HOW THE SOUL IS SOLD
May 28, 1995 New York Times
http://query.nytimes.com/gst/fullpage.html?res=990CE1D81E3BF93BA15756C0A963958260
During my recent two years as an executive story editor and then co-producer of "Star Trek: The Next Generation," nearly every episode I wrote was inspired, directly or indirectly, by the books of James Hillman ("How the Soul Is Sold," by Emily Yoffe, April 23). When Hillman reworks the world, it's by way of ideas so startling they can induce vertigo, by way of paragraphs so rich they border on poetry. JOE MENOSKY Florence, Italy
http://query.nytimes.com/gst/fullpage.html?res=990CE5D91238F930A15757C0A963958260&sec=health&pagewanted=all
http://www.startrek.com/startrek/view/series/TNG/creative/69099.html
In addition to Star Trek, Menosky recently sold a feature screenplay, "Real Time," co-authored with Brannon Braga, to director James Cameron ("Terminator," "Terminator II," and "Aliens").
Before working in film and television, Menosky was a journalist. He was science editor and reporter for National Public Radio's "All Things Considered" and "Morning Edition" and his articles and essays on the social and political ramifications of science and technology have been printed or re-printed in "The Economist," "The Washington Post," and M.I.T.'s "Technology Review" among others.
http://www.startrek.com/startrek/view/news/article/111610.html
Special to STAR TREK.COM by Deborah Fisher
04.26.2000
As Star Trek: Voyager makes a run to the end of its sixth season, the episode "Muse" also marks the end of Joe Menosky's stint as a Star Trek staff writer that began back in Star Trek: The Next Generation's fourth season. A former colleague at Simon & Simon had recommended Menosky to then ST: TNG Executive Producer Michael Piller. He gave Menosky a trial run, asking him to rewrite the fourth season episode "Clues." Piller hired Menosky on the strength of his first assignment.
Menosky entered the Star Trek fold at a critical and colorful time. Gene Roddenberry's launch of ST: TNG had relied heavily on the talents of well-known original series writers including Roddenberry himself, Dorothy (D.C.) Fontana, David Gerrold, and heavyweights Maurice Hurley and Herbert Wright. Years two and three had given way to newer and younger names and faces including Richard Manning and Hans Beimler, Melinda Snodgrass, Scott Rubenstein and Ira Steven Behr. Fresh-faced Ron Moore captured every fan's dream of a brass ring, a Star Trek job, with his spec script, "The Bonding."
After a hectic, unsettled first couple of years, the third season of ST: TNG was like beginning anew. Into this third-year team came Michael Piller, a Hollywood veteran, a former CBS censor, an experienced television staff writer with the chops to manage a writing team. He loved Star Trek and brought a stability and vision to the show and the writing staff that began to pay off almost immediately. He set up an open submission process and the staff took hundreds of pitches from experienced writers as well as fans. At its height, ST: TNG received 3,000 spec scripts a year. Besides keeping Moore on staff, Piller also acquired Jeri Taylor who became, with Piller, like mom and dad to a whole new generation of fresh, young writers. New voices were added to the stable of free-lancers like Hilary J. Bader ("Dark Page") and David Carren and Larry Carroll ("Future Imperfect").
Piller also found ways to work within the bounds of Roddenberry's rules of the Star Trek universe that so many writers had chafed against, especially the one that dictated no open conflict between regular characters. By the time Menosky arrived in the fourth season, the formula was highly recognizable -- a five-act structure with A and B plots that culminated just before the show's ending coda.
While "Legacy," a story about Tasha Yar's sister, was Menosky's debut script in October 1990, it was his scripting of "The Nth Degree," aired in April 1991, that made clear to viewers just what Menosky was capable of. "The Nth Degree" was about the character Barclay (first seen in the third season's "Hollow Pursuits") who is made super intelligent by contact with aliens. It was just the kind of intellectual game that Menosky was fond of playing and what made it so memorable was that it completely played with Star Trek's established structure. What might have once been a fifth act climax was instead plopped down into the middle of the third act and the story went someplace else entirely after that. Compared to where Star Trek scripts are now, it may seem tame by comparison, but at the time it signaled a significant change in direction for the show.
Piller, Executive Producer Rick Berman and Taylor couldn't have been more pleased. Later in the fourth season, Menosky's rewrite of "Clues" aired and he worked on "First Contact" and "In Theory." At the same time, another new kid on the block, Brannon Braga came to Star Trek as an intern. Braga's application had caught Piller's eye for two reasons -- he wrote a pretty good Star Trek script and he had flunked Human Sexuality at UC Santa Cruz. The fledging writer quickly got up to speed on "Reunion" and Braga and Menosky began a friendship that lasts to this day.
"They bonded in the early, early days," recalls former ST: TNG and Voyager Executive Producer Jeri Taylor. "When Brannon's tenure as an intern ended, I remember Joe saying he missed him. That actually got me thinking of the plan to hire Brannon. He and Joe were nothing alike whatsoever, but they seemed to fill each other out in some ways. They developed a very strange and symbiotic relationship."
Piller and Berman led the fifth season writing staff of Taylor, Menosky, Braga, Moore and Peter Allan Fields into exciting and uncharted Star Trek territory, introducing Ensign Ro, bringing Leonard Nimoy's Spock (and Denise Crosby's Sela) back for "Unification," and letting Braga loose on such stories as "Cause and Effect."
Menosky seemed to make it a personal mission to take Star Trek writing conventions and turn them on their heads, especially with stories like "Darmok" in which the writer didn't just write a script but created an entire language. "Joe is a brilliant, brilliant person," says Taylor. "I mean that both in the sense of education and native intelligence as well as creativity. His mind worked in ways that none of ours did."
Menosky marched through scripts like "Hero Worship" and "Conundrum" as he and Piller began to make their way toward the season finale, "Time's Arrow, Part I." When ST: TNG launched into season six with "Time's Arrow, Part II," former New York waiter Rene Echevarria and Science Advisor Naren Shankar had joined the staff. The stride the staff had started to hit back in season four really clicked in through season six.
But the years on staff had taken Menosky away from his first love, which was scholarly research. He slipped away to go live near family in Italy and devote himself to long hours studying, eventually penning a mini-series about the Italian Renaissance. Back home Jeri Taylor took ST: TNG through its seventh and final season using Menosky as a free-lancer on "Interface" and then "Masks."
"Masks" was a typical Menosky script much like "Muse," a story full of the writer's love of mythology, archetypes and intellectual puzzles. An examination of Data's possession and the ship's transformation by the mythic gods of another race, "Masks" gave Menosky room to march to that individual drummer that the staff had grown to know and love.
When Berman, Taylor and Piller launched Star Trek: Voyager, they had Braga and other talent to draw on but Taylor always missed Joe Menosky. He returned in the new show's second season because, as Taylor said, "we all implored him to." The timing was perfect as Taylor herself finally contemplated retirement from the Hollywood scene and the Star Trek pressure cooker. Incoming Executive Producer Braga needed a lieutenant and Menosky was it. "He became my right hand man," says Braga of Menosky's eventual ascension to Co-Executive Producer, "especially helping with the immense amount of rewriting Voyager takes. He has a kind of crazy, genius mind that brought a unique perspective to the show."
Braga cites as the high points of his work with Menosky on ST: VOY the big two-part "mini-movies" they started churning out -- "Future's End," "Year of Hell," and "The Killing Game." "Joe is very literate," says Braga, "worldly, knows a great deal about history and art and philosophy. We were very much on the same wavelength in many ways. It was fun working on those two-parters, like writing a movie but we had to do them in two weeks. We were a good team."
While Menosky would go on to write or co-write "Latent Image," "Dark Frontier," "11:59," "Equinox, "Blink of an Eye," and others, it was his work on Voyager's 100th episode, "Timeless," that Braga called "perfect." Starting with Braga's vision of the ship trapped in ice, Menosky felt that "Timeless" had all the great elements of Voyager's new style -- minimal dialogue, startling imagery, and Menosky's personal favorite, a great crash sequence.
Having already slipped back to Italy to return to his much beloved research, Joe Menosky himself was not available to comment on his long Star Trek career. Of his going, however, Jeri Taylor had this to say: "I can't speak highly enough about him. His unique sensibility was particularly suited to Star Trek and some of its loveliest, most lyric episodes have emanated from him. He is steeped in mythology, and found the most elegant ways to use that knowledge to formulate fascinating, intriguing stories. He will be sorely missed."
Ciao, Mr. Menosky.IMDB page here: http://www.imdb.com/name/nm0579775/
Wikipedia page here: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Joe_Menosky
Memory Alpha page: http://www.memory-alpha.org/en/index.php/Joe_Menosky
includes a photo
