Word: paramount
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Dates: during 1990-1999
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...Trek was never, and hopefully never will be, my vision of the future," says Berman, 48, a former documentary filmmaker and children's TV producer. "It's Gene Roddenberry's vision that I agreed to uphold." The job is trickier than it might seem. Berman, a vice president at Paramount when Roddenberry tapped him as the producer of The Next Generation, has had to sail his enterprise between the Scylla of Roddenberry's own "prime directive" -- a stricture against any conflict among members of Starfleet -- and the Charybdis of mass-market appeal...
According to Paramount TV research, Star Trek's regular weekly audience of more than 20 million includes more high-income, college-educated viewers (as well as more men) than the average TV show. Even at the better than 200 Trekkie conventions held each year, the clientele is more likely to be middle- ! aged couples with kids in tow than computer geeks sporting Vulcan ears. "In the early days, everyone had a shirt and a costume," says Mary Warren, who was selling Trek apparel at a recent convention in Tucson, Arizona. "Now you get all these normal people in here." Among...
...three seasons and 79 episodes were just enough to put the show's reruns into syndication, and there they were an enormous hit. By the end of the '70s, the success of Star Wars and Close Encounters of the Third Kind had prompted Paramount to give its TV space crew a crack at the big screen. Star Trek: The Motion Picture displeased hard-core fans. But it made a sturdy $82 million at the box office and launched a series of films that peaked in 1986 with Star Trek IV: The Voyage Home, which grossed $110 million. Only Roddenberry felt...
...second-in- command, and co-executive producer Michael Piller took control. The show soon hit its stride, with an accomplished cast, better special effects and some of the most imaginative sci-fi writing ever for TV. The series was ended last May, at the height of its popularity, because Paramount wanted to switch it to the big screen exclusively...
None of which will matter much if the film is, as expected, a big hit. Then all that Paramount will have to worry about is trying not to squeeze too much out of its cash cow. The studio plans to produce a new feature film every two years, while keeping two TV shows running simultaneously. "Star Trek will do fine if they don't kill the goose," says Barrett Roddenberry. Berman acknowledges the danger: "There's always the question about taking too many trips to the well, and one of the tasks Roddenberry left me with was at least...