Rick Berman talks Series 5 and Star Trek X film.
This is from Trek Today, but the full version will appear in the May 2001 "Star Trek Monthly" magazine.
He talks about Voyager first, giving away nothing about the final episode, as usual.
"For the film," Berman comments, "John Logan, Brent Spiner and I developed a story and we worked quite extensively on it. The studio was very enthusiastic and supportive. The first draft was written and John and I worked a great deal on that. We gave it to the studio and there are some revisions being made now. We are mid-second draft. John is a quick and speedy writer. He's back in Evansville, Illinois, and I'm expecting a second draft from him probably in the next two or three weeks. This will definitely be a post-strike picture. I would guess that the earliest this thing could start shooting would be October, and that would be assuming there is no strike. It's all up in the air now."
"Series V," on the other hand, he remarks, "is truly where my heart is right now, where my blood and toil have been. We're in pretty much full-gear. We are in prep on it. Brannon and I wrote the script. We've gotten a tremendous amount of positive reinforcement from everyone at Paramount who has read it. It's not exactly certain where it's going to end up, but it will most likely be UPN. We are in full pre-production. We've been working with Herman Zimmerman on both interior and exterior designs. In fact, I believe we will be hammering the first nails within the next few weeks on a stage that's currently being used for Vanilla Sky, a movie with Tom Cruise. We're starting to hire people. The casting process will be starting pretty soon. And I believe we will begin our two-hour premiere sometime in May."
And what about the effect of the increasingly expected writers and actor's strikes? "We'll certainly get the premiere done before the strike. We'll possibly get the premiere and one one-hour episode in before the strike. As far as what happens after that, we'll see. The way to look at it is if there's a strike, we'll have a premiere and possibly another episode that will be cut and finished and ready to air."
