Tim Russ & John DeLancie Interviewed

Star Trek: UK has put up transcripts of interviews with Tim Russ (Tuvok) and John DeLancie (Q), both of which first appeared in the May 2000 issue of the Star Trek Monthly magazine. In the first interview, Ian Spelling talks to Russ about the lack of involvement for Tuvok in recent years, his directorial Trek debut on 'Living Witness', and his recent independent feature 'East of Hope Street':

"East of Hope Street has had limited theatrical distribution through Cinema Guild Releasing out of New York," he reveals. "It's going to be going from city to city, with limited distribution in each city. We've already done Los Angeles, Tucson, San Diego and Austin, Texas. The response has been very, very good. Our big problem has been advertising. If we do promotion and pay for ads, it helps the numbers. If you don't do those things, nobody knows the picture is out there. So, we're taking it very slowly and doing what we can to promote it.

"But we're all very pleased with the reaction to the film itself. People seem to get it. A lot of people didn't know what's going on in that area, in terms of these young kids. Nobody thinks about this kind of stuff and you really don't hear about it very often. The film gives you an inside peak at that kind of life and the system, and it's surprising people.

"I think the film may eventually go to The Sundance Channel and to the Independent Film Channel," Russ says hopefully. "It may also go to one of the other cable television networks. After that it will definitely go to video. That's the main market. To be honest, that's the only market in which we're going to make our money back. We won't make it back in theatres or from cable. We'll make some money, but the bulk of it will come from the video release when it's available for rental and purchase."

"There's nothing coming up in terms of new material," he notes. "The problem with Alien Voices right now is that the audio market is simply not nearly as [established] as any of the other markets. Normally there is a book, and it becomes a popular book. That book then, after all the publicity and some sort of notoriety, has an audio tape created for it. So the audio tape comes kind of in the wake of the publicity for that book. Well, what Alien Voices does is that we create first of all not audio books but audio dramas of classic material. So the book, while it's out there, is really an ever-green product. And in this day and age, where the need to sell big numbers all the time is so important, we are kind of in a holding pattern.

"I think what the publishers are beginning to understand is that The Time Machine is The Time Machine, and there's no other The Time Machine. And if you really want a good version of The Time Machine, our book is there. And while, instead of selling 30,000 units a year it sells maybe 15,OO0 units a year, it sells maybe 15,000 units every year whereas the popular book of last year does not sell 40,000 or 30,000 units next year, and by the third year nobody cares about that book at all. So it's just the difference of the way you look at these numbers. But until these numbers are rectified, we are in a little bit of a holding pattern for our next work."

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