Star Trek: Axanar-Independent Feature Film

If that was his point, he's very forgiving about non-professionals acting!

 

I like Star Trek Continues, but never really checked out the other ST fan films.

Darryl

 

I think it's cool to put together fan films, and many have surprisingly strong production values.

But I don't imagine Axanar would have truly been indistinguishable from a big budget film.

It's also not as if they got A-level actors either. Tony Todd (who evidently quit the project) and Richard Hatch? They're popular among some genre fans. But their careers are riddled with b-movies.

 

No, all your numbers are wrong. The average cost of a Hollywood union studio feature right now is about $105 million:
http://www.hollywoodreporter.com/news/200-million-rising-hollywood-struggles-721818

And the reasons why are numerous:
http://www.investopedia.com/financial-edge/0611/why-movies-cost-so-much-to-make.aspx

Micro-budgeted (aka "ultra-low") and low-budgeted films are defined differently by the various unions and guilds. I would say anything below $100K is micro; low budget is anything under a million. Different rules kick in with the film budget hits $3 million and $9 million, respectively. SAG, the Writers Guild, and the Directors Guild are all pretty close on these definitions. Very frequently, the indie films I see hover at between $1 million and $2 million. They try very hard to keep it below $3 million, because then it comes a different "tier" and everybody gets paid much more money.

The point of the piece is that it's not necessary to spend $2 million on a fan film meant to imitate the Star Trek movies & TV shows and have fun. I think Paramount acted badly and should have taken a greater role in specifying exactly how fans could use the Star Trek universe in their amateur films, but I think the intent was always intended to apply towards fan-made shorts shot in their garages, basically elaborate student films. Paramount hadn't expected that low-budget pros would get together and shoot a $2 million movie, particularly if it's going to be released in the same year as a $200 million studio Star Trek picture.

Quick side-story: I once got to work on a $1 million film, a $3 million film, and a $10 million film within the same 3-month period. What was interesting to me is that the $3 million film looked a lot better than the $1 million film -- better camera work, better locations, more intricate scenes, complicated action. But there wasn't that much visual difference between the $3 million film and the $10 million film. The producer explained to me that the extra money basically paid for better actors, more shooting time, and more exotic locations. Everything else was pretty close.

Speaking of better actors, the biggest problem I see with all these fan-made productions is the casting is usually terrible and the characters just can't act. Some of the visuals are very sophisticated and interesting, some not so much, some of the sets are OK, but it's clear that when you pay for a real actor, there's a big difference between a mid-west actor doing little theater part time and an actual NY or LA-trained professional actor who's done it for years. This is something you can't fake or fix in post. Either the actor has skill and presence and charisma, or they don't. And that takes talent and money.

In truth, most of the expenses of these massive-budget pictures are tied to actors routinely getting $5 million or $10 million for their parts, plus millions more for a dozen producers and a half-dozen directors. The above-the-line people -- actors, writers, directors, producers -- generally consume the lion's share of the budget. The technicians don't get nearly as much as people believe, though they are often well-paid to a point. Everything else boils down to time. It took them something like 30 months to make the current Star Wars film, and when you hire a thousand people to work on a film, it's gonna cost $200 million, easy.

 

^^Some pretty charts here with related data, akin to what you are saying: https://stephenfollows.com/average-budget-low-micro-budget-film/

Yeah.

Y'know… There's a book to be made out of this fiasco.

I could imagine a coffee table book with the Axanar screenplay and storyboards, a thick section on the making of the film with production photos and cast and set pics, renderings, etc, and another section on the "unmaking" of the film (ideally that part would be written by someone with a reporting background). Such a book would be rather popular - if I were Titan Press I'd be all over this, unless Paramount objected. I imagine Paramount would be against the publication of any book that might make money for the producers, and they'll write that prohibition into whatever settlement they are making with the Axanar producers. A book that only reported on the fiasco would be protected, of course - especially if written by someone entirely outside the production - but it wouldn't be as interesting as a book full of art and including the script.

Maybe Paramount would allow a book of this kind if all proceeds went to Paramount. But then who would want to write it?

More likely Paramount will demand that everything that was created for Axanar be destroyed, down to every stitch in every costume. (And then in a dozen years or so, when everyone has calmed down, and when Axanar is taught in film schools as an example of trademark infringement, everyone's personal on-set photos will be dug up for the creation of a book much like the one that could have been done properly now).

 

This. Cause as it stands, such a book would be right in line with all the other infringing products such as stories of the Four Years War featured in Axanar written by Trek fiction authors (now downgraded to soliciting from fanfiction authors on Facebook), model ships, patches, a soundtrack and on-disc copies of Prelude and even coffee. Yes, coffee.

 

Depends on how it was done; documenting is inherently protected speech - so you end up with books like The Making of Yesterday's Enterprise, which Paramount can't touch. They can however write in whatever they want into an agreement with the producers, and that will depend entirely on Paramount's mood. And Paramount can easily intimidate any publisher that may want to do future business with them, such as Titan.

 

That's a great piece -- I appreciate the link. I think it's a little high for 2015/2016, but it's not that far off from reality. What I will say is once you get below $250K, it gets very, very hard to shoot a decent feature with high production values and recognizable actors. $2 million, you can make a fairly presentable film.

I have yet to see anybody write up why exactly this thing escalated between the producers of Axanar and the studio. I think the producers just wanted to push the envelope and raise a great deal of money and make what they thought was a good fan film; Paramount may well have believed that what the producers were really doing was cutting cushy paychecks for themselves. I don't know what went on since I wasn't there and didn't read the line-item budget. I can say if they had kept it under $100K, I don't think it would've set off any alarms, but Paramount should have been on top of this more and should've made more clear the extent of their limited copyright authorization for this stuff.

I think technically Paramount could greatly limit the book publisher's limitations on using trademarks like "Star Trek" and spaceship designs, plus they could stop them from certain kinds of drawings and illustrations and so on. I've noticed that fan-published Trek books tend to have very generic artwork and they don't reproduce the actual "Star Trek" typeface, to avoid The Wrath of Viacom.

 

Well, when stuff like this comes out...:

http://www.mobys.ws/01/03/axanar-and-profit-or-income-or-salary-or/

Most of the writeups have been from blog posts such as the above, or http://1701news.com/node/980/axanar-will-ruin-fan-trek-everyone.html

 

Let me look at the line-item budget and we can all judge for ourselves. Who gets the interest while the $2 million is sitting in the bank?

 

Axanar Productions are fighting the copyright claims and have asked the court to dismiss or strike the copyright claims in question.

Star Trek rightsholders claim ownership over various Star Trek related settings, characters, species, clothing, colors, shapes, words, short phrases and even the Klingon language.

This week, Axanar productions and Alec Peters responded to the allegations put forward in the complaint (pdf). According to the makers of the fan film, several of the allegedly “infringing elements” are not protected by copyright to begin with. In addition, Axanar productions points out that Paramount and CBS can’t claim ownership of the Klingon language, which is nothing more than an idea according to the defendants.

The defendants continue by stressing that the use of the Vulcan appearance and the Heat-Ray Phaser weapons are not unique to Star Trek. They are common appearances in nature and / or have been used in fictional works before.

“Vulcan appearance: a species with ‘pointy ears’ is not original to Star Trek, and has appeared in many fictional fantasy works depicting imaginary humanoid species predating Star Trek, including, but not limited to, vampires, elves, fairies, and werewolves, as well as in many animals in nature.”

“Phasers are also known as Heat-Ray weapons, which have existed in science fiction since H.G. Wells’ ‘War of the Worlds’ in 1898,” the complaint notes.

Besides the questions Axanar raises over the copyright protections, they also argue that the allegations aren’t specific enough, since it’s not specified which exact copyrights have been infringed.

 

i think actors need to go on a salary diet

 

I think you can look back to Winchester '73 (from 1950) as perhaps the beginning of the actors' salary problem, when Jimmy Stewart's agent Lew Wassmerman convinced the studio to give Stewart a percentage of the gross revenue in exchange for the actor getting paid less money up front. Universal was flummoxed when the actor wound up getting many times more money than he initially had asked. This led to more actors demanding to be "profit participants" in their films, which drove (and continues to drive) studios crazy.

The first time I sat up and really took notice of actors' salaries getting out of control was when Sylvestor Stallone wound up making $12 million for his role in a (fairly forgettable) 1987 arm-wrestling film, Over the Top. And that record was topped again a decade later when Jim Carrey managed to get $2o million to star in Cable Guy. What I think makes much more sense today is when actors basically work for scale -- which is not nearly as much money as people believe -- and then take a reasonable percentage of the profits. If the movie makes no money, the actors don't make money; if it makes a huge profit, the actors get handsomely rewarded. On low-budget non-broadcast shows line Axanar, SAG actors would get very modest fees, I think a minimum of only about $1000 a day for most of the roles.

Bear in mind that the vast majority of SAG-AFTRA members make less than $10,000 a year from acting. It's only the top 2% or 3% that get the astronomical numbers you read in the paper. What I think is a bigger problem with studio pictures and TV series today is that they're top-heavy with about 19 or 20 producers, none of whom are making less than $5000 a week. You wonder how they made shows 25 years ago with only 4 or 5 producers.

I'm very much on the side of union members (aka the "below-the-line" people), most of whom are talented, hard-working people who endure under very difficult conditions and do not work every week of every year. The amount of money these people earn is not even 20% of the budgets of many movies & TV shows.

 

Yep. Cary Grant, too. He followed Stewart's lead although he occasionally would make the mistake of not gambling on the film's success and would take a salary and realize his mistake too late.

 

That's why no Hollywood movie is profitable anymore, according to their 'books'.

 

The best example of that issue that I know of was Rush Hour. Chris Tucker took a lump sum, but Jackie Chan sensed that the film was going to be a hit and took a low salary in lieu of a piece of the back end. I think Chan wound up getting about $20M, far more than the $5M they had initially offered. Tucker didn't make that mistake twice.

 

'STAR TREK' COPYRIGHT BATTLE PITS PARAMOUNT AND CBS AGAINST 'PROFESSIONAL' FAN FILM
Enterprising producer raised over $1.2 million, and promised a 'feature-quality' movie
BY MARC PERTON ON 4/22/16 AT 1:12 PM
http://www.newsweek.com/star-trek-fan-fiction-451320

 

yeah, they're boned. Also some other fanfilms are either quietly being advised to curtail proceedings, or in the case of one of the other fanfilms running a kickstarter, donations are wildly lower than they have been.

 

Breaking news: Thanks to the efforts of Star Trek Beyond director Justin Lin, CBS/Paramount is dropping the lawsuit.

 

On what grounds? Can the movie now go ahead (or not)?

 

The news have been rolling in for the past few minutes or so. Here is a video of J.J. Abrams discussing it with Justin Lin at today's Star Trek fan event. You have to be logged in to Facebook to see it. If you can't see it, J.J. explains that Justin Lin was outraged by the lawsuit, went to the studio and put some pressure on them to drop it. And yes, apparently they can go ahead with the film.
Log into Facebook | Facebook »

 

Thanks anyway, but I'm not signing into facebook to watch it (it's on my block list). Will look for it elsewhere.

 

If true this is excellent news.

There is no way the film will be made even if the lawsuit is being dropped. No actor will cross the studio, and everyone else (with a lick of sense) will be considering themselves lucky to be able to walk away from this unscathed.

 

No, according to J.J. Abrams, the fans can go ahead. Apparently, they're not just dropping the lawsuit, they're allowing the Axanar folks to go ahead with the film.

 

Not so, it seems the film can indeed proceed. According to this article where JJ Abrams says that the movie will be able to move forward freely:

“We talked about this and we realized this is not the appropriate way to deal with the fans. We should be celebrating this thing. We, the fans of ‘Star Trek,’ are all a part of this world. We went to the studio and pushed them to stop this lawsuit and now, within the next few weeks, it will be announced that this thing is going away and the fan will be able to work on the project".

Finally, some rationality!

(Encuentro beat me to it!)