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Hi!
I run an online video store and just saw a screener of the first doc. It was a blast! I have a little story. ST:TNG began when I was in college in California. Much as I was horrified at a resuscitation of Trekdom, I couldn't help but watch Patrick Stewart *and* LeVar Burton together every week. Soon I realized the caliber of casting was that high throughout. The premises and characters' relationships were always interesting, regardless of how well or badly they were developed for the sake of one-hour plot lines. After hearing about the transom always being open to fan scripts, I toyed with the idea of writing one. Being an undergrad, though, I always had another 10-page paper due in 5 hours that should have taken weeks. Senior year I took a film class in the Social Sciences, a world away from the site of my major, the Humanities. It was run by Carlton Moss, whom I only knew by reputation as "this wacky black guy who shows stereotype movies and complains about them"!
While the Film Studies folks took a bus trip to LA to see a recently unearthed Oscar Micheaux silent, I stayed behind to have a talk with Prof. Moss. When I told him I was originally from Newark, NJ, he said he was too. We bonded at that. He told me it was most important to find something I felt an overwhelming personal need to write about, which sounds trite when you pound the phrase out in an email but means everything in real life. I gave him the, "I know this sounds silly but..." song and dance. What a sly old bird he was! He not only leaped right on my idea of writing about how Geordi's visor made him interact with the world differently instead of merely mentioning his blindness as some convenient plot device. He made me promise to write the whole thing out and send it to him. I didn't until after I graduated. It was the hardest thing to sit down to a blank page every day and commit to a fullfledged project and finish it with no help from anyone. It wasn't a professional script, it was essentially fan-fic. Yet somehow I felt beholden to this man for reaching out to me, and didn't want to leave his apparent confidence unjustified.
I bundled a copy up for Paramount and another for Moss. Of course the studio refused the story (at the mere mention of Lore, a restricted character) and Moss never wrote back. Neither outcome really mattered. It's so easy to drift along in modern US pop culture and not do much of anything except purchase and consume on a daily basis, but you can't go through an experience like that for the first time and not fundamentally change. Because of it, I finally began to live the intellectual life of an adult. That's why I'm amazed to hear Brannon Braga mention in Trekkies that the transom is open - since they shut it right after my submission (I was almost tempted to take that personally). I hope they are accepting fan scripts again. It makes the crucial difference between a franchise and folklore.
I just found out through an Internet search that Carlton Moss died in his late 80s of a heart attack just two years ago. UC Irvine, where he taught in SocSci, didn't bother to mention his death - never mind his life. He never breathed a word while I took his class of all I learned just weeks ago: He was part of the Harlem Renaissance. He worked with Oscar Micheaux (I bet no one on that LA-bound bus knew that)! He made his own films, some of which are on video. He was part of Hollywood's controversial wartime recruitment effort The Negro Soldier - which he wrote and appeared in as a preacher. You can hear his stories of the McCarthy blacklist in the archives of the Margaret Herrick Library at AMPAS. I was affected by all that history without any puffery or name-dropping. It just came down to a crafty old black guy and a young and stupid white girl in a room, figuring out what to do with the rest of her life. What a blessing!
Thanks loads!
Sincerely yours,