A slide from Von Dunker's pitch
There have been a lot of problems behind the scenes of CBS/Viacom and Secret Hideout's production of Star Trek Discovery. From toxic showrunners to lawsuits claiming plagiarism, it has been a rough ride for the show, which could only hold an average of 1.7 million viewers when it aired the first season on CBS Television last year. Recently we learned via Orville Nation that Secret Hideout may have stolen an idea from Daryl Von Dunker, who is an author, editor, scriptwriter and Trekkie. She had approached CBS in January of 2019 with a plan to itemize all of their props for Star Trek using iBook. An electronic props bible, if you will.
"Pretty much started by asking what they had which was three boxes of stuff in a closet. It was no longer a 'book' of any kind. Lots of prop bibles ended up looking like a photo album where you add and subtract pages that have photographs of the props. With just one or two seasons of Discovery at that time, they had already exploded beyond the book boundaries and had boxes of stuff." -Von Dunker
Discovery's prop-master, Mario Moreira, asked her for a proof of concept, so she went to work on it. For months she put this electronic props bible together for them. She worked on it from June to August of that year and came up with a first draft, which was mainly an index, a video introduction, a table of contents, and chapter examples, but opened the potential to have 3D files linked to them as well as the history of every prop, such as who made it, what materials was it made of, what colors were used, etc. as well as notes and links to scripts.
She managed to get ahold of John Van Citters, Vice President Star Trek Brand Management at CBS, who told her in August of 2019 that he couldn't independently greenlight it due to the merger with Viacom complicating things. According to Von Dunker, "he thought it was for archiving. His assistant never understood it was to help make & create the shows."
She decided to approach them again in June/July of 2020 and they asked for a second draft, so Von Dunker spent three more months refining her props bible. She added some new features like inventory control, videos, links and visuals. In her words, "It was a 'table of contents' of what 'could' be and why." There were plans to further upgrade the book and to even make it phone accessible.
"These electronic books, like all eBooks, could live on their phones. The beauty was that the books could live behind their CBS All Access website firewalls." -Von Dunker
A second meeting was set up for this pitch on November 2020, this time with Michelle Paradise and Akiva Goldsman in the room. She asked if Jonathan Frakes could join them for a director's point of view, but they didn't seem interested in including him. According to Dunker, Paradise seemed interested in what she was pitching. She was reading the power point slides and asking questions. Unfortunately one of the executives in the meeting then told Paradise that they had decided to do this project "in-house", meaning they planned on making their own electronic props bible within the studio instead of contracting someone else to do it. That felt threatening to Von Dunker, since this was her idea.
A slide from Von Dunker's power point pitch. This is the slide Paradise seemed most interested in.
She continued her pitch when the executive said, "Somebody make her stop talking", cutting the meeting short by ten minutes. Goldsman ended the meeting by telling her that he liked the idea but because of Covid and funding, they couldn't pick it up. This should have meant that Von Dunker could take her ideas elsewhere, except for one thing:
The next day, prop-master Mario Moreira called Von Dunker and threatened that if she tried to take her electronic props bible to Disney or Pixar, she would get blacklisted from the industry. So in the end she worked all that time to make this book and they ended up not buying it or paying for her work. She can't even pitch it to other companies for fear of reprisal. They kept the files she sent them for the pitch (which were not encrypted) and she believes that they're using them to keep their hundreds of props over the last four seasons of Discovery, as well as Strange New Worlds, organized.
Why else would they threaten the blacklist someone for taking their rejected idea to another company unless they were going to take it for themselves?
"From what I saw, within my part of the project, they liked having their creatives dependent on them. They like having creatives that don't have any other projects and that Star Trek is all they do. There is a certain measure of control they have when the only bread and butter that person has is Star Trek." -Von Dunker
When looking up prop-master Moreira, I noticed that there was an entry on his Memory Alpha page that was linked to a tweet. That tweet and the account are now deleted, but thanks to the Way-Back machine, I was able to retrieve it. It seems like in-between those pitch meetings, Moreira was put in charge of props for Strange New Worlds and was "actively prepping, and getting new and old prop designs together" during the lockdown. Von Dunker had believed that if they knew how to do what she was doing, they would have already done it. Seeing as the executive in the meeting confirmed that they were making an "in-house" electronic props bible, it looks like they were already in the process of doing that by the second pitch meeting.
In an interview with StarTrek.com in 2018, Moreira revealed that he wasn't introduced to TOS until he began working on Discovery, saying "For me, Star Trek is Next Generation and further on after that. My introduction to The Original Series came once I got the job on this show, when I started going back and researching." He also estimated that for season one of Discovery, they made about 120 props, which according to Dunker, had filled up about three boxes full of binders. Von Dunker's props bible would have been able to access all of those props by phone if she had gotten her way.
Her ultimate idea was that if this worked out, she could make show bibles for each show, each species, etc. The sky was the limit. However, it would still take a lot of work to complete these bibles, and as an adopted member of the Lakota Nation, she was willing to hire teams of natives to help and keep up with whatever demands Secret Hideout had.
Unfortunately because of an executive and a prop-master, that's not what happened and now Von Dunker needs help. She recently set up a Go-Fund-Me in order to pay some of her bills. She holds no ill-will towards the people who did this. Her ultimate goal is to get CBS/Viacom and Secret Hideout back on the table so that she could continue to work on the project and possibly open up some much needed jobs.
"The world of Star Trek is so huge, there's more work to be done, so let us help you, let us do the work." -Von Dunker
She worked months on this project after asking for a proof of concept and in return, they took her idea "in-house" and threatened to blacklist her if she took that idea elsewhere. If you would like to help Von Dunker, please click here donate to her Go-Fund-Me page. Better yet, if you have a project that you think could use her services, check out 5th Dimensional Publishing.
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