By Joshua Tyler
| Updated 1 minute ago
Roger Avary is a well-known Hollywood producer and director who got his start co-writing Pulp Fiction with Quentin Tarantino. He now co-hosts Tarantino’s film podcast, The Video Archives, but in addition to all of that, he’s also a major Star Trek fan.
How big a fan is he? Avary claims his family watches two or three Star Trek episodes nearly every day. He loves Star Trek so much that he offered to work on it, basically for free, when current Trek overlord Alex Kurtzman began launching new Star Trek television shows in the 2010s. What Avary learned after meeting with Kurtzman is the nightmare scenario every Trekkie has always suspected.
Avary told his story this week on The Joe Rogan Experience, saying of Alex Kurtzman, “I went in and met with the guy, I was like, I will write for scale. I will write on your new show. I just want to be part of it.”
If the writer of Reservoir Dogs, True Romance, Pulp Fiction, and Beowulf wants to work on your project for nothing, that would seem like a win. There was one problem, though: Roger Avary isn’t just an acclaimed writer; he’s also a huge Star Trek fan.
Kurtzman’s response was a hard no, and as Avary explains it, “He didn’t want anybody who had any kind of fondness for the original show. He wanted to do something new and create something new.”
Roger Avary has worked in Hollywood and helped write and direct some of the biggest, most successful movies of all time. Like his friend Tarantino, he has an encyclopedic knowledge of film and television. Because of that keen awareness of what’s good and what isn’t, he’s destroyed by what’s come of Star Trek in the wake of Kurtzman’s decisions.
Or as Avary put it: “This dweeb Alex Kurtzman just comes along and s**ts all over everything… Starfleet Academy is an abomination. I could not get through three episodes of Discovery. It’s just awful, awful storytelling… Picard was terrible.”
Roger Avary says he believes all film and television is, in some form, propaganda. Or as we sometimes phrase it on this site, screenwashing. The best movies, he suggests, are those that are personal propaganda in which a filmmaker has something personal or interesting he wants to say and delivers that message to the audience.
However, according to Avary, Alex Kurtzman’s Star Trek is corporate propaganda. Corporate propaganda is a form of screenwashing designed to deliver a pre-programmed message assigned by your overlords. Avary says of modern Star Trek, “They’re more interested in the corporate propaganda than they are any kind of personal propaganda.“
