"History Is Written By The Victors"

[master_q 0]

"History Is Written By The Victors"

 

 

Author: Michael Hinman

Date: 05-06-2003

Source: SyFy Portal

Star Trek is arguably one of the most profitable entertainment franchises of all time. Six television series, 10 motion pictures, hundreds of novels, millions of fans.

 

Somewhere in the world, a Star Trek episode is being aired right now (no matter when you read this). If you were to sit down and watch a marathon of every Star Trek episode ever made, you wouldn't be able to get up for nearly a month (hope you can hold it).

 

Star Trek is an amazing phenomenon, and many people -- including creator Gene Roddenberry -- is given credit for the work. But two people who often are left off the lists of those responsible for the success of the series are probably two of the most important people of all: John and Bjo Trimble.

 

Before there was the Internet. Before there were fan campaigns. Before there was even Star Trek, there was the Trimbles. And when Star Trek needed help in its darkest hours in 1967, John and Bjo (pronounced bee-joe) were there ... and they made history.

 

John Trimble was an active science fiction fan in Los Angeles in the 1950s, while Bjo was a genre artist who had been making a name for herself in sci-fi circles. During a birthday party for legendary writer Forry Ackerman in the late 1950s, Bjo and John literally ran into each other while hiding out under Ackerman's grand piano. They were married in 1960, and after 43 years, still are going strong.

 

While raising a young family in the 1960s, the Trimbles lives would change when they ran into a compelling television producer at a convention in Ohio.

 

"It was halfway through the second season of 'Star Trek,'" Bjo recently told SyFy Portal's Michael Hinman. "We both met Gene (Roddenberry) at the World Science Fiction Convention over Labor Day weekend in Cleveland. He told us that we should call him the next time we were in Los Angeles, and we thought it was just some typical Hollywood thing, so we didn't think much of it."

 

The couple was living in Oakland at the time, but soon after the convention, John had to make a business trip to L.A., and Bjo decided to go with him. While there, Bjo decided to see if Roddenberry's offer was sincere.

 

"We called Gene's office, and darn if he didn't invite us to the set," Trimble said. "We went in, and it was great."

 

John eventually got a transfer to Los Angeles, and Bjo found herself a regular visitor to the "Star Trek" sets, getting to know actors like William Shatner, Leonard Nimoy and DeForest Kelley. However, it was during one visit toward the end of the second season that things just didn't seem the same on the Desilu soundstages.

 

"We went onto the set, and we were surprised by what we were seeing," Bjo remembers. "People would go in front of the camera and do their acting, then come back, and be so down and so depressed. We found out that they had gotten the kind of word that troops get before the general is due. The show was going to be cancelled at the end of the second season."

 

After the first cancellation threat from the first season, writers like Harlan Ellison lobbied NBC to keep the show on the air. But Bjo realized it would take more than just the writers banding together. They needed to have an outcry from the fans, and she and John decided to grab the bull by the horns, and find some unconventional means to get NBC's attention. And they did.

 

"There have been claims that Gene paid me, or that he invented (the campaign)," Bjo said. "But what really happened here is that Gene had said that when they were all sitting around talking about (the cancellation), if there was only a way to reach the fans and tell them. A couple days later, John and I had this idea, and we contacted Gene to ask if he had thrown in the towel yet. They hadn't, and we decided to get working on our campaign to save 'Star Trek.'"

 

To make the effort a complete fan effort, Bjo said they had to keep Roddenberry as far away as possible, something that was difficult for the show's creator -- who liked to be in control of things he was passionate about -- to do.

 

"It just drove him crazy that he couldn't do anything on the campaign," Bjo said. "He so wanted to get involved. He was such a wonderful, wonderful person."

 

Roddenberry stayed away from the meetings, but he would occassionally surprise the Trimbles and their campaign committee with meat trays that would arrive at the house for their meetings, and Roddenberry himself chipped in $100 for postage in the final round of mailings.

 

But organizing such a campaign wasn't as easy in the late 1960s as it is today. There were no computers (at least not any that would fit into a single room), no organized Star Trek fan clubs, no Internet mail groups. In fact, when the Trimbles visited the Paramount mailroom to see if they could get addresses from fan mail, they discovered more than 40 large stacks of mail to the show, unopened and unanswered.

 

The Trimbles convinced booksellers and convention organizers to donate their mailing lists, and then hoped that those people would contact their friends, and everyone would write to NBC and say that they would want Star Trek saved.

 

They even got one fan to take a trip to the NBC Studios in New York City, and find her way into the executive parking lot to plaster limosuines and cars with "I Grok Spock" and "Save Star Trek" bumper stickers. Getting NBC to renew the series for a third season was important then, and ended up being much more important later on after the show finally was cancelled.

 

"We did something that a lot of people don't realize the importance of," Bjo said. "In saving it for a third season, that third season put Star Trek on the reruns (in syndication), and after the show was cancelled, it went into rerusn almost immediately."

 

During the 1960s, and mostly even today, most shows are not offered into syndication unless they have at least three seasons under their belt. If "Star Trek" had not won that third season, it's likely that it never would've reached syndication, and "Star Trek" would be nothing more than a memory, if that.

 

Running the campaign was a lot of work, especially when dealing with "snail mail." But at the same time, Bjo said she wanted to make sure that fans wrote letters that NBC executives or their assistants likely would be reading.

 

"We would grab things and run, and do things when they needed to be done because there is a timeliness here that doesn't allow for a lot of planning," Bjo said. "What I did to make up the (instructions) on how to write a letter, I went around to secretaries of corporations and even secretaries on the Paramount lot, and asked what it is about a letter, the one and only letter per day you put on your boss's desk for attention, or even filing it instead of throwing it away, that gets it there. And they told me, so I used that as a basis on how to write a letter."

 

The campaign was a success, so much, in fact, that NBC to this day still won't give an exact number of phone calls and letters they received as a result of the campaign, and the network even came in following the conclusion of one "Star Trek" episode to announce that the show would be returning for a third season, something that also had never been done before.

 

Not only did Bjo and John suddenly become fan favorites, but they had become even closer to Roddenberry, who eventually offered the couple a job reading and responding to Star Trek's fan mail.

 

Bjo said that outside of the "Save Star Trek" fan campaign, this was one of the most rewarding jobs she ever got to do. Her and John would read through hundreds of letters to the show, and after a short time it would become clear who was getting the most letters of everyone else. And no, it wasn't Shatner or Nimoy.

 

"The Enterprise got an enormous amount of fan mail," Bjo said. "You get the geeky little kids who had ambitions to be an engineer, but they wouldn't write to Scotty. They would direct their questions straight to the Enterprise."

 

Many fans would ask for autographed pictures from the ship, so Bjo would grab publicity stills of the NCC-1701, sign it, and send it off.

 

"If you ever see an autographed picture of the U.S.S. Enterprise, chances are, I'm the one who signed it," Bjo said.

 

Bjo and John never saw financial success from their efforts to help Paramount make billions of dollars. But they took on other projects after that, including writing columns for fan magazines, organizing convention art shows, and most recently helping with the new science-fiction museum planned for Seattle. They also stayed involved with Star Trek as much as they could through the beginning of "Star Trek: The Next Generation" in 1987. But by then, the family had moved to Texas, and it was hard to keep up. They were saddened, as was most of the rest of the world, when Gene Roddenberry passed away in October 1991.

 

"We were gone the last seven years of his life, and he died while we were living in Texas," Trimble said. "We didn't have the money to come back for his funeral. It was like, just a whole section of your life is erased. When you know that powerful of a personality and its suddenly gone, you don't really get closure."

 

Bjo said her memories of Gene Roddenberry are fond ones, despite his very human flaws that many fans tend to ignore.

 

"Gene was like a lot of creed of people, and I'm not at all excusing him," Bjo said. "There was always that interesting challenge or conquest over something or someone, and he certainly didn't make a big secret out of that. He was a charmer. He could talk birds out of a tree.

 

"But I always thought he was a charming soul. He was a conniver, but you have to be a conniver in Hollywood, because if you don't know how to play the game, you're dead."

 

In Part 2 of this interview, which will be published next week at SyFy Portal, Bjo Trimble talks about her opinions on what Star Trek has become in today's time, and even talks about how the riffs between the actors affected William Shatner. Also, Bjo gives tips to fan campaigners of today on how to effectively save a show from cancellation, and provides a critique of some of the most recent campaigns.

 

Michael Hinman is the co-founder and news editor of SyFy Portal, based in Tampa, Fla. He can be reached at michael@syfyportal.com.

--SyFy Portal http://www.syfyportal.com/article.php?id=977

 

What do you think about this? / . . . .

 

 

Master Q

StarTrek_Master_Q@yahoo.com

[dsbs 0]

Wow...I always liked that quote. Makes me think twice about things...I want to re-read the article more carefully before I make any comments, though...

[Indy 8]

I have heard of Bjo Trimble because I was aware of the huge letter-writing campaign she initiated. I think she was instrumental in prolonging the series for one more year and that we owe her our thanks. I heard it said back then that Star Trek was saved by one person - Bjo Trimble.

[RikerChick 5]

Wow, I'd never heard about that. She deserves the thanks of trekkies everywhere.

[master_q 0]

Wow, I'd never heard about that. She deserves the thanks of trekkies everywhere. 

Yes she does and like the article said if ST was not on at least 3 seasons there is a good possibility that that would have been the end of ST.

 

 

Master Q

StarTrek_Master_Q@yahoo.com