Back in 1979, Paramount released “Star Trek: The Motion Picture” and the Star Trek film-franchise was born.
Despite numerous behind-the-scenes problems (including the fact they had no idea how to end the story when filming began), the movie hit theaters in December of 1979 and was a huge, box-office success. It launched the “Star Trek” franchise and the epic film, directed by veteran director Robert Wise helped propel “Star Trek” to new levels of success.
However, Wise was never happy with the finished project. And there were multiple version of the film running around for years — from an extended cut on VHS to another cut for presentation on ABC. All were interesting, but none quite met Wise’s satisfaction.
Twenty years later, Paramount gave Wise a chance to go back and create his final cut of “The Motion Picture” for the film’s 20th anniversary. This new cut was released to DVD and included some trims to certain scenes, some new effects (most notable in the scenes on Vulcan at the film’s opening) and adding in some new scenes from the extended cut and the ABC run. (Alas, the famed “Memory Wall” sequence while filmed was deemed unable to be put into the final cut, thus existing only in still shots and the legendary stories from fans).
Wise recorded a commentary on the new cut of the film that is part of the official release.
Now, the team that worked with Wise on the director’s cut has put together a commentary on the creation of the new version of the classic film. The commentary track features Director’s Edition producer David C. Fein, restoration supervisor Michael Matessio. o and visual effects supervisor Daren R. Dochterman,
Fans can download the free podcast commentary from the official “Star Trek” web site at this link.
James Bond is returning to his native country for the next Bond flick, according to Variety.
The latest Bond installment, “Casino Royale” was shot at Prague’s Barrandov Studios. But the next installment (the 22nd in the long-running franchise) will return to Bond’s native soil and film at England’s Pinewood Studios. This next film is set to begin shooting in December.
Lack of financial incentives in the country is being cited as the reason for the non-return.
The loss of the film for Barrandov is a major blow to the Czech film industry. Couple that with losing the filming of Hellboy 2 in the country and many in the Czech film industry are concerned.
Not even Harry’s magical powers could keep hackers from finding and posting the closing chapter of the final installment of the “Harry Potter” series on-line.
Word began spreading Saturday throughout the “Harry Potter” fandom that the final chapter had been found and posted on-line.
And it appears the chapter is the actual final chapter and not an elaborate hoax. Tuesday, Scholastic Corp. obtained a subpoena to discover the identity of a California website user who allegedly posted the pages to his website.
Scholastic said in a court filing Monday that “materials hosted on Photobucket.com’s system” contain materials that infringe copyrights owned by Scholastic and J.K. Rowling, author of the Harry Potter books. Photobucket, a News Corp. unit, is a website for sharing photos and videos on social networks such as MySpace.
The subpoena was sent to Gaia Interactive Inc. in San Jose seeking the identity of a user on gaiaonline.com, a social network, according to the filing in San Francisco federal court.
Gaia complied with the subpoena, removed the material and temporarily banned the user from the site, said Gaia spokesman Bill Danon. The postings included scanned material and a discussion of the material, he said.
The final installment of the series “Harry Potter and the Deathly Hallows” goes on-sale this Saturday morning at 12:01 a.m. world-wide. Millions of “Potter” fans await the final installment and to find out who lives and who doesn’t make it to the end of the series. (Author J.K. Rowling has promised at least two deaths in the final installment).
I’ve not looked at these alleged final pages because I’d like to try and stay as SPOILER free as possible. If you do feel the need to find them, please DO NOT post links back to the pages here at Slice of SciFi or reveal how it all ends.