July 26, 2005
"Star Date"
Star Date Honors TrekkiesPosted by Ithildin at July 26, 2005 4:08 PM | PROCURE FINE OLD WORLD ABSINTHEScreenwriter Paul Hernandez told SCI FI Wire that he's preparing for his feature-film directorial debut: Star Date, about guys who throw a Star Trek viewing party in order to find like-minded girls, leading to the first Trek conventions. It's based on a true story.
In an interview, Hernandez described the opening scene as if making a pitch to a studio executive: "Picture this: In the opening scene it's 1972, and a couple is necking in this car, and this guy is very visibly a nerd, and you wonder what she's doing with him. Then, he notices the time, and he says he has to run home because there's a rerun of a Star Trek episode that he has missed, and he never saw it. Well, she breaks up with him."
Hernandez said that the guy then talks to his friends about finding girls who also like watching Star Trek, and they expect about 10 people. "The reality is that they end up getting about 10,000 people involved, and it's the invention of pop culture and results in the first convention," Hernandez said.
The Paramount movie will incorporate some original footage of the conventions three decades ago, showing a young William Shatner as Capt. Kirk and Leonard Nimoy as Spock. He's hoping they may be involved somehow in Star Date, too.
"I did go to a few of the conventions myself as an 11-year-old kid," Hernandez said. "In 1981 I went to the Shamrock Hotel, but I didn't get dressed up, because I thought that's just too much. [I] saw trailers for Tron and Time Bandits and then [Star Trek II:] The Wrath of Khan, and the next day we became Trekkie fans."
Hernandez wrote the upcoming movie Sky High with Mark McCorkle and Bob Schooley; it opens July 29. Hernandez's first screenplay, Instant Karma, is in production, starring Pierce Brosnan and the voices of Dom DeLuise, Burt Reynolds and Eartha Kitt in a film about a safecracker who is reincarnated as a series of animals.
