The January 1999 issue of American Cinematographer magazine contains an article about TREKKIES on pages 76-83.

The following is an excerpt:

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January 1999

The amiable and entertaining documentary Trekkies offers a fond Vulcan salute to a certain sci-fi show's most passionate fans.

by Naomi Pfefferman

...Trekkies is an affectionate look at the devotees of the Star Trek television series and its various incarnations. The titular cult is the only fan group listed by name in the Oxford English Dictionary, and one of the largest phenomenons in pop culture history. Every day, somewhere in the world, millions of people are watching Star Trek.

In this genial documentary, executive producer and host Denise Crosby (who played Lieutenant Tasha Yar on Star Trek: The Next Generation) takes the audience on a tour of the Trekkie galaxy: the conventions, the costumes, the fan clubs, the fanzine writers, even the "slash" writers who have penned "adult" Trek-themed publications featuring homoerotic liaisons between Captain Kirk and Mr. Spock.

Along the way, we meet Barbara Adams, the Whitewater juror who arrived in court wearing her Starfleet commanding-officer uniform, communicator badge, rank pips, phaser and tricorder. We also visit an Orlando, Florida dentist whose office, Starbase Dental, is crammed with Trek treasures; a 14-year-old from Bakersfield who has already attended 28 conventions; and a man who admits, despite his wife's vehement protests, that he would like to have his ears surgically altered to resemble Vulcan points.

Viewers also tour a 31' replica of the starship Enterprise at the entrance of the city of Vulcan, in Alberta, Canada; a Klingon language class at the Interstellar Language School in Red Lake Falls, Minnesota; and a Trek-themed parade in Riverside, Iowa (population 826), which touts itself as the future birthplace of Captain James T. Kirk.

Although these highlights could easily be satirized with sarcastic humor, the filmmakers sought to avoid turning Trekkies into a "mockumentary." Says Nygard, "Going into the movie, my expectations of the fans were influenced by the popular stereotype: that Trekkies are losers as portrayed by the William Shatner sketch on Saturday Night Live. It was a refreshing surprise to discover that the fans are so upbeat and positive. I mean, they are obsessed with their pastime, but there are worse things to be obsessed with than improving the future of mankind, which is what the fans really take from Star Trek."

The 36-year-old Nygard, who lives in Santa Monica, California, admits that he is not a Trekkie, although he enjoyed watching the series, along with shows like Land Of The Giants and Time Tunnel when he was a kid. His true obsession is filmmaking. While growing up in Long Lake, Minnesota, Nygard appropriated his father's Super 8 camera and began directing his three younger siblings in amateur action flicks. With a hearty laugh, he recalls that the special effects in these epics consisted of throwing homemade dummies off the roof. Nygard also spent a lot of time watching suspense thrillers and science-fiction films (he can tell you, for example, that Godzilla vs. the Smogmonster is worth seeing just for the disco scenes).

While attending the University of Minnesota, Nygard saved about $10,000 in student loans by living at his grandmother's house near campus. Ultimately, he used the money to help finance his first film, a horror comedy entitled Warped, which won the top award at the 1990 Houston International Film Festival. Nygard went on to direct the HBO premiere Back To Back and the 1991 low-budget comedy High Strung, which starred Steve Oedekerk and featured an unbilled Jim Carrey.

High Strung also featured an actress named Denise Crosby, who had just completed her first season on Star Trek: The Next Generation. Crosby kept telling Nygard about the Trekkies who had overwhelmed and amazed her at assorted conventions. She and Nygard agreed that the fans would make a terrific documentary subject; when producer Keith Border and his company Neo Art & Logic agreed to finance the endeavor in the summer of 1996, they were off and running.

The filmmakers started by contacting Richard Arnold, Gene Roddenberry's former assistant and head researcher, to get as much information as possible on the movement. "We then began our list of famous Trekkies to track down," says the director, who also prepared by watching a dozen classic documentaries, including Michael Apted's 35 Up, the Maysles brothers' Salesman, and Les Blank's Gap Toothed Women.

In plotting out a visual style for Trekkies, Nygard decided on "a cross between MTV and the Maysles brothers." He wanted the playful, energetic, hand-held, always-roving camera work of MTV shows like The Real World, plus the intuitive portraiture of the famed cinema verite' filmmakers. "I really like point-of-view shots." adds Nygard, who first needed to find a cinematographer willing to work for free up front.

Enter Harris Done, 35, who had shot second unit on Back To Back, impressing Nygard and Border with some vibrant documentary footage of the New York Stock Exchange. "I was the guy with the free camera," quips Done, who has also contributed second-unit work to such films as Casper and The Cable Guy. Conveniently enough, he even lives a block away from Nygard in Santa Monica.

Having served as director of photography on nearly 20 indie films (including Ocean Tribe, see coverage of L.A. Independent Film Festival in AC June 1997), Done knows something about making movies on the cheap. For his directorial debut, an award-winning thriller called Sand Trap, he created "moonlight" for desert night scenes by covering car headlights with colored gels.

For Trekkies, Done used his Eclair NPR 16mm camera, which he had bought for $5,000 after graduating from USC's film school, and three 400' magazines. "The Eclair was one of the workhorse documentary cameras of the late 1960s and 1970s," explains the cinematographer. "It was the first camera with coaxial snap-on magazines, which don't need a whole lot of threading. The camera doesn't have a video tap, but it works just fine. Sure, I'd prefer to use an Aaton, but for a freebie, the Eclair makes great sense."

Production got under way during the weekend of Aug. 2, 1996, when Neo provided $3,000 for 30 rolls of film to shoot a big Star Trek convention in LA. "Most of the original Trek cast members were going to be there," Nygard says, "so it was do or die."

Done was accompanied by sound man Larry Scharf, who utilized a mono Nagra recording unit.

The cinematographer shot mostly without filters to ensure a sharp blow-up to 35mm. He brought along Kodak's 100 ASA 7248 film stock for exteriors, as well as some 200 ASA 7293 and 500 ASA 7298 for interiors, though he was not happy with all of the results. "A lot of the time we were shooting recans, because we were low-budget, and we had a bad experience with recans of the 7298 early on," Done says. "The older 98 got grainy and muddy on us, so we ended up buying fresh 98 whenever we needed it."

DoneÕs humble set of lenses performed just fine, however. To create a portrait look during formal, sit-down interviews, he utilized his Angenieux 12-120mm zoom. While doing hand-held work on the dimly fit convention floor, he used a wider, faster, Angenieux 9.5-57mm zoom to capture the expansive vista of Trekkies and "Trekabilia," In a dark auction room at the convention center, for example, Done was forced to shoot with the Angenieux wide open in order to capture a fierce bidding war over a Klingon headpiece.

The filmmakers "ambushed" six of the nine cast members of the original Star Trek series and convinced them to be in the film, a feat facilitated by the participation off fellow Trek veteran Denise Crosby. "We almost always had to interview the actors at a convention where they were appearing, because any time we tried to go through an agent, it never happened," producer Keith Border says. "William Shatner said no to us seven or eight times, but we just kept asking and asking."

When stars like Nichelle Nichols (Lieutenant Uhura) and James Doohan (Engineering Officer Scotty) agreed to be interviewed, Crosby immediately shuttled them over to the camera. "We usually did the interviews in bare rooms that we could commandeer in conference centers or at hotels," Nygard recalls of Trekkies' nine-month production schedule. "During a sit-down interview, there's not much you can do except zoom in and out and get different frames, but what you can do is lighting and set design. That first weekend, we raided the hotel for things we could use as Background props for our interviews. We were pretty sneaky, and our subterfuge pretty much went unnoticed. Keith and I would often be out pilfering plants. we even 'stole' a picture off a wall in an elevator so we could hang it behind Nichelle Nichols. We kept changing the backgrounds so it would look as if every interview was done in a different actor's living room.

"The best trick we learned was to take a colored light and beam it on the wall behind the subject." Nygard continues, "We'd just add a blue, green, or a red gel to create a colored wall! It was all done on the same wall, of course. That way we could change our location without actually having to move."

Done adds that the saturated, primary gel colors lent the interviews a hint of the visual style that graces the original Star Trek TV series. Not incidentally, director of photography Gerald Perry Finnerman, ASC has described using this same lighting technique while shooting the original Trek series, in order to create different moods on the show's limited sets (see AC Oct. '94).

Done had some other low budget tricks up his sleeve as well, especially where lighting was concerned. For the sit-down interviews, he brought along his small personal lighting kit: a few baby 1Ks, a 200-watt pepper and a 300-watt midget, usually for edging or backlight. He also came up with an innovative way to create a big, flattering, soft key light. "I couldn't use 4' by 4' metal frames of gridcloth, because I didn't have a 40' truck and a bunch of gaffers he says. "Instead, I'd just take a roll of light gridcloth and hang it off a C-stand arm, like a long roll of paper towels, so it would become like a 6' by 4' hanging strip of diffusion. Then I'd bang a 1K through it to create a large, soft key light. ThatÕs what I used for most of the interviews with the original cast members; they're all older now, so it was a very flattering light.

"I'd also bring along a 4' by 4' bounce card and walk it in to bring up as much fill as I needed. when I was done, I would just roll up the gridcloth and put it in a little tube. The concept was primitive but portable." (Done later took this idea one step further when he went to Europe to shoot the Holocaust documentary The Last Days for executive producer Steven Spielberg and October Films. He created 4' x 4' "floppies," rolls of black Duvateen that he hung off of C-stands to control a big, soft key light. "I didnÕt think to do that for Trekkies'," he says, "but I wish I had.")

While doing informal, on-the-spot interviews with Trekkies on the convention floor, Done's lighting philosophy was simpler. "Most hotels and convention halls are lit by overhead fluorescent or sodium-vapor units, which cast unflattering shadows and sometimes very undesirable color temperatures," the director of photography says. "Whenever possible, I had Keith hold a 650-watt tungsten Sungun with a sheet of gridcloth over it, in order to create a nice color temperature and get [some light] into the subject's eyes. I'd try to overpower the ugly overhead lights as much as possible by throwing white tungsten fill light on the interviewees. I chose the tungsten Sungun both for the price and because it runs longer with fewer batteries. The daylight Sunguns are more temperamental, and they go through batteries much faster."

Some of Done's baby 1KS were also temperamental, as the cinematographer recalls with a groan. "I'd dug them out of the trash at the USC film-school stockroom, and my roommate rebuilt them," says Done, who has since invested in newer units. "They must have been at least 40 years old, so old that even students didn't want to use them. I was constantly rewiring them on Trekkies. But you know what? They were free!"

After the successful LA convention shoot, the filmmakers beamed off to a dozen conventions, including events in Las Vegas, Boston and Jacksonville, Florida. They trekked after a man who had legally changed his name to Captain James T. Kirk; an auctioneer who fetched $60 for a half-empty, water glass used by actor John de Lancie (who plays the mischievous, omnipotent villain Q) a devotee of Brent Spiner (Data on The Next Generation) who calls herself a "Spiner-femme"; and a Trekkie transvestite, wearing makeup and a giant wig, who burst into song on camera. The filmmakers also visited Daryl Frazetti, a Trekkie studying to be a veterinarian whose cat, Bones, wears a Dr. McCoy outfit when he watches Star Trek with his owner. "We did not want to make fun of the Trekkies," Done insists. "Some individuals seemed a little 'out there,' and it would have been easy, through lighting and camera angles, to make them seem stranger than they were. But we refused to do that.

"Instead, we talked about always trying to give a more contemporary feeling and a lot of energy to the production. Roger loves camera movement, and as an editor, he loves lots of cuts. He likes a lot of pieces, so I always tried to give him interesting angles and close-ups of Trekkie memorabilia. As a cinematographer, I enjoyed creating order and structure out of the chaos that was unfolding in front of me."

Trekkies was a bare-bones shoot in other significant ways. Because Done and all the other crew members were willing to defer payment, the feature-length documentary's hard-cash outlay was only $120,000 (the final budget was approximately $375,000). Nygard recalls that the filmmakers also made frugality a virtue while traveling. "Whenever Denise Crosby was invited to a convention, she would trade in her first-class airfare and we would buy coach tickets for the crew," the director says. "Sometimes she would be able to convince the promoter to throw in an extra hotel room or two, and we'd all cram into the rooms."

When Border couldn't afford to send Done to a particular convention, Minneapolis-based cameraman Timothy B. Johnson sometimes stepped in, with his trusty, wind-up Krasnagorsk K3 16mm camera. Johnson, 29, a videographer, had bought the camera for $350 in 1994 to teach himself the basics of shooting with film. "I needed a cheap start," he explains, "and the Krasnagorsk comes with a reflex viewfinder, an internal light meter, and a 17-69mm lens, which is unusual for such an inexpensive camera."

Johnson's first film shoot ever was the August '96 Star Trek convention in Minneapolis; it was a trial by fire. "The Krasnagorsk only takes l00' spools, so I could only shoot for three minutes before having to reload, which was a real pain," he says. Nevertheless, the cameraman had a radical idea when Nygard asked him to shoot the Vulcan Festival in Vulcan, Canada, two months later. "I thought, 'Why not shoot sound, too?'" Johnson recalls. "So I borrowed a portable DAT recorder, brought my ElectroVoice 635-A omni-directional microphone, and gave it a try."

While interviewing a man who showed off his naturally Vulcan-shaped ears, Johnson perfected his ability to record sound while rolling a noisy, wind-up camera. "The Krasnagorsk makes a very loud, clicking noise, so I would have to shoot in a noisy environment, such as a chatty room, to mask the sound," he says. Johnson also placed the camera up to l0' away from the subject so the microphone wouldn't pick up camera noise. Because the wind-up spring motor only allowed for about l0 seconds of interview time, he rehearsed his interviews ahead of time to avoid wasting film.

Back home in Minneapolis, Johnson interviewed a man who travels around in a homemade "Captain Pike chair." For those not in the know, Captain Pike was a quadriplegic character (played by actor Jeffrey Hunter) who appeared in "The Menagerie," a two-part episode of the original Star Trek series. On the show, Pike travels around in a special life-support system, which looks like a futuristic cross between an iron lung and a wheelchair. in real life, Johnson and his Krasnagorsk trudged after the Trekkie in the Pike chair as he rolled down the street in the snow.

In the end, Nygard used some 11 minutes of Johnson's Krasnagorsk footage in Trekkies including several brief interviews. The director didn't mind that he had to laboriously synch up the sound while editing on Neo's Avid Film Composer 8000. "Tim's DAT was not time-coded, so all of the sound bites in the Vulcan segment were shot on the Krasnagorsk with wild synch," Nygard says. "When I was in the editing room, it all would go out of synch after probably three or four seconds, and I would have to take out a frame or two to get it back into synch. It was very rough synch, but it worked fine for just a couple of sound bites."

The rawness of some of the production adds to the campy fun of Trekkies however. For Nygard, the documentary answers the question of why Star Trek is so popular. "A lot of science fiction tends to paint the future as a decrepit, decaying downer -- a Blade Runner-type of world where things are going to get worse," he explains. "Star Trek is the exception. It shows a future where things have improved -- human beings get along better, male/female and racial relationships are on an equal basis, and people rise because of merit. Star Trek is an ideal world, a utopia that the masses could grasp through a weekly pulp TV show."

Today, Nygard is editing and producing another sci-fi-themed documentary, Six Days in Roswell, which Johnson is directing. What's his lingering memory of Trekkies? "Denise, Harris, Keith and I were like the four-headed monster," he says. "We were unstoppable."