This morning IESB ran a story claiming to have some minor plot details for JJ Abrams’ Star Trek XI; I read it and was interested, but don’t tend to like linking to stories like this without some kind of outside confirmation. They end up being fake too often, and it’s a bummer running a retraction for a story I didn’t even get wrong myself.
You’ll remember that Moriarty at Ain’t It Cool broke big news about the plot of Trek XI, especially about how the movie concerns a group of time traveling Romulans headed to the past to wipe out James T Kirk before he ever became a thorn in their side. One of the rumors IESB is running concerns how the Romulans get back in time – they use the time portal from the classic Trek episode City on the Edge of Forever. You know, the one where Kirk lets his girlfriend get hit by a car. I usually just don’t return their phone calls when I want to break up, but then I’m not half the man Kirk is.
Anyway, this rumor has reached the ears of Harlan Ellison, the cranky genius who wrote the episode. It turns out that he heard nothing about Paramount using City on the Edge of Forever as a starting point for this movie, and apparently that’s kind of a big deal. I’ll let Ellison explain it to you:
Would someone go to that site, and suggest to those people there, that "City" and all its elements EXCEPT specific Star Trek characters, belong to Harlan Ellison–author of that much-lauded episode–by terms of the Separation of Rights clause of the Writers Guild’s Minimum Basic Agreement (MBA), and if Mr. Abrams–with whom I’m currently on strike–or anyone else, at Paramount or elsewhere, thinks they’re going to use MY creations–whether the City, the Guardians, Sister Edith Keeler, or any other elements CREATED BY HARLAN ELLISON…they had damned well better lose the unilateral arrogance, get in touch with me, or my agent, Marty Shapiro, and be prepared to pay for the privilege of mining the lode I own.
Ellison’s history with the Star Trek movie franchise is troubled at best (go look up his experience pitching a Star Trek motion picture that would have taken the crew to the very edge of the universe to meet God. The producers didn’t think the story was big enough), and he’s cantankerous in a way that only a brilliant old coot can be, so I expect that Star Trek XI‘s already rumored astronomical budget (150 million plus!!!) is about to get a little bit bigger as Paramount pays him off. And remember, Ellison’s no stranger to taking these things to the limit – he got an out of court settlement over The Terminator riffing on stuff he had written.