They want to shoot phasers, and they want to make out with green Orion slave girls
I AM boldly going where I have never gone before – to the top floor of a tenement in Dundee. This small attic flat with a view over the glittering Tay (if you crane your neck) is the unlikely location for the next Star Trek film. Not the major studio
blockbuster currently in post-production in Los Angeles, but a lovingly crafted handmade effort called The Stone Unturned, shot by a fanatical bunch of Dundonians whose passion for the sci-fi series is so intense that they have gone from watching it to making their own.
Nick Cook, a 38-year-old nurse, is the producer of The Stone Unturned and the other films made by Intrepid Productions. He answers the door to his home and leads me to the kitchen where his wife, Lucita Faria, 33, is applying green and yellow make-up to the pointed rubber ears of David Reid, a 36-year-old student accommodation manager from St Andrews. Reid explains that he is playing a character who is half-human, half-Romulan. He has a brown blanket swept over one shoulder and pinned in place with a nice brooch. His Spockish eyebrows give him a wry look.
Although the Intrepid team also shoot in nearby caves and woods, this kitchen is a key location. It's cluttered, with spotlights and stage make-up scattered around; there are models of the Enterprise on top of the fridge and a shoe-caddy full of fake phasers hanging behind the door. The focus, however, is a large wooden set which can be dressed as the inside of a spaceship. Today it's draped in bright green felt and functioning as a greenscreen, allowing for the later addition of a computer-generated interrogation chamber. Making coffee, Cook explains that they are taking a break from The Stone Unturned and shooting a scene for inclusion in a fan film made by an American group. Intrepid is the only group of this kind in the UK, but there are several in the US, the most significant of which, Phase II, is run in New York by a professional Elvis impersonator.
"Most people who make fan films do it because they want to be in Star Trek," says Cook. "They want to put on the costumes, they want to run around, they want to shoot phasers, and they want to make out with green Orion slave girls. Quite frankly, that's why I'm doing it."
Intrepid began about five years ago after Dundee's local Star Trek fan club folded. The fan club was where Cook and Faria met. He was standing in a pub called the Breadalbane, dressed in the same uniform Patrick Stewart wore in The Next Generation, and inevitably caught her eye. They married a couple of years ago in Las Vegas, a city with a fantastic Star Trek museum.
As well as working behind the camera, Cook and Faria act in the films. Intrepid has completed one so far: Heavy Lies The Crown. It took four and a half years to make, lasts 47 minutes, and features a cameo appearance by Lorraine Kelly. In the last year, 30,000 people have downloaded it for free from www.starshipintrepid.com. The Intrepid team can't charge because that would be a clear infringement of copyright, and they're already on a shoogly peg as far as that goes.
Loads of people are involved with Intrepid, but today there's a hardcore of seven, including the director Steve Hammond, a 39-year-old computer programmer. There is obvious tension between Hammond and Cook, fuelled in part by a long-running disagreement over the merits of Babylon 5; in fact, although these people are all friends, there is a fair bit of tetchiness in the air. Nothing too heated, though, and soon dispelled by the provision of orange squash and mini-doughnuts, and a discussion of whether or not what they do is geeky.
Cook thinks not: "There's really no difference between people putting on rubber ears and going to a Star Trek convention, and people who paint themselves green and go to a Celtic match."
Hammond, however, considers himself part of a geek pride movement and points out that tolerance of misfits is an important part of Star Trek's utopian philosophy. There ensues an analysis of the difference between two groups of Star Trek fans: Trekkers and Trekkies. "A Trekker," explains David Robertson, dressed as a Romulan, "wonders what it's like to have sex in zero gravity. A Trekkie just wonders what it's like to have sex."
Like any movie set, a great deal of time is spent waiting around for filming to start. Eventually, though, they begin. The camera is out in the hall, pointing in through the kitchen door. "Quiet on set!" Cook yells, ending chat in the living room but having little effect on the birds cheeping outside the kitchen window. In this scene, David Robertson has to shove David Reid into a chair and point a gun – a Romulan disruptor – in his face. Robertson then has to speak to someone off-camera. It doesn't go well at first. Reid can't remember his lines, and the whole set shakes when he is pushed down. "If we keep doing this, the chair's going to break," he says. "Never mind that," says Cook. "We'll need to make sure those lights don't set the carpet on fire."
Make no mistake, these people are obsessed. Cook reckons he has spent more than £5,000 on Intrepid over the last two years. His flat is covered with Star Trek gear: posters, DVDs, model gadgets, a vintage Captain Kirk doll still in its original packaging.
Cook makes the costumes himself, and these are draped all over the furniture in the living room and on top of the bed. "I'm constantly knee-deep in bits of fabric," he says. It can be overwhelming, and drives him crazy sometimes. "But not as crazy as it drives my wife."
She seems stoic, though. I'm talking to her in the living room, chatting about her Man From UNCLE T-shirt, when Cook yells "Lucy!" from the kitchen.
"Okay," she shouts back. "Whose ears have fallen off?"
The full article contains 1059 words and appears in Scotland On Sunday newspaper.
