http://deadline.com/2015/03/harve-benne ... 201387026/
Geez.
Major hats off and salute here, too. I credit him with helping take Trek to the next level all the way.
RIP Harve Bennett
-
Monterey Jack
- Posts: 9742
- Joined: Mon Oct 18, 2004 12:14 am
- Location: Walpole, MA
Re: RIP Harve Bennett
Bad week for Trekkies. 
-
AndyDursin
- Posts: 34272
- Joined: Tue Oct 05, 2004 8:45 pm
- Location: RI
Re: RIP Harve Bennett
You could say he helped save the franchise, as he got the budget down on II and worked with Nicholas Meyer in writing a great Star Trek story. RIP to Mr. Bennett.
Re: RIP Harve Bennett
Agreed. RIP Mr. Bennett.Monterey Jack wrote:Bad week for Trekkies.
-
DavidBanner
Re: RIP Harve Bennett
Harve Bennett was a solid TV producer, including his runs on Mod Squad, Six Million Dollar Man and Bionic Woman.
Gene Roddenberry never respected him, starting with his having Bennett tossed off the set of the pilot of "The Long Hunt of April Savage" in 1965. It's clear that Roddenberry saw him as an outsider from the moment Bennett was named to produce Trek II. Looking at the memos that Roddenberry wrote about the movies, and noting the fact that Roddenberry never once acknowledged the work Bennett had done to rehabilitate the Star Trek productions, there's a fairly obvious disdain at work.
Some of this is understandable. Bennett came in as the boss of the show, with a mandate to produce the movies in a much more efficient manner than Roddenberry had done with TMP. And he did that quite well. But his style of running the show, which we can see from the multiple accounts and from the various DVD interviews, was very much a top-down idea. According to Nick Meyer, he locked heads with Bob Sallin on Trek II, with the result being that Sallin never worked on another Trek project. With Trek III, he was clearly in charge of the operation, essentially telling Nimoy to do additional coverage when needed. Nimoy chafed under this and noted that Bennett was acting as a typical television producer where the director of the week essentially delivers the shots and then lets the producer recut everything. Trek IV was a different story. After the script was assembled by Bennett and Meyer, Nimoy took a much stronger approach for his second turn. I understand from crew that worked on Trek IV that Nimoy barred Bennett from coming to the set - and this problem continued in post, where Bennett had to be stopped from adding a subtitle to the probe communications. With Trek V, Bennett found himself essentially babysitting William Shatner's turn in the director's chair. By all accounts, it was a comedy of errors, all the way from the initial script to the disastrous VFX problems in post.
As I understand it, Bennett was thinking he was going to direct the sixth movie himself, which would once again be from a script idea of his. It's interesting that even Nick Meyer thinks Bennett's Starfleet Academy movie was a good idea and a precursor to what would eventually happen in 2009. Bennett said in interviews with Shatner that he thought this movie would be a kind of interim idea - a chance to take a breath and then move on with a new movie with the original cast. I frankly don't believe that. His Academy movie would have established a new cast in the parts, and would have set him up as the director/producer of a whole new series of movies - without needing to constantly deal with the egos of the original cast or the diminishing interference by Roddenberry. (Bennett knew as well as Rick Berman that Roddenberry was barely engaged with Trek by 1990 and that his illnesses meant that Roddenberry would be unlikely to even send any further protest memos.) But the move backfired - Paramount in 1990 and 1991 did not want to suddenly meet a new cast playing the classic parts. So they asked Bennett to produce a new movie with the original cast and he refused. He said at the time that they would not have had the time to do it properly - but this frankly sounds like Roddenberry's excuses about needing to step back from the 3rd season of TOS. It's more likely that Bennett was trying to push the studio into going ahead with his idea. They countered with an offer to do his movie idea after theirs. He countered that he could see that they were never going to make his movie idea after theirs. And with that impasse, Bennett suddenly found himself out of the picture. He admitted to Shatner that he became really depressed for some time about it - because the end result was that instead of capping his career with an acknowledged position of "Producer of Star Trek", he instead could only point to four movies, the last of which had bombed, while the rest of the Trek crew pointedly moved on without him to make a hit sixth movie. The fact that the studio turned to Nimoy to produce it had to have stung him even more.
Bennett's post-Trek work was brief, but he did get to produce two more TV series. The first one, a sci-fi cop show called Time Trax (currently being emulated by Continuum) was a low budget affair, shot in Australia. I remember it as a "meh" when it hit the airwaves in 1993, at roughly the same time as DS9 and Babylon 5. But it did give Bennett his long-hoped-for directing slot in its second and final season. After that, he worked on the very short-lived Invasion America, which was an animated show for the WB that only went 13 eps before being canned. The one bright spot I see there is that Nimoy consented to provide a voice for one of the show's villains for a few eps. After that, Bennett retired.
There are some people who've been wondering what happened to Bennett's memoirs, as he mentioned writing them over ten years ago. The answer, apparently, is that the publishing company he was going to use went under after they published O.J. Simpson's notorious "If I Did It". Bennett never went to another publisher after that. But we do have multiple extensive interviews with him. Shatner has pages of his quotes in his Star Trek Movie Memories book. Other writers also interviewed Bennett for his accounts of the making of Treks II-V. Bennett gave hours of interviews to the DVD people for the Trek movies and was part of the commentary track for Trek III. He did a supplemental interview for the Blu-ray release, where he essentially repeated the same stories he'd told in the earlier interviews. In addition to that, he also did an extensive video interview for the Six Million Dollar Man/Bionic Woman DVDs, where he made some fairly disparaging comments about Star Trek fans. (On another board, people noted that Bennett had participated in the Interstat letterzine, including an unhappy farewell letter he published there at the time that he left the franchise.)
Looking over his career and his contributions, I think he made a positive contribution to Star Trek. His work to keep things together made for some good movies and paved the way for Paramount to restart the TV franchise with TNG. I remember wondering who the heck he was at the time he took over in 1982, but looking back at his work, I do think Gene Roddenberry could have and should have acknowledged him. They were men of different philosophies, to be sure, but Roddenberry could have worked with him if he'd wanted to. Roddenberry clearly did NOT want to work with him, and as a result, any real impact Roddenberry could have had on the subsequent movies was lost in nonsense like Roddenberry's JFK story.
The highest compliment I can pay to Bennett is that I don't think he was just "jobbed in", as he put it in one of his interviews. He really did make a difference while he was there, and he should be remembered as one of the major producers of the franchise, right next to Bob Justman and Rick Berman.
BTW - the loss of Maurice Hurley last week was one that was almost completely unheralded, but he was a crucial part of the first two years of TNG, and the one who created the Borg. (Yes, he cribbed from other sci-fi writers for the Borg, but he's the one who made them an indelible part of TNG. His version of them was the most compelling.) He was actually more of a standard TV writer, usually working with Joel Surnow, for whom he wrote eps of Miami Vice, The Equalizer and 24, among several other shows. Hurley is a name that doesn't get heard much around Trek, but, like Bennett, he did significant work while he was there.
Gene Roddenberry never respected him, starting with his having Bennett tossed off the set of the pilot of "The Long Hunt of April Savage" in 1965. It's clear that Roddenberry saw him as an outsider from the moment Bennett was named to produce Trek II. Looking at the memos that Roddenberry wrote about the movies, and noting the fact that Roddenberry never once acknowledged the work Bennett had done to rehabilitate the Star Trek productions, there's a fairly obvious disdain at work.
Some of this is understandable. Bennett came in as the boss of the show, with a mandate to produce the movies in a much more efficient manner than Roddenberry had done with TMP. And he did that quite well. But his style of running the show, which we can see from the multiple accounts and from the various DVD interviews, was very much a top-down idea. According to Nick Meyer, he locked heads with Bob Sallin on Trek II, with the result being that Sallin never worked on another Trek project. With Trek III, he was clearly in charge of the operation, essentially telling Nimoy to do additional coverage when needed. Nimoy chafed under this and noted that Bennett was acting as a typical television producer where the director of the week essentially delivers the shots and then lets the producer recut everything. Trek IV was a different story. After the script was assembled by Bennett and Meyer, Nimoy took a much stronger approach for his second turn. I understand from crew that worked on Trek IV that Nimoy barred Bennett from coming to the set - and this problem continued in post, where Bennett had to be stopped from adding a subtitle to the probe communications. With Trek V, Bennett found himself essentially babysitting William Shatner's turn in the director's chair. By all accounts, it was a comedy of errors, all the way from the initial script to the disastrous VFX problems in post.
As I understand it, Bennett was thinking he was going to direct the sixth movie himself, which would once again be from a script idea of his. It's interesting that even Nick Meyer thinks Bennett's Starfleet Academy movie was a good idea and a precursor to what would eventually happen in 2009. Bennett said in interviews with Shatner that he thought this movie would be a kind of interim idea - a chance to take a breath and then move on with a new movie with the original cast. I frankly don't believe that. His Academy movie would have established a new cast in the parts, and would have set him up as the director/producer of a whole new series of movies - without needing to constantly deal with the egos of the original cast or the diminishing interference by Roddenberry. (Bennett knew as well as Rick Berman that Roddenberry was barely engaged with Trek by 1990 and that his illnesses meant that Roddenberry would be unlikely to even send any further protest memos.) But the move backfired - Paramount in 1990 and 1991 did not want to suddenly meet a new cast playing the classic parts. So they asked Bennett to produce a new movie with the original cast and he refused. He said at the time that they would not have had the time to do it properly - but this frankly sounds like Roddenberry's excuses about needing to step back from the 3rd season of TOS. It's more likely that Bennett was trying to push the studio into going ahead with his idea. They countered with an offer to do his movie idea after theirs. He countered that he could see that they were never going to make his movie idea after theirs. And with that impasse, Bennett suddenly found himself out of the picture. He admitted to Shatner that he became really depressed for some time about it - because the end result was that instead of capping his career with an acknowledged position of "Producer of Star Trek", he instead could only point to four movies, the last of which had bombed, while the rest of the Trek crew pointedly moved on without him to make a hit sixth movie. The fact that the studio turned to Nimoy to produce it had to have stung him even more.
Bennett's post-Trek work was brief, but he did get to produce two more TV series. The first one, a sci-fi cop show called Time Trax (currently being emulated by Continuum) was a low budget affair, shot in Australia. I remember it as a "meh" when it hit the airwaves in 1993, at roughly the same time as DS9 and Babylon 5. But it did give Bennett his long-hoped-for directing slot in its second and final season. After that, he worked on the very short-lived Invasion America, which was an animated show for the WB that only went 13 eps before being canned. The one bright spot I see there is that Nimoy consented to provide a voice for one of the show's villains for a few eps. After that, Bennett retired.
There are some people who've been wondering what happened to Bennett's memoirs, as he mentioned writing them over ten years ago. The answer, apparently, is that the publishing company he was going to use went under after they published O.J. Simpson's notorious "If I Did It". Bennett never went to another publisher after that. But we do have multiple extensive interviews with him. Shatner has pages of his quotes in his Star Trek Movie Memories book. Other writers also interviewed Bennett for his accounts of the making of Treks II-V. Bennett gave hours of interviews to the DVD people for the Trek movies and was part of the commentary track for Trek III. He did a supplemental interview for the Blu-ray release, where he essentially repeated the same stories he'd told in the earlier interviews. In addition to that, he also did an extensive video interview for the Six Million Dollar Man/Bionic Woman DVDs, where he made some fairly disparaging comments about Star Trek fans. (On another board, people noted that Bennett had participated in the Interstat letterzine, including an unhappy farewell letter he published there at the time that he left the franchise.)
Looking over his career and his contributions, I think he made a positive contribution to Star Trek. His work to keep things together made for some good movies and paved the way for Paramount to restart the TV franchise with TNG. I remember wondering who the heck he was at the time he took over in 1982, but looking back at his work, I do think Gene Roddenberry could have and should have acknowledged him. They were men of different philosophies, to be sure, but Roddenberry could have worked with him if he'd wanted to. Roddenberry clearly did NOT want to work with him, and as a result, any real impact Roddenberry could have had on the subsequent movies was lost in nonsense like Roddenberry's JFK story.
The highest compliment I can pay to Bennett is that I don't think he was just "jobbed in", as he put it in one of his interviews. He really did make a difference while he was there, and he should be remembered as one of the major producers of the franchise, right next to Bob Justman and Rick Berman.
BTW - the loss of Maurice Hurley last week was one that was almost completely unheralded, but he was a crucial part of the first two years of TNG, and the one who created the Borg. (Yes, he cribbed from other sci-fi writers for the Borg, but he's the one who made them an indelible part of TNG. His version of them was the most compelling.) He was actually more of a standard TV writer, usually working with Joel Surnow, for whom he wrote eps of Miami Vice, The Equalizer and 24, among several other shows. Hurley is a name that doesn't get heard much around Trek, but, like Bennett, he did significant work while he was there.
Re: RIP Harve Bennett
Great post but I wanted to quote this because I didn't know about this either and wholeheartedly agree with you.DavidBanner wrote: <snip>
...
BTW - the loss of Maurice Hurley last week was one that was almost completely unheralded, but he was a crucial part of the first two years of TNG, and the one who created the Borg. (Yes, he cribbed from other sci-fi writers for the Borg, but he's the one who made them an indelible part of TNG. His version of them was the most compelling.) He was actually more of a standard TV writer, usually working with Joel Surnow, for whom he wrote eps of Miami Vice, The Equalizer and 24, among several other shows. Hurley is a name that doesn't get heard much around Trek, but, like Bennett, he did significant work while he was there.
AndyDursin wrote:You could say he helped save the franchise, as he got the budget down on II and worked with Nicholas Meyer in writing a great Star Trek story. RIP to Mr. Bennett.
Absolutely.