How fan­dom took Star Trek beyond the final frontier

It was the fourth sea­son of Enter­prise, the pre­quel show that detailed the ear­li­est voy­ages of the leg­endary star­ship. But as rat­ings slipped, CBS pulled the plug. While many Trekkers were out­raged, the hard­core among them had a plan. Like oth­er fan com­mu­ni­ties from Star Wars to Ace Ven­tu­ra (no, real­ly), they hit the web with their own home­made movies.

Nick Cook took the demise of his Dundee-based fan club as the cue to pow­er down the VCR and get him­self and his fel­low enthu­si­asts off the sofa and on to their very own film set. He’d been impressed with the fan films already out there, par­tic­u­lar­ly the high-end Hid­den Fron­tier. It took two years, but with no knowl­edge of film­mak­ing and lit­tle in the way of writ­ing expe­ri­ence, Cap­tain Cook and his crew even­tu­al­ly cre­at­ed the first Star Trek: Intre­pid episode, ​‘Heavy Lies the Crown’. Here, he dis­cuss­es the expe­ri­ence, and reveals his thoughts on the recent Star Trek movie reboots.

“I’ve nev­er been a huge read­er of fan fic­tion; I think what weeds peo­ple out from doing fan films is the prac­ti­cal aspect. It’s very dif­fi­cult for one per­son to say, ​‘Right, I’m going to do this thing myself.’ To film, you need to get peo­ple who will act for you, you need props, cam­era equip­ment, peo­ple who will edit and do light­ing and effects – it’s hard to source all these things. For­tu­nate­ly, most peo­ple involved are hap­py to donate their time because it’s a project they have fun doing. If it wasn’t for that, we couldn’t do it.

“Fan­dom seems bro­ken into fac­tions that love, hate or don’t care about Para­mount, just as long as they get a new Star Trek. I’m very grate­ful to Para­mount and CBS – they haven’t cease-and-desist­ed me, so I don’t have any bones to pick with them even though I might dis­agree with some of their artis­tic choic­es. Star Trek: Phase II, the big broth­er of all fan films, is very well known by the mak­ers of Star Trek. They’ve had Wal­ter Koenig and George Takei guest­ing as Chekov and Sulu, and long-time Star Trek script writer and pro­duc­er Dorothy Fontana has writ­ten for them. They’re very ambi­tious, and what they’re doing is pro­fes­sion­al quality.

“To me, Star Trek is an old friend. If you want to make a film and you have a load of Star Trek fans around you, it becomes a lot eas­i­er than for one guy with a new idea. That com­mon inter­est is prob­a­bly the only rea­son we man­aged to fin­ish it in the first place. I have mixed feel­ings about the new­er Para­mount films though. I know where they’re com­ing from, and I can’t blame them – Star Trek’s earned itself an image as kind of geeky. I don’t think that’s entire­ly true but it’s cer­tain­ly become a niche show that’s looked down on by a large pro­por­tion of the public.

“Try­ing to make Star Trek pop­u­lar again and acces­si­ble is real­ly what was need­ed. Would I have gone back to Kirk and crew? No. But I think JJ Abrams did a good job with the orig­i­nal reboot – there’ll be a gen­er­a­tion who will remem­ber Chris Pine as Kirk and not Shat­ner, which will be kind of weird. There was no way they could have made this look like the orig­i­nal series and had it sell.”