SF actors Lithgow, Anderson earn top Emmys
peculative fiction didn't do quite as well at this year's Emmys as it did last year--when SF shows earned more than a dozen awards between them--but what it lacked in quantity it made up for in quality. For the second year in a row John Lithgow took home the Emmy for Best Actor in a Comedy Series for his work on 3rd Rock from the Sun, which continues to be one of NBC's highest-rated shows. 3rd Rock scored another coup when cast member Kristen Johnston was honored with an Emmy for Best Supporting Actress in a Comedy Series.
Meanwhile, X-Files co-star Gillian Anderson earned an Emmy for Best Actress in a Drama Series, which tops the Golden Globe Award she and David Duchovny were honored with earlier this year. Apparently feeling that she'd already thanked her colleagues enough at the Globes, Anderson neglected to mention them when she picked up her Emmy and instead thanked her family. That move apparently irked The X-Files cast and crew, so last week Anderson took out full-page ads in both The Hollywood Reporter and Variety to make up for the error.
Andrei Konchalovsky rounded out the SF take with an Emmy for Best Directing Miniseries or Special for his work on NBC's The Odyssey, Part I and II.
This year's Primetime Emmy Awards were given out at a ceremony held Sept. 14 in Pasadena, Calif., which was broadcast on CBS and was simultaneously Webcast from the Emmy Web site. The awards are given out annually by the Academy of Television Arts & Sciences.
As usual, science fiction shows fared well in the Creative Arts Emmy Awards--also known as the technical Emmys--which were announced at a separate ceremony held Sept. 7. Star Trek: Voyager was honored for Outstanding Hairstyling for a Series; 3rd Rock earned two technicals, one for Outstanding Costume Design for a Series and a second for Outstanding Sound Mixing for a Comedy Series or Special; Dark Skies earned an Emmy for Outstanding Main Title Design; and The X-Files picked up a technical for Outstanding Art Direction for a Series and another for Outstanding Editing for a Series.
-- Craig E. Engler, Editor
Judith Merril, SF writer, editor and anthologist, dead at 74
udith Merril, a writer and editor who made her mark on the SF field with a series of "year's best" anthologies launched in 1956, died Friday, Sept. 12. She was 74.
Merril began publishing SF with her story "That Only a Mother" in Astounding Science Fiction in 1948. Her first published novel was Shadow on the Hearth, which appeared in 1950 and was eventually televised as Atomic Attack.
But her major contribution to the field came in the 1950s, when she turned her hand to editing anthologies, beginning with Shot in the Dark. From 1956-1968 she edited 12 popular and groundbreaking "year's best" anthologies, which appeared under a variety of titles, ranging from S-F The Year's Greatest Science-Fiction and Fantasy to SF 12. A thirteenth anthology was announced but never appeared.
Merril, who moved to Canada in 1968, also edited the first of the Tesseracts series of Canadian SF, and she was an active proponent of using the term "speculative fiction" in place of "science fiction." She was married to famed SF author Frederik Pohl from 1949-1953.
The Merril Collection of Science Fiction, Speculation and Fantasy is named in her honor and was founded with the donation of her book collection to the Toronto Public Library in 1970.
-- C.E.E.
Press "2" to eradicate disease
ometimes you need to clone an advertisement to advertise a clone, or at least to stir up some controversy about your upcoming clone movie. That's what Sony Pictures did on Friday, Sept. 12, with a full-page "ad" in The New York Times that read, "Children made to order."
The ad offered readers a chance to genetically engineer their offspring by dialing 1-888-4-BEST-DNA, where they would be greeted with a menu of options that included eradicating disease and enhancing physical and intellectual traits. Of course, readers wise in the ways of SF would have realized the "Gattaca" in the advertisement was actually the name of Sony's upcoming clone movie starring Ethan Hawke and Uma Thurman.
But not-so-savvy readers, including Dr. Nancy Kass, a bioethicist at Johns Hopkins University, claimed the ad preyed on natural human vulnerabilities. Kass was quoted by Mr. Showbiz as saying the ad was "purposefully deceptive" and "just a low-blow."
Both The New York Times and Sony Pictures defended the ad, with Sony claiming the response had been generally positive. Sony did tell Mr. Showbiz that it received "one complaint that [the ad] raised false hopes among people who would welcome genetic-engineering."
Of course, the main message Sony wanted to get across was that the movie opens Oct. 24.
-- C.E.E.
SF has been good to them
cience fiction celebrities earn big bucks according to Forbes magazine, which recently released its annual top 40 list of money-making entertainers. In fact, SF auteurs earned three of the top four spots in the poll, which is based on estimated income for 1996-97.
Dinosaur mogul Steven Spielberg topped the list with a $313 million take, based largely on the success of this year's mega-hits Men in Black and Jurassic Park: The Lost World. Next up came George Lucas, who took in $241 million thanks to the re-release of his Star Wars Trilogy. Not bad for a guy who failed to even register on last year's poll.
Rounding out the top four (Oprah Winfrey ranked three with $201 million) was author and screenwriter Michael Crichton, who earned $102 million for his Jurassic efforts as well as other projects. Other SF notables included Roland Emmerich and Dean Devlin, who took in a combined $43 million.
Forbes was so impressed with the money SF was taking in that it included a sidebar titled "The Sci-fi Up-and-comers." The sidebar listed X-Files creator Chris Carter and Trilogy Entertainment's Pen Densham, Richard Lewis and John Watson (whose shows include The Outer Limits) as "hot sci-fi writers who could very well make [the top 40 list] soon."
-- C.E.E.
Playmates and Viacom expect no trouble with "Star Trek Triple Tribbles"
yrano Jones will be having nightmares about a new promotional campaign created by Playmates Toys and the Viacom Consumer Products Group. The campaign, called Star Trek Triple Tribbles, was created to attract new fans to the Star Trek brand while promoting Playmates' latest Trek toy line, the Star Trek Strike Force figures.
Four million tribbles game piece icons will be distributed between now and Dec. 31, substantially more than the 1,771,561 tribbles Jones had to clean up from Deep Space Station K-7 in the famous Star Trek episode, "The Trouble with Tribbles." But unlike Jones, consumers who clean up these new tribbles have a shot at "a multi-media home theater replica of the U.S.S. Enterprise bridge, custom-built by Paramount Studios set designers in the winner's living room."
There are three ways to win the contest: Consumers can match their game icons with a special grand-prize icon that will be shown during the season premiere of Star Trek: Deep Space Nine during the week of Sept. 29; they can match their game piece tribbles to colors on Playmates Star Trek toy packages; and they collect proofs of purchase to earn photos of
themselves morphed into a Star Trek tribbles episode.
The game pieces will be distributed in the new Star Trek Strike Force figures from Playmates, as well as the Star Fleet Academy CD-ROM and special promotional kids meals from Dairy Queen.
-- C.E.E.
Special effects are go!
orking Title Films will handle the special effects for the live-action film version of the 1960s U.K. Gerry Anderson TV series Thunderbirds in house, according to published reports. Working Title is setting up its own effects studio, which will be headed by Peter Chiang, who supervised special effects for Working Title's The Borrowers.
The original Thunderbirds series was filmed using marionettes.
-- C.E.E.
Briefly Noted
- Patrick Stewart finally said "engage" for real when he proposed to Star Trek: Voyager producer Wendy Neuss earlier this month, according to Mr. Showbiz. Although no wedding date has been set, Stewart and Neuss have reportedly embarked on a European vacation to celebrate.
- Myst fans will have an especially happy Halloween this year now that Broderbund Software has set Oct. 31 as the date for the release of the much-hyped Myst-sequel Riven. Riven will be available on both the Windows and Macintosh platforms.
- Lois Lane may have caught the real Superman's eye, but for Superman actor Dean Cain it seems country singing gets his bells ringing. Cain recently proposed to country singer Mindy McCready, who accepted even though Cain didn't actually have a ring to woo her with. Cain said he had a ring in mind but simply didn't want to wait.
- Laurence Fishburne is looking to add yet another film to his growing list of SF projects. The Hollywood Reporter reports that Fishburne is in "final negotiations" to star alongside Keanu Reeves in Matrix. Meanwhile, Carrie-Anne Moss has signed on to play the film's female lead, which will require her to undergo four months of martial arts training as preparation.
- 3rd Rock from the Sun now has an official Web site at http://www.3rdrock.com.
- If you missed Mark Hamill anchoring the latest edition of the CNBC tech TV show .com (pronounced "dot com"), don't worry. TV Interactive has every episode of the show available in streaming on its Web site at http://www.tviweb.com. TVI said the reruns will be available on the Web until December.
