Trekkies (1998) Denise Crosby, Barbara Adams, Denis Bourguignon and family, David and Laurel "Tammi" Greenstein, Gabriel and Richard Köerner, Richard Kronfeld, Joyce Mason and Evelyn De Biase, Anne Murphy. Executive Producers: Michael Leahy, Joel Soisson. Co-executive Producer: Denise Crosby. Produced by W.K. Border. Directed and edited by Roger Nygard. 87 minutes.
Not rated, 4 stars (out of five stars)
Review by Ed Johnson-Ott, NUVO Newsweekly www.nuvo-online.com Archive reviews at http://us.imdb.com/M/reviews_by?Edward+Johnson-ott To receive reviews by e-mail at no charge, send subscription requests to pbbp24a@prodigy.com
You don't need to be a Star Trek connoisseur to enjoy "Trekkies," an affectionate portrait of some the more "colorful" fans of the ubiquitous sci-fi phenomenon. The funniest documentary since "Cane Toads: An Unnatural History," "Trekkies" draws more belly laughs than any film in recent memory, including "There's Something About Mary."
Working on a shoestring budget with film stock of varying qualities, director Roger Nygard copes by editing "Trekkies" in the herky-jerky style popularized by MTV. In fact, an apt subtitle for the film would be "The Unreal World." Denise Crosby, Tasha Yar from "Star Trek: The Next Generation," serves as tour guide into the realm of Trek fandom, setting the benign, nonjudgmental tone that makes the feature work so well. While I enjoyed Michael Moore's "Roger and Me" and "The Big One," how refreshing it is to see a humorous documentary that doesn't batter its subjects with snide commentary. "Trekkies" simply lets the fans speak for themselves, with hilarious results.
Working off a "schematic" scrawled on a piece of notebook paper, one fellow shows off a glittery ball with assorted attachments. "It's a Romulan cloaking device," he explains without a hint of irony, "but I think I can modify it to work on a Federation ship." You know, I bet he can. Watch a befuddled Radio Shack clerk, eyeing the camera warily while the Trekkie shops for parts. Try, just try, to keep a straight face as the Uberfan tools down the street in his customized Captain Pike life- support motorized space-chair, with only his head sticking out of the bizarre contraption. As if the spectacle isn't freaky enough, he sports a brown corduroy winter hat with earflaps because, hey, it's chilly out there.
We also meet Barbara Adams, an employee of the Sir Speedy print shop who gained national prominence when, as a Whitewater trial juror, she insisted on wearing her Federation uniform to court. "Every day I would walk past the reporters with a Vulcan-like stoicism," she says with pride, before launching into a sermon on the ideals espoused by "Star Trek."
The original "Star Trek" debuted in the '60s, when the Vietnam war and sweeping social changes were turning the country upside down. The show presented a vision of a future where mankind not only survived, but thrived, with adventurers of varying races and nationalities united as they explored the far reaches of the heavens. Despite the mini-skirted sexism and imperialistic undertones of the show (as well as a notable lack of gays that continues to this day), the optimism of the series resonated with a determined group of disenfranchised viewers. More than 30 years, three TV series, nine films and countless books later, "Star Trek" lives on.
There's a sweet naiveté beneath the ridiculous costumes and garish make- up of these "Star Trek" fans that makes their eccentricities, if not necessarily endearing, at least understandable. Faced with a tumultuous, uncertain world, they've elected to move to a nicer one. I laughed at Gabriel, a 14-year old computer whiz who fusses over the detailing of his Federation outfits while over-enunciating multi-syllable words, but I also remembered my own painful adolescence enough to like him.
Some of the folks are considerably weirder. There's the transvestite Trekkie who dresses as the nameless wife of some obscure peripheral character, the guy considering having plastic surgery done to give his ears Vulcan-shaped points, and the "Spiner-Femme" who displays an album stuffed with photos of Brent Spiner (Data from "The Next Generation"), before aiming her telescope into the distance and wistfully noting that she can almost see the roof of the actor's home. Incidentally, I'm barely scraping the surface here. Wait until you hear about the "Q" virus!
"Trekkies" gets a bit stuffy towards the end, devoting too much footage to testimonials about the spirit of "Star Trek" before recovering with a last dash of humor, but that's a minor quibble. The film is an absolute hoot, an extremely funny cavalcade of outrageous fans who, outlandish costumes aside, are just people like the rest of us. At one time or another, we all get passionate and obsessive about something. We may not dress like Klingons or wave around phasers, but when you come right down to it, we're all pretty damn silly. Trekkies just wear their goofiness with pride.
A Discussion with Denise Crosby and Roger Nygard of "Trekkies"
by Ed Johnson-Ott, NUVO Newsweekly
Whether you're filming the founder of the Interstellar Language School, a man who legally changed his name to James T. Kirk, or a group of Klingons dining at a fast food joint, the trick is to avoid making color commentary. That's the philosophy behind "Trekkies," a hilarious documentary about Star Trek fandom. "We knew the audience would get it," explained Denise Crosby, co-executive producer of the film. "Just let them reveal themselves and tell their tales and you'll be touched, you'll be moved, you'll laugh, you'll go 'Oh my God, I thought I had some odd pastimes!'"
Crosby and "Trekkies" director Roger Nygard talked "Trek" during an interview at a downtown Indianapolis hotel. I congratulated Crosby, who just finished a year-long break after appearing in "Deep Impact" and having a baby, on her personal restraint in "Trekkies." Where many actors would have hogged the camera, Crosby served only as a pleasant, subdued host to the proceedings. She responded, "It was refreshing, actually, to be in that position. I can't stand that bombarding ego that actors have, so I was really happy to just kind of... " Nygard finished her sentence, saying "Be the Anti-Shatner?" The pair broke into gales of laughter over the dig at William Shatner, the notorious ham who played Captain Kirk. Crosby threw up her arms and gleefully shouted, "Yes, that's it, I am the Anti-Shatner!"
Denise Crosby gained fame as Tasha Yar on "Star Trek: The Next Generation, " considered by many to be the best incarnation of the venerable franchise. Several months into the series' extremely shaky first season, she asked to be written out, frustrated with scripts that left her standing around far too often. "I was going to become sort of lobotomized if I stayed on the show much longer," she said. Ironically, the episode where her character was killed offered her a long, eloquent monologue, exactly the kind of material she had craved in the first place. "It was very beautifully written, and really hit some personal notes, how I personally felt about all those actors," she explained. As to the rather arbitrary method the writers used to dispose of Tasha Yar, she said, "I knew the concept that Gene Roddenberry was after, that my character's death should be so unprovoked and so sudden that it would render itself horrific, but in hindsight it just fell flat. I think most people felt that, here you are killing off a well-loved character and it should have been more spectacular."
I asked about one the first season's most notorious episodes, a story which reinforced negative racial stereotypes. "We were just talking about this," Crosby said. "I think that show will go down in history... people will scratch their heads and say 'How did this ever get on the air?' I mean, they finally have a planet that's populated with a black race and then they present them as savage warriors, and the men want the white girl!" Shaking her head and laughing, she went on. "And they speak like the guy from the old Cola-nut commercials! Oh my God, I was just rolling my eyes the whole time."
In subsequent seasons, when the quality of the show radically improved, did she ever regret leaving the series? "You know, I never looked back," she answered. "I'm going to be really honest, I've never seen an episode since I left the show and I've never seen 'Voyager' or 'Deep Space Nine.' It's not that I have some sort of distaste for it, there's just not a lot of TV that I do watch. I watch films." "And documentaries!" Nygard chirped with a grin.
Crosby remained close with several cast members after leaving the show and was pleasantly surprised when the producers invited her to revisit her role in a superb time-travel story. The episode, "Yesterday's Enterprise," caught her by surprise. "When I left the show, that was it," she explained. "I had no plans of ever returning, I was dead. And then they called me up and said they had this idea and would I be interested? I said 'Absolutely.' They sent me this great script and I thought 'This is so clever! This is wild!' I had a great time doing it. And I got to work with Whoopi Goldberg, which I had missed due to my departure."
The success of the episode led to Crosby's idea for another character. Sela would be the child of Tasha Yar, born when she traveled backwards through time (don't ask). In Crosby's conception, the child would be a human raised by the Romulans, enemies of the Federation. "I had a meeting with Rick Berman (head honcho for the franchise after Roddenberry's death) and pitched the story," she said. "He kind of went away and thought about it for a couple of months, then called me and said they wanted to go with the idea, but with the slight variation that Tasha was pregnant by a Romulan general, so she had a half-human, half Romulan daughter." Nygard laughed and added, "Yeah, with the slight variation that you don't get paid for the idea!" Crosby appeared as Sela, and was invited back as Tasha Yar for the series' grand finale. "I thought that was really nice, actually," she said. "That was a surprise. I just had wished that Wil Wheaton was there. He was missing from the last show and it would have been nice if everyone could have been there."
Crosby met Nygard in 1991, when he cast her in the comedy "High Strung." A veteran guest at numerous "Star Trek" conventions, she proposed the idea of a documentary about the fans to Nygard, amazed that one hadn't been made already. Producer Keith Border financed the film through his company and shooting began in 1996.
The team received no help from Paramount, parent company for the "Trek" franchise. Instead, they attended conventions, ambushing cast members for interviews and eventually shooting 35 hours worth of footage. So when did Paramount, distributor of "Trekkies," finally embraced the film? "When we had an offer from a competing studio," laughed Nygard. "We always wanted to give them the benefit of first choice," said Crosby, "because 'Star Trek' is their franchise and I have a history with the studio, but they weren't jumping to the mat, so we shopped it around. Our lawyers got back to them and said 'We're moments away from letting so and so have this film. Does that interest you at all?' Boom. Offer's on the table."
Crosby and Nygard, who is currently finishing "Six Days in Roswell," a documentary about UFO enthusiasts, may do a follow-up "Trek" documentary focusing on the vast European fan base. They're not overly concerned about offending Trekkies. Nygard explains that any fan going out in public in "Trek" regalia knows they'll be noticed and possibly laughed at, and is willing to accept the consequences. Referring to one fan who tools around in a motorized "Trek" space-chair, he said affectionately, "That's just his preferred mode of transportation, because it shows his love of 'Star Trek.'"
© 1999 Ed Johnson-Ott
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