YouSaid · the spoken record

Alex Kurtzman

lines on the record: 24
first: 2024-04-18
most recent: 2024-04-18
sittings or episodes: 1
sources: podcast

Every line below is reproduced as it was said and linked to the record it came from. Nothing here is summarised or generated. Directory · Search · Corrections

“Thank you for having me. Part of building the Star Trek universe started with listening to Masters of Scale. I'm very grateful for what you guys have created because it really helped me see what was possible.”
2024-04-18 · Masters of Scale · Rapid Response: How Star Trek prospers against Netflix and Disney+, w/Executive Producer Alex Kurtzman · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“I think there's something that's been fundamentally altered. I don't think it's going to be business as usual. I think that there's going to be something new. There's going to be something totally different. And as the streamers sort of grow and as you start to see companies consolidate, it is absolutely going to change the agenda about how many things get made and what kind of things get made and for whom. And so our goal is to stay nimble. Our goal is to try and predict where it's going, but also to follow what we're seeing. And then there's that weird X factor, which is just what inspires me as an artist to tell a story. And I want to spend the next year or two of my life on it. You know, sometimes what I have found is that when I'm not listening to the market at all and I'm just following my own instincts about something that I want to see and experience, the market will catch up to that, not the other way around.”
2024-04-18 · Masters of Scale · Rapid Response: How Star Trek prospers against Netflix and Disney+, w/Executive Producer Alex Kurtzman · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“Oh no, it's, I mean, it changed everything. There's nobody who went unscathed during the strike. Obviously, we all went on strike because we felt it was necessary to make the stand, but we also knew that there would be a price for everybody. The thing I noticed most immediately was that when... Work came back. Anybody who had something that they were looking to sell, nobody was buying anything. Nobody. Like there was a freeze on spending for new things. And so you quickly go, okay, let's not take anything out right now. Let's just work with what we have and keep going and wait until actually the doors start to open again because we're just going to get a lot of no's and what's the point of that?”
2024-04-18 · Masters of Scale · Rapid Response: How Star Trek prospers against Netflix and Disney+, w/Executive Producer Alex Kurtzman · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“Yeah, it's true. You actually have to hold both things in balance. Really do, and this is where a system of checks and balances within the structure of each staff itself is so critical. Because I like to populate our staffs with a really nice cross-section of writers. When a writer says to me, yeah, I'm not really a Star Trek person, I will go hard at bringing them onto that stuff because I need that objectivity. I need someone to be like, that's just not holding my interest, you know. If I can get somebody who's not a Star Trek fan to start liking it, then we've got something. And then we have die-hard policemen in the room who say, you absolutely cannot do that to Cannon. You cannot do that in Star Trek. And then you have a Talmudic debate about what it means to make a choice like that. And then once you've really, really run it through everyone's perspective, you kind of know, like, I think we have a really legitimate reason for taking this risk. But if we don't.”
2024-04-18 · Masters of Scale · Rapid Response: How Star Trek prospers against Netflix and Disney+, w/Executive Producer Alex Kurtzman · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“And we took that lesson to heart when we did the 2009 movie and we had the benefit of actually having Leonard in the movie by saying we're going to blow up Vulcan. We're going to blow up the planet that everybody loves the most. You know, if you asked, if you took a poll and you asked Star Trek fans, what do you think about us blowing up Vulcan? They would have said, get these guys out of here. But because we did it and we tied it into the DNA of the story itself, and then we had Mr. Spock himself come on screen and tell you why it was necessary that that had to happen. We actually paced and led the fans to accept it. And that's, I think, what you have to do is you say, look, you're going to get your Star Trek comfort food and that it's going to feel like Star Trek. And once you have gotten people to buy into that and they know they're watching real Star Trek, then you take big swings and you start changing it up. And hopefully your audience follows.”
2024-04-18 · Masters of Scale · Rapid Response: How Star Trek prospers against Netflix and Disney+, w/Executive Producer Alex Kurtzman · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“I think the only way for Star Trek to endure is to take massive swings at ideas that at face value seem crazy. Nick Meyer, who directed the Wrath of Con, which, I mean, I think if you pretty much ask any Star Trek fan, which is the best Star Trek movie of all time, they will tell you the Wrath of Con. Nick said to me once, if I had taken a poll and asked every Star Trek fan out there, should I kill Spock at the end of the film, they would have crucified me. But because we did it the way we did it, it's the scene everybody remembers and still talks about as one of the greatest scenes, if not the greatest scene ever in Star Trek.”
2024-04-18 · Masters of Scale · Rapid Response: How Star Trek prospers against Netflix and Disney+, w/Executive Producer Alex Kurtzman · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“Same thing goes for, let's say, building visual effects assets. We build a whole library of visual effects assets. They're very expensive. But once you've built them, you can use them again and again and again. And you just have to be clever about how you do it so that the audience doesn't feel that they're seeing the same thing.”
2024-04-18 · Masters of Scale · Rapid Response: How Star Trek prospers against Netflix and Disney+, w/Executive Producer Alex Kurtzman · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“We spend far less producing our shows than my understanding of other big franchises in terms of what they spend to make their shows. And therefore, I'm able to say to the company that. It's the right proposition for you financially. And because we have created an ecosystem, we shoot most of our shows in Toronto, we now have all these assets that we can begin cross-pollinating between shows. And not just the assets that we physically build, because you have to remember if we need a prop, we can't go down to the store and buy it. We have to make it, right? If we need a costume, we can't go to the local whatever and get a cop outfit. We have to make it. Everything is bespoke on our show. So once you've created all of those things, you now have a warehouse, many warehouses full of it. And if we're really smart, we can begin to amortize the spend between the different shows”
2024-04-18 · Masters of Scale · Rapid Response: How Star Trek prospers against Netflix and Disney+, w/Executive Producer Alex Kurtzman · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“Well, I think what they recognized was that Wall Street came along and said, How much are you making? And people, the minute they had to open up their books, Wall Street didn't like it. And so then it becomes very difficult, which is why franchises like Star Trek have an advantage because you've got 60 plus years of embedded institutional understanding and memory in the world, you know, not just domestically but internationally. In terms of something that will cut through the clutter, I am constantly amazed that we drop a small piece of information about Star Trek, and there are 45 articles within 24 hours. And that just doesn't happen when you're doing a normal cop show. It just doesn't happen. You're lucky if you get one or two.”
2024-04-18 · Masters of Scale · Rapid Response: How Star Trek prospers against Netflix and Disney+, w/Executive Producer Alex Kurtzman · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“That are much lower cost, that are recognizable instantly that have the ability to cut through the clutter. And I would say that the winner of the streaming wars was easily in hands down Netflix, but even they are saying we're not going to spend the kind of money that we spent before on shows.”
2024-04-18 · Masters of Scale · Rapid Response: How Star Trek prospers against Netflix and Disney+, w/Executive Producer Alex Kurtzman · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“No, no, no. I think what you're going to start seeing is that some of these companies are going to start merging because it's very difficult to sustain them on their own. We have watched over the last decade the great streaming wars. And I think there was a window of time that happened to coincide with what everybody calls the golden age of streaming where you had this unbelievable amount of quality television on where you would get these amazing artistic shows that all cost 20 million an episode and made zero dollars for anybody, right? But they were amazing pieces of art. It was an incredible time. I think we have now come out the other side of that where a lot of the streamers are saying that did not work for us. That was not a financially viable and sustainable way to run a business. We need shows.”
2024-04-18 · Masters of Scale · Rapid Response: How Star Trek prospers against Netflix and Disney+, w/Executive Producer Alex Kurtzman · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“So I'm lucky because I have a 17 year old boy in my house, right? And so I see how he's consuming media. And I see that there is no monogamy to any particular channel other than TikTok. TikTok is the one constant in our house, right? So he'll watch something on Hulu or he'll watch something on Netflix or he'll watch something on Mac. There's no monogamy there”
2024-04-18 · Masters of Scale · Rapid Response: How Star Trek prospers against Netflix and Disney+, w/Executive Producer Alex Kurtzman · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“So, in order to lay it out for them and to say, I need you to accept the financial buy-in for just one season of television, let alone three or four, I'm going to tell you how we're going to roll it out over the course of the next four to five years to use a very frequently used masters of scale analogy. I'm not looking at the puck, I'm looking at where the puck is going. And part of my job is to tell Paramount, here's where the puck is going to go.”
2024-04-18 · Masters of Scale · Rapid Response: How Star Trek prospers against Netflix and Disney+, w/Executive Producer Alex Kurtzman · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“No doubt there's no doubt, and that's why ultimately, despite all appearances, we're actually not in the Quantity business. Know we were actually in the quality business, which means you have to assume that from the minute we decide we're going to make a Star Trek show, a live action Star Trek show, you're two to three years out from an ever-ending up on screen. Because you have to assume it's gonna be a year of writing, a year of production, and a year of post. Now, obviously, there's blend in terms of those timelines, but it is a massive undertaking. It's like making three huge studio movies at a time.”
2024-04-18 · Masters of Scale · Rapid Response: How Star Trek prospers against Netflix and Disney+, w/Executive Producer Alex Kurtzman · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“Performance of all other Star Trek shows, that you're still going to be selling the show in 30 years. And if you're still selling the show in 30 years and you can count on making a lot of money, you just may not get it this quarter, but you're going to get it.”
2024-04-18 · Masters of Scale · Rapid Response: How Star Trek prospers against Netflix and Disney+, w/Executive Producer Alex Kurtzman · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“Of my job is understanding how Star Trek monetizes for the company that I work for. So in this weird moment in streaming where it's very hard to tell what metric anyone is using to really argue success. Is it viewership? Okay, well, but what kind of viewership? You're not giving us numbers. So what does that actually translate to? Is it subscribers? Because are you able to calculate that X number of subscribers are signing up for your service just to watch that one show? We don't know. No, but they won't tell us to companies won't tell us. What I can tell you is that Star Trek is a waterfall that keeps rolling downstream for 30 years in terms of licensing. So it's not just a matter of saying, okay, you have to decide in this quarter whether you're successful financially. My argument is you have to think big picture. You have to assume based on the”
2024-04-18 · Masters of Scale · Rapid Response: How Star Trek prospers against Netflix and Disney+, w/Executive Producer Alex Kurtzman · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“Shield them from as much as possible is the pressure that comes down from above about what is the cadence of shows, how many, how, you know, budgets. I know you're not going to like it paramount, but you have to do it. And here's why you have to do it so that by the time the showrunner is hearing about it, the ground has been softened a little bit.”
2024-04-18 · Masters of Scale · Rapid Response: How Star Trek prospers against Netflix and Disney+, w/Executive Producer Alex Kurtzman · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“It's a question I think about every day. What happens to Paramount Plus, how it scales as a company big picture? I don't have any control over that. What I do have control over is quality. And my feeling is that part of building this franchise correctly is allowing each showrunner to their vision to the table. And I'm there at the beginning to help the boat get off the dock. with some of the key decisions, some of the big, big decisions. And then I stay involved on the shows that I'm not showing. I stay involved, but I'm not there to micromanage them. I think that is a huge mistake. If my mission is, I want each show to be its own unique color in a rainbow, then I cannot begin muddying each color with too much of my own perspective. When it comes to the business side of things, what I try and”
2024-04-18 · Masters of Scale · Rapid Response: How Star Trek prospers against Netflix and Disney+, w/Executive Producer Alex Kurtzman · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“For us to do it as an animated show. Could lower decks be a live action show? Absolutely. In fact, in season two of Strange New Worlds, we crossed the lower decks characters over. They go through a portal and they come out as the real actors who play them. Tanya needs some Jack Quaid. And they join the crew of the enterprise as live-action characters. And it totally worked. It was kind of proof of concept that if we ever did want to do a spinoff of something like that, we could have done it live action.”
2024-04-18 · Masters of Scale · Rapid Response: How Star Trek prospers against Netflix and Disney+, w/Executive Producer Alex Kurtzman · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“The benefit of having a season of television where you're doing, let's say, 10 to 13 episodes a year is that you have much more time to tell the stories and to live in the nuance of character. We can do one show that's an adult drama. We can do one show that's a comedy. We can do one show that's action-adventure. And that way we will be able to speak to each segment of the Star Trek audience. I'll give you an example with Lower Decks. So Lower Decks is our animated show that Mike McMahon did Mike McMahon came from Rick and Morty, which is, you know, another show steeped in a deep, deep understanding of science fiction. And he said the thing that I want to make sure of when we do this show is that we are never punching down on Star Trek. We're never making fun of it. You can laugh with it. You can't laugh at it. Now, Mike comes from animation, right? So he wasn't thinking of it as a live-action show. So it organically made a lot of sense.”
2024-04-18 · Masters of Scale · Rapid Response: How Star Trek prospers against Netflix and Disney+, w/Executive Producer Alex Kurtzman · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“Well, I think Hollywood in general markets itself and benefits from being a mirror that reflects the moment in which it's making its content. So when you see something like the opening of Civil War this weekend, you realize that people are obviously in an election year really thinking about this, that it is highly, highly, highly there. Look, we go to the movies or we watch television to experience catharsis. And right now, the premise of Civil War is kind of on everybody's mind in some form, right? It's writ large and it's taken to the extreme, but it's on everybody's mind. And so we go and we sit in the dark and we eat our popcorn to experience a sense of catharsis that allows us a closer understanding of the very thing we're experiencing in the world, which is why movies have always been so much a part of our popular culture.”
2024-04-18 · Masters of Scale · Rapid Response: How Star Trek prospers against Netflix and Disney+, w/Executive Producer Alex Kurtzman · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“Sure. So I think actually the thing that distinguishes Star Trek and that is the special sauce of Star Trek is Roddenberry's very unique vision of optimism. I mean, what Star Trek posits is a world in which all of the things that divide us now are in the rearview mirror. One of the greatest contributions that Roddenberry ever made to the conversation about race, gender, equality was that no one ever talked about it on the bridge, but everybody was a different color and had different interests and different preferences and no one talked about it. It was just an assumption that it was okay and understood and accepted. And that is a beautiful, beautiful thing. And I think that I would say the number one ingredient to Star Trek's endurance over all this time is that essential vision of optimism where our better angels have actually driven us to the best version of ourselves as humanity. And that is how we have continued to grow. So I think in a lot of ways it is a compass for so many people to imagine a better world.”
2024-04-18 · Masters of Scale · Rapid Response: How Star Trek prospers against Netflix and Disney+, w/Executive Producer Alex Kurtzman · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“And his father would sit down and watch Star Trek with my friend every Saturday on reruns. And that was actually the first time that I began to understand what I have now come to see full frame, which is that Star Trek has influenced enormous amounts of people in the tech world to go build the things they saw on television. And that is an amazing thing because there's not a lot of franchises that you can say have done that.”
2024-04-18 · Masters of Scale · Rapid Response: How Star Trek prospers against Netflix and Disney+, w/Executive Producer Alex Kurtzman · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“I was a fan. Actually, when I saw the wrath of Khan in the theater as a little kid, it was the first time a villain had ever rivaled Darth Vader. And that seemed impossible to me at the time. And then I started noticing that my friend, his father worked at JPL.”
2024-04-18 · Masters of Scale · Rapid Response: How Star Trek prospers against Netflix and Disney+, w/Executive Producer Alex Kurtzman · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT