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New Axanar trailer
starkaos
Member Posts: 11,556 Arc User
in Ten Forward
A new Axanar Trailer has just been released. It contains new footage and a behind the scenes look.
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CBS would probably have done better to make a deal to have the new studio produce the Four Years War as an open-channel Trek series for them in order to raise anticipation for their CBSAA Trek, but Moonves's ego and prejudice against TOS no doubt blew that option right off the table. The carefully cost-saving way Axanar is put together they could have made the series relatively cheaply which would have been perfect as a companion to DSC since they would have been a financial gamble at the time, and the DSC production team (who seem to be mostly movie people instead of TV) could have learned some tricks from them about doing more with less.
they are like Nintendo. Nintendo went after someone who made a remake of Metroid 2, which was VERY good...and stopped him....despite him making it for years. Sega, on the other hand, saw this one guy making a 2D Sonic game, and they liked it, and HIRED him to make 2D games for them. I heard Lucas hired folks who impressed him with their fan films.
THAT is how it should have been handled.....and NOT TRIBBLE over EVERYONE with this STUPID rules for fan films, now.
Ugh......Hollywood.....
Let us explore it... together. Each man hides a secret pain. It must be exposed and reckoned with. It must be dragged from the darkness and forced into the light. Share your pain. Share your pain with me... and gain strength from the sharing.
Let us explore it... together. Each man hides a secret pain. It must be exposed and reckoned with. It must be dragged from the darkness and forced into the light. Share your pain. Share your pain with me... and gain strength from the sharing.
To be fair, Peters may have been intending to plow the additional raised funds back into the production instead of pocketing it. When they could not get CBS interested in hiring them that left them a bit short.
The way he did it, with merchandising, was not smart because that kind of thing is a big deal to the networks but if they had someone with more of an open mind than Moonves at CBS they could have handled that problem a lot better than they did and come out with something advantageous to both, like CBS seizing the merchandising (perhaps even specifying penalties and advertising the fact) when striking a series deal.
Doing that and letting the fanfilm community know that merchandising was strictly off limits would have taken care of the problem more effectively than the draconian rules that effectively destroyed the community. Lucas showed that a professional studio and third party projects can coexist just fine in the novel industry with just a little organization and reasonable rules, Star Trek could have done the same thing for live action films.
It is all moot now however.
That is not as uncommon in Hollywood as you might think, the film industry is something of a snake pit where what would be called graft and corruption in a political system is just everyday business there. For instance the Academy Awards came about because of Louis B. Mayer (one of the "M"s in MGM) building himself a palatial beach house using studio resources and realizing that the unions springing up in the industry would soon stop that kind of abuse if nothing was done to stave them off.
If the shady hustle dance is done right then a deal of some sort is struck and all is forgiven and the lawyers take care of the details. Peters was using a familiar formula by treating the crowdfunding a bit like the normal industry investor-model setup but made a bad misstep by not taking Moonves's personality and opinions into account enough (if at all) and his "bold move" blew up in his face instead of being swept under the red carpet while all parties involved smiled and talked about the great plans they had.
It is not much different from the music industry in that regard. Is it a good way of doing things? Personally I don't think so but strictly speaking it is not outright illegal though it skirts it very very closely at times, and it is the way things worked in the industry pretty much since the beginning of it.
Using the crowdfunding that way could have eventually been a way for viewers to influence what is made by the professional studios more, though again I am a bit cynical on that point so I don't think any influence like that would last long before the studios became immune to the influence and just took the money.
Yep, since when has HOLLYWOOD been pure, noble and honest?
And like above, the music industry ain't much better. Hell, back in the 90's the church near me, when I still lived in Detroit kept trying to raise funds...yet the vicar sure had a nice set of wheels. Not to mention the whole Kwaumi 'the thug mayor' Kikpatrick scandals in the early 2000's.
And you all know my take on the whole CBS thing with Abdin Anas, the game make who was making 'Tardigrades' game, several years ago, while, at the same time, struggling to take care of both of his very sick parents (they both needed diaper changing, among other things)....just for CBS to conveniently make a series with pretty much the same stuff...even the characters...in looks and personas....and get away with it....I do not CARE what some of you think...that guy got TRIBBLED over royally...and I totally lost whatever respect for CBS I had for 'em. Someone ELSE needs to take the Star Trek property.....or go public domain.
They gotta PRACTICE what they PREACH. Big corporations are corrupt and shady, willing to TRIBBLE over public, workers and toss morals out the window, if it means $$$ and power. It's like a a plate of raw oysters.....sure it might be all posh and fancy....but more likely than not, it's just gonna make you sick.
Smell ya's later.
*drops mic and walks away*
There are other ways to defend the IP without a ham-fisted smackdown, they do it every day in Hollywood. And Peters was on the edges of Hollywood for a while (it is almost impossible for independents to do much in this country without dealing with them in some way), not any different from other independents who try to break into the industry full time (and yes, not all want to get in) so he knew the game, just not well enough to avoid getting cocky and hitting a minefield.
The industry generally admires bold moves, but there is a very intricate dance with arcane murky rules governing it and a lot depends on ego and whether the "injured" party takes it as a "spunky try" and takes them into the fold or an insult that needs to be addressed. Think of Leia and the thermal detonator, Jabba was amused but Moonves wasn't so the proverbial thermal detonator Peters held went off in his hand.
Another thing Leia was right about was her statement about trying to grip power too tightly, in this case the clumsy iron fisted response from the studios offended and disillusioned a lot of fans and helped set the stage for the major fracturing of the fanbase that happened with DSC.
You simply cannot apply black and white morality to Hollywood and the entertainment industry in general, it always was and probably always be shadows and shades of gray.
That's why I got ZERO respect for Hollywood anymore.
> (Quote)
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> There are other ways to defend the IP without a ham-fisted smackdown, they do it every day in Hollywood. And Peters was on the edges of Hollywood for a while (it is almost impossible for independents to do much in this country without dealing with them in some way), not any different from other independents who try to break into the industry full time (and yes, not all want to get in) so he knew the game, just not well enough to avoid getting cocky and hitting a minefield.
>
> The industry generally admires bold moves, but there is a very intricate dance with arcane murky rules governing it and a lot depends on ego and whether the "injured" party takes it as a "spunky try" and takes them into the fold or an insult that needs to be addressed. Think of Leia and the thermal detonator, Jabba was amused but Moonves wasn't so the proverbial thermal detonator Peters held went off in his hand.
>
> Another thing Leia was right about was her statement about trying to grip power too tightly, in this case the clumsy iron fisted response from the studios offended and disillusioned a lot of fans and helped set the stage for the major fracturing of the fanbase that happened with DSC.
>
> You simply cannot apply black and white morality to Hollywood and the entertainment industry in general, it always was and probably always be shadows and shades of gray.
What other way was there for CBS to defend their IP without a lawsuit?
Independent filmmakers make films all the time without the studios. You may not know of them because you’re not paying much attention to independent film.
Peter’s bold moves isnt was generated a lawsuit. It was him making money off someone else’s IP. Doesn’t matter who it is. If I made a Marvel film that raised $1M and I drew a salary from it the Mickey Mouse lawyers would be on me. Even when Lucas was letting people make fan films...if I made one and drew a salary from the film Lucas would have had his lawyers come after me.
Let us explore it... together. Each man hides a secret pain. It must be exposed and reckoned with. It must be dragged from the darkness and forced into the light. Share your pain. Share your pain with me... and gain strength from the sharing.
2020 has certainly been great for corporations. It is getting to the point where science fiction dystopias like Cyberpunk 2077 and similar science fiction stories with Megacorporations are the government are predicting the future. It is startling how much corporations control our lives like Amazon and Google and it is just getting worse.
For one thing, actually produce Star Trek which they were not doing at that time (Paramount Movie was, but not directly for CBS so it may not have counted if push came to shove). Axanar probably did them a favor by getting Moonves to move on a new Trek series, some IP legal issue sites are of the opinion that Star Trek was starting to get into the gray area even with reruns going and could have been at risk of losing the trademark from disuse if a savvy and well-connected enough company decided to challenge them for it, even with Disney playing games with IP laws via lobbying to keep their own properties safe without constant use.
In fact, trademark aside, without Disney's subversion of the copyright laws TOS itself would move into public domain (separately from the trademarked name) just two years from now. In fact, even with Disney's diddling with the laws, unless CBS starts making new TOS episodes that are close enough to the style and premise of the originals that a challenger cannot prove that newer Treks are not the same thing it could still fall into public domain (possibly under a different name) by mid century no matter what they do with new Treks that are similar in name only. It is possible that SNW is at least partially an effort to head that off though.
Also, CBS could have swung a deal with Peters to acquire the Axanar project, possibly with a PR show of force to discourage others from trying it, and then turn around and hire Peters' independent studio to produce that "seized" Axanar for them and the matter would have gone away and left everyone satisfied.
And yes, some independents do make films without dealing with Hollywood or guild and association rules at all, but those films then never see the light of day except for film festivals, foreign markets, and whatnot because Hollywood has its fingers in all of the serious for-profit distribution channels in this country. Sure, there is YouTube and whatnot but those are not exactly outlets that would come close to to making the films profitable.
One example is that Paula Abdul ran into that problem with her first video, she shot it using the equipment and personnel from her own dance business for less than $5000 but was then forced to reshoot it using guild equipment and personnel for over thirty thousand for the exact same video using the exact same effects and quality. Otherwise no one would have carried the video since they would risk being blacklisted.
Peters himself did not make anything off of the production, his "salary" was found by a legal audit to be actually just reimbursements for things he paid for out of pocket. The rest of the studio staff were making the legal minimum ($5000) in salary since the law in California makes not paying people at least a minimum amount illegal. And they did hire professional actors and others for things that could not be done otherwise, but that is not unusual for fan films.
As for equipment and whatnot, that is a little bit on the gray side, but fan films have bought things necessary to produce their films out of contributions before. The sheer magnitude of the money raised sounds like a lot but Axanar was to be a nearly theater grade film using a core of professional actors, was to run 90 minutes plus the prelude film on top of it, and that level of funding is actually quite tight for that.
This page goes into some of the details and legal ramifications of that supposed profit:
https://fanfilmfactor.com/2018/06/26/an-apology-about-axacon-leads-to-a-question-did-alec-peters-personally-profit-from-axanar/
I am not trying to say Peters was pure as the driven snow in that fiasco or anything, he certainly wasn't, and he made a serious blunder that the fan film community ended up taking crippling damage from, but the profit argument is wrong.
> (Quote)
>
> For one thing, actually produce Star Trek which they were not doing at that time (Paramount Movie was, but not directly for CBS so it may not have counted if push came to shove). Axanar probably did them a favor by getting Moonves to move on a new Trek series, some IP legal issue sites are of the opinion that Star Trek was starting to get into the gray area even with reruns going and could have been at risk of losing the trademark from disuse if a savvy and well-connected enough company decided to challenge them for it, even with Disney playing games with IP laws via lobbying to keep their own properties safe without constant use.
>
> In fact, trademark aside, without Disney's subversion of the copyright laws TOS itself would move into public domain (separately from the trademarked name) just two years from now. In fact, even with Disney's diddling with the laws, unless CBS starts making new TOS episodes that are close enough to the style and premise of the originals that a challenger cannot prove that newer Treks are not the same thing it could still fall into public domain (possibly under a different name) by mid century no matter what they do with new Treks that are similar in name only. It is possible that SNW is at least partially an effort to head that off though.
>
> Also, CBS could have swung a deal with Peters to acquire the Axanar project, possibly with a PR show of force to discourage others from trying it, and then turn around and hire Peters' independent studio to produce that "seized" Axanar for them and the matter would have gone away and left everyone satisfied.
>
> And yes, some independents do make films without dealing with Hollywood or guild and association rules at all, but those films then never see the light of day except for film festivals, foreign markets, and whatnot because Hollywood has its fingers in all of the serious for-profit distribution channels in this country. Sure, there is YouTube and whatnot but those are not exactly outlets that would come close to to making the films profitable.
>
> One example is that Paula Abdul ran into that problem with her first video, she shot it using the equipment and personnel from her own dance business for less than $5000 but was then forced to reshoot it using guild equipment and personnel for over thirty thousand for the exact same video using the exact same effects and quality. Otherwise no one would have carried the video since they would risk being blacklisted.
>
> Peters himself did not make anything off of the production, his "salary" was found by a legal audit to be actually just reimbursements for things he paid for out of pocket. The rest of the studio staff were making the legal minimum ($5000) in salary since the law in California makes not paying people at least a minimum amount illegal. And they did hire professional actors and others for things that could not be done otherwise, but that is not unusual for fan films.
>
> As for equipment and whatnot, that is a little bit on the gray side, but fan films have bought things necessary to produce their films out of contributions before. The sheer magnitude of the money raised sounds like a lot but Axanar was to be a nearly theater grade film using a core of professional actors, was to run 90 minutes plus the prelude film on top of it, and that level of funding is actually quite tight for that.
>
> This page goes into some of the details and legal ramifications of that supposed profit:
>
> https://fanfilmfactor.com/2018/06/26/an-apology-about-axacon-leads-to-a-question-did-alec-peters-personally-profit-from-axanar/
>
> I am not trying to say Peters was pure as the driven snow in that fiasco or anything, he certainly wasn't, and he made a serious blunder that the fan film community ended up taking crippling damage from, but the profit argument is wrong.
So reward his bad behavior. If CBS hired him after that copycats would have popped up out of the woodwork thinking that’s how you make it in Hollywood.
I also seem to recall that CBS couldn’t make new Trek while Paramount was making movies (I seem to recall reading this in the article about why Abrams left Trek over the merchandising).
Also that’s not how IP works. If for some reason Star Trek becomes someone else’s or public domain the TOS look doesn’t go with it. Example: if we look at Sherlock Holmes we have a series of movies starring Robert Downey Jr, Sherlock starring Cumberbatch and Elementary starring Jonny Lee Miller. And for all those Sherlock’s what is missing? The hat, pipe and magnifying glass that we closely relate to Basil Rathbone’s version....it because that version protected. If NBC got the rights to do their own Star Trek they couldn’t use the TOS look because that would still be CBS version. This is why during the lawsuit you saw CBS lawyers arguing over their version of Vulcans (eyebrows and ears) and other fine details. (Having just looked at the complaint the Axanar people got sued for trademark infringement).
As someone that works in independent film I tell people all the time not to do fan films. You’ll never know when the IP holder will come around and pull the plug. Original short films get way more notice than a Star Trek or Star Wars fan film.
Let us explore it... together. Each man hides a secret pain. It must be exposed and reckoned with. It must be dragged from the darkness and forced into the light. Share your pain. Share your pain with me... and gain strength from the sharing.
What? You want to keep your car, just because you're the one who paid for it? How selfish and greedy!
You might be right about the legal aspects, I am not a lawyer so I don't know the subtleties of the subject and am just passing along what I found out from others (and no, not Midnights Edge or Doomcock, stuff that is apparently legitimate).
While researching patent vs copyright as pertains to software (I majored in cybersecurity, which touches on legal matters somewhat) a few years ago, I ran across something from a group that was fighting copyright (and also patent and trademark) abuse, though they were not having much luck at the time against Disney's 800 pound gorilla in the lobbying circles. Since I minored in writing that was excuse enough to chase the rabbit a bit so I dug into it (yes, bad study habits, but asides like that made the slog of the legal part of my major easier).
One of the examples they used a lot was BSG/NuBSG, and TOS verses the rest of the Treks. Apparently there is some kind of obscure precedent that could allow someone to challenge an older version of an IP as abandoned if the newer ones do not have enough similarity to the older one.
NuBSG is close enough to be safe against it but it turns out that TOS is actually different enough (the usual points-of-similarity test) due to the changes insisted upon by Paramount's movie division and others over the years that it could possibly be challenged that way. A more recent article pointed out that DSC has more points of similarity with the Kelvin timeline than it does with TNG (though that was back in season one so it has probably shifted a bit) which could be significant since TNG and later were a bit shaky similarity wise to to TOS to begin with (or at least according to the debate from the earlier site).
On the other hand it was pointed out that Paramount played it smart in producing the episodes Relics, Trials and Tribble-ations, and In a Mirror, Darkly which showed the TOS era as exactly as depicted in TOS and would renew their claim on it the same way Disney does by trotting out either their original stuff for another run or more recently with remakes featuring carefully calculated similarity. CBS has failed to do that because of Moonves's prejudice against TOS which could mean the shorter cycle stuff could be approaching a dangerous gray area, like perhaps trademark (as you mentioned).
Trademark has the shortest fallow period of the trademark/copyright/patent trio, in some cases as short as three years before it can be challenged as abandoned. And as the article I linked to pointed out there were some irregularities in the way the judge handled the pre-trial (it never actually went to trial, that would have involved a jury and was settled a few weeks before that trial would have started) so the matter could possibly still be a bit iffy (though the fact that they have produced at least something with the name since probably headed that one off now).
At that point CBS had done little or nothing with Star Trek themselves since the end of ENT, and Paramount, while licensed, was not directly producing the Kelvin movies for CBS so there is the kind of gray area where either a takeover or forcing the of the trademark itself into the public domain could have had a (very slim) chance.
As I mentioned in my last comment, the 2022 automatic release into the public domain would happen regardless had Disney not undermined the Copyright Act of 1909. Even with that tampering, unless Disney manages to force through laws that grant studios perpetual copyright the TOS copyright runs out sometime around 2069 or thereabouts even if CBS uses all of Disney's extension exploits.
Or that is what I have read anyway.
As for how Hollywood does business, there are still scandals and whatnot that show that the snakepit is still pretty much the same as it has always been. Sure, Meyer could not pull the beach palace thing or union busting with impunity now, and alternate distribution channels like YouTube can get around Hollywoods grip on that somewhat if you want to keep things small-scale so Paula Abdul could have gone that route if she started today instead of back then, but if you are trying for the big time in the US market, Hollywood and their all too often shady ego fueled and exploitive way of doing business will figure in at some point.
Politicians are selected, not elected.
I think Samuel Clemens once said that if voting was legit, it would be illegal. And given how the MEDIA announced who 'won' the recent election....it's all a TRIBBLE shoot, right now.
You must have missed the part in the article where it pointed out that it was legally not the judge's place act as a jury, his job at that point was just to determine what was actually applicable to the case and what wasn't. You can call the article "stupidly biased and wrong" but from what little I have been able to find out the point about the judge's impropriety is valid, they are not supposed to make comments containing what amounts to judgments before the trial even starts.
And if you think I am some wild-eyed revolutionary tilting at the corporate windmills, I am not. I just pointed out the situation is not a simple binary thing free of all outside considerations and they had other options about how to handle it, some of which would have probably been better for all involved. What Peters did was reckless, but things were trending that way even before Axanar and he was just the one who stepped on the mine first.
Contrary to what you may believe, other fanfilm (and similar) projects have done the sort of things he did (though usually not all at once), just not on the same scale, and it was mainly that scale that caught attention and made the project such a target.
Which is why lots of people regained faith in the US election during 2016. There is no way the establishment would allow someone like the current US President in office if they controlled the election. It is possible that the establishment never thought that the current US President would win and decided to slack off that year.
However, this is getting too political for these forums.
Axanar Productions mostly just exists as one more paper company in a portfolio of such owned by Peters, his lawyer, and possibly others, stretching from coast to coast that all rent, lend, and sell stuff to each other to dynamically allocate the same pool of resources to numerous projects in a flexible way depending on the circumstances and needs of those projects.
And yes, such a structure is often used to conceal illegal activity and has acquired a certain stigma over the years, but it is itself not illegal if run observing the local tax and business laws (which in this case it does) and is used by legitimate companies far more often than you might think because of its very agile and fluid nature. In fact, variants of it are quite common in Hollywood and may even be more common than monolithic traditional companies there.
That means the case boils down to intent, and there is no way the fact finding part of a trial can determine that, in fact judging intent is such a slippery guessing game that here in the US the law specifies that they have twelve people making that guess in the hope that the give and take of hashing it all out between them might give a more accurate result.
And since the lawsuit interrupted the film project before it ended and whatever was intended for the equipment and whatnot was done there simply is nothing that can be pointed to as hard evidence of what that intent really was, much less if that intent was a deliberate attempt to gain material profit instead of just industry cred and opening doors.
Is he a crook? Maybe, maybe not (or at least not any more than entertainment industry average anyway). Either way, that "he was just using it to buy a studio with investor's money" is over simplistic and projecting an imagined motive where no proof actually exists.
And again, I am not excusing or condoning his actions, I just get irritated over knee-jerk assumptions bandied about as fact and pointing out that it is not as simple as it seems.