<BLOCKQUOTE><font size="1" face="Verdana, arial">quote:</font><HR>Uhh.. no. It tell us he has a beef with how Paramount runs Trek (puting mittens on the writers). He doesn't have much problem with Trek itself, and considers himself a TOS fan. He's also freinds with a number of people who've been involved
people who've been involved with Trek in the recent years. <HR></BLOCKQUOTE>
Uhh.. you say tomato and I say tomatoe. Trek is Paramount. If he thinks Paramount (i.e. Trek) stole his idea for B5, then I'd say that that qualifies as "having a problem."
<BLOCKQUOTE><font size="1" face="Verdana, arial">quote:</font><HR> Nope. JMS has been asked about this lots of times. He said that he could have Either Sued OR he could work to get Babylon 5 on the air.
But, he didn't have the time or energy to do both.
He chose to make Babylon 5 and make it a Better Show.
Revenge takes many forms
<HR></BLOCKQUOTE>
Yeah, i know that whenever I have to sue someone that I must stop my occupation and devote every waking minute to filing depositions and interviewing potential witnesses and preping my case for ... waitaminute, what am I thinking .... don't they have professionals whose job it is to do stuff like that? I don't mean to be crass, but the courts are there to handle things like this. For whatever reason, he chose not to go that route. He may have had better things to do or he may have just had a bad case. My point is that he could have done something and he did not.
<BLOCKQUOTE><font size="1" face="Verdana, arial">quote:</font><HR> Maybe they diserved it? <HR></BLOCKQUOTE>
Whatever.
<BLOCKQUOTE><font size="1" face="Verdana, arial">quote:</font><HR>Here's what it comes down to for me, in relation to ST: If I had a show in which I *knew* it would be renewed each season, that had a name going in that guaranteed an audience, that had a huge empire behind it, I'd take every opportunity to USE that venue to push stories to the wall, to do experimental stories, controversial stories, stories with teeth and claws and passion because in most situations. They say, "Oh, you can't risk that, you'll lose the audience." But the ST audience is a loyal one, and the Empire will make money off it regardless, so why not take it to the wall? If you have this terrific fast car, why keep it in the garage? To me, it's a catalog of missed opportunities. But that's just my subjective POV, your mileage may vary. <HR></BLOCKQUOTE>
That's one opinion, here's another:
If you're a talented writer, it's relatively easy to write an original story all your own. You can make your charaters say whatever you want and you can make plots that go wherever you want ... its your creation. But for most working writers, it don't work like that. I'm a reporter and I get paid to write the news. I am not free to write in whatever style I want, I'm not even free to construct the story that I want. I have an editor who changes my work at will. Would my stuff be better if I were able to write what I want? I think so. For established works, there are ALWAYS certain rules and regulations that you have to follow. JMS works in comics and he should know that Marvel has all kinds of restrictions that they place on their characters. Even the Centauri/Psi-Corp/Technomage trilogies had to follow an outline that JMS imposed on the writers. Frankly, it only makes sense to me that TREK would be restrictive... the damn series has been around for a long time, its immensly popular, there have been many different versions of the show...etc. If were the head of trek my overriding concern wouldn't be with "pushing the envelope" it would simply be to make the fans happy. Trek has been sucessful in this at times and they have sucked at this at times.
------------------
The Revolution Will Not Be Televised.
