Word: paramount
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...real life that wing and prayer belong to Paramount studios, which has budgeted $20 million for a flashy film revival of Star Trek, the unkillable TV series. Its hope is that the show's fans, known for their legendary loyalty, will flock to the theaters next Christmas in Trekkie-breaking numbers...
...years, of course, Paramount has been getting just the opposite news about Star Trek's box-office potential. The show was dreamed up by Roddenberry in 1966, because he thought that science fiction might provide a persuasive way of telling a hopeful, and presumably profitable, vision of history. Says he: "It seemed to me that if I had a ship, a home base, I could take it out and make any kind of comment I wanted...
Prompted by all this unexpected success, Paramount scheduled a low-budget movie several years ago. Then, when Star Wars hit, the studio returned to the project at a speed approaching warp seven. The new movie will have an expensive layering of special effects. Optics Wizard Robert Abel has been hired to give that cloud of electric whipped cream a throbbing, ominous personality. "It's so big you can't make a model of it," he hints vaguely. "It's so awesome, so powerful and has so many unique identities . . ." When the monster first appears, audiences will...
...Says Paramount's Diller, whose company had more hits than any other: "If you apply 1978's trend to next year, you're going to fail. I believe in going against everything, and I think audiences will want to be challenged, provoked and moved." Maybe so. But producers who agree might bear in mind that the hit of 1977, Star Wars, was revived in 1978 and for two months made everybody else look sick at the box office. (Long since the movie earner of all time, it has now grossed $267 million worldwide.) Why? Apparently because...
...have been a cozy breakfast on the Paramount lot, just the vice president and the heads of the major movie studios and television networks discussing how to promote cancer awareness. Then Al Gore marched in with a rough cut of his own: a five-minute video of movie and television scenes in which the hottest stars - John Travolta, Nicolas Cage, Winona Ryder among them - were smoking cigarettes. The 1997 power breakfast quickly became a food fight, with accusations of irresponsibility and censorship flying back and forth between Gore and the angry moguls...