The First Day of Production Clappers caused quite a stir. You saw the front in yesterday’s blog post and on our Facebook Fan Group. Well, I am happy to announce that we actually have two left. We only made 10. One is for the studio. Seven were sold. So we have two to give to donors. They are $ 1,500 each on the Indiegogo and come with a whole host of other perks.
Had a meeting with a big shot at a top media production company today about all sorts of things Axanar and Ares Studios. He is a donor and helped us significantly with services for Prelude.
Working from home today since that meeting was in Burbank, I got a ton done. So nice when I can be shut off from the world and just get emails answered.
A Silent Running.. follow up movie would be very interesting to write. From the perspective of a kid growing up in the 70s and extrapolating how it should have gone, within the context of the frame of mind from back then.. Today the studios and rights holders would probably perform a reboot with Justin Timberlake or something and miss the point.
It came on the cusp of the ideas around orbital habitats and beaming down power from space.. essentially the cold war and uncooperative pollution filled world of their early 21st century led to an environmental catastrophy.. not unlike Global Warming.. but they were also concerned with Nuclear Winter.
Had the Cold War persisted something like the Man in the High Castle effect might actually have occurred. Mars probably would have been colonized.. though maybe only by the elite.. a reverse Elysium.. where only the rich could afford to live on a New Colonial planet.. Earth would linger in a slowly dying Twilight Zone for Centuries.
Deforestation would be the least of its worries.. and would logically have made Silent Running far more believable.. but the idea that Civilization would be pushing the frontiers of Sciene and Space Exploration while turning inwards and ignoring the possibility of Extraterrestrial Life.. even being quite apathetic to it.. could for the “core” of a new tale.
The original storyline went after the destruction of the Valley Forge.. the lone droid would journey on and become humanities first ambassador to a Star Ship waiting at the edge of the Solar System.. witnessing all these events taking the small botanist reserve onboard in an attempt to understand this civilization.
It might seem low key, but resonates back to days in which people thought.. maybe not all the solutions to our problem lay within.. but needed help from without.
I’d like to see “Silent Running-II” explore humanities “First Contact” with an alien civilization on the edge of space.
There was a fantastic book called Life Probe and Procyons Promise.. in which something similar happened.. an automated probe millions of years old traveling at sublight changed course for Earth when it detected the tenuous edge of it radio signal bubble reaching out from the solar system. The probe was in need of repair and damaged with age.. but it needed a technological civilization to help it get to Procyon’s Star.. it was on a mission to save its builders from being trapped at sublight around a dying star forever. The Probe ultimately bartered for “help” from humanity to achieve its goal in exchange for a partnership.. to share all the science and technology that it carriered.. and the secret to faster than light travel.. if it could secure that secret from the unknown civilization apparently using faster than light engines near Procyon’s Star. — The only problem is the Probe had to judge whether to trust humanity.. or whether humanity could “survive” its own adolescence just long enough for the Probe to make a “getaway” before humanity self destructed… in the end it was utterly “meta” what they found out about each other.
Alec,
I like the way you think. That is a great story idea and sounds very good to me. Maybe a project for the Studio later on???
VERY COOL! And a beautiful pic of Artoo’s Grandparent! One of my favourite movies as well.
Silent Running is an excellent film and it heavily influenced my own sci-fi script, as did Trek, Galactica and a whole bunch of other stuff. I wish Director’s Edition would be released. That 60’s style song within the movie seems very dated now and throws me a bit out of the film.