#loudtrashunknown

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Nitpicking

When I was looking for a wiki article to use for this class I ended up on a page for the same Star Trek episode I discussed in my last post (The City on the Edge of Forever) and as I went through the talk section I found a discussion that I felt hit on a lot of points about fan communities we’ve discussed recently and was almost bizarrely funny to me. It involves one man with strong opinions about Nazi military history.

Since that’s a lot of text, a brief summary: Bruce argues that the entire central conflict of the episode is inaccurate because even if the US had entered WWII later than it did, the Germans wouldn’t have been able to develop effective nuclear weapons before the end of the war. 31dot points out that none of this matters in context of the episode and in response Bruce presents his sources. 31dot and Alan again tell Bruce that actual history doesn’t matter here, what matters is what the show says happened in history. Bruce sticks to his guns but is again shut down by Alan and Capricorn, who remind him that the Star Trek wiki is not the same thing as Wikipedia. 

In a roundabout away, Capricorn pointed out the way wikis level the playing field when they pointed out that the analysis here all holds the same merit ‘no matter if it’s the thoughts of some random editor or a published scholar.’ Even if it’s used dismissively it shows the ways in which collaborative fan communities have complicated the idea of authority. Hidden behind a screen and a username, someone could be a scholar or just a dude with a lot of free time and some really strong opinions. As Mittel says “there is no inherent reason why wikis should be suited more for recording than for editorializing, and many wikis have been used as sites of collaborative creativity, collective brainstorming, and other activities that go beyond gathering and organizing facts (Dena, Douglass, and Marino 2005; Mason and Thomas 2008). But for most people, the word wiki evokes Wikipedia and its assumed objective model of writing.” I found this example interesting because while Bruce might be technically correct in the history of our world his theory is at odds with the historical fact of the Star Trek world so in the eyes of the rest of the fans, he’s just wrong. 

And the ways in which Alan and 31dot point out Bruce’s failure to follow proper post format highlights how fan communities build their own rules and structures for acceptable discourse. It’s not just that he’s posting irrelevant information, he isn’t posting it right. For all the talk about freedom and new avenues of discussion most fan communities still have rigid guidelines on what is and isn’t okay within those communities. A lot of this discussion has centered around things like fanfiction and slash, which are often looked down upon as lesser forms of fan creativity because they tend to deviate more from accepted canon. 

BruceGrubb, et al. “Talk: City on the Edge of Forever; Dated Premise.” Memory Alpha, Aug. 2017, memory-alpha.wikia.com/wiki/Talk:The_City_on_the_Edge_of_Forever_(episode).

Mittell, J. “Sites of Participation: Wiki Fandom and the Case of Lostpedia”. Transformative Works and Cultures, Vol. 3, July 2009, doi:https://doi.org/10.3983/twc.2009.0118.

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The Cities on the Edge of Forever

Considered one of the greatest Star Trek episodes from any generation, ‘The City on the Edge of Forever’ was written by Harlan Ellison. Ellison had a pseudonym, Cordwainer Bird, that he used whenever he felt like his work had been ruined by others, a name he tried to have put on this script. Self described as “possibly the most contentious person on Earth”, Ellison took issue with the rewrites the script underwent. Nearly three decades after the airing of the original episode Ellison published a book by the same name that contained multiple versions of the script as well as an essay, most of which was rage directed at Gene Roddenberry for his ‘fatally inept treatment’ of the script and the fact that he never made any money from the episode despite its massive success.

Film and television are collaborative forms of media, especially when you get into transmedia storytelling that often involves multiple creators. It muddies the water of ownership. Does Ellison have a right to be angry about the edits to his script or did Roddenberry have ultimate say over what aired on Star Trek? Ellison’s original script involved drug dealers on the Enterprise, a concept Roddenberry took issue with because he saw it as at odds with the nature of the show’s universe. In his interview with Jonathan Gray, when asked whether the idea of an author is worthwhile Ivan Askwith responds that “especially as transmedia properties become hundreds of pieces or sprawl across tons of media, a lot of the integrity of that stuff comes from someone who plays a function that really has to be played by a core person or core group of people to be consistent” (Gray, p. 318). This is at odds with a quote from Ellison’s essay-

“The solitary creator, dreaming his or her dream, unaided, seems to me to be the only artist we can trust.”

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In an interview with startrek.com in 2013, Ellison says his original script “would be smarter and deeper and truer to what the original idea of Star Trek was when Gene Roddenberry came to [his] house and told it to me.” Ellison effectively claims he knows Star Trek better than Roddenberry because Roddenberry sold out and betrayed the original ethos of the show. He’s technically giving Roddenberry ownership of the show but then implying that ownership doesn’t give Roddenberry any actual authority over the text. Rather, Ellison seems to believe that authorial authority comes from artistic integrity, in sticking true to the concept of the piece.

Ellison, Harlan. “The City on the Edge of Forever: The Original Teleplay.”, Bantam, 1977.

“EXCLUSIVE: Star Trek Legend Harlan Ellison, Part 2.” Star Trek, 9 July 2013, www.startrek.com/article/exclusive-star-trek-legend-harlan-ellison-part-2.

Gray, Jonathan, and Ivan Askwith. “Transmedia Architectures of Creation; An Interview with Ivan Askwith.” A Companion to Media Authorship, Wiley-Blackwell, 2013, pp. 314–323.

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As a franchise Star Trek has traded hands several times. Originally owned by Desilu, a studio owned jointly by Desi Arnes and Lucille Ball (who famously saved the series when it faced cancellation early on), which also shared ownership of the series with Roddenberg’s own Norway Productions, the tv series and films were passed along in a series of mergers and acquisitions and the tv series currently belongs to CBS Television Productions while Paramount Pictures under Viacom creates the films through a license from CBS. While the tv series and movies mostly moved through because of mergers and buyouts, the comics went their own way. Partially because of strict licensing rules and costs which lead to a brief period where no one owned the a license to a comic series for a few years. Luckily, Tokoyopop stepped up to the plate in 2004 and published Star Trek: The Magna until 2009.

The comics have bounced back and forth between Marvel and DC a few times before landing at IDW Publishing in 2006. Part of the reason that the comics weren’t profitable. Going back to the early Desilu days when Lucille Ball saved the series, Star Trek wasn’t always as universally popular as it is now but it’s early fanbase was made largely of women which made the larger sci-fi community view it was ‘less serious’ and it took some time for it to find the cultural mooring that it has. But that fanbase has only grown and since the early days of fan zines, they’ve developed a world that runs parallel to the corporate one.  

When you add in Marshall’s ideas on ‘play’ the ownership of Star Trek gets both murkier and strictly defined. Star Trek encompasses a massive world that has been built by hundreds of people- both paid and not. The fan base has been active since the earlier days and they’ve produced just as much work as the official creators if not more. In 2014 a fan film called Star Trek: Axanar was announced by the release of a short film called Prelude to Axanar. Funded by Kickstarter, the film featured former Star Trek actors as well as characters and the series. 

Despite its success in fundraising the feature length film was never made because CBS/Paramount Pictures filed a lawsuit against the project in 2015 for copyright infringement. The case led to CBS/Paramount setting up strict guidelines for future fan films which limited their length and screening options and banned any professional actors or people who’d worked for any of their projects. While fan films are still allowed, the case and guidelines made it clear that CBS/Paramount doesn’t believe the fans have any claim of ownership to the franchise. They’re allowed to interact and play with the world as long as they’re doing it in a way that CBS/Paramount approves of. As Marshall says, “what is being played is an elaborate dance between the techniques of containing and servicing the desires of the ‘audience’, and the audience install venturing into unserviced and uncommercial areas of cultural activity. This dance of control and chaos is mostly clearly seen in the development of the cultural Industries’ and the audience’s presence on the Internet’s World Wide Web, as well as the the interlinked products they have created’ (Marshall p. 74). While the Star Trek fandom was thriving even in the days before the Internet, increased connectivity and access by amateurs to equipment and funding means that larger, more elaborate projects are possible and as fans gain more agency, production and distribution companies can feel threatened by a fanbase that needs their structures less and less and the issue of ownership with fan produced content becomes more complicated.

(Marshall, P. David. “The New Intertextual Commodity.” The New Media Book, BFI Publishing, 2002, pp. 69–80.)