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A New Vision: J. J. Abrams, Star Trek , and Promotional
Authorship
Leora Hadas
Cinema Journal, Volume 56, Number 2, Winter 2017, pp. 46-66 (Article)
Published by University of Texas Press
DOI: https://doi.org/10.1353/cj.2017.0002
For additional information about this article
https://muse.jhu.edu/article/645450
Access provided by Penn State Univ Libraries (29 Jan 2019 22:08 GMT)A New Vision: J. J. Abrams, Star
Trek, and Promotional Authorship
by LEORA HADAS
Abstract: This article examines the use of authorship discourses in the promotion of
media content through a case study of the 2009 Star Trek film, directed by J. J. Abrams.
Analyzing press interviews and promotional paratexts, I focus on the potential conflict
in which a franchise long associated with a distinct auteur figure was rebooted by a
different creator, and the implications for marketing Star Trek to different audiences:
new viewers and longtime fans. I demonstrate the careful management involved in the
establishment of film authorship, and how the association with a particular author figure
shapes the identity of a franchise.
S
eptember 4, 1986, was a historic day in Hollywood. For the first time, a tele-
vision writer was honored with a star on the Hollywood Walk of Fame (al-
most twenty years after the first fictional character, Mickey Mouse, received
the honor). The writer in question was Gene Roddenberry, largely credited
with the creation of the Star Trek franchise, and the tribute paid him constituted
an early critical moment for attitudes toward authorship in television in particular
and in media industries at large. Auteur theory, developed in the pages of Cahiers du
cinéma some thirty years earlier and migrating to the United States mainly through
the work of Andrew Sarris, was in the mid-1980s already an important discourse
in academic and critical understandings of film.1 It had survived the 1967 “death
of the author” and repeated criticisms, to entrench itself so firmly that in 2003,
David Gerstner and Janet Staiger observed that “every scholar (even those who
subscribe to the ‘death of authorship’) speaks of going to a Robert Altman film.”2
From the early 1980s, with the gradual emergence of television creators such as
Steven Bochco and later David E. Kelley, David Simon, and Aaron Sorkin, auteur-
ism as a mode of categorizing and understanding texts and as a theory of cre-
ative labor began to be extended to television. As Hollywood became engaged in a
© 2017 by the University of Texas Press
1 Andrew Sarris, “Notes on the Auteur Theory in 1962,” in Film Theory and Criticism, 4th ed., ed. Gerald Mast,
Marshall Cohen, and Leo Braudy (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1992).
2 David A. Grestner and Janet Staiger, Authorship and Film (New York: Routledge, 2003), xi. On the “death of the
author,” see Roland Barthes, “The Death of the Author,” Contributions in Philosophy 83 (2001): 3–8.
Leora Hadas is a teaching associate at the University of Nottingham. Her research interests include media industries,
media promotion and branding, and transnational media. This article is based on her PhD research at the University of
Nottingham.
46 Winter 2017 | 56 | No. 2 www.cmstudies.orgCinema Journal 56 | No. 2 | Winter 2017
“permanent marketing campaign” motivated by constant uncertainty as technologies
and audiences changed, the use of authorship discourses had become recognized as a
marketing tactic: a form of branding.3
Branding has become central to the way media industries approach their business
as they struggle to deal with these changes. Today’s media landscape sees an
increasingly fragmented and global media audience, and a proliferation of content,
channels, screens, and modes of viewing, with changes in regulation and processes
of horizontal and vertical integration within the industries themselves.4 The switch
in focus from audience quantity to audience quality, with niche marketing specifically
tailoring content to specific audiences, has made it crucial to lend that content an easily
recognizable identity that resonates with the identities of the designated consumers.
Television’s increasing reliance on first-order commodity relations through means
such as pay-cable channels, DVDs, and online pay-to-play services similarly requires
the development of long-term audience loyalty.5 Vast media conglomerates, such as
Disney and Time Warner, integrate the processes of production, promotion, and
distribution and control media in many forms, resulting in a need to fill a great number
of concurrent streams—the “content bottleneck” that Timothy Todreas warned of as
early as 1999.6 This leads conglomerates to deal not in film, television, or publishing
but in intellectual property that can be redeployed across all of them with minimal
new investment in the creation of characters and storyworlds. What also follows is an
ever-increasing interest in media convergence and transmedia storytelling.7
Branding offers answers to all of these challenges. It is chiefly a source of recogniz-
ability and differentiation for media content and providers alike, something that is vital
in a market that offers consumers countless options. Media brands, similar to brands
of consumer goods as discussed by Celia Lury and Adam Arvidsson, operate by creat-
ing a distinct identity for a text, a channel, a studio, and so on, an identity that is all its
own, distinct from that of competing products but consistent in itself.8 This identity is
designed to reflect and tie into the identities of its designated target audiences. Brands
thus rely on a degree of consistency and predictability, which allows for easy packag-
ing, repackaging, and repurposing of intellectual property across channels and media.
The brand name sells the association of the product with certain qualities, which work
to add extra value to a product: for example, the association of childhood magic with
the Disney logo or the cultural capital and uncensored expression embodied in HBO’s
branding as “not TV.” Anything that can dependably attract an audience with the
promise of reliable, distinct qualities can function as a brand, such as the names of
3 Paul Grainge, Brand Hollywood: Selling Entertainment in a Global Media Age (London: Routledge, 2008), 14.
4 Ibid.
5 Mark C. Rogers, Michael Epstein, and Jimmie L. Reeves, “The Sopranos as HBO Brand Equity: The Art of Commerce
in the Age of Digital Reproduction,” in This Thing of Ours: Investigating “The Sopranos,” ed. David Lavery (New York:
Columbia University Press, 2002), xi.
6 Timothy M. Todreas, Value Creation and Branding in Television’s Digital Age (Westport, CT: Quorum Books, 1999).
7 Henry Jenkins, Convergence Culture: Where Old and New Media Collide (New York: New York University Press, 2006);
Elizabeth Evans, Transmedia Television: Audiences, New Media and Daily Life (London: Routledge, 2011).
8 Celia Lury, Brands: The Logos of the Global Economy (London: Routledge, 2004); Adam Arvidsson, Brands: Meaning
and Value in Media Culture (London: Routledge, 2006); Grainge, Brand Hollywood.
47Cinema Journal 56 | No. 2 | Winter 2017
networks, studios, star actors, and familiar characters.9 The names of media creators
have that same potential to become powerful brand names.
Today, authorship is everywhere across the media industries. The endorsement
“from the creator of ” makes its appearance on more forms of cultural products
than ever. Show runners, from David Chase to Lena Dunham, have come to define
television in the United States, their establishment as auteurs of the small screen
helping establish in turn the legitimacy of the medium as a form of art.10 Hollywood
blockbuster, franchise, and summer spectacle cinema also tout the names of celebrity
writer-directors such as Christopher Nolan and Joss Whedon. These famous names,
with the people attached to them coming into the public eye in the press, in behind-
the-scenes features and through social media help to both promote cultural products
and sell them to audiences on the basis of previous familiarity, and they lend cultural
capital to texts via the romantic discourse of vision and self-expression. Framed by
auteurist discourse, they nonetheless also function as brands.
Although academic attention to the concept of the author was traditionally
concentrated around textual analysis, which locates the signature of the auteur within
the work, the idea of the author as a brand name has also seen some investigation.
In 1991, Timothy Corrigan wrote of the “commerce of auteurism,” suggesting
that auteur theory as a discourse was used in the promotion of Hollywood films.11
Martin Flanagan and Yannis Tzioumakis have written of the “blockbuster auteur”
and “industrial auteur,” acknowledging and examining the ways in which an auteur
figure was established and constructed in the film industry as a system.12 Scholars have
begun to consider television show runners as author figures.13 Nonetheless, many gaps
remain to be filled in our understanding of what may best be termed “promotional
authorship” and its relationship with established discourses of auteurship, on the one
hand, and practices of branding, on the other hand. There is room for much further
investigation of the sites in which the creator’s image and identity are constructed even
before the product itself is released.
A recent noteworthy foray into the subject is by Will Brooker, who examines
Christopher Nolan’s authorship within the framework of the Batman franchise.14
Brooker highlights the presence, or indeed significant absence, of Nolan in the posters,
trailers, book and comic adaptations, and other paratextual materials of the first
two films of his Dark Knight trilogy, Batman Begins (2005) and The Dark Knight (2008),
drawing on Jonathan Gray’s concept of paratexts as devices that “shape the reading
9 Catherine Johnson, Branding Television (Abingdon, UK: Routledge, 2012).
10 Michael Z. Newman and Elena Levine, Legitimating Television: Media Convergence and Cultural Status (New York:
Routledge, 2012).
11 Timothy Corrigan, A Cinema without Walls: Movies after Vietnam (London: Routledge: 1991).
12 Martin Flanagan, “‘The Hulk, an Ang Lee Film’: Notes on the Blockbuster Auteur,” New Review of Film and Televi-
sion Studies 2, no. 1 (2004): 19–35; Yannis Tzioumakis, “Marketing David Mamet: Institutionally Assigned Film
Authorship in Contemporary American Cinema,” Velvet Light Trap 57 (2006): 60–75.
13 Roberta Pearson, “Cult Television as Digital Television’s Cutting Edge,” in Television as Digital Media, ed. James
Bennett and Niki Strange (Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 2011); Jonathan Gray, “The Use Value of Authors,”
2013, Spreadable Media, http://spreadablemedia.org/essays/gray/#.U8-RKvldXD8.
14 Will Brooker, Hunting the Dark Knight: Twenty-First Century Batman (London: I. B. Tauris, 2012).
48Cinema Journal 56 | No. 2 | Winter 2017
strategies that we will take with us ‘into’ the text, and . . . provide the all-important early
frames through which we will examine, react to, and evaluate textual consumption.”15
Brooker describes both the emergence of Nolan’s author image and its impact on the
understanding of his Batman films and their dominant themes. He thus points to the
exploration of how the public image of the author—the audience’s perception of who
they are, what they are interested in, what is important and unimportant to them, and
what they seek to convey through their creative expression—acts as a framing device
for the work. The author image as created in entryway paratexts instructs the audience
as the “correct” way to view, enjoy, and understand the film, as well as the meanings
they should look for and expect to find within. This kind of promotional authorship
acts, to use a timely metaphor, as a set of 3-D glasses: it brings to the forefront certain
elements in the text while pushing back or obscuring others. It is these sites and the
practices of constructing a film’s authorship—and how the perception of a product’s
creators is used by the media industries to shape perceptions of the product—that this
article explores.
The 2009 Star Trek film provides an excellent test case for the purpose of revealing
how the question of authorship can make or break a franchise, as it represents a
flash point of potential conflict between two author brands. The Star Trek franchise
from its inception has had an auteur figure associated with it: Gene Roddenberry,
creator of the original series (NBC, 1966–1969). Roddenberry’s name has been
practically inseparable from the franchise ever since, and all subsequent Star Trek series
and films were created either with his involvement or by people who have known
him and professed commitment to his authorship. The 2009 film, however, was not
only a reboot that rewrote the story of the original crew of the Starship Enterprise. It
was also directed and produced by J. J. Abrams, a media creator with a distinct and
distinguished author brand of his own. In the following, I analyze a variety of the
promotional paratexts surrounding Abrams’s Star Trek, focusing on press interviews,
press releases, official behind-the-scenes documents, trailers, posters, and TV spots.
My main sources include the trade publications Variety, Hollywood Reporter, and
IndieWire; the popular papers Entertainment Weekly, New York Times, and Los Angeles Times;
the new film’s official website; and fan news site TrekMovie. This use of varied sources
enables the exploration of multiple points of view from which to gain insight on the
implications of the authorship question for different audiences and under different
circumstances.
Background: The Authorship of Star Trek. In the media landscape of the era
commonly called TV1, much smaller and more homogeneous and controlled by a
three-network oligopoly, figures similar to today’s show runners were rare.16 Gene
Roddenberry belongs to an exclusive club that also includes such icons as Rod
Serling and Mary Tyler Moore, although his name has arguably far outshone theirs.
15 Jonathan Gray, Show Sold Separately: Promos, Spoilers, and Other Media Paratexts (New York: New York University
Press, 2010), 26.
16 Roberta Pearson, “Cult Television as Digital Television’s Cutting Edge,” in Television as Digital Media, ed. James
Bennett and Nikki Strange (Durham: Duke University Press, 2011), 107.
49Cinema Journal 56 | No. 2 | Winter 2017
Roddenberry’s active construction of his own public image, positioning himself as a
brand name, is analyzed at length by Roberta Pearson and Máire Messenger Davies,
who point it out as a direct precursor to the concept of the show runner as auteur as
we know it in digital television today: “Discursive opposition to the putatively gutless
mainstream, a hallmark of cult and quality television in TV2 and TV3, was a significant
aspect of Roddenberry’s producer brand at the height of TV1[,] . . . a legacy to his . . .
spiritual heirs, the show runners of TV2 and TV3 who similarly position themselves
against the putative artistic wasteland of network television.”17 Against the “vast
wasteland” of invisible creatives in the 1960s’ three-network system, Roddenberry
promoted himself, his work, and the firm connection between both, making press
appearances and engaging with the show’s swiftly growing fan community.18 A deft
hand at portraying his show as a unique vision of the future, he presented himself as
a visionary creator battling to bring his word to fans against the soulless “suits” of the
NBC network, who wanted to cancel the show after its second season and at last pulled
the plug on the third. Roddenberry was even involved in the letter-writing campaign
that saved the series from cancellation in its second season.19 The show-runner brand
as personified by Roddenberry hence hinged on these distinctions between “artistic
integrity and social conscience” and the commercial degradation of mainstream
television.20 A discursive contrast was drawn between art and commerce, when it
might be more accurate to claim that the trappings of the former were being put to
the use of the latter. Another component of the Roddenberry brand was its association
with the ideals of scientific progress and space exploration that were popular and
valued in the 1960s: not just “one man’s vision,” as Jane Gaines describes the root of
the romantic concept of authorship, but one man’s vision of the future embodied in the
television series that bore Roddenberry’s creative signature.21
Pearson and others, however, also point to a gap between this manufactured
image and the actual history of the original Star Trek’s inception and short life span.
Other sources note that NBC was in fact quite supportive of the series. Herb Solow,
Roddenberry’s partner in the show’s development and pitching, was quoted claiming
that “NBC has been totally misjudged and maligned by Star Trek fans. Gene set about
making NBC the heavy, the villain. . . . [H]e cast himself as the god and NBC as some
demonic force from the other side.”22 Nonetheless, it is Roddenberry’s self-created
legacy that survived, despite the fact that the man himself had little to do with the
series beyond the first season of The Next Generation. As Pearson and Messenger-Davies
say, “He was fairly quickly reduced to marginal participation in the feature film series,
was not consulted when Paramount first contemplated TNG, and was rapidly sidelined
17 Roberta Pearson and Máire Messenger Davis, Star Trek and American Television History (Berkeley: University of
California Press, 2014), 36.
18 Newton N. Minow, “Television and the Public Interest” (address to the National Association of Broadcasters, Wash-
ington, DC, May 9, 1961).
19 Lincoln Geraghty, “The Star Trek Franchise,” in The Cult TV Book, ed. Stacey Abbott (London: I. B. Tauris, 2010),
131–134.
20 Pearson and Messenger Davies, Star Trek and American Television, 33.
21 Jane M. Gaines, Contested Culture: The Image, the Voice, and the Law (London: BFI, 1992).
22 Pearson, “Cult Television,” 112.
50Cinema Journal 56 | No. 2 | Winter 2017
once that show began production. Paramount wanted the brand, not the potentially
troublesome man behind it.”23
Effectively, Roddenberry was involved in only four of Star Trek’s twenty-nine televised
seasons. In fact, Dave Hipple has argued that the franchise’s eventual success, which
he largely attributes to coincidence and circumstance, owes much to its mythological
producer’s absence and that Roddenberry was more a disruptive, exploitative figure
who sought a creative and financial choke hold on his brainchild than an enterprising
artist.24 Nonetheless, his name still adorns every Star Trek–related text, always a
prominent “created by.” In 1986 he became, as mentioned earlier, the first television
writer honored with a star on the Hollywood Walk of Fame, and after his death in
1991, his ashes were launched into space aboard the shuttle Columbia. The years 1997
and 2000 saw two series produced from materials he left behind: Gene Roddenberry’s
Earth: Final Conflict (first-run syndication, 1997–2002) and Gene Roddenberry’s Andromeda
(Sci-Fi Channel, 2000–2005).
This status is the result of a long-term, coordinated campaign first by Roddenberry
himself, then by Paramount Pictures when the importance of the Roddenberry
name to the Star Trek franchise became more obvious. Star Trek was constructed as a
qualitatively and intellectually superior program because it was authored. Its status as
the expression of a singular visionary’s deep-held convictions served to hold it apart
from the mire of mass-produced entertainment, a function that the author’s name has
filled since its invention in romanticism as a defense against the commodification of art
in the era of mechanical reproduction.25 An auteur’s name, as a signature, put Star Trek
into the discursive realm of art, and said auteur’s name then became a mark of value
for the show even after the man himself was out of the picture.26 The end result is that
the name “Gene Roddenberry” had evolved into a brand name in the material sense,
similar to brands of consumer goods: namely, a sign, a face, and a name by which a
number of not necessarily similar goods or services may be linked together.27 Attached
to the products, in this case the various television shows, like a logo on a package, it
functioned as a guarantor of quality through shared origin.28
By evoking a list of associations—vision, artistic integrity, and a socially conscious
and progressive ideology—the Roddenberry brand played into the presumed
identities of the series’s presumed audiences to add value to those products. It had
become detached from the actual man in the same sense as a Foucauldian author
function. As articulated in the seminal 1967 paper “What Is An Author?,” Foucault
identifies authorship as a discursive function, one in which the author’s name—rather
than signifying a flesh-and-blood individual—serves as a means of classification and
23 Pearson and Messenger Davies, Star Trek and American Television, 37.
24 Dave Hipple, “The Accidental Apotheosis of Gene Roddenberry; or, ‘I Had to Get Some Money from Somewhere,’”
in The Influence of “Star Trek” on Television, Film and Culture, ed. Lincoln Geraghty (Jefferson, NC: McFarland
Publishers, 2008), 22–40.
25 Andrew Bennett, The Author (New York: Routledge, 2005).
26 John Frow, “Signature and Brand,” in High-Pop: Making Culture into Public Entertainment, ed. Jim Collins (Malden,
MA: Blackwell, 2002), 56–74.
27 Lury, Brands.
28 Gaines, Contested Culture.
51Cinema Journal 56 | No. 2 | Winter 2017
capitalist value assignment.29 The author is thus removed from romantic concepts of
self-expression and artistic authenticity and understood as a sign that draws together
a group of texts, invites the recognition of common patterns within them, and stamps
them with a certain value derived from itself. In this the author’s name is very much
like a brand.
The difference is that it is not the text of his shows that was attributed to Roddenberry
but their spirit—their themes, aesthetics, and politics, or in another word, the “vision”
with which they were supposedly shining forth. Texts that were not actually written
by Roddenberry could still be sold as though they bore his “signature.” But instead of
the mark of a hand or a pen, they bore the mark of a certain aesthetic and ideological
position. Henry Jenkins and John Tulloch, who analyze Roddenberry’s image according
to the Foucauldian “author myth,” discuss its framing function for the show’s fandom,
with some episodes held up as examples for expressing an abstract, ideal authorial
intent: “The authorial legend of Gene Roddenberry helps Star Trek to cohere as a
narrative and justifies fans’ interest in it. The emphasis on his ‘optimistic’ vision of
Earth’s future and his celebration of cultural diversity focused fan attention on those
episodes which most closely adopted those themes, while intensifying their distaste for
episodes which violated that ‘vision.’ ”30 This had been Star Trek’s identity for a good
forty years: one man’s vision of the future. In actuality, in the years since The Next
Generation’s second season in 1988, Star Trek’s continuing mission has been helmed by
producer Rick Berman, yet his has never become a household name outside Trekker
households. Berman has always been careful to stress his devotion to carrying on
“Gene’s vision” and denying the existence of any personal vision of his own that might
interfere (while in private, as Pearson and Messenger-Davies reveal, striving mostly to
produce some entertaining television).31 The many other creatives who have left their
mark on the Star Trek franchise through the years, such as producers Michael Piller
and Jerry Taylor, and Berman’s cocreator on Star Trek: Enterprise (UPN, 2001–2005),
Brannon Braga, have all occupied a similar position. It is thus not surprising that,
as Pearson and Messenger-Davies note, “as the spin-off series increasingly diverged
from the original series format . . . and achieved lower and lower ratings, doing justice
to the Roddenberry vision become a point of contention among Star Trek fans. . . .
[F]ans began to accuse Berman and fellow producer Brannon Braga of pursuing
profits and ratings at the expense of the creator’s original formulation of the Star Trek
storyworld.”32 A good example of this fan narrative is provided by an IGN review of
the last Star Trek series to date, Enterprise, which ran for four struggling years—short
in comparison to its three predecessors. This, the reviewer claims, can be squarely
pinned on Berman and Braga’s straying from Roddenberry’s own truth: “Berman was
interested in doing no less than making Star Trek his own by going back and usurping
creator Gene Roddenberry’s original visions with his own. The result was three years
29 Michel Foucault, “What Is an Author?,” in Authorship: From Plato to the Postmodern, ed. Sean Burke (Edinburgh:
Edinburgh University Press, 1995), 233–246.
30 John Tulloch and Henry Jenkins, Science Fiction Audiences: “Doctor Who,” “Star Trek,” (Routledge, 1995), 190.
31 Pearson and Messenger Davies, Star Trek and American Television.
32 Ibid., 39.
52Cinema Journal 56 | No. 2 | Winter 2017
of a series that managed to insult and alienate all but the most hard core of fans, losing
somewhere around ten million viewers per week in the process.”33
This is the background that renders quite complicated Paramount’s decision to pin
its hopes for a successful revival of the Star Trek franchise on J. J. Abrams. When this
decision was made in late 2007, two years after the conclusion of Enterprise, Abrams
was considered hot property in Hollywood. He had recently directed another franchise
success in Mission: Impossible III (2006), and his hit series Lost (ABC, 2004–2010) was
at the height of its popularity. He was involved in half a dozen other projects, two
of which—Cloverfield (2008) and Fringe (Fox, 2008–2013)—would yield two more
successes in the following year and cement his standing on both silver and small
screens. More, he had recently laid down his ideas on storytelling at the 2007 TED
(Technology, Entertainment, Design) Conference, a highly prestigious and influential
multidisciplinary gathering that in the same year featured such speakers as former US
president Bill Clinton and The Sims designer Will Wright. Abrams was indeed famous
and successful, but he was also clearly not Rick Berman material. He definitely had his
own brand, perhaps even his own vision.
In his TED talk, Abrams articulated his brand as based on a personal obsession:
a lifelong fascination, inspired in childhood by his grandfather, with mysteries and
riddles.34 At the center of his storytelling philosophy he placed a (physical) unopened
mystery box and explained that “mystery boxes are in everything I do.”35 Indeed,
the promotion of Abrams’s various projects has frequently been characterized by
obfuscation. Marketing campaigns have typically offered the audience minimal details,
hiding as much information as possible for as long as possible, and challenging potential
viewers to put the clues together. This is seen in the many mysteries of Lost through to
the drawn-out viral marketing campaigns of Cloverfield (Matt Reeves, 2008) and Super 8
(Abrams, 2011).36 Another factor that Abrams established in the talk as key to his
signature style is an interest in crafts, both in new filmmaking technologies and in lower-
tech tricks of the trade. He highlighted the exciting new special-effects technology
that enabled the Lost pilot scene in which a man is sucked into a jet engine, but also
shared an anecdote from the filming of M:I3 in which simple ingenuity saved the day
(or at least, saved actor Tom Cruise’s nose). These are not contradictory qualities: to
Abrams, they are both examples of utilizing available tools cleverly, which is a staple
of his image as a media creator. Last in the list of qualities that Abrams attributes to
his author brand is a focus on characters and character-centric stories. He offers his
favorite scene in Jaws (Steven Spielberg, 1975)—not a shark attack, but a touching
33 KJB, “Trek Report: Video Report—That’s a Wrap, Gang,” IGN, May 12, 2005, http://uk.ign.com/articles/2005/05/13
/trek-report-video-report-thats-a-wrap-gang. In reality, Enterprise’s decline was from an average of six million for its
first season to less than three million for its third.
34 “J. J. Abrams: The Mystery Box,” TED Talks video, 18:02, posted by “TED2007,” January 2008, http://www.ted.com
/talks/j_j_abrams_mystery_box.html.
35 Ibid.
36 John Christiano, “Case Study: Super 8—A Digital Marketing Campaign,” Sundance Institute: Artist Services, July
25, 2011, https://www.sundance.org/artistservices/marketing/case-study/super-8-a-digital-marketing-campaign/;
IGN Staff, “Cloverfield: A Viral Guide,” IGN, January 15, 2008, http://uk.ign.com/articles/2008/01/15/cloverfield
-a-viral-guide.
53Cinema Journal 56 | No. 2 | Winter 2017
exchange between father and child—as a demonstration that such a focus need not
stand in contrast to spectacle and high concept. Of course, how much Abrams’s
films and television series truly excel at touching character moments is a question for
the audience, and certainly a matter of preference. But in the TED talk, Abrams is
constructing his public image, guiding the audience toward the important qualities of
the brand. He is providing the set of 3-D glasses, which bring mysteries, craftsmanship,
and characterization to the fore.
What happened, then, when this burgeoning author brand was brought to bear
on a franchise that has possessed its own all-but-deified auteur for more than four
decades? How was Paramount to sell Star Trek now? The decision to make the film
a reboot, not only in terms of its plot but also in terms of the strict avoidance of
any involvement from Berman, Braga, and their crew, suggests a reach for a new
audience. However, especially in this era of an ongoing celebration of participatory
culture, Paramount could ill afford to ignore the only fandom whose collective name
(“Trekkers”) is acknowledged as a word in the Oxford English Dictionary. Whether the
televised Star Trek had failed because of overexposure or declining quality did not
matter to the fan base. In their eyes, the original sin was and remained its supposed
departure from “Roddenberry’s vision.” The question of who was to author the 2009
Star Trek film could be the rise and fall of not just the film but also the entire franchise.
“This is a whole new franchise”: The Absent Author and the New Star Trek
Style. With all of this considered, Gene Roddenberry’s name is conspicuous in its
relative absence from the production discourse surrounding the new film. The more
than a hundred interviews and press materials analyzed yielded no more than a dozen
mentions of Roddenberry by the film’s “Supreme Court,” as they named themselves—
Abrams, screenwriters Roberto Orci and Alex Kurtzman, and producers Bryan Burk
and Damon Lindelof.37 Only five of those mentions were made by Abrams himself.
The absence is not complete, because in fan sources in particular—fan websites and
media fandom conventions—Abrams was often called upon to explain whether and
how the new film would reflect Roddenberry’s vision and wishes. The few mentions
were made in strategic settings, whenever Abrams’s audience was likely to include
avid Trekkers seeking out information on the film or in addresses specifically for them.
Abrams mentioned Roddenberry in his quote in Paramount’s initial press release, in
his first message to the fans after signing on as the film’s director, and when interacting
with fans in a Q&A session on the Star Trek wiki Memory Alpha.38 Being credited as the
film’s “creator” by his actors at the WonderCon 2009 Star Trek panel caused Abrams
to scramble to avoid incident, showing that there is a great deal of awareness of the
issue among the film’s crew. Abrams clarified at length that, “while they’re very kind
37 Tatiana Siegel, “Star Trek Sequel on Track,” Variety, March 30, 2009, http://www.variety.com/article/VR1118
001885?refCatId=13.
38 Anthony Pascale, “It’s Official—Star Trek Is Back 12/25/08—Film to Embrace Canon,” TrekMovie, February 27, 2007,
http://trekmovie.com/2007/02/27/it-official-star-trek-is-back-122508-film-to-embrace-canon/; Anthony Pascale,
“J. J. Abrams Sends a Message to the Fans,” TrekMovie, April 14, 2007, http://trekmovie.com/2007/04/14/jj-abrams
-sends-a-message-to-the-fans/; “Ask J. J. Abrams/Answers,” Memory Alpha, May 12, 2009, http://memory-alpha.org
/en/wiki/Memory_Alpha:Ask_J.J._Abrams/Answers.
54Cinema Journal 56 | No. 2 | Winter 2017
to call me and the writers the creators of this movie you should know that we were
all so aware of Gene Roddenberry. . . . [W]e are so indebted to him.”39 Another
cluster of Roddenberry mentions appeared in the official film website’s behind-the-
scenes production notes, where Abrams was mentioned as having come to the film
“with great respect for series creator Gene Roddenberry and all that Star Trek has
achieved as a creator of an archetypal modern myth and cult phenomenon.”40 There
Abrams went so far as to state, “This is the first time that a movie has dealt with the
fundamental, primary story Gene Roddenberry originally created,” characterizing his
film as a return to a forgotten ideal, Roddenberry’s true authorial intent.41 This theme
of return to Star Trek’s roots recurs, as we shall see later on.
Even those few nods—though enthusiastic when they do crop up—are reserved al-
most entirely not for the trade or popular press, but for the crowd that had made Rod-
denberry into the icon he became: the fans. Only that portion of the audience inclined
to attend panels at fan conventions, read Memory Alpha, or dig deep into the website’s
features is the target audience of the aforementioned statements. Casual viewers for
whom Star Trek carries no particular distinction are unlikely to have run across them.
A strict dichotomy can be seen in the film’s production and marketing discourse, be-
tween hard-core fans who would boycott the film over a mistake in nacelle design and
elusive nonfans without the slightest interest in the franchise for its own sake. As Orci
has quipped, there are no casual Trekkers.42 When addressing the fannish portion of
the audience, Abrams’s and Paramount’s statements serve to maintain Roddenberry’s
name as the visionary auteur of a visionary show, the man behind Star Trek’s unique
optimism and progressive ideology, as he is celebrated whenever he makes an appear-
ance in the discourse. The franchise’s defining qualities, and indeed its ongoing quality,
continue to originate with its creator. Hence Abrams must remain respectful of and
humble before the original auteur, just as Rick Berman has been doing for many years,
and avoid any appearance of supplanting him. He even went further than Berman,
while showing an understanding of the concerns of fandom, by suggesting that the film
is a return to Roddenberry’s fundamental intent after its spirit had been lost over time.
All this points to a centrality of the author in fannish discourse that is known
from previous studies.43 As mentioned, however, the different target audiences for the
marketing of Abrams’s film are sharply delineated. In the popular press that addresses
those elusive nonfans, who might be interested in the film merely as an action or
summer movie, the mentions of Roddenberry all but vanish. To the wider moviegoing
audience, the authorship of Star Trek not only remains an open question—whether
39 “Star Trek Panel, WonderCon 2009,” YouTube video, 8:20, posted by “ComicConIntl,” May 7, 2009, http://www
.youtube.com/watch?v=85-q3XfaqZ4.
40 “Production Notes: Back to the Final Frontier,” Cinema Review, 2016, http://www.cinemareview.com/production
.asp?prodid=5317, originally posted at http://www.startrekmovie.com/.
41 Ibid.
42 Roberto Orci, comment no. 928 on Anthony Pascale, “Orci and Kurtzman to Answer Fan Questions on TrekMovie
+ Transcript of Last Week’s Impromptu Q&A,” TrekMovie, May 19, 2009, http://trekmovie.com/2009/05/18
/orci-kurtzman-to-answer-fan-questions-at-trekmovie-transcript-of-last-weeks-impromptu-qa/#1831129.
43 A handy example of the discourse in question is found in the review of fan response to Nolan’s Batman films in
Brooker, Hunting the Dark Knight, 35–40.
55Cinema Journal 56 | No. 2 | Winter 2017
concerning the film or the franchise. Another question appears: whether the author’s
identity matters at all. Is the presence of an author in the sense of a visionary auteur an
important part of the franchise’s identity and appeal? If Star Trek is not a manifestation
of “Gene’s vision,” then are we even watching someone’s vision?
Abrams would seem the natural candidate for the stand-in visionary. His name
appears with prominence in the film’s advertising and various paratexts, and the cast
and crew give him a great deal of credit for all creative decisions. All three trailers
for Abrams’s film, as well half its TV spots, tout it as “from director J. J. Abrams.”
The logo for Bad Robot, Abrams’s production company, appears on all promotional
material, equal in size and right next to Paramount’s (Figure 1).
The film’s press release lists Abrams’s various accomplishments in its fact sheet,
sandwiched between two lists of impressive Star Trek facts. Orci and Kurtzman—them-
selves hot Hollywood
names in the screen-
writing department—
state their intention
to lure Abrams into
directing the film as
well as producing it, as
Orci told Entertainment
Weekly: “We tricked
Figure 1. Logos for the production companies of Star Trek (Paramount him into directing it. . . .
Pictures, 2009).
[W]e just kept reeling
him in with pages.”44 The film’s crew was packed with Abrams’s previous collabora-
tors: Burk and Lindelof worked with him on Lost; Orci and Kurtzman also wrote M:I3,
which he directed; composer Michael Giacchino and cinematographer Dan Mindel
also worked on M:I3, and production designer Scott Chambliss and editors Mary Jo
Markey and Maryann Brandon had been with him since Alias (ABC, 2001–2006). All
of those have the Abrams connection emphasized on their official website biographies,
and their statements on their work often credit him as the true mastermind behind
creative decisions and ideas.
Yet despite all this, it is hard to say from this extensive campaign just what it is that
makes the film “a J. J. Abrams movie”—what specific qualities or ideas he brings to
the table. The thematic features usually associated with Abrams’s body of work—a
high-concept premise, a convoluted plot with many twists and surprise reveals, and
secrecy and misdirection surrounding the project—were at no point used as selling
points for Abrams’s Star Trek film, not by Abrams himself, not by others in the crew,
and not in Paramount’s official materials. What Abrams was expected to bring to the
film is not a question of content. Instead, Paramount promoted him as bringing in
an attitude, a visual and cinematographic style. Specifically, his is the style that should
metamorphose a franchise that has suffered death by geekdom into an action-packed,
44 Benjamin Svetkey, “Star Trek: New . . . and Improved?,” Entertainment Weekly, April 29, 2009, http://www.ew.com
/ew/article/0,,20275802,00.html.
56Cinema Journal 56 | No. 2 | Winter 2017
cool summer movie that would—uniquely, if the production is to be believed—appeal
to non-Trekkers.
In the trade press, this is not just an open secret but a well-formulated business plan.
Variety reported that Paramount had tapped Abrams specifically for his appeal to a
younger audience, a market in which Star Trek has been struggling for some time. This
is the creator’s name as a brand name in its most basic and obvious form. With the
youth-oriented Felicity (WB, 1998–2002) and Alias, and the eminently cool Lost under
his belt, Abrams’s name carries brand equity among the younger-than-twenty-five age
group, for whom consumption of his texts plugs into their image and identity. Thus
putting his name on a product adds to its value among that group—an assumption that
Paramount’s statistics confirmed.45 The marketing campaign, then, was designed to
present Abrams as the harbinger of cool. He told Entertainment Weekly, “It’s like, almost
despite being Star Trek, or regardless of being Star Trek, it’s a movie I want to go see.”46
In another interview he expanded: “Once we had a script, I suddenly saw that Star
Trek had all the things I loved about movies. It had great characters. It was romantic.
Funny. Full of action and spectacle. Sweet and full of heart. And I realized: Why am
I looking for other projects that have those qualities when I already have that right
in front of me?”47 The theme repeats in myriad other industry and popular sources.
Abrams told TV Guide that the film is “funny, it’s scary, it’s dramatic, emotional, and
entertaining—all without having the stuff you’d think a movie called ‘Star Trek’ would
require.”48 Kurtzman explained to the Hollywood Reporter that “our intention was to
make Star Trek something that appeals to everyone who’s ever dismissed it in the past as
being too sci-fi or too inaccessible.”49 The Abrams of official behind-the-scenes footage
and production stills is smiling and full of energy. One widely circulated shot has him
standing on the bridge of the Enterprise in jeans and a baseball cap, arms spread wide
and high as he directs a crowd of cast and crew members, all with their eyes on him
(Figure 2). In the words of Rob Moore, Paramount’s vice-chairman, Abrams’s image
was used to “educate people that this is a whole new franchise.”50
Abrams Approved: The “Rediscovery” of Star Trek’s Coolness. It is in this
notion of a “whole new franchise” that the strategy becomes a double-edged sword:
the danger of Abrams’s name—powerful but transitory, presuming he would decline
to do nothing but Star Trek for the rest of his days—overshadowing the Star Trek name,
a franchise that Paramount keeps for posterity. The name “Gene Roddenberry”
may no longer mean much outside certain circles, but everyone knows Star Trek, as
45 Tatiana Siegel, “Trek Plan: Go Young and Prosper,” Variety, April 20, 2009.
46 Jeff Jensen, “Spock Meets Spock!,” Entertainment Weekly, August 5, 2007, http://www.ew.com/ew/article
/0,,20313460_20049407,00.html.
47 Jeff Jensen, “J. J. Abrams: Entertainer of the Decade,” Entertainment Weekly, December 4, 2009, http://www
.ew.com/ew/article/0,,20313460_20324134,00.html.
48 Shawna Malcolm, “J. J.’s Next Missions,” TV Guide, August 19, 2008, 40–41.
49 Jay A. Fernandez, “Star Trek: Enterprise Marketing,” Hollywood Reporter, February 19, 2009, http://www.hollywood
reporter.com/news/star-trek-enterprise-marketing-79580.
50 Jeff Jensen, “Star Trek: New Movie, New Vision,” Entertainment Weekly, October 18, 2008, http://www.ew.com/ew
/article/0,,20233502,00.html.
57Cinema Journal 56 | No. 2 | Winter 2017
displayed by authors’
groan-inducing ten-
dency to title articles
with puns on beaming
up and boldly going.51
The name, along with
its accompanying visual
concepts, quotes, and
overall cultural legacy
can easily compete with
Coca-Cola and Mc-
Donald’s. Its problem
was that it had come to
Figure 2. J. J. Abrams directing the cast of Star Trek on the bridge of the mean the wrong things,
Enterprise (Paramount Pictures, 2009).
to carry the wrong asso-
ciations and values. It was not so much a dead franchise, as Paramount says, as it was
a negative brand.
In addition to the aging viewership, which was one of the studio’s chief concerns,
the franchise’s last offerings before the 2009 film, Enterprise and Star Trek: Nemesis (Stuart
Baird, 2002), met with reviews somewhere between poor and disastrous. Nemesis had
performed worst of all Star Trek films in the box office, worse even than The Motion
Picture (Robert Wise, 1979). Famed film critic Roger Ebert expressed his despair at the
franchise’s starships being like “rides in a 1970s amusement arcade,” at rubber-fore-
head aliens and nonsense techno-babble.52 We can learn even more from articles sur-
rounding the reboot, such as a mock review on the satiric news site The Onion wherein
“Trekkers” complain that the new film is insufficiently preachy and corny, lacks an
obsession with its own continuity, and is far too comprehensible—a list of Star Trek’s
image problems in a nutshell.53 To succeed, the franchise needed to assume new as-
sociations, to mean different and positive things—without coming to mean “created by
J. J. Abrams.” A truly successful revival of the franchise hinged on associating it with
values that came from within it, values that it has supposedly always held, not brought
in but only “rediscovered” by an able creator.
This appears to be the strategy by which Paramount and Abrams were operating,
as the marketing campaign veered—sometimes to self-contradiction—between
acknowledgment of and nods to the history of the franchise, and an emphasis on the
film being, as one TV spot boldly pronounced, “not your father’s Star Trek.”54 Abrams’s
51 Some noteworthy offenders include Siegel’s “‘Trek’ Plan: Go Young and Prosper,” playing on the Star Trek Vulcan
greeting “Live long and prosper”; Jay A. Fernandez, “Star Trek Engages Promo Drive,” Hollywood Reporter, Novem-
ber 20, 2008; Pamela McClintock, “Boldly Going Global,” Variety, May 7, 2009.
52 Roger Ebert, “Review of Star Trek: Nemesis, Paramount Pictures,” December 13, 2002, http://rogerebert.suntimes
.com/apps/pbcs.dll/article?AID=/20021213/REVIEWS/212130305/1023.
53 “Trekkies Bash New Star Trek Film as ‘Fun, Watchable,’” The Onion, May 5, 2009, http://www.theonion.com/video
/trekkies-bash-new-star-trek-film-as-fun-watchable,14333/.
54 Alex Billington, “This Is Not Your Father’s Star Trek—Another New TV Spot,” April 12, 2009, http://www.firstshowing
.net/2009/this-is-not-your-fathers-star-trek-another-new-tv-spot/.
58Cinema Journal 56 | No. 2 | Winter 2017
statements were at the forefront of this strategy. He explained to TV Guide that the film
“very much honors the canon of Star Trek. On the other hand, it won’t be like anything
you’ve seen before.”55 Speaking to the Los Angeles Times, he presented his position: “I
feel a great responsibility to these characters and everything that has come before, but I
need to make a film that is not paralyzed by all of that.”56 A nimble industry player, he
juggled between assuring the Hollywood Reporter, “I am obviously indebted to [fans]. The
great thing about getting a consensus because of the Internet is it allows you to really
hear what the audience is feeling,” and telling Variety, “We’re reading as much as we can
. . . but we’re also going to limit it. You want to remain fresh and be inspired.”57 It is
the Supreme Court’s resident hard-core Trekker, screenwriter Roberto Orci, who in the
meantime told the fan site TrekMovie.com that he and cowriter Kurtzman had watched
and read all available Star Trek material down to the paperback novels, some of which
he cited as their inspiration. The division of labor, deploying different creative agents
to deal with different segments of the audience, allowed for Paramount to have its cake
and eat it, so to speak, in terms of including the fan audience. On TrekMovie, Orci
argued quantum mechanics with the fans and tackled the question of the canonicity of
the film’s prequel comic, saving Abrams the potential diminishing of his “cool” brand
that might result from playing too nerdy with the Trekker crowd.58
The placing of the film’s creative team along a spectrum of franchise loyalty, from
devout Trekker Orci to Bryan Burk, who stressed that he had never watched an epi-
sode, played a central role in the campaign. It enabled both fans and nonfans to be
reassured that both their points of view had their representative. Naturally Abrams
himself falls in the middle of that spectrum, as someone who has watched and was
familiar with the original series but was not a fan until he discovered that Star Trek was
not what he thought it was: “I found myself surprisingly connected to a character
called James T. Kirk. I found myself loving a character whose name was Spock. And as
someone who was never really a Star Trek fan and who never really connected with any
of the characters, it was the last thing in the world I ever expected.”59 In quotes such as
this one in the Hollywood Reporter, Abrams becomes a spokesperson for the “worthiness”
of Star Trek, establishing his own experience as one of discovery of an essence already
present. It was because of his position as an outsider to both franchise and fandom
that he claims he was able to “seize the things that I felt were truly the most iconic and
important aspects of the original series and yet not be serving the master and trying
55 Shawna Malcolm, “Lost Boss Tackles Star Trek Enterprise,” TV Guide, August 11, 2006, http://www.tvguide.com
/news/Lost-Boss-Tackles-37613.aspx.
56 Geoff Boucher, “Time Travel,” Los Angeles Times, December 7, 2008.
57 Jay Fernandez, “Q&A: J. J. Abrams,” Hollywood Reporter, December 10, 2009, http://www.hollywoodreporter.com
/news/qampa-jj-abrams-92234; Josef Adalian, “Star Scribe Beams Up,” Daily Variety, July 19, 2008.
58 The exchange on the official comic reveals the importance of authorship in fannish discourse. The inter-
viewer noted to Orci that the comic bears Abrams’s and Kurtzman’s as well as Orci’s own name, explaining,
“There is a difference between a regular comic and a comic with your guys’ names on it.” Orci’s stumbling re-
ply that the Supreme Court had not yet “ruled” on the issue shows that even this hardcore Trekker is not wise
to all the ways in which fandom handles authorship. Anthony Pascale, “Exclusive Interview: Roberto Orci on
All the Latest with Star Trek (and More),” TrekMovie, December 9, 2008, http://trekmovie.com/2008/12/09
/exclusive-interview-roberto-orci-on-all-the-latest-with-star-trek-and-more/.
59 Fernandez, “Q&A.”
59Cinema Journal 56 | No. 2 | Winter 2017
to be true to every arcane detail”—as in, to boil Star Trek down to its own essence.60 His
descriptions of Star Trek’s values and its ongoing appeal—which of course must be em-
phasized as still vivid and relevant—hark back to the language of vision and the theme
of futurism but avoid attributing them as carefully as he avoids appropriating them as
his own. He explains, “It was important to me that optimism be cool again” and that
“that spirit of innovation, collaboration, possibility, adventure, and optimism . . . is
inherent in what Star Trek was.”61 He called the original series “smart television” that
was “about something,” something that is relevant particularly today as an antidote to
more cynical, darker films and to modern fears of conflict and violence.62
Abrams emphasized that the Star Trek he was bringing to the screen was an emotional
more than philosophical story, hinging on the characters and their relationships. As he
told TV Guide, “What endures isn’t a genre, it’s character and emotional connection.”63
It is reasonable to assume that this reflects a deliberate bid to redefine the franchise
away from cold and abstract “pure” science fiction (and faintly ridiculous space opera)
and stress its human appeal, as well as to show that there is more to it than an action-
packed summer film. The emphasis on character was constructed not as something
that Abrams brings in, however, but as a Star Trek staple. Abrams described Star Trek
as having started out as a character-driven show, only later becoming too entrapped
in genre tropes focusing on obscure scientific ideas and technological terms. In fact,
according to the marketing campaign, one of Abrams’s qualifications to be doing Star
Trek was his ability to wed action and human emotion on the big screen. Kurtzman
told Wired magazine, “You need someone who understands genre and the spirit of Trek
to accomplish a movie of this scope . . . yet hopefully it’s also intimate.”64 As much as
the statement works to praise Abrams’s varied skills, so it serves to characterize the film
that those skills were important for.
What Abrams was marketing was a film that is essential Star Trek, but tailored
to his own particular tastes. The faster pace, the emotional angle, the story being
character driven: none of these were alien to the franchise, or represented any radical
reenvisioning of it. They had all been lurking under its surface waiting to be (re)
discovered. The theme recurs even in discussion of the film’s more technical aspects,
an important component of the Abrams brand. Abrams stated that he wanted the
film to feel “real”—noting that Star Trek had never seemed “real” to him before—
and to ground it in the here and now; but at the same time (in a typical act of self-
contradiction) he attributed the franchise’s appeal to him to how “this is not Star Wars
60 Geoff Boucher, “Star Trek Director J. J. Abrams on Tribbles and the ‘Galaxy Quest’ Problem,” Los Angeles Times:
Hero Complex, January 29, 2009, http://herocomplex.latimes.com/2009/01/29/star-trek-direc/.
61 Jeff Jensen, “Star Trek: New Movie, New Vision,” Entertainment Weekly, October 18, 2008, http://www.ew.com/ew
/article/0,,20233502,00.html; Geoff Boucher, “J. J. Abrams: “Star Trek Must Escape the Shadow of Star Wars,” Los
Angeles Times: Hero Complex, January 31, 2009, http://www.ew.com/ew/article/0,,20233502,00.html.
62 Shawna Malcolm, “J. J.’s Next Missions,” TV Guide, August 19, 2008.
63 Ibid.
64 Hugh Hart, “Star Trek Writers Brace for Impact,” Wired, February 10, 2008, http://www.wired.com/underwire
/2008/10/star-trek-write/.
60Cinema Journal 56 | No. 2 | Winter 2017
which happened a long time ago in a galaxy far, far away. This is us and our future.”65
Orci, in interacting with fans, offered the explanation, “We are the lucky recipients
of forty years of Trek school. . . . [W]e’ve had the opportunity to learn (hopefully)
what is essential and wonderful about Trek and to distil it into its most potent form
yet.”66 This most potent form of Star Trek is, indeed, presented as J. J. Abrams’s Star
Trek. But that is Abrams as the viewer, the opinion leader, much more than Abrams the
creator who imbues the franchise with his own vision and meanings. The signature
of his name functions as a guarantor of quality more than as a claim of origin, as a
promise that the film and the franchise it was meant to jump-start are cool, modern,
and entertaining. Abrams’s presence is what turns the film from “your father’s Star
Trek” into “original Star Trek,” two very different things. The first carries all the negative
brand connotations of a tired old franchise for a bygone generation, while the other
signifies a rediscovery of a lost treasure. But Abrams is not the author here, in the sense
that those qualities rediscovered in Star Trek do not originate with him and he cannot
claim any credit for creating them. His future absence from it would not take away
from its identity. The Star Trek of the twenty-first century bears J. J. Abrams’s name as
a brand in the sense of a guarantee of quality and of an added value by association.
But it is not dependent on him in that sense of shared origin, where branding overlaps
with authorship. It comes to a wider audience authorship-free.
Another part in this positioning is played by actor Leonard Nimoy, who reprises
his role as (the original) Spock in the film, acting opposite Zachary Quinto as the
character’s younger self in a twist of time travel and alternate realities. Nimoy’s
coming out of retirement at the age of seventy-eight to act in a Star Trek film once more
is an all-but-transcendent moment for fans, celebrated by the creative team as not
only a huge achievement but also the movie’s cornerstone. Abrams described Nimoy’s
involvement to the Los Angeles Times as “essential to our goal to serve and celebrate the
history of Star Trek with this story and create something new and exciting.”67 Orci told
fans on TrekMovie that “Nimoy’s blessing is a beacon of light that we have tried to
follow like a ship in the night.”68 Elsewhere, in a moment of rare candidness from a
Hollywood resident, he asked a fan, “You think the notion of recasting everyone would
go down as smooth without him?”69 Their discourse spares nothing in communicating
Nimoy’s crucial importance to Abrams’s Trek, his position as an icon and a touchstone.
The gravity of his appearance is promoted in behind-the-scenes materials (Figure 3).
Quinto calls Nimoy the man who created the character; even the self-described nonfan
65 Boucher, “J. J. Abrams: “Star Trek Must Escape the Shadow of Star Wars.” This has now become a doubly interesting
statement, as Abrams has made a Star Wars film, which highlights the ongoing negotiation of the author image.
66 Anthony Pascale, “Orci Chats with Fans on Canon, Marketing and More,” TrekMovie, February 6, 2008, http://
trekmovie.com/2008/02/06/orci-chats-with-fans-on-canon-marketing-and-more/.
67 Geoff Boucher, “Leonard Nimoy: Star Trek Fans Can Be Scary,” Los Angeles Times: Hero Complex, May 11, 2009,
http://herocomplex.latimes.com/2009/05/11/leonard-nimoy-star-trek-fans-can-be-scary/.
68 Charles Trotter, “More Fan Q&A with Roberto Orci,” TrekMovie, January 28, 2008, http://trekmovie.com/2008/01/28
/more-fan-qa-with-roberto-orci/.
69 Roberto Orci, comment no. 1081 on Anthony Pascale, “Bob Orci Explains How the New Star Trek Movie Fits
with Trek Canon (and Real Science),” TrekMovie, December 11, 2008, http://trekmovie.com/2008/12/11/bob-orci
-explains-how-the-new-star-trek-movie-fits-with-trek-canon-and-real-science/#1334295.
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