The Star Trek Fan Club Involved In A Major Heist
Most Star Trek fans know the major role fan clubs have played in keeping the franchise alive. Long before the Trek had any spinoff TV shows or films, fan clubs worldwide kept the spirit of Gene Roddenberry’s vision alive.
This collective fervor helped convince Paramount to greenlight Star Trek: The Motion Picture. However, ahead of that film’s release, one California man committed a heist to obtain plans for some of the film’s sets, eventually trying to sell them to a local Star Trek fan club.
Stealing Star Trek: The Motion Picture
Information about this strange Star Trek heist comes to us courtesy of an old Playboy feature on the making of The Motion Picture. The internet didn’t really exist back then, but this didn’t keep fans from using any means necessary to gain info about the upcoming film. At one point, Paramount had to deal with one fan from obtaining bootlegged copies of The Motion Picture’s script and selling copies at a Star Trek convention ahead of that film’s release.
However, selling bootleg scripts is one thing…selling secret plans for a film in production is something else entirely. That didn’t keep one ambitious criminal from channeling his inner Orion Pirate and committing a heist in February 1978 to gain plans for some of The Motion Picture’s sets. He succeeded but then faced a dilemma that often plagues the best burglars: figuring out who would pay for the rare thing he had stolen.
A Foiled Heist
In this case, the California man in question decided the Star Trek Association of Orange County would pay handsomely for the purloined plans of his heist. It turned out that a fan club devoted to galactic do-gooders wasn’t interested in becoming common criminals like Harry Mudd. They didn’t waste any time calling in the closest thing America had to Starfleet Security: the FBI.
A Light Punishment
The FBI soon caught the man behind this Star Trek heist and, all things considered, his punishment was pretty light. He was fined $750 (a little over $3,600 in today’s dollars) and received two years’ probation. Officially, he was charged with stealing trade secrets, which is a testament to how seriously Paramount took his crime.
Internet Leaks Are A Lot Less Exciting
The Star Trek Association of Orange County is no longer around, and almost nothing about the man behind the heist is known. Decades ago, however, they were all involved in a major scandal that could potentially destroy Star Trek’s comeback before The Motion Picture even left drydock. Fortunately, the criminal was caught before that could happen, and the success of the Star Trek films led to The Next Generation and subsequent spinoffs.
These days, there aren’t any high-profile Star Trek heists…instead, info about upcoming shows and films is simply leaked to the internet in a much less exciting fashion.
Paramount Started Taking Security Seriously
In the intervening years, however, Paramount has gotten very good about information security, which helped keep the details about the recent Discovery finale under wraps so all of us could be sufficiently surprised by its many twists and turns. Part of us wouldn’t mind somebody engaging in another ambitious criminal caper if it could help definitively answer one of our biggest questions: are we getting another Kelvinverse film, or is that idea deader than Tasha Yar?
