined look – it was going to be the Captain and whatever he had to engender in that episode and everyone else would kind of fill in… you know first officer and Data, just like the original. Gene was sticking with that…

TrekCore: The Big Three…

Denise Crosby: Exactly. And that’s what I… I just didn’t want to be relegated to standing on that bridge episode after episode with nothing to do…

TrekCore: … and it was a big cast, there were nine players…

Denise Crosby: And that’s another thing – I think that they bit off more than they could chew – they didn’t … they had just put all these people on there and then didn’t quite know what to do with them.

TrekCore: So your last episode, for the fans at least, was the one where you were killed by the big oil monster… The ‘Skin of Evil‘. But you filmed another one after that called ‘Symbiosis‘, because the production was turned around, and then there’s a famous scene which fan’s have picked up on… just at the end of that episode you filmed last when you wave to the camera. Was that kind of just on the spur of the moment or did you plan it all along after you knew you were leaving?

Denise Crosby: Well I knew it was going to be my very last shot of the entire show – what I perceived to be my last shot – so I wanted to just do what I thought would be a bloop on the blooper reel and wave goodbye to the fans. Well then they said, “Cut” and they moved on.

TrekCore: And no one said anything?

Denise Crosby: I said, “They didn’t see that? They’ve got to redo it, they can’t use that…” and they had to use it.

TrekCore: And now on the Blu-ray you can see it even clearer, <laughing> you can zoom in and you’re like waving frantically and then there’s Gates and Patrick coming up in front of you…

Denise Crosby: Isn’t that cool? That’s totally for the fans… I’m so glad for that.

TrekCore: What can you remember about your last day on the set, do you have any memories of it?

Denise Crosby: Sure, I mean I thought that would be the last day and they came down with a cake and you know… But my favorite thing is when Rick Berman, the producer, came down to the set and the very first thing he did was pull off my communicator from my uniform and said, “Well, won’t be needing that anymore!” […] You used to just stick [it on with] velcro and it was just like some weird symbolic gesture… I don’t know if he thought I was going to sell it on eBay or you know… I mean they all looked the same – it wasn’t like mine was any special thing – it was just a very strange thing – I’ll never forget that. “Won’t be needing that anymore!” <chuckling> I was surprised he didn’t take out the rank pins…

TrekCore: <laughing> Like when they punch through the hats in Mary Poppins… “You’re no longer a banker… leave!”

Denise Crosby: Exactly… “Bye-bye!”

TrekCore: So the villain you came back to play afterwards, Sela, was loved by fans so much. What was the inspiration behind that from the writers’ standpoint and from your standpoint? And where did that blonde wig come from? Whose idea was that?

Denise Crosby: Isn’t that bizarre… a blonde Romulan? Well because of her being half human and Tasha’s daughter… The idea for Sela really came about from me. I had approached the producers after “Yesterday’s Enterprise” with the idea that maybe Tasha, when she went back on the Enterprise C, that she… I mean it was clearly established she and Lt. Castillo were in love… what we didn’t know is that Tasha was pregnant with Lt. Castillo’s baby. So that when they get engaged in this huge battle with the Romulans and everybody is just crashed… and decimated the ship… Tasha is still alive. And the Romulans take her as a prisoner so that they can raise this human baby as their own and use it as a tool against the Federation.

TrekCore: How did you come up with that? Was that just thinking one day, “Hmm?” <laughing>

Denise Crosby: <laughing> Sitting around, twiddling my thumbs and you know…

TrekCore: “Let’s get back into The Next Generation somehow…”

Denise Crosby: Yeah I don’t know… maybe it was in the air, you know people had maybe sort of talked to me about… you know at a convention or something… somehow I just composed this whole concept and I think it was because I had come back once, I thought, “Maybe we can find another way to come back.” So I pitched it. I called up Rick Berman and I went to lunch with him and I had lunch with him at the Paramount commissary and I said, “I have this idea.” And I gave him this idea and he kind of looked at me and went, “Interesting, let me think about it.” And I thought…

TrekCore: This was after stripping your commbadge of course… <chuckling>

Denise Crosby: Yes, right, but you know you had to go to him and I thought, “Well okay that’s it… he’s just obliging me and being polite. I’l never hear from him again.” A couple months went by and he called up and said, “We’re going to go with that idea you had, changing it a little bit. Instead of Lt. Castillo and you, she was held as a concubine by a Romulan General… so she’s half Romulan, she’s going to come back and she’s going to taunt… you know she’s going to be a Commander in the Romulan forces so she’s going to hate the Federation and hate her parents and hate her mother, her mother’s people…

TrekCore: A lot of, I think frustration, came in with fans towards the end of The Next Generation movie run that you weren’t brought back for any of those, especially with Nemesis since it was Romulan centered… Was there any talk or was there any approach to you from the producers about a cameo in that film.

Denise Crosby: I called them and asked them when I got wind of… that it was going to be a Romulan feature… “Can I come back?” And Rick Berman said, “You know we thought of it, we brought it up, but we can’t see any way that Sela would be around.”

TrekCore: Seems so strange that, I mean Wesley came back… Whoopi Goldberg came back for cameos…

Denise Crosby: Yeah…

TrekCore: So we were all waiting to see you…

Denise Crosby: I don’t know if I was being punished… or I don’t know… for leaving? You don’t know what works behind closed doors you know…

TrekCore: Yeah, absolutely. But there was certainly a lot of, I think anger, from fans that you weren’t in that movie because it was a goodbye to The Next Generation and you were integral to that show even if it was for a shorter time.

Denise Crosby: Oh absolutely. Well we know that. The truth will always win out.

TrekCore: So over your years that you’ve been involved with Star Trek, does it tend to all merge together now that it’s 25 years – is it a blur or do memories still stick out to you as being as fresh as the day that they happened?

Denise Crosby: It begins to kinda blur, you know, to remember what’s doing what and who was where and… but I still have a pretty clear memory of the whole experience of it all and it was great.

TrekCore: What has been your favorite role outside of Star Trek? Sometimes I think fans tend to forget that you guys had huge acting careers outside…

Denise Crosby: Right, right. Oh man, you know… every part you do you approach with all of everything you’ve got. I loved doing theatre and I’m about to do a new series next year [2013] for Showtime and they’re all really challenging and you just want to keep going… You know it’s… I can’t… It’s like asking which child do you like…

TrekCore: They’re different strands of your personality…

Denise Crosby: Yeah.

TrekCore: So please bring us up to speed on what you are doing at the moment. I know that you shot a film in August… I got “Birthmother” as the title?

Denise Crosby: Oh that was just a little short film… a friend of mine directed. But I did a pilot for Showtime called Ray Donovan. So it has been picked up for 12 more episodes starting in January.

TrekCore: So are you going to be in the full 12?

Denise Crosby: I’m going to be recurring…

TrekCore: Oh wonderful! What’s that about then?

Denise Crosby: It’s about a private investigator who is a fixer. So he’s cleaning up messes and… played by Liev Schreiber. So it’s a lot of Hollywood people: celebrities, sports stars, and a lot of sordid crimes and creepy stuff going on in LA and he’s kind of fixing it and he also has this parallel family drama going on with his father being in jail… played by John Voight. Elliot Gould… I play Elliot’s mistress.

TrekCore: <laughing> That sounds like a delicious role for you!

Denise Crosby: <laughing> It should be interesting.

TrekCore: And so when can we expect that?

Denise Crosby: I don’t know… it starts 2013 in the States.

TrekCore: Wonderful, thank you Denise. It’s been a pleasure talking to – thanks for the taking the time out for us, and enjoy the rest of your stay in London!

Denise Crosby: Thanks, it’s been so nice to talk to you finally!

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