All credit goes to the amazing Luna over on Tenforward.social.
Seriously. A fucking awesome person with an even better taste in memes. Also great at giving hugs and a thousand times funnier than I am.
PNG template for the 'This Guy Sucks' part can be found here as provided by the equally epic and truly wonderful Maurice over on Tenforward.social, although originally created by 'ihaveaweirdidea' over on Tumblr.
So happy that I've been able to spend my time lately around two people who are so kind, generous, and incredible. You could do a lot worse than following them on Mastodon. Just saying.
For those who don't know how much Rick Berman sucks:
-- Terry Farrel
-- Trek writer Eric Stillwell
https://heavy.com/entertainment/star-trek/eric-stillwell-working-with-rick-berman/
Unfortunately, the article also says Brent Spiner is a big defender of Berman.
Don't forget the fact that he was aggressively homophobic and refused Gene's wishes to depict the HIV/AIDS crisis in multiple episodes or even have a gay character on the show, including blacklisting a script about the crisis titled Blood and Fire. Not to mention shooting down the Garak/Bashir connection that both actors actively wanted and refusing to allow Malcom in Enterprise to be gay despite his actor also specifically playing him as gay.
Then there's the fact that he aggressively tore Denise Crosby's badge off of her shirt on her last day then lied about it on Twitter saying that she 'gave it to him'. Or the fact that he's the SOLE reason that Tasha Yar's legacy is being forced into sexual slavery for a high ranking Romulan. Or that he constantly fought with Marina Sirtis about her contract as well. Or that he forced himself on a ton of writing credits just on the off chance that someone might potentially sue him. Or the fact that he was micromanaging everything to do with DS9 and only got worse with Enterprise. Or the fact that he fucking breathed this morning.
Fuck him.
Data wasn't perfect. Why should Brent Spiner be. That being said, that's a hell of a character flaw...
There was also the push to have a male actor play the main androgynous alien in The Outcast that Riker falls for. Frakes was all for it. Berman nixed it.
I meant to add that and it just passed over my head in the fit of rage I was having while typing that.
I can't blame you for that. There's just so many things to say when it comes to what a horrible person Berman is.
I try not to hate people anymore. It's just too exhausting. I did before, a lot of people, and I'm just so tired.
But that man?
I could be on my deathbed and would still put on a Grandpa Joe type display if I found out that scum-covered amalgamation of used condoms had finally fucking died.
That's a hell of an epthitet. Well said. Damn.
Oh no I get what you mean, it's clarification. I wasn't super clear there. I didn't mean the actor was gay but that the actor had definitely played the character as gay.
Also: "Since the early 2000's, several writers of Star Trek material, such as David Gerrold[10][11] and Andy Mangels,[12] have criticized Berman's participation in removing and minimizing LGBT themes from multiple Star Trek series, including The Next Generation and Deep Space Nine.[13] Berman has responded by saying that he took full responsibility for the lack of such characters and that he had been working with other producers on including gay characters,[14] telling Kate Mulgrew that such a character would be included "in due time", though no such characters would be included during his time as producer.[15]"
https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Rick_Berman
Didn't really know who this guy was before but what a fucking creep.
Holy shit. Dudes a scumbag.
Sorry, neither!
As much as I hate him, I also hate actors who change and ad lib lines. Someone went through this work to phrase or develop a conversation or monologue, stayed up to make it the way they want, then an actor comes and changes it. I realized that while watching the making of Sopranos and David Chase explaining how disrespectful it is to to writer. But yeah Berman sucks.
Maybe, just maybe the actor is more invested in their particular character than the writer. Or maybe the line suits the actor better.
It's disrespectful for the writers to expect actors to play their characters without putting anything of themselves into the act.
It should absolutely be a collaboration, and not one side dictating to the other, with no feedback allowed.
But I'm not going to downvote a contribution to the conversation just because I disagree.
Like David Chase once said to Tony Sirico when Sirico said "my character wouldn't say that"
"Your character?? This is MY character mother fucker, I wrote him"
Everyone needs to stick to their job and not fuck with the jobs of others. Collaboration is ok, but not on most shows, as most scripts are written just the way they're meant to be said
But it's not there character any longer, they gave them away. The writer isn't going to be able to, much less should they dictate every little detail about a performance. Those details are so important to a charter, you can't say a charter is solely the writers creation.
Sometimes the actors know their characters a lot better than the writers. For example, in the empire strikes back, the original script had Han saying something else, whereas Ford came up with the 'I know', which fits much better with his character.
Or Rutger Hauer in Blade Runner.
One of the most influential science fiction monologues was ad libbed, and it's so much better than the original script.
Original script:
Hauer's monologue:
Huh. I always assumed Rutger Hauer came up with the 'Tannhäuser Gate' part.
I've worked in all sorts of performance disciplines. Comedia dell'arte, High clown, low clown / children's ents, improv, film, theatre in pros-arch, round..., puppet , Grotowskian devised theatre, Boalian Theatre of the Oppressed...
Only one small subset of that work demands word-perfect adherence. Performance is much more than post-Stanivlaskian Aristotlean drama.
Even Beckett, who was completely, insanely anal about everything from the design of the tree in Waiting for Godot, to the size of the spotlight in Not I, to the length and timing of the tapes in Krapps Last Tape, still made on-set changes right up to the performance.
Not to mention, often on set the script supervisor will sometimes give you last minute changes between takes.
Then, no script is ever perfect. I did Glengarry Glen Ross (which is suuuper tight in terms of interruptions, e.g.
A: "And a man has to shiver in his..."
B: "...shoes..."
A: "...boots..."
B: "...shoes... boots..."
A: "...And for what?" )
But one night the cop missed his cue during one of the sections where people are coming in and out of the office to be interviewed, and I'm (as Roma) trying to put the screws on the guy from the Chinese restaurant so I have to keep vamping on convincing him not to call his wife until the cop remembers to come out and confuses him for Shelly Levene.
It's so much better for the audience for me to vamp than it is for us to stop the play and go and tell the actor he missed his cue. The show must go on.