CBS Asks Phase II Not To Film Spinrad’s Lost Star Trek Script – Will Film New Gerrold Script Instead March 28, 2012
(by Anthony Pascale at Trekmovie.com, Filed under: CBS/Paramount, Fan Productions, New Voyages/Phase II, TOS , trackback)

A few weeks back we reported that the Star Trek Phase II fan series was going to film Norman Spinrad’s “lost” Star Trek script titled "He Walked Among Us." However, it looks like CBS has put the kibosh on the production. TrekMovie has talked with Phase II’s James Cawley to get the details on what happened and where they go next.




CBS Asks Phase II Not To Film Spinrad’s’ "He Walked Among Us"

As reported in our previous article, after sci-fi writer Norman Spinrad finished work on the Star Trek episode "The Doomsday Machine" he was commissioned (and paid $5000) to write another episode for the series. Spinrad turned around a script dealing with the prime directive called "He Walked Among Us," but after it was re-written by producer Gene Coon into something which Spinrad felt was an "unfunny comedy" he asked Gene Roddenberry to pull the episode from the schedule. Fast forward to 2012 and Spinrad rediscovers the script and publishes it online as an e-book which gets the notice of the fan production Star Trek: Phase II.

However the New York Times is reporting that following the announcement that Phase II was going to shoot Spinrad’s script in October, CBS contacted the fan production asking them not to move foreword with "He Walked Among Us." The report has been confirmed with Phase II producer/star James Cawley, who tells TrekMovie that he was "happy to comply" with the request and that there was "no animosity." Cawley notes that "Star Trek is their sandbox and we have always worked with CBS so this was not a problem."

CBS also asked Mr. Spinrad to stop selling the script online, and he has complied. The writer offered the following explanation on Facebook "I and CBS have agreed to resolve our disputes concerning the ownership of the Work; as part of the settlement between the Parties, the Parties have agree that there will be no further comment; and CBS is considering opportunities to offer licensed copies of the Work."

This wouldn’t have been the first time that Phase II has worked with a script that began life at Paramount (now CBS). On April 5th Phase II will release "The Child" which was originally written by Jon Povill and Jaron Summers for Paramount’s never-produced Star Trek: Phase II project in the 70s. The script was later re-written by Maurice Hurley for the second season Star Trek: The Next Generation. And in 2008 Phase II released the two-part episode "Blood and Fire" based on a script originally written by David Gerrold (writer of "Trouble With Tribbles") for Star Trek: The Next Generation.

Cawley confirms that he had no pushback from CBS on those previous episodes and he does not know why they are treating Spinrad’s "He Walked Among Us" differently. In a statement regarding this issue CBS says "We fully appreciate and respect the passion and creativity of the ‘Star Trek’ fan and creative communities. This is simply a case of protecting our copyrighted material and the situation has been amicably resolved.”

Cawley says that Phase II continues to move forward. In June he plans to go into production on "Bread and Savagery" a new script by Rick Chambers which will be a sequel to the original Star Trek series episode "Bread and Circuses." And in October, instead of producing Spinrad’s script, Cawley is now planning on filming an episode based on a new script from David Gerrold. No details yet on that script except Cawleywould’s hint "it involves something fuzzy."

One wonders if the script is too close to the JJ Abrams movie that is currently being done?

Good point Captain, but then again it might just be that CBS doesn't want fans using their material without permission (this makes some sense).

PS Am I seeing things in double or are some posts duplicated?
viewtopic.php?f=5&t=4521&p=70484
viewtopic.php?f=5&t=4520&p=70483

and

viewtopic.php?f=5&t=4519&p=70482
viewtopic.php?f=5&t=4518&p=70481

Deleted duplicate posts

Working on timing of the animation, opening scene, Dominion Trailer.
It is a slow process. Even with dumbed down renders it takes hours to get a
few seconds of animation.

Captain B is working on a ship model for the remaining scenes.

And it is not an easy mesh....

This means we need more CPU power... You are working on Blender, right? If so, I will see if I can install it on a monster workstation (24 GB of RAM, Intel Xeon processors, 2GB GPU NVidia card) I have at the office

Edit: We could also try using the GPU:
http://wiki.blender.org/index.php/Doc:2 ... _Rendering

When I get home I will look up the details on the system. We can always us a faster system. In short though it is running on a NVidia GPU with gigs of ram, an Intel quad CPU on 64 bit bender. These builds are big and take a lot of time to render.

I have just set up Blender and I am going some over some examples from:
http://www.ni-mate.com/use/blender/
and mainly the Bunny animation (Bunny.blend).

Rendering 10 frames with the GPU takes only 13sec. Of course I understand that the Bunny is very simple but it is a benchmark nonetheless. If you want we can try one of your .blend files and we can compare. Using our collective resources we can doing the work much faster

Edit: I also rendered the robo_ao.blend file from the official "regression suite". That one took about 4 minutes to render and save into an avi video.

Turn on Cycles rendering and you will see there are a lot of setting in the render options. Turning up the render passes to 1000 or more for example will get a better quality image but take a lot longer. Even with my files you have to match all the option settings before you render to make a valid comparison.

I will check the details when I get home and send you a file to look at.

If your system is faster you can send it to me. That will save the time of sending files.

Wow, cool collaboration. Very "Federation" ish

I will do this on Monday, as soon as I'm back at the office.
I hope you don't mean that I should send you the workstation Just kidding...

By the way, I was thinking that even if my system is much faster there would be too much hassle to render the videos with files going back and forth etc. So, I was wondering if we (Kenneth) could do the rendering on the (amazon) cloud:
http://aws.amazon.com/ec2/

Apparently, some people have already done it with blender
http://blenderartists.org/forum/showthr ... Amazon-EC2

Of course this costs money, but perhaps then we could utilize the donations some people on the Facebook site have suggested. Any thoughts?

Edit: Of course I would also be willing to donate.