WINSTON (cont.):  “. . . this crowd of five hundred people.  My friend Dominic Corrado — about six foot nine and weighing two hundred eighty pounds — and I were supposed to hold back five hundred people to get Gene across the distance of ten feet, from one door to another.  Forget it!  They could’ve killed us if they’d wanted to!  (Laughter) So I said, ‘What we needed was about twenty Helpers, all armed with a device I thought up, called a ‘stunrod’, which would shoot down unruly Trekkies with an invisible beam . . . all the Helpers trained in martial arts, give them code names, communicators, backup systems . . . all the things we needed.’  So I wrote these into a story,* and I started putting in all the experiences I had over the years in being a Helper into the series, all the crazy things I ran into . . .  Like the time it was supposed to be top secret as to what Bill Shatner’s room number was, and every Trekkie downstairs had it, but Security didn’t!  (Laughter!)  And that happened!  It really happened!

“So I used the series to do commentaries on the ‘real world,’ because I think the fans are the most interesting thing.  We can create the most interesting strange planet or environment . . . I liked ‘Star Wars,’ but they cut out the characterizations of the movie, in order to reduce it to two hours.  I think the best parts were the parts they left out.  And they didn’t leave them out of ‘The Empire Strikes Back.’  That’s what makes it such a great film.  I was expecting ‘hamburger,’ but we got ‘steak’ — good characterization.”

AUDIENCE MEMBER#5:  “Maybe even ‘filet mignon’ . . .”

WINSTON:  “No, next time we’ll get ‘filet mignon.’  My point is that people are what a universe is all about.  No matter what setting you put a story in, it’s the people that make it work.

AUDIENCE MEMBER#5:  “Another thing is that George Lucas kept a tight hand on it.”

WINSTON:  “Yeah.  No matter what Leigh Brackett wrote or what Lawrence Kasdan wrote, Lucas still had final say over ‘This works . . . this does not . . . this follows my story line . . .’ By the way, anybody know what the first movie is going to be re-titled?”

SEVERAL PEOPLE:  “‘A New Hope.’”

WINSTON:  “Right . . .”

AUDIENCE MEMBER#6:  “But who is ‘the other’?”

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*HELPERS, published in PROBE 3