Progress report: 10'8 thru 11

Okay, Oct. 8 thru Oct. 11 work out this way:

Thursday:  Nothing.

Friday:  4.5 hours figuring out shooting schedule for third season.

Saturday:  2.5 hours drawing up final schedule for third season.

Sunday:  5.5 hours drawing up final schedules for first and second seasons.

Yikes, but at least now those schedules are done. They look pretty neat; if I scan the things, I'll put them in Photobucket and link to them. But it was hair-raising work and I had to feel my way, with the result that a good deal of time was probably wasted. Muddling is a bad approach to precision work.

Argument with my father

"Possibly the truth lies somewhere in between." Do people still say that? When I was a kid you heard that a lot on the tv, always voiced by quietly smiling gray-haired men who were purported to be experts on the political life. From my father too -- if not the phrase, then the sentiment. He was a Democrat but very much a moderate Democrat, and he loved the idea of centrism. He believed you should jab your finger at the midpoint between American liberals and conservatives and figure that would do the trick.  The "somewhere" signified that you didn't even have to hit your target, the line that ran exactly down the middle. Landing in the neighborhood was enough for everyone to muddle through.

But, taken strictly, "somewhere" means nothing but "somewhere." The magic point of rightness doesn't have to be at the midpoint. Maybe it lies two notches away from one of the poles. Or maybe the rightness point doesn't have much of a penumbra and must be pinned down precisely by means of detailed thought and the processing of technical information. Or possibly there's no special reason to take the American liberal and conservative positions as the two poles that keep rightness between them. I'm for universal health care and gays in the military, so in the U.S. I'm quite progressive. But those positions wouldn't do the trick in Europe.

My father had a classic centrist temperament, whereas I see myself as a moderate conservative whose views on political issues line up with the liberal wing of the Democratic Party. How do you tell a classic centrist from a moderate conservative? I was horrified by the Lewinsky mess and what the Republicans got up to -- the government was being destabilized because that way one side thought it could score points. My father never even thought about stability. He saw the whole business as a drama concerning an individual, Bill Clinton, who had broken the rules (meaning perjury laws) and now was going to pay.

Progress report: 10'6 and '7

Nothing yesterday, meaning 10'6, and today just a couple of hours. After numerous calculations and recalculations, lean toward the third season having 163 production days for a per-ep shooting time of 6.7 days. In other words, looks like Trek's third season reverted to the 7-day shoots of season one and the first part of season two. This would be the case even though Trek remained on very thin ice for season 3, ice that got thinner every week -- after all, the show was  canceled. The books all say that Trek's budget was cut quite deeply in season three. But unless Trek had 26 days off that I haven't accounted for (days on top of the usual: Thanksgiving, etc.), then we've got the old 7-day schedule again.

Shatner says in one of his books that the series cut back to 5 days per ep, which sounds plausible to me, but see above. I should also note that Shatner tends to be unreliable. His Star Trek Memories gives the wrong month for when his father died.

I may have Sky Frontier, my series, cut back to 5 or stay at 6; either way, forget 7. The point of studying all this Star Trek lore isn't to replicate the history of the series; it's to judge what is plausible when it comes to making up stuff about an hour-long network s.f. drama back in the 1960s. The books all say that shooting time costs a lot of money; if the program has to save money, losing a day's shooting makes sense. 

But could a 144-day shooting season (6 x 24, which is the number of eps) really start on May 21, 1968, and finish on Jan. 9, 1969. Think I've shown that it couldn't. Aw damn.

Left out "Whom Gods Destroy" from my third-season lists of episodes (one has when they were aired, other when they were shot). So a lot of redoing needed tomorrow plus the above mentioned mystery about the 7 days vs. 6. Fuck, and the first two seasons worked out so nicely.

Two brilliant but nasty right-wing comments

Andrew Sullivan pulls up comments about him from an Ann Althouse thread. I'm reprinting a couple of them here. First:

Here is a human whose sexual desires fight against the flow of life itself. Cursed by a disease that may wither him to a shrub of what he once was, he screams for more attention. It's all about taking down the societal purity the Palin represents.

And:

Please. One ought always to refer to Sully by his true and complete regnal name: Her Divine Majesty Queen Mary Jane Milky Loads, Sultana of Sodom, Governess of Gomorrah, and Empress of All Urania.

You can read the whole thread if you're curious; I haven't. I'm just struck by the viciousness of the selected comments, which Sullivan certainly notices, and by what Sullivan doesn't bother to mention: namely that, at least in these two cases, a remarkable level of writing is on display. I think liberals, as a whole, are usually right but not too good word with words, and that conservatives, as a whole, are deluded and often nasty but gifted with an above average run of verbal ability. The comments above are further evidence. 

That "Milky Loads" passage is a wonderfully crafted verbal sequence; it puts to shame all the prefab orotund rant one runs across nowadays (for example, the vogue a few years ago for gerund strings: "latte-sipping, omelet-driving," etc., etc.). And the "shrub" remark, centerpiece to the first comment, is a killer. It is a beautifully compact and poetic phrase that condenses the whole course of a disease and combines it with a suggestion that the victim is no longer human, that the man or woman is now just a remnant. What a cold, nasty sentiment and how powerfully it's put across. Probably someone with a poetic enough turn of mind might have sat at a bedside and watched AIDS do its work, and then would have thought of the phrase and thereby summed up his or her hatred for the disease and what it caused. But instead a commenter with a poetic turn of mind came up with the phrase simply to express contempt for people who have AIDS.

There's a whole "life/antilife" philosophy at work, as you can see from the rest of the first commenter's remark. Ideas that big cause people to lose what bearings they have, especially when the idea is as much an emotional state as it is anything (and especially when that emotional state is panic). So not only do you get the inhuman nastiness, you also get the heavy-think delirium:

Sarah is a fertility goddess, and that magic power intimidates the death-loving, poo-pounding Sully. He rejects life, life-giving, and life-bearers.

I would guess that statement was half a joke, which means it is half lunacy. The most generous interpretation: some nut thinks modern life is a pageant of symbols being enacted to determine if our society goes pro-life or pro-death, with Sarah as symbol-in-chief for the good side. Either that or the person thinks Sarah Palin is a fertility goddess.

Damn

Progress Report: 10'2 thru 10'5

Friday:    5 hours on episode schedule. Two key sets of figures don't match

Sat: I do nothing.

Sun: 4 hours on episode schedule and leafing thru source books. I'm trying to figure out my number problem.

Today: 3.5 hours of same, plus hour of googling to turn up phone numbers for old Star Trek hands; I figure maybe they'll know the answer; no phone numbers turn up. Around about 11:30 pm I hit on a possible answer to my mystery.

The big question was how many days it took to shoot a Star Trek episode. (My novel is about people making a science fiction series back in the 1960s, and books about Star Trek provide my chief guide for guessing how a network prime time drama was put together back then.) The books about Star Trek all say episodes took 6 days' shooting apiece; Shatner's Star Trek Memories says that in the third season the figure dropped to 5. But sit down with calendars for the years in question and the 6-day figure doesn't add up.

Because of the books, and because of the fine Trek site Memory Alpha, we have hard-and-fast dates for when each season's shooting started and decent enough information for when the shooting ended (sometimes dates, sometimes phrases like "mid-February"). Count up the number of weekdays in a given season, subtract holidays, and you come up with far more days than you'll get by multiplying six by the season's number of episodes.

My guess.  Star Trek took seven days to shoot an episode for the first season and most of the second season. Then it switched to six days per ep for the second season's last batch of episodes. The switch happened right when the show was waiting to find out if NBC was going to yank it at mid-season. NBC kept the show, but (I speculate) from that point Trek was on thin ice and trying to keep its costs down so that Desilu wouldn't lose too much if the series didn't make it to syndication. 

Run the numbers that way and it's possible to go thru the calendars and map out a series of shooting dates that doesn't conflict with the fairly scattered information we have on when specific episodes were done. That's for the first and second seasons, anyway. I have to go thru the third season tomorrow.

A journey.  I discovered my numbers problem on Friday and should have just shlepped home and started looking thru my books. But instead I tried to fix the problem by allowing for more days off. No good and a long, tedious process that involved a lot of counting forwards and backwards along rows of dates.

Over the weekend I started on my source books. Grace Lee Whitney's The Longest Trek helped a lot. She was on the show such a short while that her memoir notes exactly when her episodes were shot, from date to date. She says that during the first few months of season one the show had to overlap the shooting of 4 eps: that is, one ep would be finished in the morning, the next started would start shooting that afternoon. Go by her dates and the overlapped eps were all shot in 6.5 days apiece, with the episodes just before them taking 8 days apiece. So it looks like the aim was 7 days. Take a 7-day shoot as standard, and the calendar for season one adds up.

Nothing else turned up until I stumbled across p. 357 of Inside Star Trek, where associate producer Robert Justman recalls the show's brush with death during the second season. In doing so, he quotes himself telling an exec that the series would have 16 episodes filmed as of Oct. 5. Count each of those 16 eps at 7 days apiece, and the remaining 10 eps at 6 days apiece, and season two adds up.

Now season three. 

update,  I should note that Grace Lee Whitney cites Justman as her source for the shooting dates in The Longest Trek. So I owe my grand sorting out entirely to Justman-derived data. 

Progress report: 10'1'09

Yesterday and today spent a total of 7 hours working out when different episodes were broadcast and in what order of production.