Berman Gives 'Nemesis' Update

Executive producer Rick Berman today updated fans about progress on the tenth Star Trek movie.

"The picture has been locked for over a month," Berman told the Star Trek Communicator, via TrekWeb. The interview was carried out around the time of production on Enterprise's 'The Seventh', which puts it in a time frame of the first half of September.

"We are in the final days of our last scoring session with Jerry Goldsmith," Berman continued. "This film has got four more days of dubbing, and then we go into dub review and then print mastering. We're all done and there are no changes and no simplifying. Whoever spread those rumours is just spreading rumours."

Berman gave an insight into what he'll be up to on the day of the movie's release. "Anybody that tells you they don’t look at the box-office returns is lying. The day it opens, what I have tended to do for the last few pictures is to get into a car and drive from theatre to theatre and just check out the larger theatres in L.A. I see what the lines are like and what the reactions are like. I try to slip into the theatres and stand in the back and see how people are reacting.

"You don’t get many chances to see a packed house reacting to a new movie. Then what happens is that when a film opens, at least for the first couple of weeks, I get calls two or three times a day from people here at Paramount letting me know how the picture is doing. It's a little nerve-wracking—you go through all the reviews as well."

He was also realistic about the film's competition at the box office. "The biggest enemy that this film has is the Christmas time opening. We've got James Bond and Harry Potter and The Lord of the Rings and Solaris and Gangs of New York and a dozen big movies that are opening between Thanksgiving and the end of the year," he said.

"That's our biggest competition— just the fact that there are so many movies. My guess is that this film will do very well and, as a result of that, I will probably be hearing from the powers-that-be at Paramount sooner than I hope to in starting to put together an idea for the next film. That's not to say ideas are not already percolating."

More from Rick Berman can be found in issue #142 of the Star Trek Communicator. Alternatively, extracts have been made available online here at TrekWeb.

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