Question on Richard Arnold and his role
- Thread starter RonG
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Sorry for the 40 minutes
It's fine. I discovered what Richard Arnold looked like (I never knew), found pictures of Crosby and Sirtis from the late 80s, found some comments about Arnold fromover the years, and even found one of my old tweets (comparing him to Ian Levine). Not the best use of my time, but also not the worst.
Yeah, it seems like he kind of was. I can't remember the details, but there were some other comments about him from people who worked on his Trek shows that also did not paint him in the best light.
Sorry to go off topic, but has Berman done anything since his time with Star Trek ended? I've seen most of the other major writers and producers from the shows names in other show's credits, but I don't think I've seen Berman's anywhere since These Are The Voyages.
I got the impression that he felt his time was up. Whatever else he might be he's not a dumb guy. I think he knew he was a spent force by the time Enterprise ended. For most of the final season I think Manny Coto was basically running the day to day operations and Berman was just there to sign off on things and so forth (at least until the final episode we shall not speak of).
I don't think he's ever been disappointed with his time with Star Trek or feels he did a bad job, but that it was time for new blood.
He's certainly been in the business long enough to know things move on. I imagine he's probably happy that Star Trek lives on and he's probably content to leave it in someone else's hands.
I don't think he's like Roddenberry or Arnold, that it has to have his seal of approval or anything to be official or canon or anything like that. I don't think he ever tried to interfere with the novels or other tie ins (in fact, the relaunches and their continuity started while he was still overseeing the franchise).
Yeah, but there's more to life than Star Trek. He could've moved on to something else if he'd wanted, and in fact in a Star Trek Magazine interview around the time he left Trek (excerpted here), he said he was working on a couple of other projects for Paramount and a couple of non-TV-related things. Evidently those didn't pan out, or he changed his mind.
Berman had no real influence on the tie-ins. Before Roddenberry's death, tie-ins were vetted by both the Star Trek office (Arnold representing Roddenberry) and Viacom Consumer Products (under Paula Block).
Berman was never the creative guy. He always had a creative producer (Piller, Taylor, Behr, Braga, Coto) to handle the creative side of things while he made sure the trains ran on time and kept the studio happy, occasionally dipping in creatively on pilots and films.
There's Diane Carey's fate after the Broken Bow novelization. I suspect Braga went to Berman and Berman made it known the production office was displeased, so he may not have been behind it but he would have made it happen.
I think that was more the exception that the rule. And in that case I actually don't really blame him for being upset (though I probably wouldn't have banished her necessarily). She clearly did not like "Broken Bow" which begs the question why she didn't just say she'd rather not write it if she didn't like it.
But most of the time I got the impression they left the tie-ins to others to worry about it.
Yeah, I figured either they didn't pan out, or maybe after 18 years maybe he just wanted a break or felt it was time to retire.
I always felt Berman got a bad rap from some fans. He had a bit of an ego you could say, but then I think most people in the business do. Kind of goes with the territory. Sometimes maybe he was slow to change, but he wasn't totally change averse. They did break some new ground during his term. The shows became more serialized and less episodic, and it was Enterprise that first introduced the idea of a season long story arc.
I agree with Allyn, others tended to be the storytellers. He seemed to be more the guy in charge of the nuts and bolts, making sure they had the tools and people they needed and keeping things on track.
I still remember when I used to frequent the trekmovie website I felt like a lone wolf defending the Berman regime. Every one at the time was all about Abrams and Berman was the guy that ruined Star Trek and almost killed it. I never saw it that way. It was time for new blood, yes. But Berman Trek kept me plenty entertained for years. And I still think Enterprise with Manny Coto in the picture could have went on another 2 or 3 years.
And it sort of tells you something about Berman Trek that we novel readers still want to read stories based on the previous spin-offs.
There was a brief repetitional renaissance for Berman (and Braga) a while ago, as they began discussing (or scapegoating) network interference with Enterprise (nixing the idea to have the first half-season set on Earth while the ship was being built and the crew was assembled, insisting on the Temporal Cold War so there was an element of the show moving further into the future), but, IIRC, when the Fifty-Year Mission books came out with a lot of people calling out Berman for behavior like what were talking about with Cosby a few posts ago, that sort of faded back out.
She hated The Next Generation (at least she talked shit about it and Roddenberry at a con back around 1988 or 1989) and later wrote a book in which Picard, who'd been a starship captain for decades by the time the book was set, had to learn how to be a good captain by watching Kirk on the holodeck.
She was the lead writer for New Earth, a spinoff about a bunch of characters who rejected everything Starfleet and the Federation stood for.
I assume her books sold well enough for Pocket (particularly John Ordover, as I recall) to keep going back to her, but I have to wonder why she wanted to keep writing them. It was like getting one of those youtube video ranters to write Discovery tie-ins.
If only Richard Arnold hadn't had that personal beef with Peter David, his public profile might've stayed lower (sort of like the other figures from that era featured in the documentary Chaos on the Bridge, the last place I saw Arnold as a talking head), though that may not have been what he wanted...
From what I could gather chronologically in the Usenet posts of the time, it was PAD complaining about him in print that made his practices known to fandom at large beyond the licencing realm behind the scenes.
Is Fifty-Year Mission where the stuff about Berman being an ass came from? I don't remember the details, but I read an article on one of the sites I go to with quotes from Marina Sirtis about him making some pretty nasty comments to her over the years.
Sorry for the detour, but this caught my eye on page 1:
Not specifically calling Christopher out on this because I see it everywhere in Trek fandom, but this widely held perception of Star Trek as somehow daring is rather exaggerated and oft repeated as if it were gospel.
Trek fans believe it because they've been told it repeatedly and since most 60s TV drama no longer get airplay (especially the half-hour ones) it's difficult for a modern viewer to accurately assess this for themselves. Sure, Trek did have things to say, but any serious dive into 60s TV demonstrates there were way more daring shows prior to and concurrent with it. @Harvey introduced me to The Defenders—a directly political show—which dealt with social issues for most of its four year run (fall 1961–spring 1966), including pedophilia and vigilantism ("The Attack"), teen pregnancy and abortion in general ("The Benefactor"), etc. The Virginian once featured Ann Francis as a female lawyer, tackled class issues, the death penalty, Native American and women’s rights. N.Y.P.D. portrayed anti-gay prejudice in its premier episode ("Shakedown") on September 5, 1967: a topic Trek would duck for decades. Even lighter fare like I Spy featured Eartha Kitt as a heroin addict and didn't have a happy ending. These shows did so without the relative safety of allegory that Trek often employed.
Arguably, Star Trek was part of a more politically minded trend in TV from the early 1960s, not a vanguard of it. It was certainly more daring than most contemporary scifi/fantasy/light entertainment, but compared to the drama-dramas it was frequently kid stuff by comparison to the largely forgotten heavy hitters of the era.
Not specifically calling Christopher out on this because I see it everywhere in Trek fandom, but this widely held perception of Star Trek as somehow daring is rather exaggerated and oft repeated as if it were gospel.
Trek fans believe it because they've been told it repeatedly and since most 60s TV drama no longer get airplay (especially the half-hour ones) it's difficult for a modern viewer to accurately assess this for themselves. Sure, Trek did have things to say, but any serious dive into 60s TV demonstrates there were way more daring shows prior to and concurrent with it. @Harvey introduced me to The Defenders—a directly political show—which dealt with social issues for most of its four year run (fall 1961–spring 1966), including pedophilia and vigilantism ("The Attack"), teen pregnancy and abortion in general ("The Benefactor"), etc. The Virginian once featured Ann Francis as a female lawyer, tackled class issues, the death penalty, Native American and women’s rights. N.Y.P.D. portrayed anti-gay prejudice in its premier episode ("Shakedown") on September 5, 1967: a topic Trek would duck for decades. Even lighter fare like I Spy featured Eartha Kitt as a heroin addict and didn't have a happy ending. These shows did so without the relative safety of allegory that Trek often employed.
Arguably, Star Trek was part of a more politically minded trend in TV from the early 1960s, not a vanguard of it. It was certainly more daring than most contemporary scifi/fantasy/light entertainment, but compared to the drama-dramas it was frequently kid stuff by comparison to the largely forgotten heavy hitters of the era.
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Okay, so its uniqueness has been overstated (and I've done so myself), but as you say, it was still toward the daring end of the spectrum, and more so than other SFTV of the day. It did have to push against the censors, as I'm sure those other daring shows did too. This was a time when SFTV was presumed by default to be kid stuff, and Star Trek's aspiration was to defy that preconception and prove that science fiction could be just as smart and sophisticated as the best mainstream dramas. Maybe it didn't match or surpass them, but it was still an exception for its genre. The myth that it was a typical sci-fi show for its day is probably even more prevalent than the myth that it was the most progressive show on the air.
We as fans probably go overboard with how much Star Trek pushed the envelope. But yeah, Star Trek generally was more subtle about it.
What attracts me first to any show/movie franchise is whether it's entertaining or not. And Star Trek was entertaining. Even when it was 'bad', like "Spock's Brain" or "And the Children Shall Lead" (don't know why but I always like that episode
I still found it fun. Some of the subtle messaging is something that came later.What else that attracted me to Star Trek was it's generally positive future of mankind. A lot of science fiction that depicted mankind's future were generally negative or dystopian. "Planet of the Apes", "The Omega Man", "Soylent Green", "Rollerball", even "Logan's Run"--I liked all those movies but they generally predicted some sort of dystopian future. But Star Trek was different. We get a better sense of Earth of the future in TNG, but even in the original series we see that we finally got over our differences. We were finally a united people trying to better ourselves.
And the beauty of Star Trek is it did all that subtly. It wasn't beating you over the head with it because that wasn't necessary. People of different races and backgrounds working together was the norm. They didn't need to smack you in the face with it because it was the most natural thing in the world to them.
And then, sometimes, Star Trek, usually allegorically, might tackle some sort of issue of the day. In many ways, one of my other favorite shows, Dallas, did a much better job at tackling heady issues (I'm currently rewatching the 1978-79 season and already the show handled homosexuality--a huge deal for a show from 1979, alcoholism, and drug use). But with Star Trek it was a bit different. And I think it's important to remember the show was continually being threatened with cancellation so that probably curtailed their desire to really get too deep in social commentary, and they kept it more subtle.
But it's probably important to remember Star Trek was a show to entertain first. I think the writers were more focused on the sci-fi adventure than messaging. And they did a good job of that I think.
So were most shows. The Virginian producer Frank Price made an interesting point:
“One of my maxims to all was that our goal was to make our shows for the critical ten percent of the audience. Ninety percent of the audience will be entertained by almost anything you do—if they like the actors and the concept of the series. But ten percent have a higher threshold of approval. And those were the people we were trying to please. We didn’t always succeed, but we were always trying”.
That show was in the top 30 for 2/3rds of its 9 year run, many of those in the top 20, something Trek never achieved. Same with The Defenders, which was highly rated for half its run.[/QUOTE]
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