Note: There’s a very good
reason that I’m calling this
the ‘mobile phone
convention’. That reason
will come clear as you read. At least I hope it will, or I’m going to
look rather silly – if I don’t already.
The Mobile
Phone Convention
Melbourne,
Saturday,
August 25th: Not unlike the Dufflepuds
of CS Lewis’ Voyage of the Dawn Treader,
who wanted to wash the dishes before dinner so they wouldn’t have to do
them afterwards, I’m starting this Convention report the day before the
Convention. Partially so that I have a file ready (and all the preliminaries,
such as CS Lewis allusions, out of the way,) and partially because, with my
links to the
I
admit here and now that I purposely put my mobile on today because I assumed I
would be getting messages. I was right. I got two SMS,
and then two phone calls — so I’m well prepared for the day of the
actual convention. I know all the important things that Robert said in Sydney
today, and exactly what to expect.
Sunday,
August 26th: I thought I knew what to expect - but I’ll get back to that later. Just to set
the scene, it’s a quarter to six pm Sunday, and I’m back home,
listening to one of my Con purchases, Tim Russ’ CD "Kushangaza", doing my best to actually get this Con
report done within a reasonable timeframe. (Unexpected thing number one: we
finished on time, and I was home before dark!!! - I almost feel a bit gypped.
<shrug>) And just to set the scene for this
morning, it was yet another dreadful day, weather-wise. That now makes three
Cons with bad weather, and one and a half with good weather. I still think that
bad weather is the norm!
So,
what can I say about the morning part of the Con? My first challenge was to
catch the right tram out to the Carlton Crest. The list of tram numbers (which,
like my camera, I had forgotten) made the list of
When
I arrived at the hotel, I went to the same place where the RDM con had been
last May. In almost a mirror (universe?) of what happened in May, the area was
strangely quiet. This time, however, I knew exactly where to go - the other
side of the hotel (the "Convention Entrance"), which Natalie and I
had tried first last time. When I got there, I heard and saw exactly what I was
looking and listening for queues and discussion of episodes!
While
I was in the queue to collect my ticket, my mobile rang - the caller? Need you
ask? It was Meg. So my time waiting in line was tempered by chatting with her
for a while. I eventually got up the stairs, got my ticket (and an extra
autograph token I wasn’t expecting) and the pretty hopeless photo that
came as part of the ticket price. I then went and bought a much better photo,
and looked at the dealers tables. As there were only
two, it didn’t take long. Then I settled down in a corner with Mary
Shelley’s Frankenstein,
which I have to have re-read by Wednesday. (No point in wasting the entire day,
homework-wise!)
Within
ten or fifteen minutes, however, they’d opened the auditorium, so I went
in to find my seat. I was in the second row of my ticket class, (about the
seventh row overall), with a seat on the aisle. If only I’d brought my
camera!
I
settled in - I think I was still reading Frankenstein. However I was
keeping an eye out for the famous (or infamous?) Peter - if you’ve read the
other Con report that’s actually up (as distinct from the Odyssey one,
which I still haven’t finished), you will have read about him. To be
honest, I just wanted to see how easy it would be to heckle him — it’s one of the
amusements of a con, as all Holodiction regulars
know.
However,
I didn’t get a
chance, because Peter threw the first punch, so to speak. (Not without help, I
might add!) He’d barely started his spiel - Hi, how are
you all, isn’t the weather awful:
‘Yes, I’m here,’ I reply, but he didn’t hear me.
‘[RL name]?’ (Okay, using “Sängerin”
from now on.)
So I
stood up... knowing full
well why he’s pointing me
out. He caught sight of me, and then his mobile rang. ‘I’ll get back to you,’ he said with a grin.
I sit
down, debating whether I can leave now. I doubt it - and besides, I paid good
money to see Robert Beltran, and I’m not skipping out...
no
matter what Amanda and Meg have got cooked up for me.
It’s a good five minutes before Peter
gets off the phone (and probably turns it off), and then he picks up the
microphone and turns back to us. ‘The thing I love about these Conventions,’ he says, ‘is meeting Trek fans from all over.
And I also love doing this: Sängerin, are you still
here?’
I
wave, but don’t stand up.
‘Stand up.’ So I do, reluctantly. ‘A friend of Sängerin’s came up to me in
‘Oh, it’s not your opinions,’ I say. I was going to go on and
remind him of what he’d said (and
what he’d had the tech
guy do with the "Endgame" tape) at Odyssey, but I didn’t, and Peter let me sit down. In
retrospect I am very, very, glad that I said nothing about Endgame, but I’ll explain all that in due time.
So,
after Peter had finished making a fool of me, he chatted about
various other stuff, but there was really nothing of interest in what he
said. Except for the list of upcoming anniversaries:
And so we move to the Auction. To be quite honest, there was very
little of interest in this either. But I always report on the Auction, so I won’t disappoint you. (I say always,
despite only ever having finished one Con Report - but there’s two auction reports in the as-yet-unfinished
Odyssey report!) The item that went for the most money was a complete Franklin
Mint insignia set, in a display case, that went for
$500 to a man with a very big grin on his face. The only other time we broke
$100 was for the "Timeless" 100th episode photo, signed by
Kate Mulgrew, Robbie Duncan McNeill and Garrett Wang
and including an autograph token for a signature from Robert. That went for
$110. (Not surprisingly.)
Also
of note was the item that went for the least - a set of "TNG Action
Marbles" (whatever that means) for $8... yes, we got into
one dollar bids again - the bane of Peter’s existence (other than Meg and I). I bid on a number of items,
but didn’t get any of
them. I bid on a signed photo of Jennifer Lien (which would have come close to
completing my collection of signed Voyager photos), but was outbid, and
it eventually went for $85. There were three Martok-Gowron
pictures (really nice book cover, small poster size) signed at the last Con by
both Rob O’Reilly and JG Hertzler. I think I bid to $35 each time. I didn’t record what the first one went for,
but the second went for $40, and the third for $55 (huge bargain, considering
what those prints had cost at Odyssey). At Odyssey I bid on a collector’s edition video of "All Good
Things" (with the Jon Frakes behind-the-scenes
tour) and lost out by $5. There was another copy on offer today, and I upped my
bid fifteen dollars, and still lost out by $5. (It went for $50.) One day, I’ll get one of them!
After
the auction the program said "discussion forum", but what it really
was, was Maria getting up and telling us about upcoming Cons. I should mention
at this point that, shock horror!, we were running ahead
of schedule, something with which no one could quite cope. It’s absolutely unheard of for a Con to
even be on time! Peter simply could not cope, and had to go get a cup of coffee
to calm his fractured nerves!
Only
two real items of note here - because everything else I already knew (such as,
I have to start saving for the June Con next year). First, Maria suggested that
‘the partying Klingons’ (O’Reilly and Hertzler)
should be annual visitors. Well, we all loved that idea! Secondly, Maria
actually gave FSF (Amanda and Meg’s club) a plug, mentioning the Angel Con they’re doing next year. Maria usually
never even mentions the names of her competitors (so to speak), so this is an
event worth noting.
Anyway,
when that was over, we were ‘dismissed’ for lunch, while the platinum ticket
holders went next door for lunch and photo sessions with Robert. I didn’t like the look of the hotel’s "Convention Catering", so
I went downstairs and got a cup of coffee from the lobby bar. We had a full
hour for lunch, so I actually wrote the first bit of this report then. I also
read a bit more of Roxann Dawson’s book Entering Tenebrea,
as I was getting tired of Frankenstein.
To
fill you in a little on the first lot of ‘fallout’, so to speak,
from Peter’s instructions
from my ‘friend in
Me to
Meg: "Okay, so was it you or Amanda?"
Meg
to me: "I swear it actually was not me"
Me to
Amanda: "Very funny, Amanda"
Amanda
to me: "What!?"
(Might
I point out that the amusing thing is that Meg did not ask what I was
talking about... she knew!)
Robert Beltran
After
lunch there were none of the usual delays. We all filed in, and pretty much as
soon as the seats were full, Peter started the intro for Robert.
The
door he came in from was right at the end of my row, so I had a good look at him
right at the beginning. I am being entirely honest here... my first thought was, ‘Wow, he really is gorgeous!’ Sure, I’ve always thought Chakotay
was mildly attractive, but Robert, with his slightly longer hair... wow! His face
looks a lot less square (a definite improvement), and he looks a lot younger
than he does onscreen. It’s not as
though you’re going to
find me on the RBEB anytime soon, but "objectively", I have to say he
is quite good looking.
On to substance. He began by telling us just what a
rushed trip this was. He arrived in
Robert
didn’t have a
standard "spiel", so after telling us he would answer any questions,
as long as they weren’t about Star
Trek, he answered all our questions. One of the first questions was "the
J/C question", as in, what does he think of the concept. He said that he
liked the idea of Chakotay/Torres better, and that he
had one concern about J/C - he felt that Janeway
might attempt to continue the ‘command
relationship’ in bed, as it
were, and that Chakotay might be forced to mutiny.
Naturally, the room was rolling with laughter after that comment.
Robert
then thought to check whether he was speaking to an ‘underage’ audience, and asked if there were any children.
There was only one, an adorable little three-year-old boy in an Admiral’s uniform. Being three, his mother
told Robert, it probably didn’t matter if
the subject matter were a bit ‘ripe’ - he wouldn’t understand anyway. And so Robert
continued.
As is
my custom, I’m going to try
to put the questions and answers into a slightly more logical arrangement than
they originally were... I find the
report reads better that way.
Robert,
I found, is not unlike Robbie Duncan McNeill, in that he answers questions
twice; first comically, then seriously. The best of these comical answers (in
my humble opinion) was the answer to the question, "how did you get picked
to play Chakotay?" Without missing a beat,
Robert said, "Well, I was working as a wooden Indian outside a trading
post in
He
did comment a little on working with the other cast members. Working with Tim
Russ, he said, could be ‘an
excruciating experience’. This was a
reference to a story that everyone who’d been to Odyssey knew quite well; the story of the so-called
"fart wars". As Robert said - and this is a direct quote (I was
scribbling fast, and Robert was speaking slowly and pausing frequently for
effect), ‘Tim had a way... of doing things with his body... and hopefully you were not stuck in a turbolift with him when he was doing these things. He did
it often... and he was
quite famous for it.’
On
working with the actor-directors: ‘You know, I had a bit of a crush on Roxann, so I always did my best when she was directing... ’. Robert then did a very good
impression of Bob Picardo directing Robert and Jeri
Ryan in a situation where they were doing re-takes, and had the whole day to do
them. After experiencing the numerous ‘impressions’ during
Odyssey, I begin to think that the actors spent all their time trying to
imitate each other. It’s probably a
sign of how much I revere Kate Mulgrew that I don’t think that anyone has done a decent
impression of her yet... Garrett’s didn’t come up to scratch, and neither, I must say, did
Robert’s. He did a
very good Garrett, however.
To mention yet another link with Odyssey... (did I mention that only
people who were at Odyssey were able to get tickets for Robert? That’s why there are so many ‘follow up’ questions, so to speak.) Anyway,
someone in the audience mentioned the story about Garrett, Jeri Ryan’s "elbow", and the use of postIt notes, and asked whether Robert had any similar
experiences. Robert had no idea what the person was talking about, and the
person who asked the question found it very hard to explain. Undeterred, Robert
turned it into a perfect excuse to tease Garrett, and he was very funny.
There
were the usual questions about episodes of Voyager. The ‘Favourites’ he mentioned (after saying, ‘anything I was in where I didn’t have to spout technobabble’) were In The
Flesh, Unity (sorry, but does anyone see a pattern, here?) and Nemesis.
I was very happy he mentioned Nemesis, because the fan world seems to be
divided into two factions on that one, but given the other two he mentioned, I
was tempted to call out, ‘What about Unforgettable?’ I didn’t, probably because I was scared of the answer.
As
for his ‘Un-Favourites’ (my term, not
his... his term was ‘the ones I hated’), he mentioned two; Shattered
and Endgame. Shattered he described as ‘Charles Dickens in space’. I haven’t seen it yet, but I have to admit I
can see the similarities with "A Christmas Carol".
As
for Endgame, his initial comment was that the shooting could have been
more fun. However, he said that the final few episodes were just such a
disappointment that there was very little energy among the cast. He had been
waiting for the end of the seventh season to develop all those little plot
lines that had been begun in the first few seasons and then just left, and it
never happened. Again I am quoting, he said that ‘the writers had been screwing the show
over for the past three years,’ ever since
Jeri Taylor and Michael Piller left. His comment was
that they were the two writers that actually cared. Those who were still
working for the show had ‘no respect for
us [the actors] or the fans,’ and that the
writers’ ideas of
character development was a catfight between Janeway
and Seven over whether or not to save a semi-sentient cockroach. (By the way,
this is nothing that I haven’t said before
- he’s just the
first actor to say it.)
I’m sure all JetC
fans know of "The Quote" - the one where Robert said something along
the lines that Kate seemed to think that if she could just do the finale well
enough she could find a cure for cancer. Well, to my mind, what Robert said in
Melbourne about that gave the quote a little context. He said that Kate had so
much to do in Endgame (which was true) that she wasn’t having much fun. As a result, there
was an ‘unnecessary
tension’ on the set in
the last few days. He also suggests that everyone else in the cast agrees with
him about the lack of fun on the set, even if they feel too loyal to Paramount
to say so.
I’ve discussed this to some extent with
a few people, and I think I’m easier on
Robert than most of them are. It is very hard to tell context from a quote
circulated on the Internet, and having heard Robert’s tone on the whole thing, I’m willing to give him the benefit of
the doubt. I know that some of what Garrett said in Sydney could easily be
misconstrued, and it was clear from his tone that he was bitter about some
things that happened. Maybe Garrett wasn’t thinking clearly in
That
justification over... a question was
asked about The Fight, Robert’s big boxing episode. (Boxing appeared to be his second choice -
he was offered a sports-related holodeck episode, but
baseball had already been done by DS9). There really is a funny story about the
filming of The Fight. Robert had been told that he would have three
months in which to train up and get into shape, because Brannon Braga and Ken Menosky (the audience
had to remind Robert of Menosky’s surname) wanted Robert to fight with
his shirt off. Due to a misunderstanding as to when the three months started,
Robert didn’t do the
training he’d intended to
do, and this lead to something of a stand-off on the set. Because of the lack
of training and fitness, Robert refused to do the fight scenes without his
shirt, but the director had been instructed by the producers that Robert had
agreed to do the scenes without his shirt... (all this fuss over a shirt!)
The director got on the phone with Braga - Robert
told us you could hear Braga shouting down the line.
The way Robert tells it, while the director was on the phone,
Robert got the crew on his side, by pointing out just how much time he had
spent at the pastry cart over the previous three months, and convincing the
crew that they really didn’t want him to
have to take his shirt off. He got the crew onside, and he didn’t have to take off his shirt!
The
final piece of Robert’s Voyager
criticism (or at least, criticism of the producers and the episodes that came
from the writers) was the "Robert Beltran Five-Minute Episode", which
went something like this (Robert providing all the voices);
Voyager is flying
along merrily, and there is some pointless small-talk among the bridge crew. A
decrepit freighter appears on the screen.
Janeway: Hail them
Kim:
Yes, ma’am
Janeway: I’m Captain Janeway of the Federation
Starship Voyager. Can we assist you?
Strange-looking
Alien: Captain, I’m so glad you
found us. We’re in dreadful
trouble. Will you help us?
Janeway: Of course. We will transport you over to our
ship using our incredibly superior technology.
Strange-looking
Alien: Thank you!
Scene change - the transporter room. Kim is at the
controls, Chakotay is standing behind Janeway’s
left shoulder.
Janeway: Energize
Strange-looking
Alien: (appearing on transporter platform) Thank you!
Janeway: Take a look around and tell us if you see
anything you need.
Strange-looking
Alien: (eyes lighting up as he sees Chakotay) I see
something I need - your first officer...’s liver.
Janeway: No, I don’t think I can let you have that.
Strange-looking
Alien: Tough.
He
pulls out one of the Vidiian organ grabbers - this
guy’s been around
- and extracts Chakotay’s
liver. Chakotay proceeds to enjoy a long death scene.
Janeway looks at him lying on the ground next to her.
Janeway: Mr Kim, beam the
strange-looking alien off my ship. I have to find a new first officer. And no, Mr Kim, you’re not even
getting a promotion.
(Alright,
so I embellished it a little. But the basic plot is the same as Robert told
us.)
One
of the last questions Robert was asked was about strange experiences with fans.
Again, he answered by using funny voices, telling us about the ‘crazed Janeway/Chakotay
fans’ who really
believe that he is Chakotay. This story could have
been very painful, but he was so funny you couldn’t help laughing. The fan approaches him, saying in
a scared whisper, ‘You really do
love Captain Janeway, don’t you?’ After trying very hard to point out that he just
plays Chakotay, he says he eventually gives up, plays
along, and tells the young girl that ‘he’ll do his very
best to convince Janeway of the error of her ways.’ I hope he hasn’t really come across too many of those
fans, but he made it sound very funny.
When
Robert was asked about the future, he told us that he plans to start his own
production company, writing his own screenplays and generally trying to ‘avoid the idiots in
The Autograph Line and After...
I
managed to keep myself occupied while waiting for my row to join the autograph
line by talking to a friend of a friend who had appeared at the Con. She and I
have spent long hours driving our mutual friend (KB, who gets various credits
for helping me with my fanfic) crazy by talking about
Voyager and things J/C, instead of about KB’s pet show, The Pretender. I
hadn’t seen this
woman in over a year, and it was great to catch up with her. It meant I didn’t get any reading done... I was still trying to finish Frankenstein,
but it’s not like I
haven’t read it
before.
Anyway, the autograph line. The line itself was rather
dull, but when I got up to the table, things got interesting. Peter (who wasn’t feeling well) was sitting at the
table helping Robert. Usually he doesn’t do that, George does. But because Peter wasn’t feeling well, George was supervising
the packing up. I gave my photos and personalization tokens to Maria, and when
she said my name to Robert, Peter looks up. Robert is sitting there signing my
photos, and Peter starts talking to me.
"How
did you enjoy the Convention?"
"Very
well, despite the welcome," I say back to him. "I’ve worked out who it was, by the way.
I’m just trying
to work out how to take revenge." At about this point, I realise that Robert Beltran is looking bemused. He is the
guest I’ve paid to
see, and here I am chatting to the MC. So, in an attempt to redeem myself, I
give Robert my sweetest smile, and say ‘Thank you very much’ as he gives back my photos. He’s still looking between me and Peter, but then he just grins at
me, dimples and all. In another report on this Con that I’ve read, that smile was described it
as ‘charming but
cheeky’, and that is
so, so true.
(This
is why I was glad I didn't mention Endgame earlier in the day. If I had reminded
Peter about the teasing in
I
think that’s about it.
Apart from trying to cope with the fact that it was still light outside, the
only thing left to do was go home and start writing my con report. Ah yes, but
there is still the final reason that this is called the ‘mobile phone convention’... I’d just gotten downstairs and switched my mobile
back on when it rang... it was Amanda,
ringing to see how the Con had been. We got chatting, kept chatting as I caught
the first tram... as I walked
the block between trams... as I got onto
the second tram... all the way
until the battery on my phone ran out, about two blocks from home. Speaking of
Amanda, she has been making much of the fact that her personalisation
was signed ‘much love,
Robert Beltran.’ Well, he
signed mine that way too!
All
in all, I had a great time, and I don’t regret the money I paid for the ticket. As you can probably tell
from the fact that my reports always include as much about the rest of the Con
as about what the guest or guests said, I really enjoy Conventions for
themselves. I wouldn’t go if there
wasn’t a guest I
wanted to see, but once I’m there I
enjoy the whole thing... even in
Running
tally: RDM (3 guests), 11 A5 pages of notes, 7000 word report; Odyssey (6
guests), 26 pages, report unfinished; RB (one guest), 9½ pages, 4700 word
report.